Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  I drank some more of the whisky.

  “But,” I said, “you know, there’s always a better story a little deeper in the combat zone. We got caught up front one day when the New Earth troops were retreating. I picked up a needle through the kneecap. The Friendly armor was moving up and things were getting hot. The soldiers around us took off toward the rear in a hurry, but Dave tried to carry me, because he thought the Friendly armor would fry me before they had time to notice I was a non-combatant. Well,” I took another deep breath, “the Friendly ground troops caught us. They took us to a sort of clearing where they had a lot of prisoners and kept us there for a while. Then a groupman—one of their fanatic types, a tall, starved-looking soldier about my age—came up with orders they were to reform for a fresh attack.”

  I stopped and took another drink. But I could not taste it.

  “That meant they couldn’t spare men to guard the prisoners. They’d have to turn them loose back of the Friendly lines. The Groupman said that wouldn’t work. They’d have to make sure the prisoners couldn’t endanger them.”

  Graeme was still watching me.

  “I didn’t understand. I didn’t even catch on when the other Friendlies—none of them were non-coms like the Groupman—objected.” I put my glass on the desk beside me and stared at the wall of the office, seeing it all over again, as plainly as if I looked through a window at it. “I remember how the Groupman pulled himself up straight. I saw his eyes. As if he’d been insulted by the others, objecting.

  “‘Are they Chosen of God?’ he shouted at them. ‘Are they of the Chosen?’”

  I looked across at Kensie Graeme and saw him still motionless, still watching me, his own glass small in one big hand.

  “You understand?” I said to him. “As if because the prisoners weren’t Friendlies, they weren’t quite human. As if they were some lower order it was all right to kill.” I shook, suddenly. “And he did it! I sat there against a tree, safe because of my News Correspondent’s uniform and watched him shoot them down. All of them. I sat there and looked at Dave, and he looked at me, sitting there, as the Groupman shot him!”

  I quit all at once. I hadn’t meant to have it all come out like that. It was just that I’d been able to tell no one who would understand how helpless I had been. But something about Graeme had given me the idea he would understand.

  “Yes,” he said after a moment, and took and filled my glass again. “That sort of thing’s very bad. Was the Groupman found and tried under the Mercenaries Code?”

  “After it was too late, yes.”

  * * * *

  He nodded and looked past me at the wall. “They aren’t all like that, of course.”

  “There’s enough to give them a reputation for it.”

  “Unfortunately, yes. Well”—he smiled slightly at me—“we’ll try and keep that sort of thing out of this campaign.”

  “Tell me something,” I said, putting my glass down. “Does that sort of thing—as you put it—ever happen to the Friendlies, themselves?”

  Something took place then in the atmosphere of the room. There was a little pause before he answered. I felt my heart beat slowly, three times, as I waited for him to speak.

  He said at last, “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  The feeling in the room became stronger. And I realized I had gone too fast. I had been sitting talking to him as a man and forgetting what else he was. Now I began to forget that he was a man and become conscious of him as a Dorsai—an individual as human as I was, but trained all his life, and bred down the generations to a difference. He did not move or change the tone of his voice, or any such thing; but somehow he seemed to move off some distance from me, up into a higher, colder, stonier land into which I could venture only at my peril.

  I remembered what was said about his people from that small, cold stony-mountained world: that if the Dorsai chose to withdraw their fighting men from the services of all the other worlds, and challenge those other worlds, not the combined might of the rest of civilization could stand against them. I had never really believed that before. I had never even really thought much about it. But sitting there just then, because of what was happening in the room, suddenly it became real to me. I could feel the knowledge, cold as a wind blowing on me off a glacier, that it was true; and then he answered my question.

  “Because,” said Kensie Graeme, “anything like that is specifically prohibited by Article Two of the Mercenaries’ Code.”

  Then he broke out abruptly into a smile and what I had just felt in the room withdrew. I breathed again.

  “Well,” he said, putting his glass down empty on the desk, “how about joining us in the Officers’ Mess for something to eat?”

  * * * *

  I had dinner with them and the meal was very pleasant. They wanted to put me up for the night—but I could feel myself being pulled back to that cold, joyless compound near Joseph’s Town, where all that waited for me was a sort of cold and bitter satisfaction at being among my enemies.

  I went back.

  It was about eleven p.m. when I drove through the gate of the compound and parked, just as a figure came out of the entrance to Jamethon’s headquarters. The square was dim-lighted with only a few spotlights about the walls, their light lost in the rain-wet pavement. For a moment I did not recognize the figure—and then I saw it was Jamethon.

  He would have passed by me at some distance, but I got out of my car and went to meet him. He stopped when I stepped in front of him.

  “Mr. Olyn,” he said evenly. In the darkness I could not make out the expression of his face.

  “I’ve got a question to ask,” I said, smiling in the darkness.

  “It’s late for questions.”

  “This won’t take long.” I strained to catch the look on his face, but it was all in shadow. “I’ve been visiting the Exotic camp. Their commander’s a Dorsai. I suppose you know that?”

  “Yes.” I could barely see the movement of his lips.

  “We got to talking. A question came up and I thought I’d ask you, Commandant. Do you ever order your men to kill prisoners?”

  An odd, short silence came between us. Then he answered.

  “The killing or abuse of prisoners of war,” he said without emotion, “is forbidden by Article Two of the Mercenaries’ Code.”

  “But you aren’t Mercenaries here, are you? You’re native troops in service to your own True Church and Elders.”

  “Mr. Olyn,” he said, while I still strained without success to make out the expression of his shadowed face—and it seemed that the words came slowly, though the tone of the voice that spoke them remained as calm as ever, “My Lord has set me to be His servant and a leader among men of war. In neither of those tasks will I fail Him.”

  And with that he turned, his face still shadowed and hidden from me, and passed around me and went on.

  * * * *

  Alone, I went back inside to my quarters, undressed and lay down on the hard and narrow bed they had given me. The rain outside had stopped at last. Through my open, unglazed window I could see a few stars showing.

  I lay there getting ready to sleep and making mental notes on what I would need to do tomorrow. The meeting with Padma the OutBond had jolted me sharply. I took his so-called calculations of human actions with reservation—but I had been shaken to learn of them. I would have to find out more about how much his science of ontogenies knew and could predict. If necessary, from Padma himself. But I would start first with ordinary reference sources.

  No one, I thought, would ordinarily entertain the fantastic thought that one man like myself could destroy a culture involving the populations of two worlds. No one, except perhaps a Padma. What I knew, he with his calculations might have discovered. And that was that the Friendly worlds of Harmony and Association were facing a decision that would mean life or death to their way of living. A very small thing could tip the scales they weighed on.

  F
or there was a new wind blowing between the stars.

  Four hundred years before we had all been men of Earth—Old Earth, the mother planet which was my native soil. One people.

  Then, with the movement out to new worlds, the human race had “splintered,” to use an Exotic term. Every small social fragment and psychological type had drawn apart by itself, and joined others like it and progressed toward specialized types. Until we had half a dozen fragments of human types—the warrior on the Dorsai, the philosopher on the Exotic worlds, the hard scientist on Newton, Cassida and Venus, and so forth…

  Isolation had bred specific types. Then a growing intercommunication between the younger worlds, now established, and an ever-increasing rate of technological advance had forced specialization. The trade between the worlds was the trade of skilled minds. Generals from the Dorsai were worth their exchange rate in psychiatrists from the Exotics. Communications men like myself from Old Earth brought spaceship designers from Cassida. And so it had been for the last hundred years.

  But now the worlds were drifting together. Economics was fusing the race into one whole, again. And the struggle on each world was to gain the advantages of that fusion while holding on to as much as possible of their own ways.

  Compromise was necessary—and the harsh, stiff-necked Friendly religion forbade compromise and had made many enemies. Already public opinion moved against the Friendlies on other worlds. Discredit them, smear them, publicly here in this campaign and they would not be able to hire out their soldiers. They would lose the balance of trade they needed to hire the skilled specialists trained by the special facilities of other worlds, and which they needed to keep their own two poor-in-natural-resources worlds alive. They would die.

  As young Dave had died. Slowly. In the dark.

  …In the darkness now, as I thought of it, it rose up before me once again. It had been only noon when we were taken prisoner, but by the time the Groupman came with his orders for our guards to move up, the sun was almost down.

  After they left, after it was all over and I was left alone, I crawled to the bodies in the clearing. And I found Dave among them; and he was not quite gone.

  He was wounded in the body and I could not stop the bleeding.

  It would not have helped if I had, they told me afterwards. But then it seemed that it would have. So I tried. But finally I gave up and by that time it was quite dark. I only held him and did not know he was dead until he began to grow cold. And then was when I had begun to change into what my uncle had always tried to make me. I felt myself die inside. Dave and my sister were to have been my family, the only family I had ever had hopes of keeping. Instead, I could only sit there in the darkness, holding him and hearing the blood from his red-soaked clothing, falling drop by drop, slowly on the dead variform oak leaves beneath us.

  * * * *

  I lay there now in the Friendly compound, not able to sleep and remembering. And after a while I heard the soldiers marching, forming in the square for midnight service.

  I lay on my back, listening to them. Their marching feet stopped at last. The single window of my room was over my bed—high in the wall against which the left side of my cot was set. It was unglazed and the night air with its sounds came freely through it along with the dim light from the square which painted a pale rectangle on the opposite wall of my room. I lay watching that rectangle and listening to the service outside; and I heard the duty officer lead them in a prayer for worthiness. After that they sang their battle hymn again, and I lay hearing it, this time, all the way through.

  Soldier, ask not—now, or ever,

  Where to war your banners go.

  Anarch’s legions all surround us.

  Strike! And do not count the blow!

  Glory, honor—praise and profit,

  Are but toys of tinsel worth.

  Render up your work, unasking,

  Leave the human clay to earth.

  Blood and sorrow—pain unending,

  Are the portion of us all.

  Grasp the naked sword, opposing.

  Gladly in the battle fall.

  So shall we, anointed soldiers,

  Stand at last before the Throne.

  Baptized in our wounds, red-flowing,

  Sealed unto our Lord—alone!

  After that they dispersed to cots no different from mine.

  I lay there listening to the silence in the square and the measured dripping of a rainspout outside by my window, its slow drops falling after the rain, one by one, uncounted in the darkness.

  IV

  After the day I landed, there was no more rain. Day by day the fields dried. Soon they would be firm underneath the weight of heavy surface-war equipment, and everyone knew that then the Exotic spring offensive would get under way. Meanwhile both Exotic and Friendly troops were in training.

  During the next few weeks, I was busy about my newswork. Mostly feature and small stories on the soldiers and the native people. I had dispatches to send and I sent them faithfully. A correspondent is only as good as his contacts; I made contacts everywhere but among the Friendly troops. These remained aloof, though I talked to many of them. They refused to show fear or doubt.

  I had heard these Friendly soldiers were generally undertrained because the suicidal tactics of their officers kept their ranks always filled with green replacements. But the ones here were the remnants of an Expeditionary Force six times their present numbers. They were all veterans, though most of them were in their teens. Only here and there, among the non-coms, and more often among the commissioned officers, I saw the prototype of the non-com who had ordered the prisoners shot on New Earth. Here, the men of this type looked like rabid, gray wolves mixed among polite, well-schooled young dogs just out of puppyhood.

  It was a temptation to think that they alone were what I had set out to destroy.

  To fight that temptation I told myself that Alexander the Great had led expeditions against the hill tribes and ruled in Pella, capital of Macedonia, and ordered men put to death when he was sixteen. But still the Friendly soldiers looked young to me. I could not help contrasting them with the adult, experienced mercenaries in Kensie Graeme’s forces. For the Exotics, in obedience to their principles, would hire no drafted troops or soldiers who were not in uniform of their own free will.

  Meanwhile I had heard no word from the Blue Front. But by the time two weeks had gone, I had my own connections in New San Marcos, and at the beginning of the third week one of these brought me word that the jewelers shop in Wallace Street there had closed its door—had pulled its blinds and emptied the long room of stock and fixtures, and moved or gone out of business. That was all I needed to know.

  For the next few days, I stayed in the vicinity of Jamethon Black himself, and by the end of the week my watching him paid off.

  At ten o’clock that Friday night I was up on a catwalk just above my quarters and under the sentry-walk of the walls, watching as three civilians with Blue Front written all over them drove into the square, got out and went into Jamethon’s office.

  They stayed a little over an hour. When they left, I went back down to bed. That night I slept soundly.

  * * * *

  The next morning I got up early, and there was mail for me. A message had come by spaceliner from the director of News Network back on Earth, personally congratulating me on my dispatches. Once, three years before, this would have meant a great deal to me. Now, I only worried that they would decide I had made the situation here newsworthy enough to require extra people being sent out to help me. I could not risk having other news personnel here now to see what I was doing.

  I got in my car and headed east along the highway to New San Marcos and the Exotic Headquarters. The Friendly troops were already out in the field; eighteen kilometers east of Joseph’s Town, I was stopped by a squad of five young soldiers with no non-com over them. They recognized me.

  “In God’s name, Mr. Olyn,” said the first one to reach my car, bending down
to speak to me through the open window at my left shoulder. “You cannot go through.”

  “Mind if I ask why?” I said.

  He turned and pointed out and down into a little valley between two wooded hills at our left.

  “Tactical survey in progress.”

  I looked. The little valley or meadow was perhaps a hundred yards wide between the wooded slopes, and it wound away from me and curved to disappear to my right. At the edge of the wooded slopes where they met open meadow, there were lilac bushes with blossoms several days old. The meadow itself was green and fair with the young chartreuse grass of early summer and the white and purple of the lilacs, and the variform oaks behind the lilacs were fuzzy in outline, with small, new leaves.

  In the middle of all this, in the center of the meadow, were black-clad figures moving about with computing devices, measuring and figuring the possibilities of death from every angle. In the very center of the meadow for some reason they had set up marking stakes—a single stake, then a stake in front of that with two stakes on either side of it, and one more stake in line before these. Farther on was another single stake, down, as if fallen on the grass and discarded.

  I looked back up into the lean young face of the soldier.

  “Getting ready to defeat the Exotics?” I said.

  He took it as if it had been a straightforward question, with no irony in my voice at all.

  “Yes sir,” he said seriously. I looked at him and at the taut skin and clear eyes of the rest.