Naked to the Stars

by Gordon R. Dickson

  He said, through stiff lips:

  “I can’t blow it with you here.”

  “Yes, you can,” she said. Her voice was very quiet, very certain. It was as if she had moved into a shell of peace from which nothing would be able to take her, neither death nor sorrow. “I know you can.”

  He got heavily to his feet, and looked once more to the hills.The light of the sun was now resting on them and it made the whole horizon seem ablaze with horizontal rays shooting all at him. He walked slowly over to the arming button. He looked at her again and put his finger on it.

  “All right, Cal,” said a voice from somewhere above his head. “You win. ”

  It was the voice of Harmon. Cal stared foolishly around, fora second he half-expected the General to walk into the observation room.

  “We’ve been listening to you,” said Harmon. “We fired a contact mike into the skin of your ship eight hours ago. If you’d left that room for five minutes, we’d have had you. Look out to the hills, there. I’ve had Alt standing by to pass the word to Wantaki. You can see the Progs already starting to come in.”

  Cal looked. Against the glare of the sun he had to shield his eyes. But when he did he made out dark masses moving in, close to Manaha. They were already in below the range of Headquarters’ heavy ground weapons.

  “All right,” said Cal. “I’ll come down.”

  He waited until the approaching Paumons forces were actually into the city. Then he went down in the ship, with Annie beside him. When they stepped out onto the ramp and started to the ground, he saw that there was quite a gathering waiting for them.There were Military Police, both male and female, Colonel Harry Adom of the Military Police, and Cal’s own Contacts Service aide, Major Kai. Major Kai was fifteen years older than Cal and looked like a bank clerk. He represented the old guard over whose head Scoby had put Cal in charge. Kai was looking embarrassed and unhappy, but Cal was glad to see him there.

  “Major,” he said. “You take over Contacts until orders can be got out from General Scoby. He’ll want—”

  “He’s here, himself,” interrupted Kai. “Or rather, he’s coming in right now.” He pointed off to their left and upward. Cal,glancing in that direction, saw the sudden flash of a pinpoint of reflecting surface, high enough up to still catch the sunlight.

  “When did he send word he was coming?” said Cal.

  “Yesterday,” said Kai unhappily. “The message came in. We couldn’t get hold of you.”

  Cal had reached the bottom of the ramp now. The MP’s waiting there closed about him. He saw the female MP’s moving in on Annie.

  “Wait a minute!” he called. “She didn’t have anything to do with this. I—”

  They paid no attention to him. The MP’s were searching him for weapons.

  “All clean,” said one.

  Across the field, the courier ship bearing Scoby was now down and landed. There was quite a crowd around it, and as the hatch opened and the small figure preceded by a small cheetah came out, another small figure walking like Harmon stepped forward to shake hands.

  “Cal,” said Annie’s voice.

  He looked over at her, as the cold metal of handcuffs closed around his wrists. They were doing the same thing to her. Fora second, they could look at each other. Then the MP’s closed around Cal once more and he and she were led off in different directions.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Military Police took Cal to the Stockade and locked him in a cell by himself in an unoccupied section of the building. It was so quiet and isolated that it was almost as if he were in a hospital instead of a prison. At the end of four days they took him in a closed car to the field and put him on a ship for Earth. It was impossible to tell what had happened since he had been arrested. Fighting might even have been going on without his being able to know it. And they made it a point to tell him nothing. Scoby did not come to see him.

  Back at Earth, he was taken to the Fort Shuttleworth Military Prison outside Denver and housed in separate quarters that were a little better than a cell—a room and a half. It was like a small,compact apartment, and through the bars of a fairly wide window Cal could see a section of perfectly kept green lawn, some tall, pyramidal pine trees, and beyond that the white top of a mountain. He thought that it was Longs Peak, but he could not be sure and a small, irrational stubbornness kept him from asking anyone, so he never did establish its identity from that window for certain.

  Shortly after he was placed there, a Captain from the Adjutant General’s department came to see him with a folder of papers. The Captain identified himself as Cal’s legal representative. He explained something to the effect that they were pondering charges against Cal. It would probably be treason and lesser crimes, but nothing was established yet. For some reason it was a matter of jurisdiction. The Captain took himself and his work very seriously, and most of what he had to say Cal found fairly unintelligible. The Captain wanted an account in Cal’s own words of what had led up to Cal’s arrest, and took it down in recorder and on paper. He and Cal were pretty well up against it as far as the book went, he told Cal. They would find it hard to deny the statements of prosecution. Their best bet, considering the Lehaunan background, might be to make their claim one of temporary insanity.

  Cal was uncooperative on that point. He would not claim temporary insanity. Otherwise, he paid only slight attention to the Captain’s flow of words. He was more interested in pumping the other man for news. Annie, said the Captain, was under arrest elsewhere. He did not know exactly where. He, himself, was not representing her. About the Paumons, he had very little information. The human and native Alien forces there were certainly at peace at the present moment, though the situation was touchy, as always. Yes, he believed the Paumons authorities had had some sort of official talk with the human Command, but there had been no more than a mention of it in the news services and he had heard nothing from official sources.

  “It’s a long ways off, there around Bellatrix, you know,” he said to Cal.

  After the Captain’s visit, they began to allow Cal the news services and he got a sudden supply of backed-up mail. There was nothing from Scoby and only a handful of letters from Annie—and these had been censored almost into unintelligibility. Cal wrote her back, but with no great hopes that his letters would not be treated the same way.

  It was July on Earth. There were seldom clouds on the mountain peak Cal could see from his window. He read a good deal and thought and walked around his locked quarters. The Captain came occasionally with papers for him to fill out or sign. July went into August and August drifted into September. He felt the leaking away of the valuable days of his life. He had found again the serenity that had come to him in the later days of Contacts School, and he did not worry too wholeheartedly over what would eventually happen to him. It was a curious thing that while the death penalty was not now imposed by a civilian court, the Armed Services had retained it for certain crimes. For himself,his conscience was clear and it was no worse an end than Walk’s had been. But he worried about what would be done to Annie.

  Then, the third week in September, his Captain was able to tell him that Annie had been released without charges. He felt a great relief and even hoped that she might manage to visit him after that. But she did not come, and even her letters stopped coming. He told himself that this was good, that she was well out of it.

  He was able to face the fact that he loved her now, and understand why he had been unable to tell her so before. He had been shackled by the old fear of a reenactment of his mother’s death, with Annie in his mother’s role, and he in his father’s.Just so, he had been able to face the fact that he had always wanted to be the sort of man his father was, but had gone against him because he had blamed his father for his mother’s death.Looking at his father through the stripped eyes of a child, he had taken his father’s refusal to be vindictive against the Armed Services and the officer indirectly responsible for his wife’s death,as a sign his father did n
ot really care. Now that his father was dead, it came to Cal that his father must have cared very much.

  Not only cared, but loved!—and been right about many things. He had been right about the uncertainty of that thin line that marks off the soldier from the murderer, that thin line that is also the edge of the precipice over which the spirit of a man falls to its final destruction. Cal could face this, too, now, as he could face the fact that with the Lehaunan in that village he himself had crossed the line and fallen. A man, he told himself now, can kill and go on living. But if he murders, he erects a barrier between himself and life; a barrier behind which he dies alone.

  And a man begins, thought Cal, to murder when he begins to tell himself that it is all right to kill; that there are practical or moral justifications for it. Because there are none. Sometimes it happens and things afterwards are better than they were before.But it is never good, it is always bad. There was always a better way if someone had had the wit to find it.

  I suppose, thought Cal, leaning against his window and looking out through the bars at the grass and the pines swayed by the wind that seemed to be always blowing, and the far-off mountain peak with a small white cloud near it—I suppose it should be pushed right to the point of holding insects and microbes sacred, to hold water. But that’s a trap, too. To say, if I can’t be perfect there’s no point in my being good at all. I didn’t have any qualms back there on the Paumons about blowing up Harmon—no, of course I did. But the point is: how much more readily I would have put my own head on the block to pull Walkout. And Harmon by his own standards is an upright and honorable man, while Walk was something to frighten Paumons babies with and better off dead.

  No, Cal corrected himself again, I’m wrong about that. Nobody is better off dead, not in that sense. No. There are always miracles. There is always hope. If you deny miracles and hope, you’re playing God—and that’s the insects and microbes bit allover again. If I can’t shoot par, I won’t pick up a golf club. Wrong. You stick by what you believe, and go on doing what you can in your own clumsy, imperfect way, trying to hack out Heaven by next Tuesday, even though practical people like Harmon are sure it can’t be done. And damned if you don’t make some progress now and then.

  Christ, yes, thought Cal! Otherwise we might as well have stayed in little family ape-bands, wandering around and trying to tear out the throat of every other living thing that stood up to us. The thing is not to kid yourself. Just because cutting a man open to get out his ruptured appendix has a way of saving his life doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing to cut a man open. It’s a very bad thing, a destructive, immoral wrong being done to the living body. And you must never lose sight of that fact, either through long custom or need to justify your own emotional reactions to the cutting. And one day you may be moved to the point of finding some way to save the man’s life without cutting him open.

  And it’s that way with us, thought Cal. We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that it’s wrong to go up against each new race we meet with all guns blazing. The only right way in the end is to go naked to the stars. Without weapons, because we don’t need them. You never find a way until you try. And you don’t try as long as you kid yourself that it’s okay to—

  The sound of a door opening behind him broke off Cal’s train of thought. It was one of his guards with the noon meal on a tray.

  “No mail today either,” said the guard, as he put the tray down. “They seem to be losing your address these last few weeks.”

  Two weeks later, Cal was taken from his cell to the office of the Director of the Prison, where an Administrative Services Captain told him he was released. There was no explanation. He was given a small plastic container in which to carry his possessions, a sealed manila envelope, and escorted to the gate of the Prison.

  As he walked to the gate, he opened the envelope and drew out a sheet of paper inside. It was his release from the Services. He was discharged, he read, without honor but with prejudice,and not recommended for reservice. The gate opened before him and he stepped out into the wide parking lot beyond.

  He had to look twice to believe what he saw. It was Annie, and Scoby with the cheetah, and beyond them a convertible flyer. Annie ran and put her arms around him, but Scoby stood impatiently with one foot on the step to the open door of the flyer.

  “Oh, Cal!” said Annie, holding tightly to him. “Cal, will you ever forgive us? We couldn’t. We just couldn’t!”

  “Come on, come on!” said Scoby.

  They got into the flyer and Scoby sat down at the controls with Annie and Cal on the curved seat behind him. Annie would not let go of Cal; she sat pressed close against him.

  “Oh, Cal!” she said. She was trying not to cry and it was making her nose red.

  Scoby touched the controls and the flyer went straight up about nine thousand feet, then made a half-turn and streaked eastward. Cal caught one last glimpse of the mountain peak to the north of his prison window. It apparently had put aside all clouds in honor of the occasion. It stood sharp and white against the perfect blue of the sky.

  “Where are we going?” asked Cal.

  “Washington,” grunted Scoby.

  “Darling,” said Annie. “We couldn’t even write. We had to make them think you weren’t at all important, that we’d forgotten all about you.”

  Cal shook his head. The whole thing had happened so quickly everything had an unnatural feel to it, as if it was a trick of some sort.

  “But what happened?” he said.

  “Politics,” said Scoby, not turning his head. Limpari swung cat’s eyes about from where she sat staring out the window, and then yawned at Scoby.

  “He had to wait. I had to wait, too. Until it looked as if nobody cared what happened to you any more. That’s why I stopped writing you. Only I didn’t stop writing, Cal. I wrote anyway. I just didn’t mail the letters. I’ve got them all for you.”

  The flyer had been continuing to climb and to increase its speed as it did so. They were now at a hundred thousand feet with the sky black overhead. Their speed would be about two thousand miles an hour, Cal noted automatically from the instruments before Scoby. After sitting still for so many weeks it was an odd sensation to have sprouted wings and be hurtling to some distant destination. Below him, he could see the line of the sunset, flowing toward them across the earth below. He felt the beginnings of a slow return from numbness, like a leg that has gone to sleep and is just now beginning to wake up.

  “I thought you were well out of it,” he said to Annie.

  “Oh, no!” she said. “You knew I’d never just give you up. You knew Walt would never abandon you, either!”

  “Walt?” he said. And then he remembered that this was Scoby’s first name. It was a small shock, after all this, to realize Scoby had a first name. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand it,” Cal said. “That Captain assigned to my case said the charge was probably going to be treason.” He looked at Scoby. “And here I am.”

  “Matter of jurisdiction,” said Scoby. The ship had leveled off now. He put it on automatic pilot and swiveled his chair around,pulling out his pipe. “That’s what I went back about. The time was just right for squeezing on the home front. I squeezed.” He got the pipe going. “I got the Contacts Service made a separate civilian branch. Not under Armed Services any more.”

  “So you were really acting under civilian authority when you interdicted Harmon and tried to make him talk with Wantaki,” said Annie. “Even if you didn’t know it, or Harmon didn’t.” Cal looked from one to the other.

  “What difference did that make?” he said.

  “Just one,” answered Scoby, uttering rich puffs of smoke from his pipe. “Harmon didn’t have the authority to order you arrested. On paper, since a peace had been signed with the Paumons, you as head of the Contacts Department, were his superior, not he yours.”

  Scoby leaned back around to the automatic pilot and set the speed-and-distance clock.

  “Of course,” h
e said, swinging back to face them, “he had a case to make. The fact orders hadn’t arrived; and you threatened human as well as Paumons lives, and so forth. So what I did was wait and let things cool, until it wasn’t worth the Combat Services’ while to make an issue out of you. Early this week I tacked your release onto a list of little minor demands I was dealing with from the Services. And here you are.”

  Cal sighed. He felt abruptly small, and insignificant.

  “No fuss,” said Scoby. “Or wasn’t that what you were thinking?”

  “Not exactly,” said Cal. He looked ahead out the window of the flyer. They were almost to their meeting with the sunset line moving toward them over the relief map of the earth below, and beyond that edge of light he saw only darkness. “I was thinking it’s all over, now.”

  “Over?” said Scoby.

  “Finished! Wound up,” said Cal.

  “Finished!” said Scoby. “What d’you mean finished? You think you brought eternal peace to the Paumons by having Wantaki and Harmon hating each other’s guts?”

  “No,” said Cal, “they admire each other.”

  “Hating each other’s guts and admiring each other, what the hell’s the difference,” said Scoby. “But just the two of them sitting down across a table from each other? You think the Lehaunan’re all set up, now, or there’s no rebuilding to be done with the Griella? That what you think?”

  “No,” said Cal. There was a slow, heavy weariness creeping into him. He was looking out the window now at the rapidly approaching darkness—and remembering. It seemed there was always a darkness for him. It had been dark on the Lehaunan hillside before they had gone in to take the town. It had been in darkness that Walk had called him a Gutless Wonder; and in the Paumons darkness, Walk had died. Night had been falling as he reached for the arming button on the flagship, that meant the end for everyone there; and darkness was falling again, here, now.

  “Don’t you think there’s work to be done?” Scoby was saying. “Why do you think I worked so hard to get you loose? This is what I’ve been after from the start. My own Department,independent, where I can get the kind of men I want and train them the way they ought to be trained, instead of having to let good people go by the board because they couldn’t pass Services’ physical, or couldn’t make it over an obstacle course!” He glared at Cal.