Home from the Shore

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Johnny stood up, saluted and went out. Back in the barracks, after the day’s duties, he rounded up the other class representatives, including Abner,and told them the news about Mikros. He did not tell them that Mikros might possibly be making a run for the sea. Such ideas were best kept private as long as possible.

  Mikros was not given permission by his physicians to leave the hospital the next day; and it was not until after duty hours that evening that Johnny was able to make the trip to see him.

  "Good, you made it,” said Mikros as Johnny stepped into the hospital room, closing the door behind him. Mikros' hands continued his speech, silently. If you hadn't come by lights-out I’d have been gone.

  It’s a good thing I got here when I did then,signalled Johnny. He went on aloud. "I’ve got good news for you. You’re leaving, with me, now."

  "Leaving?" Mikros stared at him. “Back to the Academy?”

  "That’s right,” Johnny said. “Stower talked to the hospital early today; and the order to release you went out this noon. But you know administrative red tape. The papers just got here to your ward a few minutes before I showed up... slow down, Mikros. There’s no rush.”

  But Mikros was already out of his hospital bed and rummaging in the room's closet for his uniform. He pulled it out and glanced over it.

  It had been cleaned and repaired. He dressed swiftly.

  How'd you manage it? he hand-flashed at Johnny as he pulled his jacket on.

  I didn’t, Johnny replied. Stower’d obviously made up his own mind to get you back quickly. He wants the whole business over and dealt with as fast and quietly as possible. He's going to lineup the lander cadets tomorrow morning and give you a chance to pick out the ones who jumped you.

  “Good," said Mikros, aloud.

  "I told him you'd have no trouble "

  “I won't.''

  Since Mikros was returning to the Academy on orders, official transportation was available.

  They returned in the back of an empty ambulance, on a shuttle run from the hospital to the Academy infirmary. When they got there, a group of Mikros' classmates were waiting for them, just beyond the check-in desk at the entrance to their barracks.

  These swarmed around Mikros as he went through; and he disappeared in the crowd of their bodies. Johnny, however, was held up by the Duty Officer as he started to pass the desk.

  "General Stower wants you, as soon as you come in," the duty officer said. This night, it was a short, stiff lieutenant with red hair, not one of the cadre staff known to be sympathetic or friendly to the sea-born.

  Oh?” said Johnny. "I’ll go over right now."

  "You’ll wait to be taken over," said the lieutenant.

  Johnny looked past the man to the crowd about Mikros, now moving off, disappearing down the corridor and through the further double doors that let them into the barracks proper.

  Yes sir, he said, and stepped aside from the desk.

  A single military policeman showed up in answer to the lieutenant's phone call, and with the MP Johnny left the barracks and walked over to the Academy Commandant’s residence. They were ushered into an old-fashioned, lamp-lit library to meet a Stower in shirtsleeves, with a pipe in his mouth and an unsmiling face.

  "That’ll be all," he said to the military policeman. "Close the door behind you.”

  The MP went out.

  "Well, Joya," said Stower. He was on his feet himself and he made no motion to sit or offer Johnny a chance to sit. “Suppose you tell me about this report business."

  “Report business, sir?"

  Johnny stared at the officer. It was beyond common sense that he had been escorted here by a guard because of the report he had written on the unsuccessful attempt to capture the space bat.

  “I think you know what I’m talking about.” Stower’s teeth clamped down hard on his pipe. "All those reports you cadets from the sea wrote after the training cruise—the reports you asked the commander for special permission to turn in late.”

  "Yes sir—but I still don't understand, sir,” Johnny said. "We did get the permission; but I think everyone turned his report in well within the extended deadline.”

  "You know they did,” said Stower. His eyes glittered in the lamp light like highly polished brass buttons on some stiff and ancient uniform. “Who organized it? Was it you?"

  “Sir,” said Johnny. “I repeat, I don't understand." Stower walked close to him and stared up into his eyes.

  "By God," said Stower, softly, “if you don’t, who does, then?"

  His voice came back once more to a conversational level.

  "Do you know what was in the report anyone beside yourself turned in?”

  "No sir."

  "Then I’ll tell you,” said Stower. "They all said the same thing, almost with the same words all the way through, as yours did. Are you trying to tell me that wasn't arranged?"

  Johnny thought suddenly of the criticism, and the argument against attempts to capture the bats, that had filled his own report. There was a lost feeling inside him.

  “No sir...” he shook his head. "No one arranged anything. I assure you. What you tell me... it's hard to believe.”

  "You can't believe it?" Stower gave a short grunt of a laugh. "Well, it’s happened! And how could it happen unless all of you planned it?"

  Johnny stood silent, his mind spinning.

  "Well, sir..." he began, slowly, after a second.

  “Damn it!" exploded Stower, "you’re not going to try to tell me it could be done without agreement by all of you?"

  "Yes sir, I am," said Johnny. "You see, the sea people—"

  "Now, by God! I've had this sea-people business, and had it, until I’m full up on it!" snapped Stower. "Whenever you people do anything you shouldn't, the excuse is always that you're none of you to blame, because the way you were brought up in the sea made you do it. There's no regulation, there's no duty, you can't shove aside just by pleading your difference from the rest of us. Well, there’s got to be a limit to that and this time you've exceeded it! Do you know what you, all of you, did with those reports? You made a massive, unanimous, political protest against something that’s vital to our development of space! How can I cover up something like that?"

  "You don't have to, sir," said Johnny. "Why don't you just pass the results on to the Department of Space with my assurance that it was an instinctive unanimity, and ask them if they wouldn’t like to reexamine the business of capturing space bats in the light of it."

  Stower’s eyes remained changed.

  "That might get me off the hook," he said, his voice suddenly emptied of emotion. "It won't get the rest of you off.”

  “We shouldn’t have to apologize for anything that's an honest reaction," Johnny said. “If they question us, we'll admit how we felt. The truth of the matter is, sir, trying to catch one of those bats to study it is a dead end. If we keep trying from now to doomsday, the bats we catch will always choose to die once they’re captured. The whole thing's wrong—and useless. It ought to be stopped; and any one of us would be glad to tell anyone that, if we're asked.”

  "I suspect you will be,” Stower said.

  Johnny watched him closely. When the general said nothing more for several seconds, Johnny spoke again.

  "Sir," he said. "Was something else concerning you?"

  "Not something else,” said Stower. "I've only got your word for it that those reports weren't an organized effort. Tomorrow, I've agreed to line up the cadets who don't come from the sea and let your classmate pick out those he says attacked him—and I'll only have his word for it that they're the ones. You know, Joya, there's a limit to how far we can go to accommodate you and the others like you, a limit to the amount of things I can do to the other cadets and to the military structure of this Academy; and I rather think we've finally gone beyond it."

  "I don't follow you, sir.”

  "Follow this, then. I’m going to hold that parade tomorrow as promised. Palamas can go down the lines
and look the other cadets over. But all that's going to happen to any of the people he picks out is that we’ll look into them. Unless there’s other evidence, solid evidence, to prove that those particular cadets were off-Academy without permission and beat him up, nothing's going to happen to them."

  "General!” said Johnny. "How can there be any other evidence?”

  "There'd better be," said Stower. "We're still a society where people are innocent until proved guilty, I'll remind you of that.”

  "But what you’re saying," Johnny said,

  “is that it’s almost a certainty the ones who ganged up on Mikros will get away with it. If that's so, they'll have shown they can do this sort of thing any time they feel like it!"

  "Look at it that way if you like," said Stower. "Evidence is still going to be required. Good night, Joya."

  “Sir, if you let those landers get away with this, all the sea-born cadets are going to be pushed to a breaking point—”

  "Good night, Joya."

  Johnny stared at the older man. In the lamplight, Stower's face was like the face of some ancient, angry snapping turtle.

  He went back to the barracks by himself, without the escort of the military policeman, who had been dismissed to his usual duties. His mind was racing like an engine under full throttle; and by the time he reached his own room, its activity had begun to turn up certain inevitable alternatives.

  There was no one in his room, no one in any of the rooms along the corridor of his floor.

  But he could hear a muted rumble of voices from the floor just below, where the cadets of the Junior class had their rooms. Some sort of party seemed to be in progress. He walked down and found the noise centering around the room of Mikros. The crowd there turned to greet him but he pushed through with hardly a word until he came to Mikros himself, seated cross-legged on one of the beds of the room as if on an emperor's divan.

  "Johnny!" said Mikros, seeing him. Mikros moved over on the bed to make room. "Sit down!"

  Johnny shook his head and leaned forward to speak in the other’s ear.

  "No," he said, softly. "Break this up, find the other representatives and bring them to my room. Do it quietly. We've come to the point of making a decision at last, one way or another."

  Chapter 3

  The hour was about four in the afternoon at Savannah Stand, with most of the air-taxis, the day-charter flyers, back in the ranks.

  Pilots were hanging around, talking, and the smell of solvent was on the air, the water stains drying back to the pale color of the concrete ramp floor from the flyers that had just been washed down.

  It was, in fact, a few minutes after four.

  A gang of the pilots were needling about how theNu-Ark was just about ready to split apart in the air and her pilot never know the difference.

  Just then, one of them spotted a possible fare down at the far end of the ranks. He came up along the line of parked flyers, a big young tourist, in a flower-patterned thousand-islands shirt, hanging outside his pants, walking across the water stains already fading out like the cigarette smoke in the sun and looking into faces under the shadows of the ducted fans as he passed. He came on down and stopped at last by the Nu-Arkand hired her. He and her pilot took off east, out over the ocean.

  "One to five, in beers," said the pilot of the Squarefish as they watched the Nu-Ark shrink down in the distance, “one of the fans comes off before he gets back here."

  That’s a bad luck bet," said the pilot of the Singalong. “Don't none of you take him up on that." Nobody did, either.

  "You got no sense of humor," said theSquarefish pilot.

  The day was a hot-bright day in late July, clear as a bell. About twelve miles off-shore aboard theNu-Ark the two men felt the motors of both fans quit, stutter a moment and then take up their tale again, not quite as smoothly as before.

  But the pilot said nothing and the passenger said nothing. They had not uttered a word to each other since leaving the Stand. They had not even looked at each other.

  The pilot was sitting by himself up front.

  The passenger stood in back. They were indifferent sections of the flyer, which was like a metal shoebox in shape between the fans, and divided up near the front by a steel partition with a narrow doorway in it just back of the pilot seat.

  The whole flyer had a light flat-tasting stink of lubricating oil from the fans all through it.

  It vibrated to the hard working of the fans so that anything touched sent a quiver from the finger ends up to the elbow. Up front of the partition there was just room for the pilot, his control bar and instruments, and a wide windscreen looking forward. In the bigger part of the box behind was the passenger section, six bolted-down seats and luggage racks in the space behind the seats.

  The racks were forest-green like the walls,with a permanent color that had been fused into them. The two side walls had a couple of windows apiece. All the seats, which were overstuffed and with arm and headrests, were covered in an imitation tan leather that still looked as good as the day it had been put on at the factory. Only the olive drab paint of the floor had been scratched and worn clear down to silver streaks of metal by the sand tracked in from the beach,which gritted and squeaked underfoot at every step.

  With only an occasional little noise from the sand, the passenger stood by one of the windows looking north in the back section, staring out and down at the sea. To his left, back the way they had come, the shoreline where the land ended and the ocean began was sharp and as definite as if someone had drawn it in sand-colored ink. To his right and northeast, from this height the sea was blue-gray, smoke-colored, corrugated and unmoving, stretching miles without end to the horizon, and lost there. There was no doubt about the shoreline. But the distant horizon line where

  ocean met sky was no line at all. The still, blue-gray waters lifted to the far emptiness until they were lost in it. No one could have said for sure where the one ended and the other began.

  The sky, on the other hand, that went to meet the sea, was a pale thin blue with only a small handful of white clouds about thirty miles off and at twenty thousand feet. Right from the moment of takeoff, the passenger had seen that the pilot of the Nu-Ark never looked at the clouds. He kept his eyes only on the indefinite horizon. Glancing over now, the passenger saw by the back of a head showing above the headrest of the pilotseat that the pilot was still at it. It looked to the passenger as if the pilot was soused to the sty that he no longer noticed it. He did not notice the vibration, the faltering of his fans or the stink of oil. Likewise, he seemed used to the look of the sea. But the far-off and strange part of things that was the horizon drew all the attention of his eyes.

  They were brown, his eyes, the passenger remembered. A little bloodshot. Set in a middle-aged tropical face tanned and thickened into squint lines around the comers of the eyes. Just then the pilot spoke, without turning.

  "Keep straight on out?" he said.

  The passenger went tight at the sound of the voice, jerking his eyes back to the pilotseat.

  But the black, straight hair of the pilot showed unmoving against the tan imitation leather.

  The passenger hooked a thumb into the neck opening of his bright-printed sports shirt. With one quick downward jerk of the thumb he unsealed the closure and the shirt fell open.

  “Straight on out," he said. He shrugged off the shirt and reached for the belt closure of his green slacks. "Another four or five minutes, this heading."

  "Ten, twelve miles," said the pilot.

  "All right."

  The black-haired portion of his head that was showing tilted forward. The passenger could see him finally leaning toward the sea. Looking, no doubt, for a vee of wake, a squat triangle of sail, some dark boat-shape.

  “Who do you think’s out here now—" he began.

  He had started turning his head to look back as he spoke. As his eyes came around to see the passenger undressing, he moved with unexpected quickness, letting go of the control b
ar and swinging himself and his pilot seat all the way around. The flyer shuddered briefly as it went into autopilot. The passenger ripped off his slacks and stood up straight in only khaki-colored shorts. They looked at each other.

  The look on the pilot's face had not changed.But now the passenger saw the brown eyes come to sharp focus on him. He stood balanced and waiting.

  The only thing he was afraid of now was that the pilot would not look closely enough. He was afraid the pilot might see only a big young man in his early twenties. A young man with a strong-boned body muscled like a wrestler, but with a square, open and too easy-going sort of face. Then he saw the pilot's eyes flicker to the three blue dots tattooed on his bare right collarbone, and after that drop to the third finger of his right hand which showed a ring of untanned white about its base. The eyes came backup to his face then. When he saw their expression had still not changed, he knew that there was one fear, at least, he could forget.

  "I guess,” said the pilot, "you know who's out there after all."

  "That’s right," he said. He continued to stand, leaving the next move up to the pilot.

  Six inches from the pilot's still left hand was the small, closed door of a map compartment. In there would probably be a knife or gun. The pilot himself was big-boned and thick-bodied. The years had put a scar above one eyebrow and broken and enlarged three knuckles on his right hand.These were things that had caused the pilot to be picked by him for this taxi-job in the first place. He had trusted a man like the pilot of theNu-Ark not to go off half-cocked.

  "So you seen a space bat," said the pilot now, still watching him. The name came out sounding odd in the southern accent; but for a moment it hit home and the pilot blurred before his eyes as tears jumped in them. He blinked quickly; but the pilot had not moved. Once again he remembered how slow land people were to tears. The pilot would not have been figuring that advantage.

  "We all did," he said.

  "Yeh," said the pilot. "Your picture was on the news. Johnny Joya, aren’t you?"

  "That’s right," he said.

  "Ringleader, weren't you?”