The Outposter

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Wilkes," said Mark, and found himself smiling at the older man. He turned to Ulla.

  "Ulla, this is my Earthside tutor, Wilkes Danielson," he said. "Wilkes, this is Ulla Showell."

  "How do you do, Miss Showell, how do you do?" said Wilkes, letting go of Mark to shake hands warmly with Ulla. He turned back to Mark. "Forgive me—"

  "For showing up here?" said Mark.. "I've been expecting you."

  "Expecting me?" said Wilkes, in a tone of delight. He fell into step with Mark and Ulla as they moved to a waiting ground car and climbed in, with Mark behind the controls. Ulla took a seat in the back and motioned Wilkes to sit beside Mark, which he did.

  "You used to climb mountains," Mark said. "Remember telling me about that?"

  "Yes. Yes, of course—you're right," said Wilkes. "But I'm an old man now, or I thought I was an old man until I guessed what you were up to out here."

  Mark swung the car about and headed toward the Residence.

  "What am I up to?" he asked.

  "You're making a revolution, of course!" said Wilkes. "I should have guessed it even before I read about your station driving off a Meda V'Dan ship and capturing two others. No other Outpost Station or colony has ever done anything like that, and yours couldn't have done it unless it had weapons no Outpost Station has ever had."

  "It's time for a change," said Mark.

  "Of course," said Wilkes. "And I should have seen it before you. I was the anthropolo­gist, the sociologist. But then you're the one who's making it change, Mark, and that's the difference."

  "So you came out to watch?" asked Mark, pulling the car to a halt before the Residence entrance.

  "I came out to help. I had to pull all kinds of strings. But if a year or two is all the time I've got left, at least I can do something with it, this way. You can use me, can't you, Mark?"

  "Always," said Mark. "You and Brot are part of everything I do."

  He got out of the car and waited while Wilkes and Ulla also got out. They started into the Residence.

  "I've got to go and talk to Brot first," Mark said, as they went through the door. "You don't mind waiting fifteen or twenty minutes, do you, Wilkes? Then I'll be free."

  "Don't worry," said Ulla unexpectedly. "I'll entertain Mr. Danielson. There's a lot I want to ask him." She took the fragile older man by an arm. "We can have some coffee in the downstairs lounge here."

  She led Wilkes off through a doorway to their right. Mark continued on to the entrance to Brot's room and found his adoptive father sitting up behind a desk in a power chair.

  "How'd it go?" Brot asked as Mark entered the room.

  "Twelve ships," said Mark. "All cruiser mass forty. And the trade went off as scheduled with the Meda V'Dan. How's it been back here?"

  "Busy," growled Brot. "I'll say one thing for that Jarl—he doesn't sit around. And now that tutor of yours showing up here in the middle of everything."

  "Wilkes is a walking library," said Mark quietly, sitting down in a chair opposite the desk, "And he's got true genius-level intelli­gence. Did he rub you the wrong way?"

  "No," said Brot. "He's all right. But he's nothing but a goddam bag of bones."

  "He's dying," said Mark. "Bone cancer."

  "I knew that eight years ago when I messaged him asking him to take you on for tutoring," said Brot. "But he looks like he won't last the week, now. A sneeze would tear him apart."

  "He'll last long enough," said Mark. He looked at Brot. "How about you?"

  "Me?" Brot snorted. "I'll make a hundred and thirty or blow my own brains out! You aren't classing me with someone like that?"

  Mark smiled for the second time in one day —in fact, he realized, the second time since getting off the cruiser.

  "I've never classed you with anyone," Mark said. "You're all by yourself, Brot."

  "Too damn right. What's next in the plans?"

  "Work." Mark's smile vanished. "We've got perhaps three months to train colonists to handle all twelve of those ships, at least under certain specific, simple conditions. At the end of that time, I want to hold a meeting here of all Outpost Station commanders you think would be able to work with us without fight­ing—either us or each other."

  "I'll make a list," said Brot. "What else?"

  "Minor things," said Mark. They talked a while longer about those minor things before Mark excused himself to get back to his re­union with Wiikes.

  In the weeks that followed, Mark's former tutor fitted effectively and powerfully into the team Mark had set up with Lily Betaugh to deduce the philosophy and psychology of the Meda V'Dan. Wilkes was also unexpectedly useful in that he swept up Ulla to work as his assistant. This settled an inner question Mark had been avoiding with some difficulty— which was what the daughter of Admiral Gen­eral Showell was doing making an apparently unlimited stay at Abruzzi Fourteen Station. Ulla had been useful before this as a companion to Brot. But except for the lack of the parts of his limbs that had been ampu­tated, the burly former station commander (for Mark had been confirmed in that post following the publicity about the Meda V'Dan raid) was now so stubbornly recovered that it was ridiculous to pretend he needed someone hovering about him.

  But Ulla, it turned out after Wilkes had put her actively to work, had other uses as well. She was able to give Mark a rough but effec­tive idea of where the Navy patrols would be conducting their sweeps in the neighbour­hood of the Colony Worlds they were sup­posed to protect. From this, and working with Maura Vols, Mark was able to make an intelli­gent guess at which patrol the Meda V'Dan might hit if they chose to attack any part of the Navy.

  "But what I can't see," protested Ulla, some nine weeks later, "is why you think they're liable to attack Navy ships at all. They never have, not since the early days of the Colonies when the Navy was first set up, and even the Navy used to say those attacks were more than likely mistakes. Once the Base was fully operational, no Meda V'Dan ship has ever looked twice at a Navy vessel."

  "They may now," said Mark.

  "But why?" Ulla insisted. "I know that every time the station trades with Meda V'Dan you warn the aliens to leave the Navy alone. But why would they want to do any­thing?"

  "To find out how much strength we have here at Abruzzi Fourteen," said Mark, at last.

  She shook her head.

  "Then that means every time you warn them, you're essentially daring them to do something to a Navy patrol," she said. "Isn't that right?"

  "Yes," said Mark. He discovered his jaw was set so hard that the muscles ached.

  "But the colonists you're training aren't anywhere near ready to fight their ships, let alone in a space battle."

  "Give them another month," said Mark, "and they'll be good enough—for my pur­poses."

  He turned and left her. He found himself torn, these days, between the desire to seek her out and the desire to avoid her. The end result was that he buried himself in work as much as possible, and with one exception, no one at Abruzzi Fourteen came close to match­ing the hours he put in.

  That exception was Jarl Rakkal. There was a relentlessness in the way the big man attacked any problem, but it was a smooth, efficient relentlessness that never seemed to exhaust its possessor. Four hours sleep a night were evidently sufficient for him, and during the other sixteen hours of the twenty-hour day on Ganera VI he did not let up for a second.

  He made plans, then went to the place where the plans were being executed and stood over whoever was concerned with exe­cuting them until they were done to his satis­faction. He had not exaggerated to Mark his ability to handle people. He had shaken up both the agricultural and manufacturing teams of the colony and gotten them to pro­ducing at three times their former rate. He had even put Age Hammerschold in charge of the furniture factory and talked at the old man until Age stopped muttering to himself, perked up, and took command of work there.

  Jarl was technically a colonist, but by sheer capability and effort he had raised himself in importance to the community,
until now, with the exception of Hubble, he was the most important man after Mark at Abruzzi Four­teen. He was like a river in flood, moving everything he encountered, so that by the end of four months after he had arrived, everyone —again except for a single person—gave way to him without argument.

  The exception was Brot. Against the rock that was the former station commander, the powerful waters of Jarl's will broke and divided.

  "You're a smooth bastard," Brot had told him bluntly the first day they had met. "And I don't like smooth bastards. Stay out of my way and there'll be no trouble."

  Jarl had refused to give up in the case of everyone else who had resisted him. But after that first encounter with Brot he had never tried again to influence or compete with the older man. Instead he had, as Brot advised, stayed out of Brot's way. And there had been no trouble.

  In a way, it was a compliment to Brot's in­nate strength that Jarl paid to no one else— not even to Mark. The big man was a strange case from Mark's point of view. Mark told himself that if Jarl possessed even the slight­est spark of real feeling, it would have been impossible not to like him. But there was no spark. There was nothing. Jarl's concern be­gan and ended with himself. He was without fear, brilliant, imaginative, resourceful—but within him that which should have been warm and responsive with instinctive emotions was cold and dead as some stony fossil.

  Jarl recognized this in himself, obviously, because he was not shy of making compari­sons between Mark and himself.

  "You know," he said one day, when they had finished going over the colony's books to­gether, "I ought to be the one to change his­tory, not you."

  Mark looked at him across the coffee pot they were sharing.

  "Want to try?" Mark asked.

  Jarl laughed.

  "Not with hands or guns, or anything like that," he said. "But in other ways, I'm so much the better man than you—and still, there you are, out in point position for the for­ward march of mankind, and here I am in line behind you. And I don't have any weaknesses."

  Mark drank his coffee without comment.

  "What about Ulla?" asked Jarl unexpected­ly.

  "What about her?" Mark asked. "You don't want her."

  Jarl's eyebrows went up.

  "Not want Ulla? The admiral-general's daughter?" he said. "Of course I do."

  "No." Mark shook his head and put his cup down. "When you first came here she might have been some help to you. You don't need her now—you're already on your way back up. So you don't want her, really."

  Jarl's eyebrows came down.

  "You might be right," he said. "I've got my teeth into something here. Which doesn't alter the fact that Ulla's changed now. She wants you."

  Mark's jaw tightened grimly.

  "I don't know that she does," he said. "But in any case, no one's going to have me."

  "Still planning on dying?" Jarl considered him with a frankness as brutal as his insight was penetrating. "Excuse me. I mean still planning on being killed? What if people don't oblige you?"

  Mark shoved the coffee pot and the cups to one side.

  "Let's see those performance records for the spaceship trainees," he said.

  "Come to think of it," said Jarl, without moving immediately, "maybe that's what it is, why you're out there in front and I'm not.

  You're going someplace—to your own execu­tion. That's why I can't beat you out. You're a moving target. If you ever stood still, I'd pass you up automatically."

  "Performance records," said Mark, point­ing toward the spool file drawers.

  "Coming up," said Jarl, turning to get them. He got out the proper spool and snapped it into the desktop viewer, and together they bent to a study of how the training colonists to man the Navy ships was progressing.

  But even though the records finally showed the trainees competent to execute the few simple ship manoeuvres that Mark required of them, that fact was not able to wash Jarl's words out of his brain. They clung there, as Jarl's words had a tendency to do, like the barbed spines of a sand burr in the skin, and they rankled. Until Mark decided that it was time to make Ulla understand about him.

  He came to this conclusion while returning to the Residence unexpectedly early one day, hot and dusty from a swing by ground car around all the agricultural sections of the station. The crops were excellent this year, again thanks to Jarl. They would have more than enough to feed the colony during the winter, whose beginning was now less than three months off. But just because the harvest was good, it posed a problem. Normally, everyone in the colony who was able to work was recruited to get the crops in. But this year he had nearly a fourth of his available work force tied up in those being trained to operate, navigate, and fight the ex-Navy spaceships. If he took them off that training and sent them out to the fields scattered all over the station, there could be no way of getting the ships manned again swiftly in case of necessity.

  And there had still been no sign of Meda V'Dan activity against the Navy. The trading ships of the aliens came right to the station nowadays, in ever-increasing numbers, to trade. The Meda V'Dan had never seemed so peaceful and cooperative. And every twenty hours one of the heavy scout ships relieved another, out on the station by the patrol route Mark, Maura and Ulla had decided was the most likely area for an alien attack on the Navy. Daily the returning scout ships report­ed no sign of alien activity.

  Mark therefore had been puzzling his prob­lem all day—whether to risk taking the trainees out of the cruisers for harvesting, or not—and finding Ulla's face intruding on his thoughts in spite of everything he could do. In exasperation he had decided that if he could not solve one problem, at least he would solve the other—and he headed back toward the Residence.

  As he came in through the Residance front door onto the soft carpet of the entrance hall, he heard from beyond the door that led to Brot's room the soft murmur of voices, one of them Ulla's.

  As he walked toward the door, his boots noiseless on the carpet, he recognized the other two voices. One was, of course, Brot's. The other was the voice of Wilkes. Less than a pace from the door, Mark checked. For he could understand now what the voices were saying, and they were talking about him.

  "But that's just what I've asked him a number of times," Ulla was saying. "Why?"

  "Damn idiot," rumbled Brot's voice.

  "No." It was Wilkes speaking. "In a way, it's my fault. I'd never had a pupil like him. And I had no family. I was like a father who dreams about his son following in his footsteps, but being better at it than any man in history. I talked to Mark constantly. I talked too much. I not only filled him up with what he needed to know, but I tried to fill him up with every­thing I knew, too."

  "The hell!" said Brot. "He didn't have to listen, did he? Why wasn't he outside swimming, or skiing, or running around with girls?"

  "Because he wasn't an ordinary boy," said Wilkes. "He was a very extraordinary boy— not only because of the mind he had, but be­cause the Meda V'Dan had killed his parents and he'd spent his first thirteen years here with you, Brot."

  "What did I do?" growled Brot.

  "The same thing I did—only in a different direction," Wilkes said. "I tried to make him all scholar. You tried to make him all out-poster. And we both succeeded—too well. With an ordinary boy it might not have done him any harm. But Mark was too capable of learning. He was a finished outposter at thir­teen, and a finished scholar at eighteen, and better at being both than either of the men who taught him. You gave him the desire to clean up this colony situation; I gave him the means, the knowledge and theory to work with. From both these things, he's come up with a plan he won't tell us about, except for two things. That it means the end of the Meda V'Dan, and that it means his own end, too, at the hands of the people he'll save from the Meda V'Dan."

  "All right," said Brot. "We've got to stop him—that's all."

  "Can you stop him from going after the Meda V'Dan?" asked Wilkes.

  "Hell, no! How?" exploded Brot.
/>   "Then you can't stop him from going to his own destruction, either," said Wilkes. "They're hooked together, they're both part of a single thing."

  "I don't believe it!" broke in Ulla, "I don't! He wouldn't just commit suicide. Not Mark!"

  "Suicide? What suicide?" snarled Brot. "He's doing a job where getting it done will get him killed, that's all. And Wilkes's right. He can't do anything. I can't do anything. But you can."

  "Me?" There was almost a note of panic in Ulla's voice. "Why do you say it has to be me? He hardly knows I'm here, and you've known him all his life, the two of you together! Why should he listen to me? What can I do you can't do?"

  "You know that you can make him want life bad enough, girl," Brot's voice dropped to a rumble. "You're the only one who can do that."

  "I?" she said on a strange note. "Then do you mean, he—"

  The chimes of the front door signal sounded through the Residence. Mark turned swiftly and strode softly but rapidly to the door. As he opened it, he heard the door to Brot's room opening behind him. But what else sounded behind him after that he did not hear, for standing on the Residence steps was Orval Belothen, who had captained one of the scout ships that had alternated on watch over the Navy patrol route. Beyond Orval, silver above the browning grass of the landing area, reared his vessel, just returned.

  "Meda V'Dan ships, Mark," Orval said. "Six of them. Gathering just at scan limit range beyond the patrol route. And the patrol's due to pass in less than ten hours absolute."

  Mark was down the front steps in two long strides and into a ground car.

  "Get to the communications building!" he flung over his shoulder at Orval. "Order all cruisers manned and ready to take off as soon as possible."

  Chapter Fifteen

  "Lift and go!" said Mark.

  They lifted and went—all twelve cruisers and four scout ships. It had taken them over three hours to man the vessels and get them all into space, but the area where the Meda V'Dan were expected to intercept the Navy patrol was less than seven hours away.