The peeper turned to the tester and said, “So that’s the mini-seizures you were thinking about. Are you sure he belongs in the Army?”
“He’s been examined—” the tester started to say, then the Captain cut him off.
“I see. They’re too short to worry about, and they have no after-effects. Not a problem unless they get longer or have side effects. No worse than an occasional sneeze.” Then he did leave, muttering, “Good enough for government work,” as he walked off.
The whole thing gave me a weird feeling. A damned peeper calling me a post, as if there was something wrong with me.
That was several years, two more stripes, and a couple of rockers ago, and I’d gotten used to peepers, and wasn’t nervous any more. There aren’t a lot of them, they’re not really around much, and since they’re kicked up to officer rank automatically, they don’t fraternize with the enlisted troops and NCOs. In fact they don’t fraternize with officers any more than they can help.
So I was as used to peepers as a non-peeper (or post, if you insist) can get, and wasn’t thinking about them the day that I got the odd assignment.
I should have guessed that something was up when I saw the First Sergeant standing nearby, watching the morning formation, obviously waiting for it to be over. Actually, I did figure that something was up—I just didn’t figure that the something had anything to do with me.
As soon as the word “Dismissed” echoed across the field, the First Sergeant headed over to me.
“Good morning, Sergeant,” she said.
“Good morning, Top. Something up?”
“Something’s up, all right. Tell Malone to take your platoon today, then report to Lieutenant Minteer at the chopper pad at oh-eight hundred.”
This was not a good start for the day. Minteer was a real prick, even if he wasn’t a peeper. “Report to Minteer, okay. And do what, Top?”
“You’ll have to ask him that,” she said. “You now know as much as I do about it.”
Her eyes could look warm, the way brown eyes are supposed to, usually if she’d heard a good joke (preferably a dirty one), but they were hard now. Something was going on, and she was annoyed that she didn’t know much about it. At least she wasn’t annoyed at me.
I told Malone to take charge of the platoon, then told PFC Moriko to follow me to the motor pool. “I need one each chauffeur, O.D. in color, Joe, and you just volunteered. So let’s go get a limo.” The mini-seizures might be hazardous if anyone actually drove cars anymore, but my own car, like any civilian car, did all the driving. I could have used one of the Army buggies with no risk, either. They looked ugly, their shock absorbers didn’t do much absorbing, and their seats were minimally comfortable, but they drove themselves, too. However, the Army was still the Army, and my med profile required that I have a driver, human-type, with me in the car, even though he wouldn’t be doing any driving.
“What’s up, Sarge?” Moriko asked, once we were on the way to the chopper pad.
“Damned if I know,” I said, “but Lieutenant Minteer is supposed to be there, so watch the language. ‘Always perform your duties in a military manner,’” I said, mimicking Minteer’s eastern accent.
Minteer was there, all right, along with a full bird private. I told Moriko to stay with the car until I knew what was going on, then walked over to Minteer. We exchanged salutes and good mornings, then the SPC told me, “The chopper should be here in five or less, Sarge.”
Minteer scowled and said, “Did I hear you address this man as ‘Sarge,’ soldier? ‘Sarge’ is what sergeants get called in comic books. Do you think you’re in a comic book, Specialist Luigi?”
The PFC looked surprised, with a deer-in-the-headlights expression. He must not have run into Minteer before. “Uh, no sir. Sorry, sir.”
Moriko was behind me where I couldn’t see him, but I hoped he was managing not to smile. Looking inscrutable wasn’t his strong suit.
Minteer wasn’t through. “And the vehicle that’s on its way here is a Field Drive Transport Vehicle, not a ‘chopper.’ You can call it a FDTV, if that’s too big a mouth full for you, but it’s not a ‘chopper.’ ‘Chopper’ is what helicopters were called because of the noise they made, and it’s ridiculous to call an FDTV a ‘chopper.’ Have you ever seen a helicopter outside of a museum?”
Luigi said he hadn’t, but fortunately for him, the chopper was now in sight, and approaching rapidly. From past experience, I knew that Minteer was just getting started.
The egg-shaped vehicle came to a stop, humming, then settled to the pad on its runners. The door on the side opened, and a captain stepped out and walked over to us. Then I noticed that his uniform had the stylized brain with an eye in the center of it that was the patch of the telepath corps. I noticed that before I got a good look at his face . . .
Flicker.
. . .and realized that I had seen him somewhere before, but couldn’t remember where . . .
Flicker.
. . .but mostly I was wondering why I had just had two mini-whatsits less than a minute apart. That had never happened before.
He returned our salutes and said, “Good morning, gentlemen. Nothing like starting off the day with a chopper ride.” Somehow, I was sure he did that on purpose. Peepers have an advantage when it comes to getting under someone’s skin. Fortunately for Luigi, he was already showing a poker face, and kept it up. Minteer wasn’t as successful at suppressing the sour look on his mug. “I’m glad you brought transportation, Sergeant Zinman. Let’s go.” He nodded to Minteer. “Thank you for meeting me here, Lieutenant,” then headed for the car, without waiting for a salute or further pleasantries. Minteer looked like he’d just been handed a maggot sandwich.
“We need to go to building D-12,” the captain said, then got into the back of the car. Moriko and I climbed into the front. Moriko said, “Sir, that building is off limits . . .“
“Not to me, Mr. Moriko. Let’s go.” He could have told the car where to go himself—its A.I. pays attention to rank—but kept up the polite fiction that Moriko was actually driving the vehicle.
We rolled along and I still had no idea why I was here. I didn’t know what went on in D-12, but it must be restricted, since there was a fence around it with concertina on top, and an armed guard at the only gate, and I had a feeling that if the captain had clearance to go inside, I’d have to wait outside.
“Sergeant Zinman, my name is Carpenter, and I’ll answer your questions once we get inside the building,” the mystery officer said.
I flickered twice while he was talking. I was more puzzled by that than anything about Carpenter’s business. Usually, months would go by without one of the micro-seizures, but I’d had a string of them just now. Maybe I’d be getting a medical discharge soon.
Carpenter had Moriko park the car outside the fence. “Wait for me,” he told him.
“Just wait for you, sir?” Moriko asked.
“Sergeant Zinman may be coming back later,” he told him, then, “Come with me, Sergeant,” to me.
Carpenter was expected, which didn’t surprise me, but I was on the guest list too, which was surprising. Inside the building, we walked down hallways with the usual drably painted walls, and came to a door that slid open when Carpenter put his ID in the reader.
The room wasn’t large, and just had a conference table with a few chairs around it and a flatscreen on one wall. No windows, just the one door.
Carpenter sat down and gestured toward a chair on the opposite side of the table. “Have a seat, Sergeant.”
I did . . .after I had flickered a couple of more times. I wondered . . .
“No, sergeant, I’m not making you do that. Or maybe my presence is making you do it, but I’m not deliberately using any influence on you.”
The flickering seemed to have stopped, but it felt different than usual, repeating that way. It was like I was building up a vague image of something that I had never noticed with the separated single flickers.
�
��Sergeant, what do you think of the Russian civil war?”
That stopped me from thinking about the flickers. “What? Uh, what do you mean, sir?”
“Don’t you think it odd that the country broke apart like that, fighting against each other, even using a couple of tactical nukes, for no obvious reason at all?”
Well, everyone seemed to think it was odd. And it had caught all the Kremlin-watchers by surprise. “Yes, sir, I think it was odd.” I decided to paraphrase Will Rogers. “But all I know about it is what was in the news.” I wondered if . . .
“No, Sergeant Zinman, I don’t suspect you of having gotten hold of any classified information about it. There’s no classified information of importance, anyway. Just a lot of after-the-fact guessing. Actually, it was a trial run. Worked very well, too, and it didn’t spread to other nations.”
“You mean the U.S. started it somehow, sir?” And why was he . . .
“I’m telling you this, Sergeant, because we need to know just what you are. We need to know that before we start the main event.”
“Main event, sir? You mean you’re going to do the same to China?” And what did he mean, “what you are?” Surely he could see . . .
“Yes, I can see in your mind that you don’t know anything about all this. Incidentally, we are going to do the same to China, but not just China; and when I say “we,” I don’t mean this country. But first, I needed to see about your odd flickering. You’re a piece in the game that doesn’t fit, sergeant. Actually, that’s not right, because you don’t seem to be part of the game. But we don’t know exactly what you are, and we can’t take any chances.”
Now I remembered where I had seen him before. Last Saturday, I had been in civvies, about to leave the fort and go into town. I had noticed the base C.O. talking with a captain, and just then I had flickered. And the captain had suddenly ignored what the general was saying and stared intently at me. It had been Carpenter. I had gone on and forgotten about it.
“Yes, you caught my attention that day. I had to find out what that flickering meant. Suppose I told you that the U.S. and China are about to have a nuclear exchange?”
I didn’t understand, but I was feeling scared. Telepaths do go psycho, more often than, well, us posts. But I didn’t think he was insane.
“Interesting. I expected that to make you flicker. How about this?”
Carpenter wasn’t there anymore. In his place was a Chinese officer, a member of their telepath corps from the patch on his uniform. It, too, had a stylized brain, but with a dragon coiled around it. I started to get up.
Sit down, someone said to me. It wasn’t a voice, but it was in my head. I sat down, not that I had any choice.
The Chinese officer was gone. Now a Russian officer was sitting across the table. “You know that a telepath can’t lie to another telepath?” he said.
I didn’t say anything, but I thought about how often I’d heard that.
Now, there was a different Russian officer talking to me. “I’m going from a double agent to a quadruple agent, Sergeant Zinman. When a Russian officer who happens to be a telepath tells another Russian officer who also happens to be a telepath that there’s a group of traitors who are going to launch a tactical nuke at Moskva, he is believed. When the same officer tells another high-ranking telepath officer that traitors have taken over the missiles in Moskva and are about to attack the missile emplacements in the rest of the country, he also is believed. It worked. And it will work on the United States and China, too.”
Somehow, I wasn’t scared now. I should have been, but . . .
“Yes, it is odd that you’re suddenly so calm. And I really expected you to start flickering again. Maybe we should take you apart to see if there’s something different about your brain, but there isn’t time. I guess you’ll have to commit suicide.” He took a small laspistol out of his uniform—I hadn’t seen any sign of it before—and put it on the table. “Don’t touch it until I tell you to.”
I tried to reach for it, and nothing happened. “You wanted to know what I was—” I began.
“I still am curious, but as I said, there isn’t time to satisfy that curiosity right now.”
“What are you?”
“The name wouldn’t mean anything to you. Nor would the number of the star of the planet I come from. Your astronomers have cataloged it and given it a designation, but I see that you, Sergeant, have only the most elementary knowledge of astronomy. Our telepaths are much stronger and more talented than any of yours, and I can lie to another telepath and be believed. Pick up the pistol now.”
Flicker. “You’re invading us? Won’t the radiation poison—?”
“We are just eliminating possible competition. Pick up the pistol. Besides, we have ways of neutralizing radiation. Pick up the pistol!”
Flicker. He was looking nervous, and his face seemed to waver. Maybe he was close to reverting to his natural appearance.
He told me to pick up the pistol again, and got another flicker response. He started to reach for the pistol, and stopped. I could see he was trying to reach for it, but couldn’t make his hand move.
And the flicker started and kept on going. It was like a color filter had dropped over my eyes, but it had nothing to do with color. I was standing up, now, though I didn’t remember getting to my feet. And there was something in front of me, barely visible out of the lower part of my vision. I was looking straight ahead and had the feeling that I shouldn’t try to look down.
Carpenter—or whatever his (its?) real name was—was staring at the middle of my chest. His human face looked terrified, and I somehow knew it wasn’t an illusion.
Then something started speaking.
It wasn’t using any words I knew. Most of the sounds wouldn’t turn into anything like words, though some of them came into my head as nonsense syllables: Ia! Frthgr! Nghall! Ia! It made no sense to me, but I wasn’t the intended recipient of the message. And somehow I could see into Carpenter’s brain and hear what he was hearing. Not in words, but something more basic. We have plans for this planet. You shouldn’t have interfered with the property of others older and stronger than you. I see into you. I see where your pathetic little empire is located. We’ll have to turn our attention to you vermin so that you won’t interfere with us again.
Carpenter was exerting all his concentration, I could tell. It was like I was a telepath, but I knew the other—thing—was doing all that and I was just picking up the overflow. He managed to get to his feet, and took a step toward the door while trying to reach for something in his pocket. Then he sat back down and picked up the laspistol. In ten minutes, the voice that wasn’t a voice told him.
Then, the flicker closed back up. I closed back up. Somehow, it was like I had doors in my front and something had opened them and come partly out. It had kept me from looking down at it. I got the impression that seeing what it looked like would not be a good idea. I had a glimpse of its appearance darkly reflected in the flat screen on the wall, and started to scream, but something made me look away and somehow I forgot what I had seen, and wondered why I thought I needed to scream. The last thing I sort of heard was close portal. Then, I was leaving the room, and walking down the hall. I had the feeling that I had just had a talk with Carpenter, but couldn’t remember anything about it. Or why he wasn’t with me now.
I had an odd thought, about being chosen to be a portal to something else—sounded weird, like some kind of screwball religion or cult—then I forgot some more and wondered why I was thinking of the word “portal.” Like I was trying to remember a joke I had heard long ago.
I went out through the gate. The guard asked me if Captain Carpenter was still inside, and I said . . .
Flicker.
I don’t know what I said, but it satisfied the guard. I got back in the car. “Back to the platoon, Joe,” I said.
“Is the captain staying behind,” Moriko asked, as he told the car where to go.
Flicker.
“W
hat captain, Joe?”
Joe looked confused. “Did I say something about a captain? I must have been thinking of something else.”
“Didn’t you ever hear that you’re not paid to think, soldier?” I said, imitating Lieutenant Minteer’s accent so that Joe would realize it was a joke. For some reason, I was thinking about telepaths and how much trouble they were.
I must have been thinking out loud, because Joe said, “Look on the bright side, Sarge. Suppose Lieutenant Minteer was a telepath. That would be scary.”
“I can’t think of anything that would be scarier,” I said.
We drove on.
* * *
Hank Davis is senior editor emeritus at Baen Books. While a naïve youth in the early 1950s (yes, he’s old!), he was led astray by SF comic books, and then by A.E. van Vogt’s Slan, which he read in the Summer 1952 issue of Fantastic Story Quarterly while in the second grade, sealing his fate. He has had stories published mumble-mumble years ago in Analog, If, F&SF, and Damon Knight’s Orbit anthology series. (There was also a story sold to The Last Dangerous Visions, but let’s not go there.) A native of Kentucky, he currently lives in North Carolina to avoid a long commute to the Baen office.
At my request, he supplied this afterword.
While I’m sure there are occasional exceptions, friends usually have something in common. In the case of my friend David Drake, our common interests include the science fiction pulps of yesteryear, movie serials (the cinematic equivalent of pulps), the history of science fiction, including once-popular writers and stories whose reputation has unjustly gone into eclipse (there’s some overlap with the SF pulps here), and various less eccentric areas of interest, such as the late, great singer Peggy Lee. We also have in common, for better or worse, being Vietnam veterans.
Obviously, a story for an anthology commemorating Dave’s big seven-oh year should involve some of those interests, and my first thought was writing a movie-type serial (on paper, not on film) with insidious villains, rip-roaring action, slam-bang fistfights, and a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter—but then I had a rare attack of sanity and remembered that movie serials typically had twelve chapters, fifteen in some cases, and such a segmented epic would take up too much space in the book, particularly coming from a mere dilettante whose story is appearing alongside others by genuine pros who have produced substantial bodies of work. So I decided instead to give a nod to Dave’s military service, not to mention his towering status as the Dean of military science fiction (though it should be noted that he’s far too versatile to write only military sf) and go with a modestly short piece set in a future version of the U.S. Army.
Onward, Drake! - eARC Page 21