While no one looked, Robert Manning sneezed and blew his nose and
touched the flame of his cigarette lighter to the two squares of
microfilm.
* * * * *
The white-faced communications sergeant stood just inside the door, and
this time he failed to be impressed with the unusual smartness of the
Colonel's acknowledging salute. The thick sheaf of yellow papers he
held in his left hand was trembling visibly, noisily, and he couldn't
make it stop.
"Well, Grady, what is it? You look as though you'd picked up a telepath
message from one of our Callistan cap-crawlers, or something--"
He reached out for the quaking message the sergeant held, and the
communications man smiled nervously and held it out to him.
"Sorry, sir. I--I guess I just--"
"No trouble, boy?" The stocky black-and-silver uniformed figure
paused in its movement, the thick pile of yellow papers momentarily
forgotten. All of Steele's personnel seemed like sons to him. Even the
raw recruits who had previously never been further out than Earth's
own Moon. Sometimes, during the lonely hours there had been in the
fastnesses of Space, he had surmised it was because there had never
been a real son of his own with whom to share the adventures of his
calling.
But hadn't it been Space itself that had denied him those many things
other men could take for granted--the things for which he had never
quite been able to trade? Forty years of it. Venus to Pluto. Deep Space
at the System's rim and beyond, to the very edge of Infinity itself.
Sometimes this deep hurt within him seemed too great. And yet, somehow,
it seemed always worth the venture. One day, no matter the cost or the
hurt, men's outposts would be flung to the stars themselves. This thing
he knew.
The sergeant was speaking, and there was a fear in his eyes.
"Something's--happened, home, sir. You'd better read this right away.
All the way to the very end, sir."
Steele ran a freckled, stub-fingered hand slowly and deliberately along
the close-cropped iron-gray side of his squarish skull.
_Attention all stations, the message read. URGENT IMPERATIVE. Earth
has been successfully invaded. The rapidity, timing, and infallibility
of the attack has made the necessity of immediate capitulation
unquestionable. The following-listed units are therefore commanded, for
the good of the planet, to return to home Earth bases at once, with
all armament either completely dismantled or destroyed. The conquerors
have warned that failure to comply with this command will result in
wholesale liquidation of Earth's populace._
The long list of outposts followed for fifteen closely-spaced pages.
The message was signed _Taylor, General, New United Nations World Space
Force, Commanding_.
Steele suddenly felt himself struggling to keep order for full-scale
attack bottled in his throat.
Then he fought to keep from simply cursing.
He fought to keep the hot, quick panic in him from boiling into some
unthinkable suicide.
The sergeant still stood before him, the thing of awful fear deep in
his eyes.
"Get Major Zukow at once, sergeant."
"Yes, sir. But sir--"
"What is it?" His jaws hurt, and he could feel the words hissing from
between his teeth.
"The list, sir. We're the smallest and newest unit there is, so we'd
lie right at the bottom, page fifteen. But we're not there. We're not
listed at all, sir."
He looked. Grady was right. And OK'd and signed by Taylor himself, no
mistaking that.
"Get Major Zukow, sergeant. On the double!"
"Yes, sir!" The communications non-com stumbled awkardly;
acclimatization to lesser gravities came quickly only with long
experience. He recovered, and then in a curious loping fashion began to
run.
* * * * *
For terse seconds Steele spoke clipped words into a unit-communicator.
And then he waited for Zukow.
It would be a moment, or so yet. He looked at the message again,
re-read it, tried to glean information from it that it didn't contain.
It told what, but it didn't tell _why_. Nor even how. It was just
a command, to be obeyed like any other command. No, it wasn't the
soldier's place to question. Never the soldier's place to question.
Here is an ideal, they would say. Here is the thing you must work
or fight for. Here is what is worth believing in. And the soldier
believed. If he did not he was fortunate, for then he just had a job
to do. But if he believed, he was the most hapless creature in the
Universe. For sooner or later, the ideal wore thin as a facade for the
more practical expediencies which moved behind it. What true ideal
there was with the soldier, yet his was not the freedom to serve it....
And when the ideal was suddenly scrapped; when they said now, now it
is all over, now this is what you must do--here is a new thing to
believe....
_Forty years, from the bogs of Venus to the wastes of Pluto_....
He looked again at the list headed _ALL UNITS_: and checked them, one
by one.
Grady had been right. Experimental simply wasn't there. Maybe an
experimental Light Space Brigade on a dark little world like Callisto
could get lost in the shuffle.
But he knew better. With Earth at stake, Taylor would allow no such
error. Taylor knew every one of his units by heart, he must....
He thought about Taylor. He thought about him the way he had known him
as both soldier and individual, as general and as a man. Character.
Principle. Guts. The three biggest things about Taylor. A man who
followed orders to the letter--a man who would surrender of his own
volition, no matter what price to pay the piper ... that was where the
principle came in; the character, the guts.
He looked at Taylor's facsimile-signature again. Signed by force? By
threat? Obviously. The message itself said as much. But if somehow
there'd been a mistake, a record overlooked, Taylor would know, and
would--
_But who else would know? At a glance, who else would know? And then
how much would Taylor dare?_
For one of the rare times in his life, Steele was frightened to his
core.
"Colonel Steele, sir!" Major Zukow snapped a perfunctory salute,
put himself at rest and lowered his towering square-cut body into a
laxerchair. The healthy pink in his broad face and the purposefulness
in the set of his clean-cut features made him look younger than he
was, and the close-cropped black hair was like an added insigne of his
profession to his perfectly-fitted uniform.
"You'd better take a look at this, Georgi. And then we've got to get
things moving." Steele handed the order across his desk.
He waited while Zukow read. He watched Zukow's face. It seemed to
gradually coagulate.