by Andre Norton
“Then there has been more than one?” asked the colonel quietly.
Kurt started to stammer.
Colonel Harris silenced him with a gesture of his hand. “I’m talking about the country to the north, the tableland back of the Twin Peaks.”
“It’s a beautiful place!” burst out Kurt enthusiastically. “It’s . . . it’s like Imperial Headquarters must be. Dozens of little streams full of fish, trees heavy with fruit, small game so slow and stupid that they can be knocked over with a club. Why, the battalion could live there without hardly lifting a finger!”
“I’ve no doubt that they could,” said the colonel.
“Think of it, sir!” continued the sergeant. “No more plowing details, no more hunting details, no more nothing but taking it easy!”
“You might add to your list of ‘no mores,’ no more tech schools,” said Colonel Harris. “I’m quite aware that the place is all you say it is, sergeant. As a result I’m placing all information that pertains to it in a ‘Top Secret’ category. That applies to what is inside your head as well!”
“But, sir!” protested Kurt. “If you could only see the place—”
“I have,” broke in the colonel, “thirty years ago.”
Kurt looked at him in amazement. “Then why are we still on the plateau?”
“Because my commanding officer did just what I’ve just done, classified the information ‘Top Secret.’ Then he gave me thirty days’ extra detail on the plows. After he took my stripes away that is.” Colonel Harris rose slowly to his feet. “Dixon,” he said softly, “it’s not every man who can be a noncommissioned officer in the Space Marines. Sometimes we guess wrong. When we do we do something about it!” There was the hissing crackle of distant summer lightning in his voice and storm clouds seemed to gather about his head. “Wipe those chevrons off!” he roared.
Kurt looked at him in mute protest.
“You heard me!” the colonel thundered.
“Yes-s-s, sir,” stuttered Kurt, reluctantly drawing his forearm across his forehead and wiping off the three triangles of white grease paint that marked him a sergeant in the Imperial Space Marines. Quivering with shame, he took a tight grip on his temper and choked back the angry protests that were trying to force their way past his lips.
“Maybe,” suggested the colonel, “you’d like to make a complaint to the I.G. He’s due in a few days and he might reverse my decision. It has happened before, you know.”
“No, sir,” said Kurt woodenly.
“Why not?” demanded Harris.
“When I was sent out as a scout for the hunting parties I was given direct orders not to range farther than twenty kilometers to the north. I went sixty.” Suddenly his forced composure broke. “I couldn’t help it, sir,” he said. “There was something behind those peaks that kept pulling me and pulling me and”—he threw up his hands—“you know the rest.”
There was a sudden change in the colonel’s face as a warm human smile swept across it, and he broke into a peal of laughter. “It’s a hell of a feeling, isn’t it, son? You know you shouldn’t, but at the same time there’s something inside you that says you’ve got to know what’s behind those peaks or die. When you get a few more years under your belt you’ll find that it isn’t just mountains that make you feel like that. Here, boy, have a seat.” He gestured toward a woven wicker chair that stood by his desk.
Kurt shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, stunned by the colonel’s sudden change of attitude and embarrassed by his request. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but we aren’t out on work detail, and—” The colonel laughed. “And enlisted men not on work detail don’t sit in the presence of officers. Doesn’t the way we do things ever strike you as odd, Dixon? On one hand you’d see nothing strange about being yoked to a plow with a major, and on the other you’d never dream of sitting in his presence off duty.”
Kurt looked puzzled. “Work details are different,” he said. “We all have to work if we’re going to eat. But in the garrison, officers are officers and enlisted men are enlisted men and that’s the way it’s always been.”
Still smiling, the colonel reached into his desk drawer, fished out something, and tossed it to Kurt.
“Stick this in your scalp lock,” he said.
Kurt looked at it, stunned. It was a golden feather crossed with a single black bar, the insignia of rank of a second lieutenant of the Imperial Space Marines. The room swirled before his eyes. “Now,” said the older officer, “sit down!”
Kurt slowly lowered himself into the chair and looked at the colonel through bemused eyes.
“Stop gawking!” said Colonel Harris. “You’re an officer now! When a man gets too big for his sandals, we give him a new pair—after we let him sweat a while!”
He suddenly grew serious. “Now that you’re one of the family you have a right to know why I’m hushing up the matter of the tableland to the north. What I have to say won’t make much sense at first. Later I’m hoping it will. Tell me,” he said suddenly, “where did the battalion come from?”
“We’ve always been here, I guess,” said Kurt. “When I was a recruit, Granddad used to tell me stories about us being brought from some place else a long time ago by an iron bird, but it stands to reason that something that heavy can’t fly!”
A faraway look came into the colonel’s eyes. “Six generations,” he mused, “and history becomes legend. Another six and the legends themselves become tales for children. Yes, Kurt,” he said softly, “it stands to reason that something that heavy couldn’t fly so we’ll forget it for a while. We did come from some place else though. Once there was a great empire, so great that all the stars you see at night were only part of it. And then, as things do when age rests too heavily on them, it began to crumble. Commanders fell to fighting among themselves and the Emperor grew weak. The battalion was set down here to operate a forward maintenance station for his ships. We waited but no ships came. For five hundred years no ships have come,” said the colonel somberly. “Perhaps they tried to relieve us and couldn’t, perhaps the Empire fell with such a crash that we were lost in the wreckage. There are a thousand perhapses that a man can tick off in his mind when the nights are long and sleep comes hard! Lost . . . forgotten . . . who knows?”
Kurt stared at him with a blank expression on his face. Most of what the colonel had said made no sense at all. Wherever Imperial Headquarters was, it hadn’t forgotten them. The I.G. still made his inspection every year or so.
The colonel continued as if talking to himself. “But our operational orders said that we would stand by to give all necessary maintenance to Imperial warcraft until properly relieved, and stand by we have.”
The old officer’s voice seemed to be coming from a place far distant in time and space.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Kurt, “but I don’t follow you. If all these things did happen, it was so long ago that they mean nothing to us now.”
“But they do!” said Colonel Harris vigorously. “It’s because of them that things like your rediscovery of the tableland to the north have to be suppressed for the good of the battalion! Here on the plateau the living is hard. Our work in the fields and the meat brought in by our hunting parties give us just enough to get by on. But here we have the garrison and the Tech Schools—and vague as it has become—a reason for remaining together as the battalion. Out there where the living is easy we’d lose that. We almost did once. A wise commander stopped it before it went too far. There are still a few signs of that time left—left deliberately as reminders of what can happen if commanding officers forget why we’re here!”
“What things?” asked Kurt curiously.
“Well, son,” said the colonel, picking up his great war bonnet from the desk and gazing at it quizzically, “I don’t think you’re quite ready for that information yet. Now take off and strut your feather. I’ve got work to do!”
IV
At War Base Three nobody was happy. Ships that were suppos
ed to be light-months away carrying on the carefully planned search for General Carr’s hideout were fluttering down out of the sky like senile penguins, disabled by blown jets, jammed computers, and all the other natural ills that worn out and poorly serviced equipment is heir to. Technical maintenance was quickly going mad. Commander Krogson was being noisy about it.
“Schninkle!” he screamed. “Isn’t anything happening any place?”
“Nothing yet, sir,” said the little man.
“Well make something happen!” He hoisted his battered brogans onto the scarred top of the desk and chewed savagely on a frayed cigar. “How are the other sectors doing?”
“No better than we are,” said Schninkle. “Commander Snork of Sector Six tried to pull a fast one but he didn’t get away with it. He sent his STAP into a plantation planet out at the edge of the Belt and had them hypno the whole population. By the time they were through there were about fifteen million greenies running around yelling ‘Up with General Carr!’ ‘Down with the Lord Protector!’ ‘Long Live the People’s Revolution!’ and things like that. Snork even gave them a few medium vortex blasters to make it look more realistic. Then he sent in his whole fleet, tipped off the press at Prime Base, and waited. Guess what the Bureau of Essential Information finally sent him?”
“I’ll bite,” said Commander Krogson.
“One lousy cub reporter. Snork couldn’t back out then so he had to go ahead and blast the planet down to bedrock. This morning he got a three-line notice in Space and a citation as Third Rate Protector of the People’s Space Ways, Eighth Grade.”
“That’s better than the nothing we’ve got so far!” said the commander gloomily.
“Not when the press notice is buried on the next to last page right below the column on ‘Our Feathered Comrades’,” said Schninkle, “and when the citation is posthumous. They even misspelled his name; it came out Snork!”
V
As Kurt turned to go, there was a sharp knock on Colonel Harris’ door.
“Come in!” called the colonel.
Lieutenant Colonel Blick, the battalion executive officer, entered with an arrogant stride and threw his commander a slovenly salute. For a moment he didn’t notice Kurt standing at attention beside the door.
“Listen, Harris!” he snarled. “What’s the idea of pulling that clean-up detail out of my quarters?”
“There are no servants in this battalion, Blick,” the older man said quietly. “When the men come in from work detail at night they’re tired. They’ve earned a rest and as long as I’m C.O. they’re going to get it. If you have dirty work that has to be done, do it yourself. You’re better able to do it than some poor devil who’s been dragging a plow all day. I suggest you check pertinent regulations!”
“Regulations!” growled Blick. “What do you expect me to do, scrub my own floors?”
“I do,” said the colonel dryly, “when my wife is too busy to get to it. I haven’t noticed that either my dignity or my efficiency have suffered appreciably. I might add,” he continued mildly, “that staff officers are supposed to set a good example for their juniors. I don’t think either your tone or your manner are those that Lieutenant Dixon should be encouraged to emulate.” He gestured toward Kurt and Blick spun on one heel.
“Lieutenant Dixon!” he roared in an incredulous voice. “By whose authority?”
“Mine,” said the colonel mildly. “In case you’ve forgotten I am still commanding officer of this battalion.”
“I protest!” said Blick. “Commissions have always been awarded by decision of the entire staff.”
“Which you now control,” replied the colonel.
Kurt coughed nervously. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but I think I’d better leave.”
Colonel Harris shook his head. “You’re one of our official family now, son, and you might as well get used to our squabbles. This particular one has been going on between Colonel Blick and me for years. He has no patience with some of our old customs.” He turned to Blick. “Have you, colonel?”
“You’re right, I haven’t!” growled Blick. “And that’s why I’m going to change some of them as soon as I get the chance. The sooner we stop this Tech School nonsense and put the recruits to work in the fields where they belong, the better off we’ll all be. Why should a plowman or a hunter have to know how to read wiring diagrams or set tubes. It’s nonsense, superstitious nonsense. You!” he said, stabbing his finger into the chest of the startled lieutenant. “You! Dixon! You spent fourteen years in the Tech Schools just like I did when I was a recruit. What for?”
“To learn maintenance, of course,” said Kurt.
“What’s maintenance?” demanded Blick.
“Taking stuff apart and putting it back together and polishing jet bores with microplanes and putting plates in alignment and checking the meters when we’re through to see the job was done right. Then there’s class work in Direc calculus and subelectronics and—”
“That’s enough!” interrupted Blick. “And now that you’ve learned all that, what can you do with it?”
Kurt looked at him in surprise. “Do with it?” he echoed. “You don’t do anything with it. You just learn it because regulations say you should.”
“And this,” said Blick, turning to Colonel Harris, “is one of your prize products. Fourteen of his best years poured down the drain and he doesn’t even know what for!” He paused and then said in an arrogant voice, “I’m here for a showdown, Harris!”
“Yes?” said the colonel mildly.
“I demand that the Tech Schools be closed at once and the recruits released for work details. If you want to keep your command, you’ll issue that order. The staff is behind me on this!”
Colonel Harris rose slowly to his feet. Kurt waited for the thunder to roll, but strangely enough it didn’t. It almost seemed to him that there was an expression of concealed amusement playing across the colonel’s face.
“Some day, just for once,” he said, “I wish somebody around here would do something that hasn’t been done before.”
“What do you mean by that?” demanded Blick.
“Nothing,” said the colonel. “You know,” he continued conversationally, “a long time ago I walked into my C.O.’s and made the same demands and the same threats that you’re making now. I didn’t get very far, though—just as you aren’t going to—because I overlooked the little matter of the Inspector General’s annual visit. He’s due in from Imperial Headquarters Saturday night, isn’t he, Blick?”
“You know he is!” growled the other.
“Aren’t worried, are you? It occurs to me that the I.G. might take a dim view of your new order.”
“I don’t think he’ll mind,” said Blick with a nasty grin. “Now will you issue the order to close the Tech Schools or won’t you?”
“Of course not!” said the colonel brusquely.
“That’s final?”
Colonel Harris just nodded.
“All right,” barked Blick, “you asked for it!”
There was an ugly look on his face as he barked, “Kane! Simmons! Arnett! The rest of you! Get in here!”
The door to Harris’ office swung slowly open and revealed a group of officers standing sheepishly in the anteroom.
“Come in, gentlemen,” said Colonel Harris.
They came slowly forward and grouped themselves just inside the door.
“I’m taking over!” roared Blick. “This garrison has needed a house cleaning for a long time and I’m just the man to do it!”
“How about the rest of you?” asked the colonel.
“Beg pardon, sir,” said one hesitantly, “but we think Colonel Blick’s probably right. I’m afraid we’re going to have to confine you for a few days. Just until after the I.G.’s visit,” he added apologetically.
“And what do you think the I.G. will say to all this?”
“Colonel Blick says we don’t have to worry about that,” said the officer. “He’s going to tak
e care of everything.”
A look of sudden anxiety played across Harris’ face and for the first time he seemed on the verge of losing his composure.
“How?” he demanded, his voice betraying his concern.
“He didn’t say, sir,” the other replied. Harris relaxed visibly.
“All right,” said Blick. “Let’s get moving!” He walked behind the desk and plumped into the colonel’s chair. Hoisting his feet on the desk he gave his first command.
“Take him away!”
There was a sudden roar from the far comer of the room. “No you don’t!” shouted Kurt. His battle-ax leaped into his hand as he jumped in front of Colonel Harris, his muscular body taut and his gray eyes flashing defiance.
Blick jumped to his feet. “Disarm that man!” he commanded. There was a certain amount of scuffling as the officers in the front of the group by the door tried to move to the rear and those behind them resolutely defended their more protected positions.
Blick’s face grew so purple that he seemed on the verge of apoplexy. “Major Kane,” he demanded, “place that man under restraint!”
Kane advanced toward Kurt with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. Keeping a cautious eye on the glittering ax head, he said in what he obviously hoped to be a placating voice, “Come now, old man. Can’t have this sort of thing, you know.” He stretched out his hand hesitantly toward Kurt. “Why don’t you give me your ax and we’ll forget that the incident ever occurred.”
Kurt’s ax suddenly leaped toward the major’s head. Kane stood petrified as death whizzed toward him. At the last split second Kurt gave a practiced twist to his wrist and the ax jumped up, cutting the air over the major’s head with a vicious whistle. The top half of his silver staff plume drifted slowly to the floor.
“You want it,” roared Kurt, his ax flicking back and forth like a snake’s tongue, “you come get it. That goes for the rest of you, too!”
The little knot of officers retreated still farther. Colonel Harris was having the time of his life.