Diaz had never thought about it in quite that way. Like most Corpsmen, he had held the average civilian in thinly disguised contempt. But… from time to time, he remembered, he’d been glad his mother died before he enlisted. And why did his sister hit the bottle so hard? Then there had been Lois, she of the fire-colored hair and violet eyes, who wept as if she would never stop weeping when he left for duty. He’d promised to get in touch with her on his return, but of course he knew better.
Which did not erase memories of men whose breath and blood came exploding from burst helmets; who shuddered and vomited and defecated in the last stages of radiation sickness; who stared without immediate apprehension at a red spurt which a second ago had been an arm or a leg; who went insane and must be gassed because psychoneurosis is catching on a six months’ orbit beyond Saturn; who—Yeah, Carl had been lucky.
You could talk as much as you wished about Corps brotherhood, honor, tradition, and gallantry. It remained sentimental guff… No, that was unjust. The Corps had saved the people, their lives and liberties. There could be no higher achievement—for the Corps. But knighthood had once been a noble thing, too; then, lingering after its day, it became a yoke and eventually a farce. The warrior virtues were not ends in themselves. If the warrior could be made obsolete…
Could he? How much could one man, even powered by a machine, hope to do? How much could he even hope to understand?
The moment came upon Diaz. He lay as if blinded by shellburst radiance.
As consciousness returned, he knew first, irrelevantly, what it meant to get religion.
«By God,» he told the universe, «we’re going to try!»
The battle would resume shortly. At any moment, in fact, some scoutship leading the American force might fire a missile. But when Diaz told his guard he wanted to speak with General Rostock, he was taken there within minutes.
The door closed behind him. The living room lay empty, altogether still except for the machine throb, which was not loud since the Ho was running free. Because acceleration might be needful on short notice, there was no spin. Diaz hung weightless as fog. And the Monet flung into his eyes all Earth’s sunlight and summer forests.
«Rostock?» he called uncertainly.
«Come,» said a voice, almost too low to hear. Diaz gave a shove with his foot and flew toward the office.
He stopped himself by grasping the doorjamb. A semicircular room lay before him, the entire side taken up by controls and meters. Lights blinked, needles wavered on dials, buttons and switches and knobs reached across black paneling. But none of that was important. Only the man at the desk mattered, who free-sat with wires running from his head to the wall.
Rostock seemed to have lost weight. Or was that an illusion? The skin was drawn taut across his high cheekbones and gone a dead, glistening white. His nostrils were flared and the colorless lips held tense. Diaz looked into his eyes, once, and away again. He could not meet them. He could not even think about them. He drew a shaken breath and waited.
«You made your decision quickly,» Rostock whispered. «I had not awaited you until after the engagement.»
«I… I didn’t think you would see me till then.»
«This is more important.» Diaz felt as if he were being probed with knives. He could not altogether believe it was his imagination. He stared desperately at paneled instruments. Their nonhumanness was like a comforting hand. They must be for the benefit of maintenance techs, he thought in a distant part of himself. The brain doesn’t need them. «You are convinced,» Rostock said in frank surprise.
«Yes,» Diaz answered.
«I had not expected that. I hoped for little more than your reluctant agreement to study my work.» Rostock regarded him for a still century. «You were ripe for a new faith,» he decided. «I had not taken you for the type. But then, the mind can only use what data are given it, and I have hitherto had small opportunity to meet Americans. Never since I became what I am. You have another psyche from ours.»
«I need to understand your findings, sir,» Diaz said. «Right now I can only believe. That isn’t enough, is it?»
Slowly, Rostock’s mouth drew into a smile of quite human warmth. «Correct. But given the faith, intellectual comprehension should be swift.»
«I… I shouldn’t be taking your time… now, sir,» Diaz stammered. «How should I begin? Should I take some books back with me?»
«No.» Acceptance had been reached; Rostock spoke resonantly, a master to his trusted servant. «I need your help here. Strap into yonder harness. Our first necessity is to survive the battle upon us. You realize that this means sacrificing many of your comrades. I know how that will hurt you. Afterward we shall spend our lives repaying our people… both our peoples. But today I shall ask you questions about your fleet. Any information is valuable, especially details of construction and armament which our intelligence has not been able to learn.»
Doña mía. Diaz let go the door, covered his face and fell free, endlessly. Help me.
«It is not betrayal,» said the superman. «It is the ultimate loyalty you can offer.»
Diaz made himself look at the cabin again. He shoved against the bulkhead and stopped by the harness near the desk.
«You cannot lie to me,» said Rostock. «Do not deny the pain I am giving you.» Diaz glimpsed his fists clamping together. «Each time I look at you, I share what you feel.»
Diaz clung to his harness. There went an explosion through him.
NO, BY GOD!
Rostock screamed.
«Don’t,» Diaz sobbed. «I don’t want—» But wave after wave ripped outward. Rostock flopped about in his harness and shrieked. The scene came back, ramming home like a bayonet.
«We like to put an extra string on our bow,» the psych officer said. Lunar sunlight, scarcely softened by the dome, blazed off his bronze eagles, wings and beaks. «You know that your right ulna will be replaced with a metal section which contains a nerve-triggered nuclear cartridge. But that may not be all, gentlemen.»
He bridged his fingers. The young men seated on the other side of his desk stirred uneasily. «In this country,» the psych officer said, «we don’t believe humans should be turned into puppets. Therefore you will have voluntary control of your bombs; no posthypnosis, Pavlov reflex, or any such insult. However, those of you who are willing will receive a rather special extra treatment, and that fact will be buried from the consciousness of everyone of you.
«Our reasoning is that if and when the Unasians learn about the prisoner weapon, they’ll remove the cartridge by surgery but leave the prosthetic bone in place. And they will, we hope, not examine it in microscopic detail. Therefore they won’t know that it holds an oscillator, integrated with the crystal structure. Nor will you; because what you don’t know, you can’t babble under anesthesia.
«The opportunity may come, if you are captured and lose your bomb, to inflict damage by this reserve means. You may find yourself near a crucial electronic device, for example a spaceship’s autopilot. At short range, the oscillator will do an excellent job of bollixing it. Which will at least discomfit the enemy, and may give you a chance to escape.
«The posthypnotic command will be such that you’ll remember about this oscillator when conditions seem right for using it. Not before. Of course, the human mind is a damned queer thing; it twists and turns and bites its own tail. In order to make an opportunity to strike this blow, your subconscious may lead you down strange paths—may even have you seriously contemplating treason, if treason seems the only way of getting access to what you can wreck. Don’t let that bother you afterward, gentlemen. Your superiors will know what happened.