Naked to the Stars

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Cal looked up impatiently. Tack and the young Lehaunan were still twenty feet from him, still immersed in their drawing. Cal got heavily to his feet and stalked over to them.

  “. . .a bunny rabbit. See?” Tack was pointing at a sketch he had drawn and put in the young Lehaunan’s hand. “See the ears? Bunny rabbit. Say bunny rabbit.”

  “Burr. . .” said the young Lehaunan. “Burra . . .brrran—”

  “All right,” said Cal. “That’s enough.” He cast a quick glance around, but there were no adult Lehaunan in sight.“Out!” He took two more steps forward and cuffed the young Lehaunan sharply. “Get out of here!”

  The youngster cried out, and fell back a few steps, still clutching the sheet of paper with the drawing. He whimpered and looked at Tack.

  “Sec!” said Tack.

  “Shut up!” Cal said. He took another step toward the young Lehaunan, who hesitated, then held out the paper shyly toward him.

  “Burraba...” said the little Lehaunan, uncertainly.

  “Get!” barked Cal, striding forward. The young Lehaunan cried out and scuttled away into the further dimness beyond two of the houses.

  Cal looked around, sweating. But there were still no adults in view. He let out a relieved breath. He had been dull-witted with exhaustion a moment before, but now he felt as if he had just taken some powerful stimulant. He was once more conscious that he was a soldier, with authority and responsibility. He was wide awake. He turned around and led off once more.

  Tack followed. Cal could feel the younger soldier’s resentment like a hand laid against Cal’s back.

  “Listen to me,” Cal said, without slowing down or turning his head. “You’re carrying that sketch book to put down military information about this town. Not to play games with. And just because the Lehaunan let us walk around here as long as we aren’t carrying any power equipment doesn’t mean they’re harmless. You saw what happened to Runyon when he went up to one of the adults just wearing a recorder—and the truce was still on then, too.” Cal paused. There was no answer from behind him. “Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” said Tack, behind him.

  “All right.” They walked on. “And if you’re wound up be-cause I had to slap that kid back there, just remember that good military practice—the smart thing to do—would have been tochop him over the ear and hide his body some place safe so he couldn’t go tell the wrong parties about what we’re doing here.”

  Tack said something Cal could not catch.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said,” muttered Tack, “I could have chased him off without hitting him, if you’d told me.”

  “I shouldn’t have had to tell you.”

  They went on. After about five more minutes, they came to a wall of the compound where the trucks had been spotted. They walked along the outside of the wall from end to end. But there was no way to get over, or even see over it, without equipment they had not dared bring. And there was no way visible through it but a pair of blank, high, locked gates. Tack made a number of sketches, but in the end they were forced to turn away without learning anything that explained the trucks.

  “We could try up around the hill from behind,” said Tack.

  “No time,” said Cal. He looked at the timepiece set in his wrist scope. “Five hours to dawn. Come on back to camp.”

  On their way once more through the town, they did not see the little Lehaunan again.

  “Sec?” said Joby’s voice as Cal and Tack came down the slope near the cable phone and the waiting men.

  “Joby?” said Cal. “How come you’re still here? Runyon get rich?”

  - “No, he’s still alive. A tech-nurse made it in from Division on her own two feet. You know that Lieutenant Anita Warroad that came out with the replacements last month? That little brunette?”

  “No,” said Cal. “She bring drugs?”

  “Yeah. She’s got him back knowing where he is.”

  “Any news from Division?”

  “That’s what I’ve been going to tell you,” said Joby. “There was a directive to all units from General Harmon, over the cable phone. All unit commanders, pending further orders, are to take whatever independent action they consider individually necessary to hold their present positions.”

  “Yeah,” said Cal softly, under his breath.

  He stood for a second.

  “All right,” he said, raising his voice. “Everybody in here where I can talk to them. Get them in, Joby. Where’s Walk?”

  “Here,” answered Walk’s voice, so close at hand it was startling.

  “Want to talk to you.”

  Cal led off into the darkness. He could hear Walk following.After a dozen steps he turned and stopped. Walk’s steps stopped. “That order,” said Cal in a low voice. “It leaves it up to me."

  “It does that,” said Walk, without expression in his voice. Cal waited a moment, but there was silence.

  “Have you got something in mind?” said Cal.

  “It’s your show.”

  “Yes,” said Cal. “That’s right, I guess. It’s my show. All right.” He stepped around where Walk would be and headed back. He heard Walk’s footsteps start and followed behind him again like a mockery. Cal counted off the dozen steps back and stopped.

  “Joby?” he said.

  “They’re all here,” said Joby.

  “All right. Section units,” said Cal. “Sound off. One?”

  “Here,” said a voice out of the night, “all present and accounted for.”

  “Two?”

  “Here.”

  “Three?”

  “All here.”

  He went on down the list of Sections. All six from A to F were there. Eighty-three sound men, plus Tack, Joby and Walk waiting on his words in the darkness.

  “Morituri te salutant!” he heard his dead father’s voice say suddenly and clearly upon the waiting air. “Axe, Caesar. ’’With a sudden superstitious horror he clamped his jaw shut and dis-covered it had been himself that was speaking with the exact pure accent and intonation of the older man. For a moment he stood numb and shaken, expecting anything in the way of response and questions from the armed and waiting men before him. But no sound came back; no voice queried. The exhaustion-hazed world settled back toward sanity around him. Perhaps, he thought, there was no one among them who had recognized the ancient salute of the Roman gladiators in its original Latin.“Those who are about to die. . .” He shoved the thought from him with almost a physical use of muscle. He cleared his throat.

  “Right, then,” he said, clearing his throat again. He spoke a little louder. “You all know how we stand. The truce was up at sunset, according to Division. At dawn, the Lehaunan in that town down there will probably be hitting us, especially since they seem to be getting reinforcements or supplies from some-where underground into that walled power center compound back of town. If we wait until dawn, they’ve got us. If we hit them now, considering that they don’t like to fight at night, maybe it’ll be the other way around.”

  He paused. There was no sound from them.

  “So that’s what we’re going to do,” he went on. “Hit them now. Harness up with hand weapons, fire rifles, only. In five minutes we’re moving out in skirmish order of Sections. We’ll move in skirmish order right to the edge of die town and when I signal, we go in shooting and fight our way through town and into that compound. That’s all. Section Leaders here to me.”The leaders of the Sections—in some cases they were not even Squad men, so reduced was the Wing’s rank and strength—gathered about Cal for their individual orders. As soon as he had disposed of them, Cal went in search of the tech-nurse who had walked in to take care of Runyon. He found her with Runyon in the same anonymous patch of darkness where he had left the wounded Contacts Officer earlier.

  “Nurse?” he said, peering into the obscurity. “Lieutenant?”

  “We’re over here, Section Leader,” said a young woman’s voice that had some ring of familiari
ty to Cal’s ears.

  “You know me? Have I met you before, Lieutenant?” said Cal.

  “You came into Medical HQ about your ambulance liaison last week,” was the answer. Cal nodded to himself. He remembered her now. An almost tiny little girl with penetrating brown eyes. There had been a shift in ambulance assignments in the field units and she had seen to it that he was put in touch with his new driver.

  “I remember,” he said. “Lieutenant, we’re moving up. All of us. You’ll be left here alone with the Contacts Officer. I can’t even spare you a man for the cable phone. But if you sit tight right here, you’ll be okay. Division’ll have an ambulance out at dawn.”

  “Cal...” it was Runyon’s voice, weak, but no longer irrational. “You aren’t going to attack that town.”

  “If you’d like, Nurse, we can move you and Lieutenant Runyon back to the cable phone.”

  “Cal,” said Runyon. “Cal, listen. They don’t think the way we do, these Lehaunan. Not like us. I’m positive they think the truce is good until tomorrow, dawn. Don’t you see what that means, then, if you hit them tonight? It’ll be proof to them that, we make truces and—”

  “Sorry,” said Cal. “But the outfit is a sitting duck for any sort of morning attack from that town, Lieutenant. Now, Nurse—”

  “You can’t do this!” cried Runyon feebly. “It’s murder.”

  “What do you know about it, Gutless Wonder!” exploded Cal suddenly, as a white flare seemed to burst suddenly in his brain. “You got a theory for the situation? Well, stuff your theory! Stuff your ethics! Chew on them and use them instead of a backbone, you—”

  “Section Leader!” Cal found himself literally being wrestled back by the small invisible figure of the tech-nurse. “This man is badly wounded! And he’s officer rank. And you can’t—”

  “And I’m in command here!” Cal jerked roughly back out of her grasp. “Remember that. Both of you. It’s a combat area, my Wing, and my responsibility. So do what I tell you and save your breath for the brass back at Headquarters!”

  He turned and stalked off.

  “Cal!” It was Runyon’s voice behind him, calling. “Cal!”

  “Walk?” said Cal, halting where he judged the men to be lined up. “Section Leaders?”

  “Here,” answered Walk. And the Section Leaders also answered. Over their close, low-pitched voices, he could hear the distant calling of Runyon, struggling against the nurse’s attempts to quiet him.

  “All right. Moving out.” Cal led off up the slope into the darkness and toward the distant, sky-reflected glow of the town.

  And it was then that his later memory began to fail him.

  What happened came back to him afterwards as a series of disconnected incidents, like a badly edited film:

  They were spread out in a skirmish line and going down the slope on the far side of the hill. The nighttime city was distant, small and amber-colored before them. The slope was steep and he could hear men losing their footing with the weight of their equipment and the fact that they could not see where their feet were stepping. He could hear them sliding on down through the gravel and weeds for some distance before they could dig in their heels and elbows to stop.

  “Keep close! Keep them together, Sections!” Cal kept calling.

  And one desperate voice finally snarled back, “How can I keep the sonsabitching sonsabitches close when I can’t even keep my own sonsabitching self in line?”

  A near-hysterical howl of laughter burst out suddenly at this,off to Cal’s right. And then it was cut off again, as suddenly as if the laughter had without warning felt cold hands close about his throat.

  They were spread out still in a skirmish line, moving up through the level ground of cultivated fields to the town’s outer ring of illumination, and waiting for Cal to blow the whistle that would signal their attack.

  “Cal?” It was Walk’s voice, suddenly and eerily out of the night almost beside Cal’s ear.

  “What? What’re you doing up here? You’ve got the rear to take care of!” hissed Cal.

  “Yeah. And I’m going back there in just a minute,” said Walk. “I just wondered if we still had you ahead of us up here,that’s all.”

  Cal felt a sick, hot rage rising in his throat. He took a slow breath and spoke carefully.

  “Get back to your position.”

  Walk laughed, and his laugh faded away, going away, behind Cal. Cal walked on at a normal pace. When he was a dozen feet from the outer ring of town lights, he put the whistle to his lips, and blew.

  Yelling and running, the human soldiers, looking clumsy and unnatural in their harnesses and equipment, burst forward into the glare, black against the hard amber illumination, dodging between the dome-roofed buildings, the fire rifles spitting little pale ghosts of flames from the pinholes of their muzzles, making small, dry noises like the breaking of sticks.

  Cal found himself yelling, too . . . running, and his rifle was spitting in his hand.

  It had all taken on the air of a carnival, of a pigeon shoot.There was hardly a sputter of opposition. The humans were running between the buildings, calling out to each other. Keeping score. Making bets.

  Black-furred bodies lay between the buildings. Half in and half out of triangular doorways. The barber pole lights had holes shot in them, but continued to shed their usual glow over the scene. The buildings had holes in them.

  They were at the gates, the high, solid, locked gates of the compound. They had shot the locking mechanism to ribbons but the gates themselves refused to open. Some of the men were cheering and rocking one of the taller, thinner barber poles. It teetered. It leaned farther, and then fell. Men scattered, cheering.

  It bounced as it hit, like a great rubber toy. It came down again, knocking over a soldier who had not dodged fast enough.It rolled off one of his legs, leaving it oddly angled below his knee.

  The men howled with laughter. Joby, who was standing over the fallen man, went into a fit of rage.

  “Why don’t you look where you’re standing?” he raved at the soldier with the broken leg. The man, who had been laughing with the rest, stopped suddenly and burst into shamefaced tears.Walk yelled at the others to pick up the pole. Twenty of them grabbed it.

  It was light. Cal found himself holding it nearest the front.Holding it like a battering ram, they ran at the gates. The gates shivered and sagged; and the barber pole rebounded so springily they almost dropped it.

  “Again!” yelled Cal. They ran at the gates again. They burst them open and spilled into the interior of the compound. Inside there were Lehaunan with hand weapons who immediately began firing at them.

  They were past the Lehaunan with the guns. There had only been a handful of them. The humans were swarming over one of the truck-like devices, halted just outside the hole in the hillside. By main strength a cover was tom off the vehicle, revealing inside it a load of jagged rock.

  “Ore!” shouted somebody. “Ore cars!”

  The men howled like disappointed madmen.

  Cal stared.

  Under his feet there was a feeling suddenly as if the ground there, and all the universe attached to it, slipped without warning and rocked, and he . . .

  ...He was sitting on one of the protuberances like half-barrels, on one of the open spaces between the rounded, dome-like buildings. Dawn was washing a pale yellow-pink light over his surroundings, and a small, cool wind moved about between the buildings and ruffled the black fur of a Lehaunan adult male, fallen about twenty feet off. It moved on to blow through the sooty body hair of an adult female, dimly seen fallen just inside the triangular entrance to one of the buildings beyond.

  A young Lehaunan identical with the one he had cuffed yesterday was tugging and murmuring over the still body just inside the entrance. He caught sight of Cal and for a moment his orange nose projected inquisitively beyond the doorway in Cal’s direction. Then it was pulled back inside.

  Cal sat looking at the wind playing in the fur of the de
ad one closest to him. He thought of the youngster he had just seen and his fingers twitched about the fire rifle lying across his knees. But that was all. He had the vague notion that he was about to make some important decision, but there was no hurry. He went back to watching the movements caused by the breeze in the fur.

  There was a noise close by him. A voice.

  He looked slowly around. It was the young Lehaunan from the doorway. Close up, he seemed even more familiar. He was holding a grimy piece of paper out to Cal.

  “Burraba. ...” said the young Lehaunan diffidently.

  Cal stared at the scarcely recognizable sketch of a long-eared rabbit on the paper.

  “Burr . . . abbut?” said the young Lehaunan.

  There was a coolness on Cal’s face in the blowing wind. He put his fingers to chin and cheek and they came away wet. He was crying.

  “Bunnnrra . . . abbut?” said the young Lehaunan hopefully.

  Chapter Three

  The next thing was that Cal woke to find himself strapped down in a bed in free fall. Above him was the frame and springs of the bed overhead. Through a maze of such tiers of beds with men in them, he saw a white metal ceiling. He was bandaged high on the left leg and there was a bandage also around his body low on the chest. He lay still for some time in this white world, hearing the little sounds of men heavily but not ideally drugged against pain. An orderly came by with a hypo gun.

  “Where’m I going?” Cal managed to say huskily, to the orderly.

  “HQ Hospital, back on Earth,” said the orderly. He had a clean-shaven, uninvolved face. He found Cal’s arm under the sheet of the bed and lifted it out into the open.

  “How’m I hit?”

  “You’ll be all right. Leg bum,” said the orderly, putting the hypo against Cal’s upper arm. “Small scorch on your side. ” His eyes met Cal’s unreadably for a moment. “From a fire rifle, the report says.” He pressed the trigger of the hypo gun and Cal,straining to sort out the meaning behind these last words and opening his mouth to ask another question, swam off into unconsciousness.