Cal, trapped in a snarl of paperwork and tripped up on every hand by inefficiency or petty resentment on the part of Contacts Officers over whose heads Scoby had promoted him by putting him in Paumons authority, saw a crisis approaching. He messaged Scoby back on Earth, saying that the greater authority of the older man was badly needed with the Expedition. Scoby sent back word that he could not possibly come before six weeks.Talk to Harmon, he advised. Cal made an attempt to do so, but his appointments with the Commander of the Expedition had away of being canceled at the last moment. Harmon messaged that he would have his office set up time for a talk with Cal at the first opportunity. Time slipped by.
The six weeks came and went. Harmon remained incommunicative. Scoby had not come, or sent word he was coming. Cal,working alone in his office early one evening—he understood better now why Scoby’s desk had always been loaded with papers—at endless reports and explanations of reports, heard the single snap of a fire rifle close under his window. And then two more snaps.
There was a commotion in his outer office. His door burst open, and a Paumons whom he suddenly recognized as Ola Tain half-fell inside. There was a babble of voices beyond in the outer office as Cal jumped up and helped the other into a chair. Ola Tain was burnt clear through the body twice. He could not live.The office door banged open again, and Cal, looking up, saw a hard-faced and shoulder-scorched man in the entrance whom he did not recognize—and then with a sudden shock did recognize.He had looked a little like Walk, but he was Washun, the Contacts Cadet who had shared Cal’s second tour of Basic at Fort Cota. The Contacts shoulder patch on his jacket now was stained and ancient.
“It’s Walker Blye, in Zone Eleven,” said Washun. “He’s planning a massacre.”
Chapter Fourteen
The two-man atmosphere ship fled westward at forty thousand feet of altitude. It caught up with the retreating sunset, passed it and came down half a world away in late afternoon at Garrison Number Three of Zone Eleven—Walk’s Headquarters.
The garrison was drained empty of men. The senior man was a non-com, a Wing Section. It was Tack. He and Cal looked at each other like close relatives that have been raised at far distances from each other, and to different customs, as Cal questioned him.
“He left six hours since,” said Tack. “He took twenty-eight hundred men and all equipment back in the hills. To that place they call the Valley of die Three Towns—how did you know?”
“A Paumons named Ola Tain,” said Cal. “Wantaki knows about Walk’s plan. Was he crazy? He could be court-martialed for this.”
“He is crazy,” said Tack, lowering his voice, and glancing at Washun, who had made the trip with Cal, and now stood at the long end of the Headquarters Office, out of earshot. “He doesn’t care—about anything. And he’s always drunk, now. But you say Wantaki’s laying for him?”
“Yes,” said Cal. His body felt heavy and tired and old. “Tain came to your own Contacts man in this area”—he gestured at Washun—“to try and stop the whole thing. But your tame Paumons caught him and shot him up. Washun rescued him and got him to me. But he couldn’t even talk by that time.” Cal felt bitter inside. “He was shot again outside my office by some fool.”
“Can you get to Walk in time?”
“Give me a combat-ground car. I’ll try.”
The sunset caught up with Cal once more as he shoved the little round car, alone, along an unpaved roadway back into the jagged, tree-covered young mountains of Zone Eleven. In the darkness, the trees looked even more like Earthly trees, the dirt road like some back-country trail of home. The combat car,fleeing a few inches above the pounded dirt of the road on the soft, shushing noise of its countless tiny jets, seemed to be pouring itself into the pit of the quickly falling darkness. And there came on Cal suddenly one of those seconds of strange emotion he had been used to calling “inside-out” moments when he was a boy—while his mother was still alive. For the first time he recognized that he had never had them after her death. But now one was with him once again and he saw himself with a strange,still, twilight clarity, as if from a little distance, a different viewpoint just outside his body. And what he saw had a sadly comical lack of sense and yet a sharp understanding.
What, he wondered suddenly, was he doing here in this heavy, adult body? In a complicated vehicle, on this strange world, upon this alien soil? To what dangerous explosion of things were the steel bars of events channeling him? He was bound to save some lives, to avert some kind of disaster. But was that really the purpose, was that really the meaning? For a moment he found himself storm-tossed on a sea of endless mystery. And then the road curved suddenly and his own automatic hands,jerking the combat car into the turn, snapped things sharply into pitilessly clear and unambiguous focus in his mind.
It was not any faceless duty that he was facing here, but the sharp spectre of his own guilt. It was not the Paumons villages,but Walk he was rushing to save, so that he might still save himself.
For it was Walk, his dark twin; Walk, his other self, for whom he was responsible and had always been responsible. Annie had seen it, when she had burst out in the hospital back on Earth after the Lehaunan expedition, that Walk was the weak one.Weak he was not, in the ordinary sense. But when they had gravitated together instinctively as boys—two motherless half-orphans—Walk had been the One with greater need and less initiative of imagination. Cal had taken the Services’ side in revenge against his father for his mother’s death. But Walk,following Cal’s greater imagination into the glory-land of a military life which Cal had fashioned as a club against Cal’s father, had had ho buried knowledge of its unreality outside Cal’s mind. Walk had believed. He had followed the sound of the trumpet—expecting to-find-the-home and the kin he lacked behind it. And Cal, who had known his lie for what it was from the beginning,deep inside, had escaped his own mirage—but left Walk behind with it, stumbling in the desert.
Walk had pursued the mirage of love, and, not finding it, had grown more savage and murderous. He would force the mirage to be real. He would force his cause to be just, his fighting noble, his life, when it came to an end, to be a worthy price paid on a purchase of value. And all the time he was doing this,the undeniable realization grew stronger and stronger in him that his god was an empty shell, his purposes false, and he faced no final dedication, but the closed-in grave of a brain-mad wolf.
But the sin in this, it came home to Cal now, was on Cal’s head. For whatever small credit, he might try to count work he had done with the Paumons prisoners of war. For whatever Paumons soldiers he had saved on that march to Manaha, or eased in better conditions of prison camps, or protected during questioning by Combat officers; for whatever he might count to his benefit from this—he must also count his share in the Paumons whom Walk had harried to an exhausted end, to those prisoners who had died from indifference or cruelty while in his hands, to those he had slain outright, or killed for no necessary reason. If Walk massacred tonight, Cal massacred also.
Cal’s hands were wet with sweat on the wheel. Night had completely fallen. As recklessly as Walk himself might have done, Cal flung the combat car into the turns and twists of the unknown and narrow road, toward its destination.
Through the darkness, with only the narrow beam of his head-lights, he fled. Finally, he nosed upward over a little rise and saw abruptly down into a valley where lights glowed and clustered about three main areas. He swooped down upon them. But as he entered the first of these, he found the lights came from the broken windows of damaged homes. There was rubble in the streets, but no movement of living beings. But when he stopped in the little open space at the center of the town area where he was, dark bodies moved in around his car.
He got out. They were all Paumons laden with weapons.
“Come,” said one of them. Cal followed him. They walked across the open space, and Cal’s guide stood aside at a door to a low building. Cal pushed open the door and stepped inside.He found himself in a low-roofed room with a dirt
floor. There was a wooden table, two cots, some plain chairs, and several heavy, square wooden timbers holding up the roof. Wantaki stood beside the table, and between two of the pillars, slumped with the cords about his wrists only holding him upright, his shirt torn off, was Walk.
“Ola Tain?” said Wantaki. Cal, who had started to go to Walk, stopped. He had thought Walk unconscious when he first stepped in, but he saw now that although Walk’s head slumped between his bare shoulders, his eyes were open and watching.His body showed a bad wound low on the left side.
“Dead,” said Cal. “He died reaching me.”
“Yes,” said Wantaki. He did not say anything more for a moment. “I would have saved him, but . . . that is the way it goes for people like him.”
Cal came up to the table. Wantaki looked squarely at him.
“I have no good word to say for you,” said Wantaki. “People like you are—” the Paumons expression he used was untranslatable. “With him”—he used the verb form that made it clear he was referring to Walk, the only other person in the room—“it is different. He is as good as a man any day. If you had been all like that, you might even have eaten us up the way you have tried to. But you were not. I would not even have him tied up like that, but many of my soldiers hate him, and something had to be done.”
He waited. Cal waited also, saying nothing.
“I am a military man,” said Wantaki. “This is the beginning.For a while your weapons gave you an advantage; but we have stolen some of them and made more. Today was the beginning.We are going to rise all over the world. We will wipe out your Expedition. And then we will go hunting you in your own home planet.”
“No,” said Cal. “Any uprising will fail. The Expedition has weapons it has not used.”
“I do not believe you,” said Wantaki. He stared at Cal for along moment. “Besides it does not matter. Weapons can eventually be duplicated. If we fail this time, we will not fail next. The Paumons spirit will never endure to be a tame beast. And right is on our side.”
“That can only end in a stalemate,” said Cal.
“How can it end in a stalemate when we are superior to you?”said Wantaki. “Given equal weapons, our spirit will conquer—I do not know why I talk to you.”
“I do,” said Cal. “You’re thinking of all the Paumons that must die before you win your victory.” He stepped to the edge of the table. “If the humans would negotiate with you, face to face, as equals, and not as conquerors talking to conquered,would you hold off your rising?”
Wantaki said nothing.
“If you could walk into Expedition Headquarters with sufficient force to feel safe, and there talk, would you?”
“You cannot do this,” said Wantaki.
“I can. Give me three days.” Cal looked over at Walk. “And him.”
“He is dying.”
“Still.”
Wantaki stepped away from the table and then stepped back again.
“I have a responsibility to save lives, as you say,” he said.
“I don’t believe you... but it’s a bargain.” He went to the door. “When you are ready to go, you may go.”
He went out. Cal turned quickly to Walk and untied the rope on one side. Walk came heavily down into his arms. Holding him, Cal got the other rope untied and laid Walk on one of the cots. Walk’s eyelids fluttered and he looked up into Cal’s face.
Walk’s lips moved. He did not seem to be saying anything.Then Cal realized he was whispering. Cal bent his ear down close to the lips.
“Cal,” Walk was whispering. “. . . lucky . . . lucky, go out. . . in . . . time.”
“You’re going to be all right,” said Cal. Then he realized from the shadow of a look on Walk’s face that he had misunderstood. It was not the present moment Walk was talking about.
“. . . lies,” whispered Walk. ". . . trumpets . . . drums. Liars .. .”
“Lie quiet,” said Cal. “Rest a bit. Then I’m taking you east to the Hospital.”
Walk sighed and closed his eyes and lay still. Cal sat quietly beside him for perhaps half an hour. Then he realized Walk had opened his eyes and was looking at him again.
“What?” said Cal. He bent down to hear. Walk’s faint breath tickled his ear.
“Annie...” whispered Walk, “. . . hates me?”
“No,” said Cal. “Hell, no! Annie likes you. We both like you a lot. So does Tack. So does everybody.”
“Good,” Walk whispered. “. . . know . . . somebody. You. . . never . . . ?”
“Hell, no!”
“Promised me . . . good . . . feeling. Noble . . . Liars. Feel lousy . . . dying. Nothing but . . . damnservice. . .”
“Hey, boy,” said Cal. His throat hurt. He reached out and took hold of Walk’s hand. “You got nothing but family. Annie and me and everybody. What’re you talking about?”
“Lousy . . . Knew . . . liars, long . . . time ago, Didn’t get out. . . time.” He closed his eyes once more and lay still.
Cal continued to sit. About an hour later, Walk spoke once more.
“Don’t . . . mind . . . being killed,” Cal was barely able to make out with his ear right at the pale lips. “Just . . . don’t want. . . to die. . ."
A little while later, when Cal lifted an eyelid, the eye beneath stared straight and unmoving and fixed.
Chapter Fifteen
Cal brought the body of Walk into Hospital Receiving, back at the Hospital at Expedition Headquarters.
“But the man’s dead, Colonel!” said the First Lieutenant in Receiving. “What do you want us to do with him?”
“Give him a Services funeral,” said Cal. He went in search of Annie.
“I’m going to see Harmon,” he said. “I want you to get off duty here, now, and do something for me. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” she said. “What is it, Cal?”
“Get a ground car and follow me over. Wait until I go in to Headquarters, then park it around by the side entrance to the Files Office. Leave the motor running and clear out. Can you do that?”
“Yes, Cal, but—”
“I’m not telling you any more,” said Cal. “If you have to ask questions, don’t do it.”
“All right,” she said. “Give me a minute to get somebody up here to take over the ward desk.”
Cal drove a ground car of his own to Expedition HQ. In the scope he could see Annie’s car following. He pulled into the official parking lot, and went in.
“Colonel?” said the Wing Section behind the small wooden fence that separated staff from visitors in the outer office.
“Contacts Service,” said Cal. “Colonel Truant. I’m to talk to General Harmon.” And without waiting for an answer, he pushed open the small gate in the fence and strode past.
“But Colonel, just a minute. Colonel!”
He heard steps behind him but kept going. He passed through another door into another, smaller office, where a Captain looked up, startled, from a wide desk.
“Colonel Truant!” said Cal. He kept traveling. The farther door in this second office was closed. He opened it and stepped through.
Harmon and Colonel Alt were standing together by a desk, within.
They both turned as the Captain from the outer office and other staff members reached the door behind Cal.
“General,” said Cal. “I think it’s time for your talk with the Contacts Service.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the Captain, from behind Cal’s shoulder. “He just walked by—”
“That’s all right,” said Harmon. “Close the door.” Cal heard them leave and the door close behind him.
“Alone,” said Cal.
Colonel Haga Alt came around the desk, walking on his toes like a boxer.
"Truant,” he said, “I’ve waited one hell of a long time for—”
“Hag,” said Harmon. Alt stopped. He looked back at Harmon. “It’s all right, Hag,” said Harmon gently. “You can leave us.”
Alt’s nostrils spread. “Al
l right, sir,” he said. He walked on, looking squarely into Cal’s face, passed him, and Cal heard the door shut a second time behind him.
“All right, Truant,” said Harmon, in the same gentle voice. “What is it?”
“The Paumons are rising.”
“I know,” said Harmon.
“I know you know,” said Cal. “I know you planned it this way. There was a time when I thought you just didn’t know any better. But I found out different.”
Harmon walked around the desk himself and stood in front of it. They were only a few feet apart. Harmon put his hands together behind him, like a lecturer.
“Back in Denver,” he said, “I sent you to General Scoby because I was under the impression that whatever had happened to you with the Lehaunan, you were a soldier.”
“I was,” said Cal. “I was one of the prettiest.”
“But you aren’t any more?”
“Yes,” said Cal. “I’m a soldier. I'm a hell of a soldier. But maybe you wouldn’t recognize the kind I am.”
“No,” Harmon said. “You’re wrong. I would recognize what kind you are. In fact, I do. That’s why I’m talking to you, instead of having you thrown out.” He sat down on the edge of the desk. “You’re the best kind, Cal. That’s why I sent you over to Scoby in the first place. Because you’re the kind that has to fight out of a sense of conviction. Men like that are too valuable to lose.”
“Only, I am wrong.”
“Yes,” said Harmon. “You got in among people like General Scoby who talk about fine things like peace and understanding and no more war. It impressed you. I think you may have forgotten that those sort of things don’t come about naturally. They have to be imposed by a strong hand from the outside.” He looked at Cal, and his voice was almost pleading. “I want you to understand. Damn it, you’re the sort of man who ought to understand.”
Naked to the Stars Page 12