Soldier, Ask Not

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Piers stared at me, his face a little white.

  "What do you mean?" he said at last. "You can't openly side with the Exotics-you don't mean that?"

  "Of course not," I answered. "But I might easily see something that they could turn to their advantage to get out of the situation. If so, I could make sure that they see it, too. There's nothing certain of success about this; but, as you said, otherwise, where do we stand now?"

  He hesitated. He reached for his glass on the table and, as he picked it up, his hand shook a little. It took little insight to know what he was thinking. What I was suggesting was a violation of the spirit of the law of impartiality in the Guild, if not the letter of it. We would be choosing sides-but Piers was thinking that perhaps for the sake of the Guild we should do just that, while the choice was still in our own hands.

  "Do you have any actual evidence that Eldest Bright means to leave his occupation forces cut up as they are?" I asked as he hesitated. "Do we know for sure he won't reinforce them?"

  "I've got contacts on Harmony trying to get evidence right now-" he was beginning to answer when his desk phone chimed. He pressed a button and it lit up with the face of Tom Lassiri, his secretary.

  "Sir," said Tom. "Call from the Final Encyclopedia. For Newsman Olyn. From a Miss Lisa Kant. She says it's a matter of the utmost emergency."

  "I'll take it," I said, even as Piers nodded. For my heart had lurched in my chest for some reason which I had no time to examine. The screen cleared and Lisa's face formed on it.

  "Tam!" she said, without any other greeting. "Tam, come quick. Mark Torre's been shot by an assassin! He's dying, in spite of anything the doctors can do. And he wants to speak to you-to you, Tam, before it's too late! Oh, Tam, hurry! Hurry as fast as you can!"

  "Coming," I said.

  And I went. There was no time to ask myself why I should answer to her summons. The sound of her voice lifted me out of my chair and headed me out of Piers's office as if some great hand was laid upon my shoulders. I just-went.

  Chapter 21

  Lisa met me at the lobby entrance to the Final Encyclopedia, where I had first caught sight of her years before. She took me into the quarters of Mark Torre by the strange maze and the moving room by which she had taken me there previously; and on the way she told me what had happened.

  It had been the inevitable danger for which the maze and the rest of it had been set up originally- the expected, reasonless, statistically fatal chance that had finally caught up with Mark Torre. The building of the Final Encyclopedia had from its very beginning triggered fears latent in the minds of unstable people on all the sixteen civilized worlds of men. Because the Encyclopedia's purpose was aimed at a mystery that could be neither defined nor easily expressed, it had induced a terror in psychotics both on Earth and elsewhere.

  And one of these had finally gotten to Mark Torre-a poor paranoiac who had kept his illness hidden from even his own family while in his mind he fostered and grew the delusion that the Final Encyclopedia was to be a great Brain, taking over the wills of all humanity. We passed his body lying on the floor of the office, when at last Lisa and I reached it, a stick-thin, white-haired, gentle-faced old man with blood on his forehead.

  He had, Lisa told me, been admitted by mistake. A new physician was supposed to have been admitted to see Mark Torre that afternoon. By some mistake, this gentle-looking, elderly, well-dressed man had been admitted instead. He had fired twice at Mark and once at himself, killing himself instantly. Mark, with two spring-gun slivers in his lungs, was still alive, but sinking fast.

  Lisa brought me at last to him, lying still on his back on the blood-stained coverlet of a large bed in a bedroom just off the office. The clothing had been taken from his upper body and a large white bandage like a bandolier angled across his chest. His eyes were closed and sunken, so that his jutting nose and hard chin seemed to thrust upward almost as if in furious resentment of the death that was slowly and finally dragging his hard-struggling spirit down under its dark waters.

  But it was not his face that I remember best. It was the unexpected width of chest and shoulder, and length of naked arm he showed, lying there. I was reminded suddenly, out of the forgotten past of my boyhood history studies, of the witness to the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, lying wounded and dying on the couch, and how that witness had been startled by the power of muscle and bone revealed in the unclothed upper body of the President.

  So it was with Mark Torre. In his case, the muscle had largely wasted away through long illness and lack of use, but the width and length of bone showed the physical strength that he must have had as a young man. There were other people in the room, several of them physicians; but they made way for us as Lisa brought me up to the bedside.

  She bent and spoke softly to him.

  "Mark," she said. "Mark!"

  For several seconds I did not think he would answer. I remember even thinking that perhaps he was already dead. But then the sunken eyes opened, wandered, and focused on Lisa.

  "Tam's here, Mark," she said. She moved aside to let me get closer to the bed, and looked over her shoulder at me. "Bend down, Tam. Get close to him," she said.

  I moved in, and I bent down. His eyes gazed at me. I was not sure whether he recognized me or not; but then his lips moved and I heard the ghost of a whisper, rattling deep in the wasted cavern of his once-broad chest.

  "Tam-"

  "Yes," I said. I found I had taken hold of one of his hands with one of mine. I did not know why. The long bones were cool and strengthless in my grasp.

  "Son . . ." he whispered, so faintly that I could hardly hear him. But at the same time, all in a flash, without moving a muscle, I went rigid and cold, cold as if I had been dipped in ice, with a sudden, terrible fury.

  How dare he? How dare he call me "son"? I'd given him no leave, or right or encouragement to do that to me-me, whom he hardly knew. Me, who had nothing in common with him, or his work, or anything he stood for. How dare he call me "son"!

  But he was still whispering. He had two more words to add to that terrible, that unfair, word by which he had addressed me.

  ". . . take over. . . ."

  And then his eyes closed, and his lips stopped moving, though the slow, slow stir of his chest showed that he still lived. I dropped his hand and turned and rushed out of the bedroom. I found myself in the office; and there I stopped in spite of myself, bewildered, for the doorway out, of course, was still camouflaged and hidden.

  Lisa caught up with me there.

  "Tam?" She put a hand on my arm and made me look at her. Her face told me she had heard him and that she was asking me now what I was going to do. I started to burst out that I was going to do no such thing as the old man had said, that I owed him nothing, and her nothing. Why, it had not even been a question he had put to me! He had not even asked me-he had told me to take over.

  But no words came out of me. My mouth was open, but I could not seem to speak. I think I must have panted like a cornered wolf. And then the phone chimed on Mark's desk to break the spell that held us.

  She was standing beside the desk; automatically her hand went out to the phone and turned it on, though she did not look down at the face which formed in the screen.

  "Hello?" said a tiny voice from the instrument. "Hello? Is anyone there? I'd like to speak to Newsman Tam Olyn, if he's there. It's urgent. Hello? Is anyone there?"

  It was the voice of Piers Leaf. I tore my gaze away from Lisa and bent down to the set.

  "Oh, there you are, Tam," said Piers out of the screen. "Look, I don't want you to waste time covering the Torre assassination. We’ve got plenty of good men here to do that. I think you ought to get to St. Marie right away." He paused, looking at me significantly in the screen. "You understand? That information I was waiting for has just come in. I was right, an order's been issued."

  Suddenly it was back again, washing out everything that had laid its hold upon me in the past few minutes-my long-sought plan and
hunger for revenge. Like a great wave, it broke over me once more, washing away all the claims of Mark Torre and Lisa that had clung to me just now, threatening to trap me in this place.

  "No further shipments?" I said sharply. "That's what the order said? No more coming?"

  He nodded.

  "And I think you ought to leave now because the forecast calls for a weather break within the week there," he said. "Tam, do you think-"

  "I'm on my way," I interrupted. "Have my papers and equipment waiting for me at the spaceport."

  I clicked off and turned to face Lisa once more. She gazed at me with eyes that shook me like a blow; but I was too strong for her now, and I thrust off their effect.

  "How do I get out of here?" I demanded. "I've got to leave. Now!"

  "Tam!" she cried.

  "I’ve got to go, I tell you!" I thrust past her. "Where's that door out of here? Where-"

  She slipped past me as I was pawing at the walls of the room and touched something. The door opened to my right; and I turned swiftly into it.

  "Tam!"

  Her voice stopped me for a final time. I checked and looked back over my shoulder at her.

  "You're coming back," she said. It was not a question. She said it the way he, Mark Torre, had said it. She was not asking me; she was telling me; and for a last time it shook me once more to my deepest depths.

  But then the dark and mounting power, that wave which was my longing for my revenge, tore me loose again and sent me hurtling on, through the doorway into the farther room.

  "I'll be back," I assured her.

  It was an easy, simple lie. Then the door I had come through closed behind me and the whole room moved about me, carrying me away.

  Chapter 22

  As I got off the spaceliner on Ste, Marie, the little breeze from the higher pressure of the ship's atmosphere at my back was like a hand from the darkness behind me, shoving me into the dark day and the rain. My Newsman's cloak covered me. The wet chill of the day wrapped around me but did not enter me. I was like the naked claymore of my dream, wrapped and hidden in the plaid, sharpened on a stone, and carried now at last to the meeting for which it had been guarded over three years of waiting.

  A meeting in the cold rain of spring. I felt it cold as old blood on my hands and tasteless on my lips. Above, the sky was low and clouds were flowing to the east. The rain fell steadily.

  The sound of it was like a rolling of drums as I went down the outside landing stairs, the multitude of raindrops sounding their own end against the unyielding concrete all around. The concrete stretched far from the ship in every direction, hiding the earth, as bare and clean as the last page of an account book before the final entry. At its far edge, the spaceport terminal stood like a single gravestone. The curtains of falling water between it and me thinned and thickened like the smoke of battle, but could not hide it entirely from my sight.

  It was the same rain that falls in all places and on all worlds. It had fallen like this on Athens on the dark, unhappy house of Mathias, and on the ruins of the Parthenon as I saw it from my bedroom vision screen.

  I listened to it now as I went down the landing stairs, drumming on the great ship behind me which had shifted me free between the stars-from Old Earth to this second smallest of the worlds, this small terraformed planet under the Procyon suns-and drumming hollowly upon the Credentials case sliding down the conveyor belt beside me. That case now meant nothing to me-neither my papers nor the Credentials of Impartiality I had carried four years now and worked so hard to earn. Now I thought less of these than of the name of the man I should find dispatching groundcars at the edge of the field. If, that is, he was actually the man my Earth informants had named to me. And if they had not lied.

  "Your luggage, sir?"

  I woke from my thoughts and the rain. I had reached the concrete. The debarking officer smiled at me. He was older man I, though he looked younger. As he smiled, some beads of moisture broke and spilled like tears from the brown visor-edge of his cap onto the tally sheet he held.

  "Send it to the Friendly compound," I said. "I'll take the Credentials case."

  I took it up from the conveyor belt and turned to walk off. The man standing in a dispatcher's uniform by the first groundcar in line did fit the description.

  "Name, sir?" he said. "Business on St. Marie?"

  If he had been described to me, I must have been described to him. But I was prepared to humor him.

  "Newsman Tam Olyn," I said. "Old Earth resident and Interstellar News Services Guild Representative. I'm here to cover the Friendly-Exotic conflict." I opened my case and gave him my papers.

  "Fine, Mr. Olyn." He handed them back to me, damp from the rain. He turned away to open the door of the car beside him and set the automatic pilot. "Follow the highway straight to Joseph's Town. Put it on automatic at the city limits and the car’ll take you to the Friendly compound."

  "All right," I said. "Just a minute."

  He turned back. He had a young, good-looking face with a little mustache and he looked at me with a bright blankness. "Sir?"

  "Help me get in the car."

  "Oh, I'm sorry, sir." He came quickly over to me. "I didn't realize your leg-"

  "Damp stiffens it," I said. He adjusted the seat and I got my left leg in behind the steering column. He started to turn away.

  "Wait a minute," I said again. I was out of patience. "You're Walter Imera, aren't you?"

  "Yes, sir," he said softly.

  "Look at me," I said. "You've got some information for me, haven't you?" ' He turned slowly back to face me. His face was still blank.

  "No", sir."

  I waited a long moment, looking at him.

  "Ail right," I said then, reaching for the car door. "I guess you know I'll get the information anyway. And they'll believe you told me."

  His little mustache began to look like it was painted on.

  "Wait," he said. "You've got to understand. Information like that's not part of your news, is it? I've got a family-"

  "And I haven't," I said. I felt nothing for him.

  "But you don't understand. They'd kill me. That's the sort of organization the Blue Front is now, here on St. Marie. What d'you want to know about them for? I didn't understand you meant-"

  "All right," I said. I reached for the car door.

  "Wait." He held out a hand to me in the rain. "How do I know you can make them leave me alone if I tell you?"

  "They may be back in power here someday," I said. "Not even outlawed political groups want to antagonize the Interstellar News Services." I started to close the door once more.

  "All right," he said quickly. "All right. You go to New San Marcos. The Wallace Street Jewelers there. It's just beyond Joseph's Town, where the Friendly compound is you're going to." He licked his lips. "You'll tell them about me?"

  "I'll tell them." I looked at him. Above the edge of the blue uniform collar on the right side of his neck I could see an inch or two of fine silver chain, bright against winter-pale skin. The crucifix attached to it would be down under his shirt. "The Friendly soldiers have been here two years now. How do people like them?"

  He grinned a little. His color was coming back.

  "Oh, like anybody," he said. "You just have to understand them. They've got their own ways."

  I felt the ache in my stiff leg where the doctors on New Earth had taken the needle from the spring-rifle out of it three years before.

  "Yes, they have," I said. "Shut the door."

  He shut it. I drove off.

  There was some religious medal on the car's instrument panel. One of the Friendly soldiers would have ripped it off and thrown it away, or refused the car. And so it gave me a particular pleasure to leave it where it was, though it meant no more to me than it would to him. It was not just because of Dave and the other prisoners they had shot down on New Earth. It was simply because there are some duties that have a small element of pleasure. After the illusions of childhood are gone
and there is nothing left but duties, such pleasures are welcome. Fanatics, when all is said and done, are no worse than mad dogs.

  But mad dogs have to be destroyed; it is simple common sense.

  And you return to common sense after a while in life, inevitably. When the wild dreams of justice and progress are all dead and buried, when the painful beatings of feeling inside you are finally stilled, then it becomes best to be still, unliving, and unyielding as-the blade of a sword sharpened on a stone. The rain through which such a blade is carried to its using does not stain it, any more than the blood in which it is bathed at last. Rain and blood are alike to sharpened iron.

  I drove for half an hour past wooded hills and plowed meadows. The furrows of the fields were black in the rain. I thought it a kinder black than some other shades I had seen. At last I reached the outskirts of Joseph's Town.

  The autopilot of the car threaded me through a small, neat, typical St. Marie city of about a hundred thousand people. We came out on the far side into a cleared area, beyond which lifted the massive, sloping concrete walls of a military compound.

  A Friendly noncom stopped my car at the gate with his black spring-rifle and opened the car door at my left.

  "Thou hast business here?"

  His voice was harsh and high in his nose. The cloth tabs of a Groupman edged his collar. Above them his forty-year-old face was lean and graven with lines. Both face and hands, the only uncovered parts of him, looked unnaturally white against the black cloth and rifle.

  I opened the case beside me and handed him my papers.

  "My Credentials," I said. "I'm here to see your acting Commander of Expeditionary Forces, Commandant Jamethon Black."

  "Move over, then," he said nasally. "I must drive thee."