Naked to the Stars

by Gordon R. Dickson

  After this there was a hazy period in which the leg began to hurt seriously. In between shots from hypo guns, Cal was vaguely conscious of arriving back in Headquarters Hospital outside Denver, Earth, and of some kind of an operation on the leg.

  There was a short period in which he seemed to be out of his head. Suddenly, with no transition from the hospital, he found himself back in his father’s bookstore. They were in the semi-private collectors’ room, enclosed by shelves full of not microtapes but bound volumes. Cal stood facing his father, seated behind his father’s desk. Above the head of the older man was the regency mirror with the gilt frame giving back an image of Cal’s seventeen-year-old face. And on the small shelf below it,between the shelves on either side (holding to the left, Spengler; to the right, Churchill) was a small carving of Bellerophon capturing the winged horse Pegasus. The powerfully muscled arm of the young Greek mythological hero was around the proudly arched neck of a great winged creature, forcing it to the earth.The sweeping pinions were spread wide in resistance, the delicately carved head rearing itself to look the conqueror squarely in the face. The strong equine shoulders hunched in unabandoned resistance. Only one front leg, buckling under the strength of the hero, presented its hoof directly toward the viewer in what Cal had always thought was an ugly, crippled fashion.

  “Of course you can stop me,” Cal heard himself saying, as he had said eight years before. “I’m not eighteen. You can phone down and say I don’t have your permission to enlist.”

  He looked down at his father, seated in the desk chair with the carved armrest, his father’s wide shoulders and upper body showing above the surface of the desk, his sinewy forearms laid out upon the desk’s slick top. His father’s quiet, long-boned face looked back up at him.

  “Do you want me to phone them?” his father said.

  “You know what I want,” said Cal.

  “Yes,” said Leland Truant, “you want to go out with a club and beat the universe into submission—” He checked himself. “No,” he said, “that’s unfair. You want to go slaying dragons, that’s all.” He sighed. “It’s not surprising.”

  “And you—” Cal looked at himself again in the mirror; his face was white—“want me to stay here and go to tea parties with your Societic, don’t-hurt-anyone friends!”

  “Now you’re being unfair,” said his father. "I’ve never tried to convert you to my way of thinking, deliberately.”

  “No, that wouldn’t be right, would it?” Cal said, talking quickly to keep his voice from cracking. “That wouldn’t be the non-violent way. It’d be violence of the intellectual kind.”

  “Not exactly,” said his father.

  “What do you mean, not exactly?” Cal’s voice cracked after all.

  “I mean it simply wouldn’t be fair. That’s why I’ve always tried to avoid it with you. A man has too many opportunities to brainwash his own son, unconsciously, without adding a conscious effort to the business.” Leland looked up at Cal for a moment. “If you stop to think, you know that’s true. All I ever did was try to set you an example. With your mother dead, I didn’t trust myself to do anything else.”

  “But you wanted me to be just like you, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  “Of course,” said his father. “Anyone with a son hopes—”

  “You admit it. You see? You planned—”

  “No,” said his father. “I only hoped. I still hope—that when you reach a mature level of judgment you’ll find a greater purpose to life than that which involves killing. No matter how justified.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes with the inescapable gesture of middle age. “I’ll admit I also hoped you’d stay out of the Armed Services and improve your chances of living until you reached that point of mature judgment. But I imagine I was wrong in that. If you believe something, you should follow it.”

  “You,” said Cal savagely, “talk like it was murder. It isn’t murder when a soldier kills.”

  “Isn’t it?” said his father. “Never? The killing of a soldier is always justified?”

  “Yes!”

  “How can you be so sure?” said his father. Cal felt his chin lifting defiantly.

  “Because that’s what soldiering teaches—responsibility. A responsible being doesn’t engage in unjustified killing, in murder. An irresponsible being under our system soon gets weeded out.” Leland Truant shook his head slowly.

  “Yes,” he said, “I can see how iron-clad and complete that all sounds to you.” He rubbed his eyes again. “But I think you’ll learn that the human being is more complex than you think now. We’re all potential murderers, Cal. Pushed, pulled,stampeded, or maneuvered to the proper point, we can all be brought to where murder is possible to us. And not just accidental murder, but cruel, vicious, even wanton, reasonless murder.”

  “Words!” cried Cal. “Words, words, words! That’s all you ever give me! What would you have done when mom was alive if some scaly lizard of an Alien had come breaking in here trying to kill her?”

  “I would have fought, of course,” said his father. “I would have grabbed any kind of a weapon I could lay my hands on and done my level best to stop him, to kill him. And if I’d succeeded”—his voice grew a trifle sardonic—“I was a good deal younger when your mother was alive—I would have felt first savagely triumphant, then a little awed at what I’d been able to do against an armed intruder, graduating as time went on to a pleasant sense of superiority and a sneaking desire that other people should recognize it.”

  “Then what’s wrong with what I want to do? What?”

  “Nothing,” said his father. “You’re just young.” He sighed. “Besides the fault is mainly mine.”

  Cal stared at the older man.

  “Yours?”

  “Yes.” Leland nodded at the books around them. “I thought the best way to bring up a boy was to expose him to as much information as possible. I crammed you fall of the books that had brought me understanding and tolerance. I forgot that it’s natural for a son to. seek an opposite point of view from his father. Where I saw the dark tragedy of Malory’s Morte d'Ar-thur, you saw the bright clash and bang of Round Table knights unhorsing evil opponents. You swallowed Kipling by the yard.You knew verse after verse of ‘The Ballad of the Clampherdown,’and ‘The Ballad of East and West.’ You missed entirely the deeper messages that he sounded in the music of Piet Lichtenberg, and ‘The Half-Ballad of Waterval’ slid in one ear and out the other with you.”

  His father leaned forward in his chair, both hands spread out on the surface of the desk. Cal saw the cords stand out on the backs of those hands.

  “I know,” said his father. “I know. Because I did exactly the same thing, when I was your age! I needed a faith, too. And I went galloping out looking for a banner under which to enlist myself. And that was good. That was the way it ought to be. But then, having committed myself, I made the mistake of setting my conscience aside. I thought that, having committed myself to a good cause, everything I must do would automatically also be good.” He gave his son a long look. “There’s nothing wrong with soldiering, Cal, as long as you can keep your ideals about it alive. But God help you, my son, the day you murder them.”

  Cal opened his mouth to speak, but his throat felt choked.

  “I don’t blame you for being ashamed of me,” said his father.“At your age it must be doubly hard to have a parent who not only was convicted and disgraced in his youth for opposing the present veteran-dominated government, but one who is still unrepentant enough to believe in equal voting rights and mankind’s duty to search for a better way of getting along with other intelligent races than out killing them.” His father’s hands relaxed suddenly. Suddenly they were the hands of an older and tired man. “No, I can’t tell you what to do. I wouldn’t if I could. We have to each follow what we believe in, even if our beliefs take us different ways.”

  The room seemed to waver and fog about Cal.

  He felt as if he were exploding inwardly. All the pressure
of the years swelled up inside him and burst out of his throat in the cruelest words he could find.

  “You always hated them, because they wouldn’t have you!”he cried. “That’s why she was killed. Because of you!”

  He looked furiously, pointedly, down at his father’s clubbed left foot—projecting from underneath the desk at one side toward Cal—in its special boot, hoof like and ugly. He looked backup to his father’s face and saw the older man still sitting looking at him. His father’s face had not changed. It looked sadly at him. Cal felt his inner fury break and crumble into pain and despair. He had done his worst. He had cut his deepest. And his father still sat, refusing to admit the wrong he had done.

  “Alexander of Macedon,” said his father, “and Jesus of Nazareth both founded empires, Cal. Where are the hosts of the Alexandrians today?”

  Cal turned and plunged out of the room, unseeing.

  The mists cleared. He was once more in a hospital bed; in along ward now with a row of beds down each side of the room.Wires reached out from the robot nurse by his bedside and held him with metallic lack of doubt.

  “How are you feeling, Section Leader?” asked the canned voice of the device confidentially.

  “A’right,” muttered Cal.

  A white, translucent plastic tube emerged from the body of the device and nudged his lips.

  “You’re doing just fine, Section Leader,” said the voice. “Just fine. Drink this, now.”

  He lifted his heavy lips apart, fumbling at the tube, and a cool mint-tasting fluid flowed between them and eased his dry throat.He closed his eyes, exhausted by that small effort. Consciousness of the hospital dissolved from around him once more.

  . . . Walk had been waiting for him that day he had the argument with his father, outside the Recruitment Office. Cal saw him pacing impatiently as Cal came slowly up. At seventeen,Walk was thin as a honed-down butcher’s knife. And under his straight black hair and startlingly black brows his eyes had a glint of wildness that was close to something berserk. He was like a hungry man who does not care for consequences.

  “You talk to him?” Walk said as Cal came up. “What’d he say?”

  “It’s all right,” said Cal emptily.

  “You’re all set then?”

  Cal nodded. He made an effort. “How about you?”

  Walk laughed.

  “I’ve been set for months, now. The old man’s glad to get rid of me. Almost as glad as she is.” He was referring to his step-mother, who was ten years older than his father and dominated him as she had failed to dominate Walk himself. “I’m not even going back home again. You going back?”

  Cal shook his head.

  “Then come on,” said Walk. “You want to live forever?” And he turned and led the way into the Recruitment Office. . . .

  Chapter Four

  Cal began to recover and was transferred to a convalescent section. In charge of the convalescent section was Anita War-road, the small nurse who had come with medication for Run-yon, the Contact Officer. Cal asked after Runyon, and she told him that the other man had died back at base hospital. He was surprised to find that she blamed herself for it, that she thought if she had come faster or arrived sooner, she might have been able to save Runyon. They found themselves talking like old friends. As the days went by, and Cal grew stronger, he found himself being attracted by her as a woman. They could not fraternize in the hospital, since she was an officer, but then, before he was discharged, a field commission came through, making Cal a lieutenant.

  Walk—also a lieutenant, now—and Joby came visiting the convalescent section. To celebrate both new commissions, they smuggled in a bottle. They had several surreptitious drinks and left the three-quarters full bottle with Cal. That night, after lights out, he started drinking from it by himself. Almost before he knew it, he had finished it. It had been a one-liter bottle of hundred-and-ten-proof whisky. He was very drunk. He lay on his back, holding on to the nightstand beside the bed to stop the room from turning like a shadowy, seasick merry-go-round. After a while the room slowed down and he passed out or went to sleep.

  He woke up in the later darkness of four in the morning, dry-mouthed and sweating. He drank all the water in the dispenser on his nightstand, and then lay back. He felt dizzy, sick, and hollow with fear and a sense of his own worthlessness. He lay still, wishing for sleep, but all he could do was lie there, reliving the past. Scene after scene came back into unnaturally sharp focus. He relived the final argument with his father. He went through basic training all over again. He remembered the first flogging he had seen...

  The soldier flogged had been a trainee from his own company.The trainee had been seventeen, just as Cal was. The trainee had gotten drunk, for the first time in his life, on his first weekend pass. He had stolen a copter and smashed it up. The military police had got to the scene of the wreck first, and brought him back to the stockade. But the Armed Services refused to surrender him to the civilian authorities. The Combat outfits looked after their own, the trainees were told. The Armed Services made financial reparation, paying for all the damage done. The company was paraded, the trainee given twenty lashes and a dishonorable discharge. The trainee returned to his own home town and another trainee from the same town was able to tell the rest of the company how the discharged boy made out, having the news in letters from home.

  The ex-trainee’s father was a veteran of the Combat Services,himself. When the boy got there, he found the door of his home locked against him. An aunt and uncle finally took him in. He got a fairly good job in the repair department of his uncle’s general store. The other employees, because his uncle was the owner, did not needle him much about what had happened to him. Nevertheless, some three months later, he hanged himself in the basement of his uncle’s home. He would have been eighteen in exactly one week.

  Cal did not get sick or pass out at the flogging, itself, as some of the other trainees did. Afterwards, however, he lay face down on his cot, staring dry-eyed into the darkness of his pillow. Now that it was over, some of the tougher trainees were beginning to recover and be rather loud-voiced about it. Cal heard them talking, and after a while he heard a voice beside his right ear: “Hey, Truant! You going to lie there all day?”

  “So?” answered the voice of Walk from the cot on the side of Cal’s left ear. “There’s some regulation against it, Sturm?”

  “Well, hell!” said the voice of Sturm uneasily. After seven weeks all the trainees knew Walk, and none of them wanted trouble with him. He was recognized as a wild man. “It’s not as if it was his brother got the twenty, or anything.”

  “No,” said Walk. “But he saw his dad get it, when he was only six years old.”

  “His dad?” said the voice of Sturm. “He saw? When’d they let kids—”

  “It wasn’t on an Armed Services post,” said Walk. In the pillow, Cal squeezed his eyes shut desperately. Don’t tell it, he willed at Walk, passionately. Let it go! But Sturm was already asking.

  “It wasn’t? How come?”

  “It was back during the Equal Vote riots. They sent an Armored Wing into our town to put down the rioting. The Reserve Captain in command had dreams of glory or something. He rounded up a batch of the rioters and worked them over to find out who the ringleader in the town was. There wasn’t any ring-leader, but he finally got the name of the most respected Equal Vote advocate in town. It was Cal’s dad.”

  “Well, hell, if he was one of those—”

  “One of those!” sneered Walk. “Old man Truant hadn’t stuck his nose out of doors. His wife was expecting and he was standing by to take her to the hospital at any minute. The captain sent a squad of men to arrest Cal’s father. He told his wife it wasn’t anything, he’d be right back. But from her upstairs window she could see out into the town park. Fifteen minutes later she saw a crowd with the soldiers tying Cal’s old man to a whipping post. She sent Cal ahead to tell them to wait, and she tried to get over there herself. But she fell downstairs, had
a miscarriage and bled to death. Now, you got something cute to say to Cal?”

  There was an uneasy silence.

  “Well, cripes!” said the voice of Sturm, finally. “How come the captain had authority to do that to a civilian?”

  “He didn’t,” said Walk’s voice. “Seems he got kind of carried away. Old man Truant got a letter of apology from the government and an offer of reparations later on, but by that time his wife was planted and the fifty scars on his back were all healed. Besides, he’s got the Societic point of view: make your-self a good example unto all men.”

  There was a moment of silence that stretched out longer and longer; then the sound of Sturm’s bootsteps going away. The talk took up again in the far parts of the room, and after a while mess call sounded and the voices and a clatter of boots moved out, leaving silence behind them. In that silence. Walk’s voices poke, close to Cal’s ear.

  “You’re not the Only one that had it not so good. Just remember that.”

  Then the cot creaked and his boots, too, moved out.

  Six weeks later, when they graduated from basic and got their first ten-day leave, Cal and Walk went to a hotel room in New Orleans and lived it up. Cal did not go home then or later. A year and a half after that, just after he shipped out at the beginning of the campaign against the Griella, he got word from a cousin that his father was dead. Cal had never answered any of his father’s messages since entering the Services. He messaged back, now, that the family lawyer could take care of everything.

  The dawn came finally. After breakfast Cal was told to report to the Examinations Section for his final check over before being okayed for discharge. He had not expected this until next week,and he expected that his hangover would be noted and questions asked. But he passed through the physical without comment by the examining physicians. He found himself finally in the office of the psychiatrics officer.