Galactic Medal of Honor

by Mack Reynolds

  He took his time showering and shaving, then went back into his living room, returned the bed to the wall and went over to his order box. He dialed himself a space colonel’s dress uniform and for once was able to utilize his Universal Credit Card. Off hand, he couldn’t remember having used it since he’d received his medal. Not even in that cathouse in Paris. Almighty Ultimate that had been an experience. That platinum blonde hadn’t been kidding when she said they knew tricks.

  Dressed, he looked about the apartment and grunted contempt. It was the last night that he’d ever spend in this miniature dump.

  He left the apartment and went down to the service elevators and took one to the motor pool in the basements. He wanted to avoid meeting any other residents in the building. He was beginning to get autograph signer’s cramp in his right hand.

  He summoned an auto cab and was able to get into it quickly enough to avoid more than two handshakes and one autograph. He dialed the Interplanetary Lines Building.

  By the time he had covered the distance between the curb and the huge building’s entry, a small crowd had gathered and were applauding him. He grinned and waved at them, but darted inside before anyone could come up with paper and stylo.

  The lobby was packed with bustling citizens to the point where nobody recognized him, which was all right with Don Mathers. He made his way over to the series of reception desks. Most of them were automated, but two boasted live girls.

  The one he stopped before knew him immediately and she ogled him in surprise.

  She was a cute little thing, very trim in her Interplanetary Lines uniform, which, stiff and proper though it was, failed to disguise her ripeness. She was very brunette, her black hair and brows reminding him of Dian Keramikou, her red mouth that of the German girl in Geneva, the one who was willing to put out on her honeymoon. What was her name? He couldn’t remember.

  He said, “I’d like to see either or both Lawrence Demming or Maximilian Rostoff.”

  She stood immediately. “I’ll personally escort you, Colonel Mathers.”

  They headed for an elevator set off to one side of the public elevator banks and obviously private.

  When they entered it, he grinned at her and said, “What are you doing tonight, Miss?”

  Her face went pale. “Oh, anything, sir.”

  He grinned again. “Maybe I’ll take you up on that if I’m not too busy.”

  He had never seen anyone so taken aback. She said, all flustered, “I’m Toni… Toni Fitzgerald. You can just call this building and ask for me. Any time. Any time at all.”

  “When are you off?”

  “That doesn’t make any difference, Colonel Mathers.”

  “Don,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to get you fired.”

  “I… I mean, my supervisor wouldn’t dream of firing me, or anything else, if I was with you… Don.”

  “Well, maybe we’ll get together,” he smiled. “But meanwhile, let’s see Old Man Demming.”

  That took her back too. She said weakly, “Mr. Demming has been out in SanSan. I don’t know if he has returned as yet. But Mr. Rostoff is in his office.”

  SanSan, the West Coast equivalent of Bost-Wash. The city currently extended from what was once San Francisco to what was once San Diego and was still expanding, north, south and east. Only the Pacific prevented it from edging west as well.

  The elevator whooshed them to rarefied altitudes and they left it to emerge into a labyrinth of extensive offices, most overrunning with computers and chattering business machines, none of which Don recognized.

  “This way, Colonel Mathers,” she said. “Mr. Rostoff has recently established offices in the Interplanetary Lines Building. Three floors.”

  He followed her, hard put to keep his eyes from her trim buttocks which managed to sway ever so slightly, despite the stiff uniform.

  She said, “I’ve applied six times for Space Service, but they won’t take me. My two brothers were lost in that collision between the Minerva and Sioux City off Pluto last year.”

  Don, who was to her right and very slightly behind her said, “That’s too bad, Toni. However, the Space Service isn’t as romantic as you might think. And the name’s Don.”

  “Yes, sir,” Toni Fitzgerald said, her soul in her eyes. “You ought to know… Don. Nobody will ever believe me when I tell them you told me to call you by your first name.”

  Don Mathers was somehow irritated, though he didn’t know why. He said nothing further until they had reached their destination in the gigantic office building. He thanked her after she had turned him over to another receptionist.

  However, his spirits had been restored by the time he was brought to the door of Max Rostoff’s private office. His new guide, as impressed as had been Toni, hadn’t even bothered to check on the interplanetary magnate’s availability before ushering Mathers into the other’s presence.

  Max Rostoff looked up from his half acre of desk, looking wolfishly aggressive as ever.

  He came to his feet, smiling, and extended a hand to be shaken. “Why, Colonel,” he said, turning on such charm as he could muster. “How fine to see you again. Nora, that will be all.”

  Nora gave the interplanetary hero one more long worshipful look and then turned and left.

  As soon as the door had closed behind her, Max Rostoff turned on his visitor and snarled, “Where have you been, you rummy son of a bitch?”

  X

  He couldn’t have shocked Don Mathers more if he had suddenly levitated and flown out a window.

  “We’ve been looking for you for over a week,” Rostoff snapped, enraged. “Out of one bar, into another. Our men couldn’t catch up with you. Damn it, don’t you realize we’ve got to get going, you drunk? We’ve got a double dozen and more of documents for you to sign. We’ve got to get this thing underway, before somebody else does.”

  Don blurted, “You can’t talk to me that way”

  It was the other’s turn to stare. Obviously, Max Rostoff had as short a temper as his power was long. He said, low and dangerously, “No? Why can’t I?”

  Don glared at him.

  Max Rostoff ran a hard hand back over his bald, tanned head and sneered, low and dangerously, “Let’s get this straight, Mathers. To everybody else but Demming and me, you might be the biggest hero in the solar system. But you know what the hell you are to us?”

  Don felt his indignation seeping from him. For the past two weeks he had been a god. For the past few days, he had begun to believe it himself. But here he was confronting reality.

  Rostoff was saying, “To us, you’re just another demi-buttocked incompetent on the make. You’re a guzzler. A woman chaser. An opportunist willing to freeload on all the starry-eyed slobs who think you’re the greatest thing to come down the aisle since Alexander the Great. You think our men didn’t check you out? Hell, you didn’t even pay your hover-cabs. Underpaid cabbies that needed the couple of pseudo-dollars you owed them. Hell, you didn’t even pay in the whorehouse you spent twenty-four hours in, in Paris. The madam closed the place up to all customers as long as you were there. Do you know who her husband was? I won’t bother to tell you. He died in a One Man Scout; blew when the shuttle was taking him into orbit.”

  Don sank into one of the enormous office’s huge, real-leather chairs.

  Rostoff said, “You’re a rummy and a con man and… a coward. We have the record of your past six patrols, Mathers.”

  Don said nothing. He was breathing deeply.

  Rostoff added contemptuously, “Make no mistake, Mathers, you’ll continue to have a good thing out of this only so long as we can use you.”

  A voice from behind them said, “Let me add to that, period, end of paragraph.” It was the corpulent Lawrence Demming, who had just waddled in from an inner office.

  He said, and even his voice seemed fat, “And now that’s settled, I’m going to call in some of our lawyers who have already begun to work on the project. While they are about, we conduct ourselves as t
hough we’re three equals. Theoretically we will be.” He lowered himself into a sizable chair with a sigh. It was obvious that his feet were too small for his bulk.

  “Wait a minute now,” Don blurted. “What do you mean theoretically? What in the hell do you think you’re pulling? The agreement was we split this whole thing three ways.”

  Demming’s jowls wobbled as he nodded. “That’s right. And your share of the loot is your Galactic Medal of Honor. That and the dubious privilege of having the whole thing in your name. You’ll keep your medal and we’ll keep our share.” He grunted heavily and added, “You don’t think you’re getting the short end of the stick, do you?”

  “I think I’m getting shafted with the stick,” Don said indignantly.

  Rostoff had reseated himself. He said now, “Let’s keep this on as gentlemanly a scale as possible.” He took Don in. “We’ve been working this over ever since you were successful in your farce attack upon the Kraden. This is what we’ve come up with. We are going immediately to incorporate the Donal Mathers Radioactives Mining Corporation, concentrating at first on Callisto and its pitchblende deposits. Recent prospecting has indicated a high incidence of carnotite on Ganymede and Io. We’ll undoubtedly move in on them.”

  “What’s carnotite?” Don said, his voice sulky.

  Rostoff’s face indicated disgust at the other’s lack of knowledge. “It’s an ore composed of oxides of vanadium, uranium and potassium. It usually occurs, often in cavities of rocks, as a lemon-yellow crystalline powder; it crystallizes in the orthorhombic system.”

  Don Mathers was out of his depth. “All right, go on,” he said. “What’s all this about my being squeezed out?”

  “That’s not the way to put it,” Demming wheezed. He had closed his eyes and leaned back into his chair as Rostoff talked.

  Rostoff went on. “We’re going to present this on the highest patriotic level,” he said. “The Donal Mathers Radioactives Mining Corporation is above such mundane matters as making large profits. You will be president and you’ll be chairman of the board, but you will not own a single share of stock. That should impress the peasants.”

  “What the hell do I live on?” Don said with belligerence.

  “All that you will receive from the corporation will be your expenses. Of course, your expense account will be unlimited. You will receive not a single pseudo-dollar in salary, but what difference if your expense account is unlimited?”

  “The same thing,” Demming wheezed.

  “What’s the Space Service going to say about all this?” Don said. “Officers aren’t supposed—”

  “You’ll resign from the Space Service tomorrow,” Rostoff said.

  “That won’t go over. You’re not allowed to resign, especially in time of war. Besides, it’ll hurt my image with the common herd.”

  Rostoff made with a humorless laugh. “No, it won’t. In the first place, you can resign any time you want. You can do no wrong. In the second place, we’ve assembled a whole squad of writers and speech writers for you. This will be presented as the ultimate in patriotism, you throwing yourself into a non-profit endeavor to solve the uranium shortage.”

  Demming said, “You’d better move into my apartments. Tomorrow the speech writers want a preliminary session with you. They want your style of talking. They’re going to have to work on your public image. We also have a couple of actors to coach you. Then you’ll have to have a session with the makeup staff.”

  “Makeup!”

  “Yes,” Rostoff said. “Everything from the way you cut your hair to the type of civilian clothes you wear. We’re considering a new style of clothes, which you’ll sponsor. The simplicity look. You’re going to be the clean cut kid from next door, who, in view of the war effort, scorns expensive, fancy clothing, expensive cars, and all the rest of it.”

  “Almighty Ultimate, why?”

  Rostoff sighed. “The standard of living is too damn high these days. To maintain it, employees have to be paid too much. We want to lower wages and salaries—all in the name of the war effort, of course. We’re going to get them down to a living wage.”

  “A meager living wage,” Demming said. “The bastards are living too high on the hog.”

  Look who’s talking about hogs, Don thought inwardly.

  Rostoff said, “In the privacy of your own quarters, of course, you can do whatever you want. Eat, drink, wear, and bed anything or anybody you want. But in public you’re a simple, earnest, personally unambitious young man, as befits being the hero of the solar system.”

  Demming sighed satisfaction and said, “The common stock we sell will return a minimum dividend, very minimum. The dividends of the preferred stock will be limited only by the rate of profit the corporation realizes. Max, here, and I will own the preferred stock but that fact will not be made public. Through you, we will take measures to get permission to withhold such information due to, ah, let us say, national security, always a useful term.”

  “It’s the rip-off of the century,” Don muttered.

  Rostoff grinned his wolf grin. “It’s the rip-off of all history,” he corrected.

  “And you called me a con man,” Don said bitterly.

  Demming wheezed again and said, “Let’s knock this off and get the law boys in.” He pushed his bulk to his feet and went over to the desk and flicked a switch on one of the screens there and said, “Dirck.”

  Dirck Bosch, his Belgian secretary, entered from the same inner office Demming had emerged from earlier.

  Demming said, “Bring in the damn lawyers. We’ve got enough paper work to keep us busy for the rest of the week.”

  Don said, “Wait a minute. What if I say no?”

  Rostoff chuckled his humorless laugh. He said, “We four here, including you, are the only living persons who know that you’re a heel, not a hero.”

  Don Mathers lost track of the number of lawyers who came and went. They were all obviously top men in their various fields, very deferential to Demming and Rostoff and as impressed with meeting Don as anybody else had been since his decoration. Two of them, pleading children who collected, even asked for autographs. Don, of course, complied, suspecting that they, in actuality, wanted them for themselves, not for their kids.

  It would be impossible for him to ever go broke, he decided acidly. If worse came to worse, he could always stand on a street corner and sell his signature for, say five pseudo-dollars a throw.

  He didn’t bother to read any of the things he signed. Had he, it would have taken him forever; some of the sheaf’s of legal paper were half an inch thick.

  Finally, Demming grunted to his secretary, “What time is it, Dirck?”

  Dirck Bosch told him immediately, seemingly not even looking at his wrist chronometer.

  Demming lurched to his feet. “I have a guest,” he said. “Let’s call the rest of this off until tomorrow.”

  Rostoff said, “Tomorrow, Don is going to have to start work on his autobiography.”

  “Autobiography?” Don snorted. “I could no more write an autobiography than…”

  Rostoff said absently, scanning some papers in his hands, “We’ve got a writer chap to ghost it. One of the best authors in the system. But he’ll have a lot of questions to ask you. We want to get it into print as soon as possible—before we issue stock. We’re also having two other books done, one a juvenile, another a straight biography.”

  Demming was headed for an elevator to one side of the room. He said, “I’ll go up and welcome the Grand Presbyter. Max, can you stay for dinner?”

  “Yes, of course.” Demming said to Don, “We have a suite prepared for you. You can pick up your things, or we’ll have one of the men go over to get them, tomorrow. Ill expect you gentlemen in ten minutes or so. In the blue dining room, Max.”

  Maximilian Rostoff and Don wound up two or three more items and then the lawyers left, followed by the self-effacing Dirck Bosch, leaving Rostoff and Don alone.

  Don looked at the door thro
ugh which the Belgian secretary had just gone and said, “What spins with him?”

  Rostoff didn’t look up but said, “Who?”

  “Bosch. He knows the whole story. Suppose he spills it?”

  Rostoff shook his head. “Demming owns him. Some years ago he worked in Demming’s, let us say, security staff. A situation arose in which it became necessary to, as you’d say, liquidate two financial competitors. Demming has definite proof that Bosch performed the deed.” He smiled his lupine smile. “The moral of the story is, don’t ever let friend Lawrence get anything on you. Which, obviously, is too late a warning in your case.”

  Don said, “He could still spill, given enough pressure of whatever sort on him. He hates Demming.”

  “Everybody hates Demming. You’re more observant than I would have given you credit for. However, Bosch has a semi-invalid wife and two children in Brussels. Their only source of income is Bosch’s pay from Demming. Her medical bills are high. If anything happened to Bosch’s income they would be in poverty.”

  “He could get a job somewhere else, if he could beat the murder rap. He’s obviously a top notch man.”

  “Not with Demming blacklisting him. Let’s go on upstairs. You’re going to meet the Grand Presbyter.”

  “The Grand Presbyter! You mean the head of the Universal Reformed Church? I thought I misunderstood Demming when he mentioned this guest of his.”

  Rostoff didn’t bother to answer. He tossed the legal papers to his desk and led the way to the elevator.

  When the door opened again, they emerged into a dining room possibly half again as large as the “cozy” family room in which he had eaten with the Demming family several weeks before. It was largely in blue, even the Gainsborough painting which Don absently recognized as that master’s most famous work. He wondered how many dining rooms Demming maintained in all.

  Besides Martha and Alicia Demming, there was a stranger present. Not exactly a stranger. Don recognized him from the times he had seen him on Tri-Di. It was Peter Fodor, Grand Presbyter of the Universal Reformed Church, successor to the prominence once held by a combination of the Pope, the Patriarch of the Orthodox Eastern Church, and the Grand Mufti of Mecca. He was a quiet, dignified man in his early sixties. He was very straight in posture and slight in build though his comparatively simple robes did little to hide a rounded paunch. He held a glass of sherry in his hand, as did Martha and Alicia. Somewhat to Don’s surprise, there was a quirk of sly humor in his eyes that didn’t show up on Tri-Di where he usually seemed somewhat sad.