by Joe Haldeman
The first time they passed in the halls, Graubard greeted Schon with a karate kick to the throat. Diana had to build him a new trachea. Graubard got a more intensive round of detention, counseling and details — hell, I couldn’t transfer him to another company — and then he was a good boy for two weeks. I fiddled their work and chow schedules so the two would never be in the same room together. But they met in a corridor again, and this time it came out more even: Schon got two broken ribs, but Graubard got a ruptured testicle and lost four teeth.
If it kept up, I was going to have at least one less mouth to feed.
By the Universal Code of Military Justice I could have ordered Graubard executed, since we were technically in a state of combat. Perhaps I should have, then and there. But Charlie suggested a more humanitarian solution, and I accepted it.
We didn’t have enough room to keep Graubard in solitary detention forever, which seemed to be the only humane yet practical thing to do, but they had plenty of room aboard the Masaryk II, hovering overhead in a stationary orbit. I called Antopol and she agreed to take care of him. I gave her permission to space the bastard if he gave her any trouble.
We called a general assembly to explain things, so that the lesson of Graubard wouldn’t be lost on anybody. I was just starting to talk, standing on the rock dais with the company sitting in front of me, and the officers and Graubard behind me — when the crazy fool decided to kill me.
Like everybody else, Graubard was assigned five hours per week of training inside the stasis field. Under close supervision, the soldiers would practice using their swords and spears and whatnot on dummy Taurans. Somehow Graubard had managed to smuggle out a weapon, an Indian chakra, which is a circle of metal with a razor-keen outer edge. It’s a tricky weapon, but once you know how to use it, it can be much more effective than a regular throwing knife. Graubard was an expert.
All in a fraction of a second, Graubard disabled the people on either side of him — hitting Charlie in the temple with an elbow while he broke Hilleboe’s kneecap with a kick — and slid the chakra out of his tunic and spun it toward me in one smooth action. It had covered half the distance to my throat before I reacted.
Instinctively I slapped out to deflect it and came within a centimeter of losing four fingers. The razor edge slashed open the top of my palm, but I succeeded in knocking the thing off course. And Graubard was rushing me, teeth bared in an expression I hope I never see again.
Maybe he didn’t realize that the old queer was really only five years older than he; that the old queer had combat reflexes and three weeks of negative feedback kinesthesia training. At any rate, it was so easy I almost felt sorry for him.
His right toe was turning in; I knew he would take one more step and go into a savate´ leap. I adjusted the distance between us with a short ballestra and, just as both his feet left the ground, gave him an ungentle side-kick to the solar plexus. He was unconscious before he hit the ground. But not dead.
If I’d merely killed him in self-defense, my troubles would have been over instead of suddenly being multiplied.
A simple psychotic troublemaker a commander can lock up and forget about. But not a failed assassin. And I didn’t have to take a poll to know that executing him was not going to improve my relationship with the troops.
I realized that Diana was on her knees beside me, trying to pry open my fingers. ‘Check Hilleboe and Moore,’ I mumbled, and to the troops: ‘Dismissed.’
5
‘Don’t be an ass,’ Charlie said. He was holding a damp rag to the bruise on the side of his head.
‘You don’t think I have to execute him?’
‘Stop twitching!’ Diana was trying to get the lips of my wound to line up together so she could paint them shut. From the wrist down, the hand felt like a lump of ice.
‘Not by your own hand, you don’t. You can detail someone. At random.’
‘Charlie’s right,’ Diana said. ‘Have everybody draw a slip of paper out of a bowl.’
I was glad Hilleboe was sound asleep on the other cot. I didn’t need her opinion. ‘And if the person so chosen refuses?’
‘Punish him and get another,’ Charlie said. ‘Didn’t you learn anything in the can? You can’t abrogate your authority by publicly doing a job … that obviously should be detailed.’
‘Any other job, sure. But for this … nobody in the company has ever killed. It would look like I was getting somebody else to do my moral dirty work.’
‘If it’s so damned complicated,’ Diana said, ‘why not just get up in front of the troops and tell them how complicated it is. Then have them draw straws. They aren’t children.’
There had been an army in which that sort of thing was done, a strong quasi-memory told me. The Marxist POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, early twentieth. You obeyed an order only after it had been explained in detail; you could refuse if it didn’t make sense. Officers and men got drunk together and never saluted or used titles. They lost the war. But the other side didn’t have any fun.
‘Finished.’ Diana set the limp hand in my lap. ‘Don’t try to use it for a half-hour. When it starts to hurt, you can use it.’
I inspected the wound closely. ‘The lines don’t match up. Not that I’m complaining.’
‘You shouldn’t. By all rights, you ought to have just a stump. And no regeneration facilities this side of Stargate.’
‘Stump ought to be at the top of your neck,’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t see why you have any qualms. You should have killed the bastard outright.’
‘I know that, goddammit!’ Both Charlie and Diana jumped at my outburst. ‘Sorry, shit. Look, just let me do the worrying.’
‘Why don’t you both talk about something else for a while.’ Diana got up and checked the contents of her medical bag. ‘I’ve got another patient to check. Try to keep from exciting each other.’
‘Graubard?’ Charlie asked.
‘That’s right. To make sure he can mount the scaffold without assistance.’
‘What if Hilleboe—’
‘She’ll be out for another half-hour. I’ll send Jarvil down, just in case.’ She hurried out the door.
‘The scaffold …’ I hadn’t given that any thought. ‘How the hell are we going to execute him? We can’t do it indoors: morale. Firing squad would be pretty grisly.’
‘Chuck him out the airlock. You don’t owe him any ceremony.’
‘You’re probably right. I wasn’t thinking about him.’ I wondered whether Charlie had ever seen the body of a person who’d died that way. ‘Maybe we ought to just stuff him into the recycler. He’d wind up there eventually.’
Charlie laughed. ‘That’s the spirit.’
‘We’d have to trim him up a little bit. Door’s not very wide.’ Charlie had a few suggestions as to how to get around that. Jarvil came in and more-or-less ignored us.
Suddenly the infirmary door banged open. A patient on a cart; Diana rushing alongside pressing on the man’s chest, while a private pushed. Two other privates were following, but hung back at the door. ‘Over by the wall,’ she ordered.
It was Graubard. ‘Tried to kill himself,’ Diana said, but that was pretty obvious. ‘Heart stopped.’ He’d made a noose out of his belt; it was still hanging limply around his neck.
There were two big electrodes with rubber handles hanging on the wall. Diana snatched them with one hand while she ripped his tunic open with the other. ‘Get your hands off the cart!’ She held the electrodes apart, kicked a switch, and pressed them down onto his chest. They made a low hum while his body trembled and flopped. Smell of burning flesh.
Diana was shaking her head. ‘Get ready to crack him,’ she said to Jarvil. ‘Get Doris down here.’ The body was gurgling, but it was a mechanical sound, like plumbing.
She kicked off the power and let the electrodes drop, pulled a ring off her finger and crossed to stick her arms in the sterilizer. Jarvil started to rub an evil-smelling fluid over the man’s chest.
‘Get out of the way, William, you aren’t sterile.’ Diana felt his collarbone, measured down a little ways and made an incision straight down to the bottom of his breastbone. Blood welled out and Jarvil handed her an instrument that looked like big chrome-plated bolt-cutters. I looked away but couldn’t help hearing the thing crunch through his ribs. She asked for retractors and sponges and so on while I wandered back to where I’d been sitting. With the corner of my eye I saw her working away inside his thorax, massaging his heart directly.
Charlie looked the way I felt. He called out weakly, ‘Hey, don’t knock yourself out, Diana.’ She didn’t answer. Jarvil had wheeled up the artificial heart and was holding out two tubes. Diana picked up a scalpel and I looked away again.
He was still dead a half-hour later. They turned off the machine and threw a sheet over him. Diana washed the blood off her arms and said, ‘Got to change. Back in a minute.’
I got up and walked to her billet, next door. Had to know. I raised my hand to knock but it was suddenly hurting like there was a line of fire drawn across it. I rapped with my left and she opened the door immediately.
‘What — oh, you want something for your hand.’ She was half-dressed, unself-conscious. ‘Ask Jarvil.’
‘No, that’s not it. What happened, Diana?’
‘Oh. Well,’ she pulled a tunic over her head and her voice was muffled. ‘It was my fault, I guess. I left him alone for a minute.’
‘And he tried to hang himself.’
‘That’s right.’ She sat on the bed and offered me the chair. ‘I went off to the head and he was dead by the time I got back. I’d already sent Jarvil away because I didn’t want Hilleboe to be unsupervised for too long.’
‘But, Diana … there’s no mark on his neck. No bruise, nothing.’
She shrugged. ‘The hanging didn’t kill him. He had a heart attack.’
‘Somebody gave him a shot. Right over his heart.’
She looked at me curiously. ‘I did that, William. Adrenaline. Standard procedure.’
You get that red dot of expressed blood if you jerk away from the projector while you’re getting a shot. Otherwise the medicine goes right through the pores, doesn’t leave a mark. ‘He was dead when you gave him the shot?’
‘That would be my professional opinion.’ Deadpan. ‘No heartbeat, pulse, respiration. Very few other disorders show these symptoms.’
‘Yeah. I see.’
‘Is something … what’s the matter, William?’
Either I’d been improbably lucky or Diana was a very good actress. ‘Nothing. Yeah, I better get something for this hand.’ I opened the door. ‘Saved me a lot of trouble.’
She looked straight into my eyes. ‘That’s true.’
Actually, I’d traded one kind of trouble for another. Despite the fact that there were several disinterested witnesses to Graubard’s demise, there was a persistent rumor that I’d had Doc Alsever simply exterminate him — since I’d botched the job myself and didn’t want to go through a troublesome court-martial.
The fact was that, under the Universal Code of Military ‘Justice,’ Graubard hadn’t deserved any kind of trial at all. All I had to do was say ‘You, you and you. Take this man out and kill him, please.’ And woe betide the private who refused to carry out the order.
My relationship with the troops did improve, in a sense. At least outwardly, they showed more deference to me. But I suspected it was at least partly the cheap kind of respect you might offer any ruffian who had proved himself to be dangerous and volatile.
So Killer was my new name. Just when I’d gotten used to Old Queer.
The base quickly settled back into its routine of training and waiting. I was almost impatient for the Taurans to show up, just to get it over with one way or the other.
The troops had adjusted to the situation much better than I had, for obvious reasons. They had specific duties to perform and ample free time for the usual soldierly anodynes to boredom. My duties were more varied but offered little satisfaction, since the problems that percolated up to me were of the ‘the buck stops here’ type; those with pleasing, unambiguous solutions were taken care of in the lower echelons.
I’d never cared much for sports or games, but found myself turning to them more and more as a kind of safety valve. For the first time in my life, in these tense, claustrophobic surroundings, I couldn’t escape into reading or study. So I fenced, quarterstaff and saber, with the other officers, worked myself to exhaustion on the exercise machines and even kept a jump-rope in my office. Most of the other officers played chess, but they could usually beat me — whenever I won it gave me the feeling I was being humored. Word games were difficult because my language was an archaic dialect that they had trouble manipulating. And I lacked the time and talent to master ‘modern’ English.
For a while I let Diana feed me mood-altering drugs, but the cumulative effect of them was frightening — I was getting addicted in a way that was at first too subtle to bother me — so I stopped short. Then I tried some systematic psychoanalysis with Lieutenant Wilber. It was impossible. Although he knew all about my problem in an academic kind of way, we didn’t speak the same cultural language; his counseling me about love and sex was like me telling a fourteenth-century serf how best to get along with his priest and landlord.
And that, after all, was the root of my problem. I was sure I could have handled the pressures and frustrations of command; of being cooped up in a cave with these people who at times seemed scarcely less alien than the enemy; even the near-certainty that it could lead only to painful death in a worthless cause — if only I could have had Marygay with me. And the feeling got more intense as the months crept by.
He got very stern with me at this point and accused me of romanticizing my position. He knew what love was, he said; he had been in love himself. And the sexual polarity of the couple made no difference — all right, I could accept that; that idea had been a cliche´ in my parents’ generation (though it had run into some predictable resistance in my own). But love, he said, love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months. Bullshit, I said, and accused him of wearing cultural blinders; thirty centuries of prewar society taught that love was one thing that could last to the grave and even beyond and if he had been born instead of hatched he would know that without being told! Whereupon he would assume a wry, tolerant expression and reiterate that I was merely a victim of self-imposed sexual frustration and romantic delusion.
In retrospect, I guess we had a good time arguing with each other. Cure me, he didn’t.
I did have a new friend who sat in my lap all the time. It was the cat, who had the usual talent for hiding from people who like cats and cleaving unto those who have sinus trouble or just don’t like sneaky little animals. We did have something in common, though, since to my knowledge he was the only other heterosexual male mammal within any reasonable distance. He’d been castrated, of course, but that didn’t make much difference under the circumstances.
6
It was exactly 400 days since the day we had begun construction. I was sitting at my desk not checking out Hilleboe’s new duty roster. The cat was on my lap, purring loudly even though I refused to pet it. Charlie was stretched out in a chair reading something on the viewer. The phone buzzed and it was the Commodore.
‘They’re here.’
‘What?’
‘I said they’re here. A Tauran ship just exited the collapsar field. Velocity .80c. Deceleration thirty gees. Give or take.’
Charlie was leaning over my desk. ‘What?’ I dumped the cat.
‘How long? Before you can pursue?’ I asked.
‘Soon as you get off the phone.’ I switched off and went over to the logistic computer, which was a tw
in to the one on Masaryk II and had a direct data link to it. While I tried to get numbers out of the thing, Charlie fiddled with the visual display.
The display was a hologram about a meter square by half a meter thick and was programmed to show the positions of Sade-138, our planet, and a few other chunks of rock in the system. There were green and red dots to show the positions of our vessels and the Taurans’.
The computer said that the minimum time it could take the Taurans to decelerate and get back to this planet would be a little over eleven days. Of course, that would be straight maximum acceleration and deceleration all the way; we could pick them off like flies on a wall. So, like us, they’d mix up their direction of flight and degree of acceleration in a random way. Based on several hundred past records of enemy behavior, the computer was able to give us a probability table:
Unless, of course, Antopol and her gang of merry pirates managed to make a kill. The chances of that, I had learned in the can, were slightly less than fifty-fifty.
But whether it took 28.9554 days or two weeks, those of us on the ground had to just sit on our hands and watch. If Antopol was successful, then we wouldn’t have to fight until the regular garrison troops replaced us here and we moved on to the next collapsar.
‘Haven’t left yet.’ Charlie had the display cranked down to minimum scale; the planet was a white ball the size of a large melon and Masaryk II was a green dot off to the right some eight melons away; you couldn’t get both on the screen at the same time.
While we were watching, a small green dot popped out of the ship’s dot and drifted away from it. A ghostly number 2 drifted beside it, and a key projected on the display’s lower left-hand corner identified it as 2 — Pursuit Drone. Other numbers in the key identified the Masaryk II, a planetary defense fighter and fourteen planetary defense drones. Those sixteen ships were not yet far enough away from one another to have separate dots.