Naked to the Stars

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Have a seat, Lieutenant,” said the psychiatrics officer, a major who was a short, pleasant-faced man with a brown mustache, not much older than Cal. Cal sat down on the chair facing the officer and at one side of the desk. The chair was cold.

  “Let’s see now...” The officer ran through some papers and wave charts from various testing machines. “How’re you feeling, Lieutenant?”

  “Fine,” said Cal. “My leg isn’t even stiff, and you can hardly see where the skin graft goes.”

  “You had a bum on your side, too?” The officer frowned at the charts.

  “Sort of a small scorch. That was healed up long ago.”“Yes. Pretty obviously a fire rifle bum. You don’t have any idea how it happened?”

  “No, sir,” said Cal. “I was pretty much out on my feet from lack of sleep toward the end, there. Things are pretty hazy after we hit the town.”

  “So I see,” said the major, examining one of the wave charts.“There’s a good sixteen-hour hold there in your conscious recall up to the time you came to on the hospital ship. And evidently you got burned somewhere during that period. Hmm—” he frowned at the chart. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea, Lieutenant, if we went in there with a full exploratory and made sure of the facts for that period. In fact, I’d strongly recommend it.”

  Cal felt the coolness of the room like a winding sheet about him. Slowly his stomach began to gather itself up in a tight knot,and he felt an empty fear.

  “Sir,” he said slowly, “do I have to agree to that?”

  “No,” said the major, looking at him. “Of course not. You’re perfectly free to accept or not, just as you wish. But I’d think you’d want the security of knowing you didn’t have anything hidden in that period that might cause trouble later.” He paused.“We needn’t delay your discharge for it. You can go ahead with that and come back for a three-day psych at your convenience.”“I don’t think it’s worth the trouble, Major.”

  “Whatever you think, Lieutenant.” The psychiatrics officer made some marks on the papers before him, wrote a line or two,and signed the papers. “That’s all.”

  Cal stood up.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t thank me. My job. Good luck, and enjoy yourself.”

  “I will, sir.” Cal left.

  He came back to the convalescent section to find Annie War-road on duty. She looked at him oddly, and walked away into the section office. He went after her.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  She was standing behind her desk. For answer she opened a drawer and showed him the empty, flat, liter bottle of whisky.“Well, you know the drill,” he said. “Report me.”

  “You know I won’t do that,” she said, shutting the drawer.“I’ll get it out of here. It’s just—” She broke off suddenly, biting her underlip angrily. He was surprised to see that she looked close to tears.

  “It’s that Walk!” she burst out. “He’s the weak one. But when you’re with him, you—”

  She bit her lip again and turned and went out quickly from the office.

  “Weak!” he echoed. “Walk weak?” He opened his mouth to laugh at the ridiculousness of it, but found suddenly that there was no laughter in him. The hollow fear and worthless feeling of the night came back on him. He walked out of the office, looking for Annie. She was energetically banging equipment together in the Section laboratory; she turned away from him when she saw him staring in at her.

  He went back to his bed and lay down on his back, staring at the white ceiling.

  Chapter Five

  It was a three-day business getting discharged. In the process Annie’s upset and his hangover got left behind together. That weekend Annie took a three-day leave and they flew down to Mexico City to paint the town red. But they ended up in the little mountain city of Taxco where the silver and obsidian jewelry comes from, sitting in the mountain sunlight on an open-air terrace through the long mornings with a bottle of wine as an excuse on the table between them, and happily, no great pressure to talk. For the first time that he could remember, a sense of peace seeped into Cal. And he found himself talking more freely to Annie than he had to anyone in his life. Now and then, even,things came to his tongue that surprised even himself. One morning when Annie had voiced the same thought of peace that lay in his own thoughts, he quoted without thinking, and before he could stop himself:

  “So all the ways—” He checked abruptly. “Nothing,” he said to Annie’s look of inquiry. “Just some poetry you made me think of.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why. It doesn’t even fit.”

  But she wanted to hear it, and so, feeling a little foolish, herepeated two lines of “The Last Tournament,” from Tennyson’sIdylls of the King:

  “So all the ways were safe from shore to shore,

  But in the heart of Arthur pain was Lord.”

  Repeating them, he frowned, trying to think why these, of all poetry, should intrude on him here, between Expeditions, in the healing morning sunlight of Taxco. Looking up again, he caught Annie looking at him oddly.

  “Something the matter?” he asked.

  “It’s just that I’ve never seen you do much reading,” she said. “Particularly of things like poetry.”

  He laughed. “That’s for people who can’t do anything else,”he said. “What say we run down to Acapulco later this afternoon for a swim?”

  So suddenly the three days were over. Annie went back to Headquarters Hospital, near Denver, and Cal began a four-month period in which he did little but kill time and use up his accumulated back pay. He received a Star Cluster to add to his list of decorations. But rumors of a new Expedition brought him back to Expedition Base Headquarters, outside Denver, in March. He went directly to the Recruitment Office there.

  A chinook—a warm, dry wind off the slopes of the surrounding mountains—was blowing down the company street on which he stood and melting the last evidences of a late spring snowfall.The moving air felt cool on hands and face, but the sudden rise in windy temperature was making him uncomfortably warm inside his uniform jacket. The jacket felt strange after all these months of civilian clothing.

  Isolated in the western sector of the brilliantly blue sky, the clouds had piled high into a great, toppling, white castle shape.But, as Cal glanced at it, the harrying wind ripped among it and tore it to fragments fleeing over the ramparts of the mountaintops. Cal’s head was dull with a slight hangover. He touched his fingertips to the row of medal ribbons on his lapel, and went inside.

  The section leader who took his application punched for Cal’s records. When they appeared imaged in the film holder on his side of the counter, he looked them over carefully.

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” he said, at last. “But I can’t sign you yet.”

  “Yet?” said Cal.

  Looking across the counter, then, he suddenly identified the look he saw in the man’s eyes. It was the same look he had noticed on the face of the psychiatrics officer, and before that on the face of the orderly of the hospital ship. He had seen it, he remembered now, on Annie, when he had quoted those two lines of Tennyson to her in Taxco.

  Now it looked at him from the polite, strange face of this administrative non-com.

  “Can’t sign me yet?” said Cal again.

  Across the room behind the barrier of the counter, a desk printer began to turn out copies of some manual with a faintly thumping noise, as of something being softly hammered together. The sound echoed in Cal’s lightly aching skull.

  “I’m sorry, sir. You haven’t been through Psychiatric Exploratory.”

  “That’s not required.”

  “Yes, I know, sir. But in your case here, the releasing Medical Officer seems to have recommended it as a condition for reservice.”

  “I was discharged on a leg bum,” said Cal. “On a leg bum, that’s all.”

  “Yes, sir. I see that. But the MO has discretion about conditions of reservice.”

  “Look,” said Cal—there was a mo
ment of polite, desperate silence between them—“there must have been some mistake made on the original records back at the hospital. Could I see your commanding officer here, for a moment, do you suppose?”

  “I’ll see, Lieutenant.”

  The Section Leader left. A few minutes later he came back and led Cal through the barrier to an office and a seat across the desk from a Colonel Haga Alt, whom Cal remembered as General Harmon’s aide in the Lehaunan Expedition.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir,” said Cal.

  “I was just waiting for General Harmon to finish some business. We’re updating equipment. I’ve got a few minutes, Lieutenant.” Alt was a dark-haired, wiry man in his early forties, alittle shorter than Cal. “You were Combat Engineers on Lehaunan?”

  “Yes, sir.” Cal found his back sensitive to the back of the chair he was sitting in, all the way up. He made an effort to relax. “Fourth Assault Wing.”

  “I remember. You got a Star Cluster for taking that power center town in the hills. That was a good job.”

  “Thank you, Colonel. Not really necessary, taking—”

  “ ‘Not necessaries’ are usually our main job, Lieutenant. An ex-mulebrain like you ought to know that. Cigaret?”

  “No thank you, sir.” Cal watched Alt light up. “The Section Leader outside there...”

  “Yes?” Alt took the cigaret out of his mouth, fanned the smoke aside and leaned forward over the film holder set in his desk. He studied its screen a second. “Yes.” He sat back in his chair, which tilted comfortably and creaked in the momentary stillness of the office. “There’s no point in pussyfooting around with you, Lieutenant. Your psychiatrics officer in the Discharge Unit evidently thought you had some possible psychological damage that would rule you out for reservice. It’s only a guess on his part, of course. Why don’t you run over to Medical Headquarters and have them test you and write you a release on this hold?”

  “Well,” said Cal carefully. Alt leaned back in his chair, watching. His eyes were neither warm nor cold. Cal was suddenly conscious of the fact that one of his feet, in a heavy uniform boot, was projecting out to one side of the desk where Alt could see it if he looked down. It must look awkward and unnatural out there. Cal pulled it back hastily. His heart began to thump. Alt was still waiting for his answer. The room seemed steamy and blurred.

  “Alexander of Macedon—” said Cal.

  “What?” said Alt, frowning.

  “I’m sorry, sir.” Cal got a firm grip on the arms of his chair,down out of sight-level below Alt’s desk top. The room cleared to his vision. “I guess I’m not too good at explaining something like this. What I mean is ... I understand the digging around in a psych exploratory sometimes triggers off a difficulty that might never have come to life.”

  “One chance in several hundred,” said Alt dryly.

  “But if such a thing happened, I’d be permanently unfit for service.”

  “True enough,” said Alt. “But if it doesn’t—and the odds are all in your favor. The exploratory will either show there’s nothing wrong in this blank period of yours„on Lehaunan world,or it’ll show something the medics can grab while it’s fresh and get out. So you end up qualified for reservice either way.”“Yes, sir.” Cal took a deep breath. “But would you like to bet your career, Colonel, even at those odds, when you knew yourself it wasn’t really necessary?”

  “Lieutenant,” replied Alt, “I would not. And what’s that got to do with the situation.”

  Cal let out the breath he had taken.

  “Nothing, I guess, sir,” he said numbly. He waited for Alt to dismiss him. But the other man sat instead for a moment,staring across the desk top at him.

  “Hell!” he said at last, and shoved his half-smoked cigaret down the disposal in his desk. “Would you like to tell me your version of why you think that psych-hold is on your record?”“Yes, sir.” Cal looked out the window for a moment and saw the unmoving mountains there. The words came easily from him, as if he had rehearsed them. “I’ve got an area of amnesia during and following that attack on the town when I was wounded. But by that time I’d been in sole command of the Wing for nearly sixty hours and I hadn’t had any sleep for that length of time. The outfit was in an untenable position and under combat pressures. The truth is, I was just out on my feet most of the time. That’s why I can’t remember.”

  “I see.” Alt looked at him for a short additional moment,then got to his feet. “Wait here a moment, Lieutenant.” He went out.

  Cal was left alone in the neat, white-lighted office for some ten minutes. At the end of that time, Alt returned, followed by a tall, spare man of Alt’s own age, who strode in on Alt’s heels as if to the measure of silent drums. Three small gold stars shone on his jacket collar. Cal got to his feet.

  “Here he is,” said Alt to the tall man. “Lieutenant”—he turned to Cal—“General Harmon wants to talk to you.”“Thank you, sir.” Cal found himself shaking hands. Deep-set gray eyes looked down into Cal’s face as they shook.

  “You earned that Star Cluster of yours, Lieutenant—Truant,isn’t it? The Colonel here tells me you want to get back on with your Wing.”

  “Yes, General.”

  Harmon turned and paced across to the nearest wall of the office. He struck a button there and the surface went transparent to reveal a black background on which a design in white appeared.

  “Recognize that, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, sir. A space schema. Our territory out towards Orion.”“That’s right. You’ve had some command school.”

  “Not officer yet, sir. N.C.O.”

  Harmon raised his eyebrows.

  “We give Space-and-Tactics now in N.C.O. school, do we?”

  “No, sir, I . . . looked it up on my own once.”

  “Very good. Well now, look here.” Harmon moved a button and a red line leaped from a center point out through the diagram. “What do you make of that?”

  Cal studied it for a second.

  “The pattern of our advance, sir, in that quadrant. Since the beginning; since World Unification, at the end of the Twentieth Century. And as far as we’ve gotten with the Lehaunan, now.”

  “And to within forty light years of the nearest star systems in the Orion Group.” Harmon glanced aside and a little down at Cal. “Lieutenant, why do you think we might be interested,say”—his finger indicated one of the Orion stars—“in Bellatrix, here?”

  “Well,” said Cal, “it’s just about next on the list.”

  “List?”

  “Sir?”

  “I said,” repeated Hannon calmly, “what list? What list are you referring to?”

  Cal straightened slightly inside his uniform. A charge of electricity seemed to have gone through the room. He felt keyed-up, almost feverishly alive.

  “No list, sir,” he said. “I meant, Bellatrix would be the next system we’d encounter in our normal expansion into space.”

  “And if we didn’t go on with our normal expansion?”

  Cal looked up in sharp surprise. But Harmon merely stood,patiently waiting“We couldn’t afford not to, sir,” said Cal slowly. “Population pressures, plus natural instincts—We’d be committing racial suicide if we didn’t keep on expanding.”

  “Really, Lieutenant? Why?”

  “Why...” Cal fumbled for words and phrases he had not needed for a long time. “Halting our natural expansion would leave us . . . with the sort of self-emasculation that ends in racial suicide. We’d outgrow our resources; we’d be sitting ducks for the first more practical minded race that grew in our direction.”

  “True enough,” said Harmon. “But I wasn’t asking you for what everybody learns in school nowadays.” He turned square on to Cal. “What I’m interested in is your own feelings. You’ve been a mulebrain. You’ve seen the Griella and the Lehaunan from the wrong end of their guns. What do you think?”

  “We’ve got to keep moving,” said Cal. He looked up at Harmon and said it again. “We’ve got to k
eep moving.” He felt suddenly that he was saying too much, but the words came out anyway. “We have to keep winning and being the strongest.Every time somebody tries to appeal to somebody else’s better nature, somebody gets hurt. We had a Contacts Officer with our Wing against the Lehaunan. The truce was on, and he went into their lines to talk to them—just talk to them. He carried a recorder . . . and they cut him—they cut him—” Cal’s voice suddenly began to thin and hoarsen. He broke it off sharply. “The only safe way is to be on top. Always on top. Then you can make sure nobody gets hurt. You’ve got to win!”

  He stopped. There was a strange small silence for a second in the office and then Alt, glancing aside at the space schema on the wall, whistled two odd little sharp notes and raised his eye-brows.

  But Harmon put his hand on Cal’s arm.

  “You’re a good man, Lieutenant,” he said. “I wish half as many men again in Government thought the way you do.” He let go of Cal’s arm. “Let me show you something,” he said,turning back to the schema. His fingers stabbed out beyond the furthest point of the red line’s advance, at a small and brilliant white dot.

  “Bellatrix,” he said.

  He looked back at Cal.

  “That’s the star where we’re going next, Lieutenant. She’s got a system with two worlds that we could use. One of them’s pretty much available, but the other one’s got a race on it called the Paumons. A red-skinned, hairless bunch of bipedal humanoids that’re the closest thing to us we’ve yet run across. They’ll be giving us a run for our money and our lives that’ll make the Griella and the Lehaunan and all the rest look like members ofan old ladies’ Sunday sewing circle. We’re setting up the Expedition for there, now. I’m going, the Colonel here is going,and your old Wing will be there when we go in.” Hannon paused and looked Cal directly in the eyes. “But I’m sorry, Lieutenant—I’m afraid you won’t be listed in the table of organization. ”He paused. Beyond the open door of the office where the three of them stood, somewhere down the corridor outside, Cal heard a door slam and a man’s voice call out to someone on a note of brisk and businesslike urgency.