[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It's one thing to laugh at a man because his job is useless
and outdated--another to depend on him when it suddenly isn't.
_In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning
fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time
of peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we
shall summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need,
and out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time
we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands,
he will come._
--_Scandinavian legend_
Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in
the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy,
snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were
all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee
and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from the north. It
was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an army ship landed
in a field near the settlement.
There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the
colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore
grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had
convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but
no one went out to greet them.
After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship
and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained
there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly
thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or
just plain orneriness.
"Well, I never," a nice lady said.
"What's he just _standing_ there for?" another lady said.
And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a
soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk.
The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children
and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh so
carefully, to hate war they had also been taught, quite incidentally,
to despise soldiers.
The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.
* * * * *
Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and
pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out
in that miserable cold to meet him.
The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not
too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than
Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were
tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.
"Captain Dylan, sir." His voice was low and did not carry. "I have a
message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?"
Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. "Nobody's in charge here. If you
want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?"
The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless eyes.
Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it to Rossel.
It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it idly. He
was about to ask again what was it all about when the airlock of the
hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-haired young man
appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to Dylan.
"C'n I go now, Jim?"
Dylan turned and nodded.
"Be back for you tonight," the young man called, and then, grinning,
he yelled "Catch" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it and
put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in disgust. A
moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to lift.
"Was he _drunk_?" Rossel began angrily. "Was that a bottle of
_liquor_?"
The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the
envelope in Rossel's hand. "You'd better read that and get moving. We
haven't much time."
He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow. As
Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving but
could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to watch
that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray spongy
clouds and the cold.
After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again.
* * * * *
The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race
occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from
home. Late in the year 2360--the exact date remains unknown--an alien
force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and
the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the
army.
When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists,
thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children,
were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines,
even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned, so were
the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray. What else they had,
nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier
finally stumbled on something.
For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main
buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be
buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow
a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien learn
vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb
at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The
detonating wire had been cut.
In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of
earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.
The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five
hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small,
weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing but spread
the news, and Man began to fall back.
In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won
stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of
the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died
in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those
ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a
society which had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only
defense Earth had.
This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from Earth
with a bottle on his hip.
* * * * *
An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven
face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and
listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists
were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great
suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait,
between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage.
Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than those
in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan
grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake
it and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly
and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and
impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and set
up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without ever
having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a home
out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned again. But
at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.
This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at all
by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and an
outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy thing.
He stirred restlessly.
By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't much
to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring distractedly: "Lupus,
Lupus--doesn't that mean wolves or something?"
Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was very
possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no need for
discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to clear the
hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see it.
But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number of
women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up their
anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed forward and
confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.
"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our
_home_. We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been
paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you
earned your keep. We demand...."
It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He hoped
that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front of him
now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, "soldier boy." The
gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.
"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that
were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs for
the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is."
* * * * *
Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had wanted
the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ... but this was
not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned aliens might be
coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did was talk. He had
realized a long time ago that no peace-loving nation in the history
of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and although peace was a noble
dream, it was ended now and it was time to move.
"We'd better get going," he finally said, and there was quiet.
"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three of
this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm instructed
to have you gone by then."
For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked off and
the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone. One or two
stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and the big gloomy man
said he wanted guns, that's all, and there wouldn't nobody get him off
his planet. When he left, Dylan breathed with relief and went out to
check the bomb, grateful for the action.
Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the
radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the
wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and
it felt fine.
Dylan had been called up out of a bar--he and Bossio--and told what had
happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This
would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him.
After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk,
a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like
that. It would take time.
He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.
Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain.
Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty
years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way
along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled
and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot
of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and
he had done them all.
Once he had even studied military tactics.
He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green.
But he'd been only nineteen when his father died--of a hernia, of a
crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked
too long on a heavy planet--and in those days the anti-war conditioning
out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians
of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down
doctor. And ... now he was a captain.
He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait
and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days
was upon him now and there was nothing he could do but say the hell
with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of
the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults
which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the
core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point:
it made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed
nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something
pleasant from the old days, when the wire came loose in his hands.
Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it
threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire
had just been cut.
* * * * *
Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his
hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and
then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real,
there was no time for that.
When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited he
did not notice the wire.
"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?"
Dylan looked at him vaguely. "She sleeps two and won't take off with
more'n ten. Why?"
His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.
"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take
forty. We came out in groups, we never thought...."
Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. "You're sure? No baggage, no
iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?"
"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck--she's all we
could afford."
Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. "It 'pears that
somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like."
It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. "All right," he said
quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, "we'll do what we can.
Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask."
The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around
him and the scurrying people.
"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?"
Dylan shook his head. "The fleet's spread out kind of thin nowadays."
Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great irritation, but
he said, as kindly as he could, "We'll get 'em all out. One way or
another, we won't leave anybody."
It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had
happened.
Dylan showed him the two clean ends. "Somebody dug it up, cut it, then
buried it again and packed it down real nice."
"The damn fool!" Rossel exploded.
"Who?"
"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on
a live bomb like this, but I never...."
"You think one of your people did it?"