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“Cold Victory”

 

 

 

Introduction

^ »

 

One plot was foiled but the struggle continued for another generation. The enlightened attitudes the Institute sought to implant met increasing cultural and emotional resistance. No amount of psycho-dynamic manipulation could make pure rationality congenial to the average person. Despair deepened as employment rates shrank. The rage of Earth’s superfluous masses finally exploded against the gifted elite in the Humanist Revolt of 2170. The Psychotechnic Institute was abolished and its surviving members fled into exile. But like many conquerors before them, the Humanists soon learned it is harder to keep power than to win it.

 

— from Cold Victory

 

 

“Cold Victory”

« ^ »

 

It was the old argument, Historical Necessity versus the Man of Destiny. When I heard them talking, three together, my heart twisted within me and I knew that once more I must lay down the burden of which I can never be rid.

This was in the Battle Rock House, which is a quiet tavern on the edge of Syrtis Town. I come there whenever I am on Mars. It is friendly and unpretentious: shabby, comfortable loungers scattered about under the massive sandwood rafters, honest liquor and competent chess and the talk of one’s peers.

As I entered, a final shaft of thin hard sunlight stabbed in through the window, dazzling me, and then night fell like a thunderclap over the ocherous land and the fluoros snapped on. I got a mug of porter and strolled across to the table about which the three people sat.

The stiff little bald man was obviously from the college; he wore his academics even here, but Martians are like that. “No, no,” he was saying. “These movements are too great for any one man to change them appreciably. Humanism, for example, was not the political engine of Carnarvon; rather, he was the puppet of Humanism, and danced as the blind brainless puppeteer made him.”

“I’m not so sure,” answered the man in gray undress uniform of the Order of Planetary Engineers. “If he and his cohorts had been doctrinaire, the government of Earth might still be Humanist!”

“But being born of a time of trouble, Humanism was inevitably fanatical,” said the professor.

The big, kilted Venusian woman shifted impatiently. She was packing a gun and her helmet was on the floor beside her. Lucifer Clan, I saw from the tartan. “If there are folk around at a crisis time with enough force, they’ll shape the way things turn out,” she declared. “Otherwise things will drift.”

I rolled up a lounger and set my mug on the table. Conversational kibitzing is accepted in the Battle Rock. “Pardon me, gentles,” I said. “Maybe I can contribute.”

“By all means, Captain,” said the Martian, his eyes flickering over my Solar Guard uniform and insignia. “Permit me: I am Professor Freylinghausen—Engineer Buwono; Freelady Neilsen-Singh.”

“Captain Crane.” I lifted my mug in a formal toast. “Mars, Luna, Venus, and Earth in my case . . . highly representative, are we not? Between us, we should be able to reach a conclusion.”

“To a discussion in a vacuum!” snorted the amazon.

“Not quite,” said the engineer. “What did you wish to suggest, Captain?”

I got out my pipe and began stuffing it. “There’s a case from recent history—the anti-Humanist counterrevolution, in fact—in which I had a part myself. Offhand, at least, it seems a perfect example of sheer accident determining the whole future of the human race. It makes me think we must be more the pawns of chance than of law.”

“Well, Captain,” said Freylinghausen testily, “let us hear your story and then pass judgment.”

“I’ll have to fill you in on some background.” I lit my pipe and took a comforting drag. I needed comfort just then. It was not to settle an argument that I was telling this, but to reopen an old hurt which would never let itself be forgotten. “This happened during the final attack on the Humanists—”

“A perfect case of inevitability, sir,” interrupted Freylinghausen. “May I explain? Thank you. Forgive me if I repeat obvious facts. Their arrangements and interpretation are perhaps not so obvious.

“Psychotechnic government had failed to solve the problems of Earth’s adjustment to living on a high technological level. Conditions worsened until all too many people were ready to try desperate measures. The Humanist revolution was the desperate measure that succeeded in being tried. A typical reaction movement, offering a return to a less intellectualized existence; the savior with the time machine, as Toynbee once phrased it. So naturally its leader, Carnarvon, got to be dictator of the planet.

“But with equal force it was true that Earth could no longer afford to cut back her technology. Too many people, too few resources. In the several years of their rule, the Humanists failed to keep their promises; their attempts led only to famine, social disruption, breakdown. Losing popular support, they had to become increasingly arbitrary, thus alienating the people still more.

“At last the oppression of Earth became so brutal that the democratic governments of Mars and Venus brought pressure to bear. But the Humanists had gone too far to back down. Their only possible reaction was to pull Earth-Luna out of the Solar Union.

“We could not see that happen, sir. The lesson of history is too plain. Without a Union council to arbitrate between planets and a Solar Guard to enforce its decisions—there will be war until man is extinct. Earth could not be allowed to secede. Therefore, Mars and Venus aided the counterrevolutionary, anti-Humanist cabal that wanted to restore liberty and Union membership to the mother planet. Therefore, too, a space fleet was raised to support the uprising when it came.

“Don’t you see? Every step was an unavoidable consequence, by the logic of survival, of all that had gone before.”

“Correct so far, Professor,” I nodded. “But the success of the counterrevolution and the Mars-Venus intervention was by no means guaranteed. Mars and Venus were still frontiers, thinly populated, only recently made habitable. They didn’t have the military potential of Earth.

“The cabal was well organized. Its well-timed mutinies swept Earth’s newly created pro-Humanist ground and air forces before it. The countryside, the oceans, even the cities were soon cleared of Humanist troops.

“But Dictator Carnarvon and the men still loyal to him were holed up in a score of fortresses. Oh, it would have been easy enough to dig them out or blast them out—except that the navy of sovereign Earth, organized from seized units of the Solar Guard, had also remained loyal to Humanism. Its C-in-C, Admiral K’ung, had acted promptly when the revolt began, jailing all personnel he wasn’t sure of . . . or shooting them. Only a few got away.

“So there the pro-Union revolutionaries were, in possession of Earth but with a good five hundred enemy warships orbiting above them. K’ung’s strategy was simple. He broadcast that unless the rebels surrendered inside one week—or if meanwhile they made any attempt on Carnarvon’s remaining strongholds—he’d start bombarding with nuclear weapons. That, of course, would kill perhaps a hundred million civilians, flatten the factories, poison the sea ranches . . . he’d turn the planet into a butcher shop.

“Under such a threat, the general population was no longer backing the Union cause. They clamored for surrender; they began raising armies. Suddenly the victorious rebels had enemies not merely in front and above them, but behind . . . everywhere!

“Meanwhile, as you all know, the Unionist fleet under Dushanovitch-Álvarez had rendezvoused off Luna; as mixed a bunch of Martians, Venusians, and freedom-Minded Earthmen as history ever saw. They were much inferior both in strength and organiza­tion; it was impossible for them to charge in and give battle with any hope of winning . . . but Dushanovitch-Álvarez had a plan. It depended on luring the Humanist fleet out to engage him.

“Only Admiral K’ung wasn’t having any. The Unionist command knew, from deserters, that most of his captains wanted to go out and annihilate the invaders first, returning to deal with Earth at their leisure. It was a costly nuisance, the Unionists sneaking in, firing and retreating, blowing up ship after ship of the Humanist forces. But K’ung had the final word, and he would not accept the challenge until the rebels on the ground had capitulated. He was negotiating with them now, and it looked very much as if they would give in.

“So there it was, the entire outcome of the war—the whole history of man, for if you will pardon my saying so, gentles, Earth is still the key planet—everything hanging on this one officer, Grand Admiral K’ung Li-Po, a grim man who had given his oath and had a damnably good grasp of the military facts of life.”

I took a long draught from my mug and began the story, using the third-person form which is customary on Mars.

 

•   •   •

 

The speedster blasted at four gees till she was a bare five hundred kilometers from the closest enemy vessels. Her radar screens jittered with their nearness and in the thunder of abused hearts her crew sat waiting for the doomsday of a homing missile. Then she was at the calculated point, she spat her cargo out the main lock and leaped ahead still more furiously. In moments the thin glare of her jets was lost among crowding stars.

The cargo was three spacesuited men, linked to a giant air tank and burdened with a variety of tools. The orbit into which they had been flung was aligned with that of the Humanist fleet, so that relative velocity was low.

In cosmic terms, that is. It still amounted to nearly a thousand kilometers per hour and was enough, unchecked, to spatter the men against an armored hull.

Lieutenant Robert Crane pulled himself along the light cable that bound him up to the tank. His hands groped in the pitchy gloom of shadowside. Then all at once rotation had brought him into the moonlight and he could see. He found the rungs and went hand over hand along the curve of the barrel, centrifugal force streaming his body outward. Damn the clumsiness of space armor! Awkwardly, he got one foot into a stirrup-like arrangement and scrambled around until he was in the “saddle” with both boots firmly locked; then he unclipped the line from his waist.

The stars turned about him in a cold majestic wheel. Luna was nearly at the full, ashen pale, scored and pocked and filling his helmet with icy luminescence. Earth was an enormous grayness in the sky, a half ring of blinding light from the hidden sun along one side.

Twisting a head made giddy by the spinning, he saw the other two mounted behind him. García was in the middle—you could always tell a Venusian; he painted his clan markings on his suit—and the Martian Wolf at the end. “Okay,” he said, incongruously aware that the throat mike pinched his Adam’s apple, “let’s stop this merry-go-round.”

His hands moved across a simple control panel. A tangentially mounted nozzle opened, emitting an invisible stream of air. The stars slowed their lunatic dance, steadied . . . hell and sunfire, now he’d overcompensated, give it a blast from the other side . . . the tank was no longer in rotation. He was not hanging head downward, but falling, a long weightless tumble through a sterile infinity.

Three men rode a barrel of compressed air toward the massed fleet of Earth.

“Any radar reading?” García’s voice was tinny in the earphones.

“A moment, if you please, till I have it set up.” Wolf extended a telescoping mast, switched on the portable ’scope, and began sweeping the sky. “Nearest indication . . . um . . . one o’clock, five degrees low, four hundred twenty-two kilometers distant.” He added radial and linear velocity, and García worked an astrogator’s slide rule, swearing at the tricky light.

The base line was not the tank, but its velocity, which could be assumed straight-line for so short a distance. Actually, the weird horse had its nose pointed a full thirty degrees off the direction of movement. “High” and “low,” in weightlessness, were simply determined by the plane bisecting the tank, with the men’s heads arbitrarily designated as “aimed up.”

The airbarrel had jets aligned in three planes, as well as the rotation-controlling tangential nozzles. With Wolf and García to correct him, Crane blended vectors until they were on a course that would nearly intercept the ship. Gas was released from the forward jet at a rate calculated to match velocity.

Crane had nothing but the gauges to tell him that he was braking. Carefully dehydrated air emerges quite invisibly, and its ionization is negligible; there was no converter to radiate, and all equipment was painted a dead nonreflecting black.

Soundless and invisible—too small and fast for a chance eye to see in the uncertain moonlight, for a chance radar beam to register as anything worth buzzing an alarm about. Not enough infrared for detection, not enough mass, no trail of ions—the machinists on the Thor had wrought well, the astrogators had figured as closely as men and computers are able. But in the end it was only a tank of compressed air, a bomb, a few tools, and three men frightened and lonely.

“How long will it take us to get there?” asked Crane. His throat was dry and he swallowed hard.

“About forty-five minutes to that ship we’re zeroed in on,” García told him. “After that, quién sabe? We’ll have to locate the Monitor.”

“Be most economical with the air, if you please,” said Wolf. “We also have to get back.”

“Tell me more,” snorted Crane.

“If this works,” remarked García, “we’ll have added a new weapon to the System’s arsenals. That’s why I volunteered. If Antonio García of Hesperus gets his name in the history books, my whole clan will contribute to give me the biggest ranch on Venus.”

They were an anachronism, thought Crane, a resurrection from old days when war was a wilder business. The psychotechs had not picked a team for compatibility, nor welded them into an unbreakable brotherhood. They had merely grabbed the first three willing to try an untested scheme. There wasn’t time for anything else. In another forty hours, the pro-Union armies on Earth would either have surrendered or the bombardment would begin.

“Why are you lads here?” went on the Venusian. “We might as well get acquainted.”

“I took an oath,” said Wolf. There was nothing priggish about it; Martians thought that way.

“What of you, Crane?”

“I . . . it looked like fun,” said the Earthman lamely. “And it might end this damned war.”

He lied and he knew so, but how do you explain? Do you admit it was an escape from your shipmates’ eyes?

Not that his going over to the rebels had shamed him. Everyone aboard the Marduk had done so, except for a couple of cpo’s who were now under guard in Aphrodite. The cruiser had been on patrol off Venus when word of Earth’s secession had flashed. Her captain had declared for the Union and the Guard to which he belonged, and the crew cheered him for it.

For two years, while Dushanovitch-Álvarez, half idealist and half buccaneer, was assembling the Unionist fleet, intelligence reports trickled in from Earth. Mutiny was being organized, and men escaped from those Guard vessels—the bulk of the old space service—that had been at the mother planet and were seized to make a navy. Just before the Unionists accelerated for rendezvous, a list of the new captains appointed by K’ung had been received. And the skipper of the Huitzilopochli was named Benjamin Crane.

Ben . . . what did you do when your brother was on the enemy side? Dushanovitch-Álvarez had let the System know that a bombardment of Earth would be regarded as genocide and all officers partaking in it would be punished under Union law. It seemed unlikely that there would be any Union to try the case, but Lieutenant Robert Crane of the Marduk had protested: this was not a normal police operation, it was war, and executing men who merely obeyed the government they had pledged to uphold was opening the gates to a darker barbarism than the fighting itself. The Unionist forces was too shorthanded, it could not give Lieutenant Crane more than a public reproof for insubordination, but his mess-mates had tended to grow silent when he entered the wardroom.

If the superdreadnaught Monitor could be destroyed, and K’ung with it, Earth might not be bombarded. Then if the Unionists won, Ben would go free, or he would die cleanly in battle—reason enough to ride this thing into the Humanist fleet!

Silence was cold in their helmets.

“I’ve been thinking,” said García. “Suppose we do carry this off, but they decide to blast Earth anyway before dealing with our boats. What then?”

“Then they blast Earth,” said Wolf. “Though most likely they won’t have to. Last I heard, the threat alone was making folk rise against our friends on the ground there.” Moonlight shimmered along his arm as he pointed at the darkened planet-shield before them. “So the Humanists will be back in power, and even if we chop up their navy, we won’t win unless we do some bombarding of our own.”

¡Madre de Dios!” García crossed himself, a barely visible gesture in the unreal flood of undiffused light. “I’ll mutiny before I give my name to such a thing.”

“And I,” said Wolf shortly. “And most of us, I think.”

It was not that the Union fleet was crewed by saints, thought Crane. Most of its personnel had signed on for booty; the System knew how much treasure was locked in the vaults of Earth’s dictators. But the horror of nuclear war had been too deeply graven for anyone but a fanatic at the point of desperation to think of using it.

Even in K’ung’s command, there must be talk of revolt. Since his ultimatum, deserters in lifeboats had brought Dushanovitch­Álvarez a mountain of precise information. But the Humanists had had ten years in which to build a hard cadre of hard young officers to keep the men obedient.

Strange to know that Ben was with them—why?

I haven’t seen you in more than two years now, Ben—nor my own wife and children, but tonight it is you who dwell in me, and I have not felt such pain for many years. Not since that time we were boys together, and you were sick one day, and I went alone down the steep bluffs above the Mississippi. There I found the old man denned up under the trees, a tramp, one of many millions for whom there was no place in this new world of shining machines—but he was not embittered, he drew his citizen’s allowance and tramped the planet and he had stories to tell me which our world of bright hard metal had forgotten. He told me about Br’er Rabbit and the briar patch; never had I heard such a story, it was the first time I knew the rich dark humor of the earth itself. And you got well, Ben, and I took you down to his camp, but he was gone and you never heard the story of Br’er Rabbit. On that day, Ben, I was as close to weeping as I am right this night of murder.

The minutes dragged past. Only numbers went between the three men on the tank, as trogational corrections. They sat, each in his own skull with his own thoughts.

The vessel on which they had zeroed came into plain view, a long black shark swimming against the Milky Way. They passed within two kilometers of her. Wolf was busy now, flicking his radar around the sky, telling off ships. It was mostly seat-of-the-pants piloting, low relative velocities and small distances, edging into the mass of Earth’s fleet. That was not a very dense mass; kilometers gaped between each unit. The Monitor was in the inner ring; a deserter had given them the approximate orbit.

“You’re pretty good at this, boy,” said García.

“I rode a scooter in the asteroids for a couple of years,” answered Crane. “Patrol and rescue duty.”

That was when there had still been only the Guard, one fleet and one flag. Crane had never liked the revolutionary government of Earth, but while the Union remained and the only navy was the Guard and its only task to help any and all men, he had been reasonably content. Please God, that day would come again.

Slowly, over the minutes, the Monitor grew before him, a giant spheroid never meant to land on a planet. He could see gun turrets scrawled black across remote star-clouds. There was more reason for destroying her than basic strategy—luring the Humanists out to do batle; more than good tactics—built only last year, she was the most formidable engine of war in the Solar System. It would be the annihilation of a symbol. The Monitor, alone among ships that rode the sky, was designed with no other purpose than killing.

Slow, now, easy, gauge the speeds by eye, remember how much inertia you’ve got . . . Edge up, brake, throw out a magnetic anchor and grapple fast. Crane turned a small winch; the cable tautened and he bumped against the hull.

Nobody spoke. They had work to do, and their short-range radio might have been detected. García unshipped the bomb. Crane held it while the Venusian scrambled from the saddle and got a firm boot-grip on the dreadnaught. The bomb didn’t have a large mass. Crane handed it over, and García slapped it onto the hull, gripped by a magnetic plate. Stooping, he wound a spring and jerked a lever. Then, with a spaceman’s finicking care, he returned to the saddle. Crane paid out the cable till it ran off the drum; they were free of their grapple.

In twenty minutes, the clockwork was to set off the bomb. It was a little one, plutonium fission, and most of its energy would be wasted on vacuum. Enough would remain to smash the Monitor into a hundred fragments.

Crane worked the airjets, forcing himself to be calm and deliberate. The barrel swung about to point at Luna, and he opened the rear throttle wide. Acceleration tugged at him, he braced his feet in the stirrups and hung on with both hands. Behind them, the Monitor receded, borne on her own orbit around a planet where terror walked.

When they were a good fifteen kilometers away, he asked for a course. His voice felt remote, as if it came from outside his prickling skin. Most of him wondered just how many men were aboard the dreadnaught and how many wives and children they had to weep for them. Wolf squinted through a sextant and gave his readings to García. Corrections made, they rode toward the point of rendezvous: a point so tricky to compute, in this Solar System where the planets were never still, that they would doubtless not come within a hundred kilometers of the speedster that was to pick them up. But they had a hand-cranked radio that would broad cast a signal for the boat to get a fix on them. How many minutes had they been going? Ten. . .? Crane looked at the clock in the control panel. Yes, ten. Another five or so, at this acceleration, ought to see them beyond the outermost orbit of the Humanist ships—

He did not hear the explosion. A swift and terrible glare opened inside his helmet, enough light reflected off the inner surface for his eyes to swim in white-hot blindness. He clung to his seat, nerves and muscles tensed against the hammer blow that never came. The haze parted raggedly, and he turned his head back toward Earth. A wan nimbus of incadescent gas hung there. A few tattered stars glowed blue as they fled from it.

Wolf’s voice whispered in his ears: “She’s gone already. The bomb went off ahead of schedule. Something in the clockwork—”

“But she’s gone!” García let out a rattling whoop. “No more flagship. We got her, lads, we got the stinking can!”

Not far away was a shadow visible only when it blocked off the stars. A ship . . . light cruiser—“Cram on the air!” said Wolf roughly. “Let’s get the devil out of here.”

“I can’t.” Crane snarled it, still dazed, wanting only to rest and forget every war that ever was. “We’ve only got so much pressure left, and none to spare for maneuvering if we get off course.”

“All right. . . .” They lapsed into silence. That which had been the Monitor, gas and shrapnel, dissipated. The enemy cruiser fell behind them, and Luna filled their eyes with barren radiance.

They were not aware of pursuit until the squad was almost on them. There were a dozen men in combat armor, driven by individual jet-units and carrying rifles. They overhauled the tank and edged in—less gracefully than fish, for they had no friction to kill forward velocity, but they moved in.

After the first leap of his heart, Crane felt cold and numb. None of his party bore arms: they themselves had been the weapon, and now it was discharged. In a mechanical fashion, he turned his headset to the standard band.

“Rebels ahoy!” The voice was strained close to breaking, an American voice. . . . For a moment such a wave of homesickness for the green dales of Wisconsin went over Crane that he he could not move nor realize he had been captured. “Stop that thing and come with us!”

In sheer reflex, Crane opened the rear throttles full. The barrel jumped ahead, almost ripping him from the saddle. Ions flared behind as the enemy followed. Their units were beam-powered from the ship’s nuclear engines, and they had plenty of reaction mass in their tanks. It was only a moment before they were alongside again.

Arms closed around Crane, dragging him from his seat. As the universe tilted about his head, he saw Wolf likewise caught. García sprang to meet an Earthman, hit him and bounced away but got his rifle. A score of bullets must have spat. Suddenly the Venusian’s armor blew white clouds of freezing water vapor and he drifted dead.

Wolf wrestled in vacuum and tore one hand free. Crane heard him croak over the radio: “They’ll find out—” Another frosty geyser erupted; Wolf had opened his own air-tubes.

Men closed in on either side of Crane, pinioning his arms. He could not have suicided even if he chose to. The rest flitted near, guns ready. He relaxed, too weary and dazed to fight, and let them face him around and kill forward speed, then accelerate toward the cruiser.

The airlock was opening for him before he had his voice back. “What ship is this?” he asked, not caring much, only filling in an emptiness.

Huitzilopochtli. Get in there with you.”

 

•   •   •

 

Crane floated weightless in the wardroom, his left ankle manacled to a stanchion. They had removed his armor, leaving the thick gray coverall which was the underpadding, and given him a stimpill. A young officer guarded him, sidearm holstered; no reason to fear a fettered captive. The officer did not speak, though horror lay on his lips.

The pill had revived Crane, his body felt supple and he sensed every detail of the room with an unnatural clarity. But his heart had a thick beat and his mouth felt cottony.

This was Ben’s ship.

García and Wolf were dead.

None of it was believable.

“Sir. . . .”

Ben’s head turned, and Robert saw, with an odd little sadness, gray streaks at the temples. What was his age—thirty-one? My kid brother is growing old already.

“Yes, Mr. Nicholson?”

The officer cleared his throat. “Sir, shouldn’t the prisoner be interrogated in the regular way? He must know a good deal about—”

“I assure you, not about our orbits and dispositions,” said Robert Crane with what coolness he could summon. “We change them quite often.”

“Obviously,” agreed Ben. “They don’t want us to raid them as they’ve been raiding us. We have to stay in orbit because of our strategy. They don’t, and they’d be fools if they did.”

“Still. . . .” began Nicholson.

“Oh, yes, Intelligence will be happy to pump him,” said Ben. “Though I suspect this show will be over before they’ve gotten much information of value. Vice Admiral Hokusai of the Krishna has succeeded to command. Get on the radio, Mr. Nicholson, and report what has happened. In the meantime, I’ll question the prisoner myself. Privately.”

“Yes, sir.” The officer saluted and went out. There was compassion in his eyes.

Ben closed the door behind him. Then he turned around and floated, crossing his legs, one hand on a stanchion and the other rubbing his forehead. His brother had known he would do exactly that. But how accurately can he read me?

“Well, Bob.” Ben’s tone was gentle.

Robert Crane shifted, feeling the link about his ankle. “How are Mary and the kids?” he asked.

“Oh . . . quite well, thank you. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about your own family. Last I heard, they were living in Manitowoc Unit, but in the confusion since. . . .” Ben looked away. “They were never bothered by our police, though. I have some little influence.”

“Thanks,” said Robert. Bitterness broke forth: “Yours are safe in Luna City. Mine will get the fallout when you bombard, or they’ll starve in the famine to follow.”

The captain’s mouth wrenched. “Don’t say that!” After a moment: “Do you think I like the idea of shooting at Earth? If you so-called liberators really give a curse in hell about the people their hearts bleed for so loudly, they’ll surrender first. We’re offering terms. They’ll be allowed to go to Mars or Venus.”

“I’m afraid you misjudge us, Ben,” said Robert. “Do you know why I’m here? It wasn’t simply a matter of being on the Marduk when she elected to stay with the Union. I believed in the liberation.”

“Believe in those pirates out there?” Ben’s finger stabbed at the wall, as if to pierce it and show the stars and the hostile ships swimming between.

“Oh, sure, they’ve been promised the treasure vaults. We had to raise men and ships somehow. What good was that money doing, locked away by Carnarvon and his gang?” Robert shrugged. “Look, I was born and raised in America. We were always a free people. The Bill of Rights was molded on our own old Ten Amendments. From the moment the Humanists seized power, I had to start watching what I said, who I associated with, what tapes I got from the library. My kids were growing up into perfect little parrots. It was too much. When the purges began, when the police fired on crowds rioting because they were starving—and they were starving because this quasi-religious creed cannot accept the realities and organize things rationally—I was only waiting for my chance.

“Ben, be honest. Wouldn’t you have signed on with us if you’d been on the Marduk?”

The face before him was gray. “Don’t ask me that! No!”

“I can tell you exactly why not, Ben.” Robert folded his arms and would not let his brother’s eyes go. “I know you well enough. We’re different in one respect. To you, no principle can be as important as your wife and children—and they’re hostages for your good behavior. Oh, yes, K’ung’s psychotechs evaluated you very carefully. Probably half their captains are held by just such chains.”

Ben laughed, a loud bleak noise above the murmur of the ventilators. “Have it your way. And don’t forget that your family is alive, too, because I stayed with the government. I’m not going to change, either. A government, even the most arbitrary one, can perhaps be altered in time. But the dead never come back to life.”

He leaned forward, suddenly shuddering. “Bob, I don’t want you sent Earthside for interrogation. They’ll not only drug you, they’ll set about changing your whole viewpoint. Surgery, shock, a rebuilt personality—you won’t be the same man when they’ve finished.

“I can wangle something else. I have enough pull, especially now in the confusion after your raid, to keep you here. When the war is settled, I’ll arrange for your escape. There’s going to be so much hullaballoo on Earth that nobody will notice. But you’ll have to help me, in turn.

What was the real purpose of your raid? What plans does your high command have?

For a time which seemed to become very long, Robert Crane waited. He was being asked to betray his side voluntarily; the alternative was to do it anyway, after the psychmen got through with him. Ben had no authority to make the decision. It would mean court-martial later, and punishment visited on his family as well, unless he could justify it by claiming quicker results than the long-drawn process of narcosynthesis.

The captain’s hands twisted together, big knobby hands, and he stared at them. “This is a hell of a choice for you, I know,” he mumbled. “But there’s Mary and . . . the kids, and men here who trust me. Good decent men. We aren’t fiends, believe me. But I can’t deny my own shipmates a fighting chance to get home alive.”

Robert Crane wet his lips. “How do you know I’ll tell the truth?” he asked.

Ben looked up again, crinkling his eyes. “We had a formula once,” he said. “Remember? ‘Cross my heart and hope to die, spit in my eye if I tell a lie.’ I don’t think either of us ever lied when we took that oath.”

“And—Ben, the whole war hangs on this, maybe. Do you seriously think I’d keep my word for a kid’s chant if it could decide the war?”

“Oh, no.” A smile ghosted across the captain’s mouth. “But there’s going to be a meeting of skippers, if I know Hokusai. He’ll want the opinions of us all as to what we should do next. Having heard them, he’ll make his own decision. I’ll be one voice among a lot of others.

“But if I can speak with whatever information you’ve given me . . . do you understand? The council will meet long before you could be sent Earthside and quizzed. I need your knowledge now. I’ll listen to whatever you have to say. I may or may not believe you. I’ll make my own decision as to what to recommend . . . but it’s the only way I can save you, and myself, and everything else I care about.”

He waited then, patiently as the circling ships. They must have come around the planet by now, thought Robert Crane. The sun would be drowning many stars, and Earth would be daylit if you looked out.

Captains’ council. . . . It sounded awkward and slow, when at any moment, as far as they knew, Dushanovitch-Álvarez might come in at the head of his fleet. But after all, the navy would remain on general alert, second officers would be left in charge. They had time.

And they would want time. Nearly every one of them had kin on Earth. None wished to explode radioactive death across the world they loved. K’ung’s will had been like steel, but now they would—subconsciously, and the more powerfully for that—be looking for any way out of the frightful necessity. A respected officer, giving good logical reasons for postponing the bombardment, would be listened to by the keenest ears.

Robert Crane shivered. It was a heartless load to put on a man. The dice of future history . . . he could load the dice, because he knew Ben as any man knows a dear brother, but maybe his hand would slip while he loaded them.

“Well?” It was a grating in the captain’s throat.

Robert drew a long breath. “All right,” he said.

“Yes?” A high, cracked note; Ben must be near breaking, too.

“I’m not in command, you realize.” Robert’s words were blurred with haste. “I can’t tell for sure what— But I do know we’ve got fewer ships. A lot fewer.”

“I suspected that.”

“We have some plan—I haven’t been told what—it depends on making you leave this orbit and come out and fight us where we are. If you stay home, we can’t do a damn thing. This raid of mine . . . we’d hope that your admiral dead, you’d join battle out toward Luna.”

Robert Crane hung in the air, twisting in its currents, the breath gasping in and out of him. Ben looked dim, across the room, as if his eyes were failing.

“Is that the truth, Bob?” The question seemed to come from light-years away.

“Yes. Yes. I can’t let you go and get killed and— Cross my heart and hope to die, spit in my eye if I tell a lie!”

 

•   •   •

 

I set down my mug, empty, and signaled for another. The bartender glided across the floor with it and I drank thirstily, remembering how my throat had felt mummified long ago on the Huitzilopochtli, remembering much else.

“Very well, sir.” Freylinghausen’s testy voice broke a stillness. “What happened?”

“You ought to know that, Professor,” I replied. “It’s in the history tapes. The Humanist fleet decided to go out at once and dispose of its inferior opponent. Their idea—correct, I suppose—was that a space victory would be so demoralizing that the rebels on the ground would capitulate immediately after. It would have destroyed the last hope of reinforcements, you see.”

“And the Union fleet won,” said Neilsen-Singh. “They chopped the Humanist navy into fishbait. I know. My father was there. We bought a dozen new reclamation units with his share of the loot, afterward.”

“Naval history is out of my line, Captain Crane,” said the engineer, Buwono. “How did Dushanovitch-Álvarez win?”

“Oh . . . by a combination of things. Chiefly, he disposed his ships and gave them such velocities that the enemy, following the usual principles of tactics, moved at high accelerations to close in. And at a point where they would have built up a good big speed, he had a lot of stuff planted, rocks and ball bearings and scrap iron . . . an artificial meteoroid swarm, moving in an opposed orbit. After that had done its work, the two forces were on very nearly equal strength, and it became a battle of standard weapons. Which Dushanovitch-Álvarez knew how to use! A more brilliant naval mind hasn’t existed since Lord Nelson.”

“Yes, yes,” said Freylinghausen impatiently. “But what has this to do with the subject under discussion?”

“Don’t you see, Professor? It was chance right down the line—chance which was skillfully exploited when it arose, to be sure, but nevertheless a set of unpredictable accidents. The Monitor blew up ten minutes ahead of schedule; as a result, the commando that did it was captured. Normally, this would have meant that the whole plan would have been given away. I can’t emphasize too strongly that the Humanists would have won if they’d only stayed where they were.”

I tossed off a long gulp of porter, knocked the dottle from my pipe, and began refilling it. My hands weren’t quite steady. “But chance entered here, too, making Robert Crane’s brother the man to capture him. And Robert knew how to manipulate Ben. At the captain’s council, the Huitzilopochtli’s skipper spoke the most strongly in favor of going out to do battle. His arguments, especially when everyone knew they were based on information obtained from a prisoner, convinced the others.”

“But you said. . . .” Neilsen-Singh looked confused.

“Yes, I did.” I smiled at her, though my thoughts were entirely in the past. “But it wasn’t till years later that Ben heard the story of Br’er Rabbit and the briar patch; he came across it in his brother’s boyhood diary. Robert Crane told the truth, swore to it by a boyhood oath—but his brother could not believe he’d yield so easily. Robert was almost begging him to stay with K’ung’s original plan. Ben was sure that was an outright lie . . . that Dushanovitch-Álvarez must actually be planning to attack the navy in its orbit and could not possibly survive a battle in open space. So that, of course, was what he argued for at the council.”

“It took nerve, though,” said Neilsen-Singh. “Knowing what the Huitzilopochtli would have to face . . . knowing you’d be aboard, too. . . .”

“She was a wreck by the time the battle was over,” I said. “Not many in her survived.”

After a moment, Buwono nodded thoughtfully. “I see your point, Captain. The accident of the bomb’s going off too soon almost wrecked the Union plan. The accident of that brotherhood saved it. A thread of coincidences . . . yes, I think you’ve proved your case.”

“I’m afraid not, gentles.” Freylinghausen darted birdlike eyes around the table. “You misunderstood me. I was not speaking of minor ripples in the mainstream of history. Certainly those are ruled by chance. But the broad current moves quite inexorably, I assure you. Vide: Earth and Luna are back in the Union under a more or less democratic government, but no solution has yet been found to the problems which brought forth the Humanists. They will come again; under one name or another they will return. The war was merely a ripple.”

“Maybe.” I spoke with inurbane curtness, not liking the thought. “We’ll see.”

“If nothing else,” said Neilsen-Singh, “you people bought for Earth a few more decades of freedom. They can’t take that away from you.”

I looked at her with sudden respect. It was true. Men died and civilizations died, but before they died they lived. No effort was altogether futile.

I could not remain here, though. I had told the story, as I must always tell it, and now I needed aloneness.

“Excuse me.” I finished my drink and stood up. “I have an appointment . . . just dropped in . . . very happy to have met you, gentles.”

Buwono rose with the others and bowed formally. “I trust we shall have the pleasure of your company again, Captain Robert Crane.”

“Robert—? Oh.” I stopped. I had told what I must in third person, but everything had seemed so obvious. “I’m sorry. Robert Crane was killed in the battle. I am Captain Benjamin Crane, at your service, gentles.”

I bowed to them and went out the door. The night was lonesome in the streets and across the desert.

 

« ^

 

 

 

“Holmgang”  —  Index  —  “What Shall It Profit?”