He was in a private room, which was bad, but he wore a maroon bathrobe, which was good-at least it meant he was in a hospital instead of an Army stockade. (Unless the private room meant he was in the detention ward of the hospital.)
Kramer wondered what he had done. There was no way to tell, at least not by searching his memory. Everything went into a blurry alternation of shouting relays of yutes and the silence of the Blank Tanks. He was nearly sure he had finally told the yutes everything they wanted to know. The question was, when? He would find out at the court-martial, he thought. Or he might have jotted it down, he thought crazily, in the diary.
Jotted it down in the... ?
Diary!
That was the thought that had struggled to come through to the surface!
Kramer’s screams brought the corporal back in a hurry, and then two doctors who quickly prepared knockout needles. He fought against them all the way.
“Poor old man,” said the WAC, watching him twitch and shudder in unconsciousness. (Kramer had just turned forty.) “Second dose of the Blank Tanks for him, wasn’t it? I’m not surprised he’s having nightmares.” She didn’t know that his nightmares were not caused by the Blank Tanks themselves, but by his sudden realization that his last stay in the Tanks was totally unnecessary. It didn’t matter what he told the yutes, or when! They had had the diary all along, for it had been on him when Mabry thrust him in the rocket; and all Ripsaw’s secrets were in it!
The next time the fog lifted for Kramer it was quick, like the turning on of a light, and he had distorted memories of dreams before it. He thought he had just dreamed that General Grote had been with him. He was alone in the same room, sun streaming in a window, voices outside. He felt pretty good, he thought tentatively, and had no time to think more than that because the door opened and a ward boy looked in, very astonished to find Kramer looking back at him. “Holy heaven,” he said. “Wait there!” He disappeared. Foolish, Kramer thought.
Of course he would wait. Where else would he go?
And then, surprisingly, General Grote did indeed walk in.
“Hello, John,” he said mildly, and sat down beside the bed, looking at Kramer. “I was just getting in my car when they caught me.”
He pulled out his pipe and stuffed it with tobacco, watching Kramer. Kramer could think of nothing to say. “They said you were all right, John. Are you?”
“I-.think so.” He watched the general light his pipe. “Funny,” he said. “I dreamed you were here a minute ago.”
“No, it’s not so funny; I was. I brought you a present.”
Kramer could not imagine anything more wildly improbable in the world than that the man whose combat operation he had betrayed should bring him a box of chocolates, bunch of flowers, light novel or whatever else was appropriate. But the general glanced at the table by Kramer’s bed.
There was a flat, green-leather-covered box on it. “Open it up,” Grote invited.
Kramer took out a glittering bit of metal depending from a three-barred ribbon. The gold medallion bore a rampant eagle and lettering he could not at first read.
“It’s your D.S.M.,” Grote said helpfully. “You can pin it on if you like. I tried,” he said, “to make it a Medal of Honor. But they wouldn’t allow it, logically enough.”
“I was expecting something different,” Kramer mumbled foolishly.
Grote laughed. “We smashed them, boy,” he said gently. “That is, Mick did. He went straight across Polar Nine,, down the Ob with one force and the Yenisei with another. General dough’s got his forward command in Chebarkul now, loving every minute of it. Why, I was in Karpinsk myself last week-they let me get that far-of course, it’s a rest area. It was a brilliant, bloody, backbreaking show. Completely successful.”
Kramer interrupted in sheer horror: “Polar Nine? But that was the cover-the Quaker cannon!”
General Grote looked meditatively at his former aide. “John,” he said after a moment, “didn’t you ever wonder why the card-sorters pulled you out for my staff? A man who was sure to crack in the Blank Tanks, because he already had?”
The room was very silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, John. Well, it worked-had to, you know; a lot of thought went into it. Novotny’s been relieved. Mick’s got his biggest victory, no matter what happens now; he was the man that led the invasion.” The room was silent again. Carefully Grote tapped out his pipe into a metal wastebasket. “You’re a valuable man, John. Matter of fact, we traded a major general to get you back.” Silence.
Grote sighed and stood up. “If it’s any consolation to you, you held out four full weeks in the Tanks. Good thing we’d made sure you had the diary with you. Otherwise our Quaker cannon would have been a bust.” He nodded good-bye and was gone. He was a good officer, was General Grote. He would use a weapon in any way he had to, to win a fight; but if the weapon was destroyed, and had feelings, he would come around to bring it a medal afterwards.
Kramer contemplated his Distinguished Service Medal for a while. Then he lay back and considered ringing for a Sunday Times, but fell asleep instead.
Novotny was now a sour, angry corps commander away off on the Baltic periphery because of him; a million and a half NAAARMY troops were dug in the heart of the enemy’s homeland; the greatest operation of the war was an unqualified success. But when the nurse came in that night, the Quaker cannon-the man who had discovered that the greatest service he could perform for his country was to betray it-was moaning in his sleep.
Mute Inglorious Tam
Cyril left a fragment about medieval England; it had no story attached to it, only a few pages of description and character. It lay in my files for fifteen years, until I happened to be sitting in a panel discussion with two or three other s-f writers (Ben Bova, Katherine Mac-Lean and Gordon Dickson, I think they were) and we fell to talking about what made a science-fiction writer what he is. What, I asked, might any of us have been if we had been born in another place and time? If we could not possibly have been science-fiction writers, perhaps because there was no science yet, maybe because we were illiterate? And then it occurred to me that it would be fun to write a story about that; and sometime later it struck me that Cyril’s fragment might fit in well with such a notion; and I dug it out, and it did.
ON A LATE SATURDAY afternoon in summer, just before the ringing of Angelus, Tam of the Wealdway straightened from the furrows in his plowed strip of Oldfield and stretched his cracking joints.
He was a small and dark man, of almost pure Saxon blood. Properly speaking, his name was only Tam. There was no need for further identification. He would never go a mile from a neighbor who had known him from birth. But sometimes he called himself by a surname-it was one of many small conceits that complicated his proper and straightforward life-and he would be soundly whipped for it if his Norman masters ever caught him at it.
He had been breaking clods in the field for fifteen hours, interrupted only by the ringing of the canonical hours from the squat, tiny church, and a mouthful of bread and soft cheese at noon. It was not easy for him to stand straight. It was also not particularly wise. A man could lose his strip for poor tilth, and Tarn had come close enough, often enough. But there were times when the thoughts that chased themselves around his head made him forget the steady chop of the wooden hoe, and he would stand entranced, staring toward Lymeford Castle, or the river, or toward nothing at all, while he invented fanciful encounters and impossible prosperings. It was another of Tarn’s conceits, and a most dangerous one, if it were known. The least it might get him was a cuff from a man-at-arms. The most was a particularly unpleasing death.