Well, he triumphed at the poker table, and refrained from admitting this was because he had learned the hard way. from his sister Jill. That made him wonder how she was doing, and Mother and Dad and Alice and her husband and their kids. He missed them more than anybody he had met on Earth.
Monotony became tension as the convoy neared its goal. In merely interplanetary space, it would certainly be detected by the Naqsans, whose fleet was likewise busy around that sun. If they decided on an assault—
Tension became terror. The Naqsans did attack. And the air corpsmen had nothing to do but crouch jammed together between blank bulwarks. If they took a direct hit, they would likely never know it. Conway learned how excellent was the American expression “sweating it out.” To judge from the stink and clamminess, his skin exuded every poison his body could make.
After many hours—mostly devoted to maneuvers and computations, then a swift burst of furies, then more hours when men must wait—the enemy evidently decided the price was too high, and withdrew. The convoy had suffered losses of its own. These included a ranger which had taken a near miss, peeling back half its hull. The crew was spacesuited, but a number of suits got ripped open, and all men took varying amounts of blast, heat, and hard radiation. The convoy rescued what casualties it could and divided them among the ships that remained.
Travelers on the personnel carrier gave up bunks and helped tend the wounded while the voyage proceeded through its last stages. Don Conway thus experienced men with pulverized bones, with faces cooked away and eyeballs melted, with vomiting and diarrhea and the sloughing off of hair, skin, flesh, intelligence. He had seen death before, in animals and a few sophonts; but the latter had been peaceful. Now he understood why, for a year after Aunt Ellen perished in the Dalag, Jill had had nightmares. He even guessed this was part of the reason for her closeness to Larreka.
But Aunt Ellen was the victim of a senseless accident. These men had died, were dying, would survive as cripples when cloning wasn’t feasible, in a great cause. Right?
At first his unit was stationed near Barton, the capital of Eleutheria, largest human settlement on Mundomar. Action was slight everywhere on the planet. The front had stabilized, which Conway read as “stalemated.” Desultory clashes occurred on land, in the air, at sea.
“Wait a while,” Eino Salminen warned. “The lull is mainly due to lack of supplies on either side. But Earth and Naqsa are pouring in materiel. Soon the fun begins.”
“Why can’t we blockade?” Conway inquired.
“They would try the same against us. We would get battles with heavy nuclear weapons at satellite altitudes, maybe in atmosphere. Bad enough to meet in deep space. Close-in fighting of that kind would probably ruin the planet we are supposed to be fighting about. Worse, it could provoke a full-scale war between the mother worlds.”
Conway guessed he understood this wisdom. Neither Eleutherians nor Tsheyakkans missiled each other’s towns. The latter, in their drive to regain Sigurdssonia, had occupied several communities of the former; but he learned to scoff [privately] at what atrocity stories he heard. If you checked, the proven horrors were incidental to combat—children got in the way of bullets, et cetera— and Tsheyakkan military governors, while strict, treated Eleutherians as humanely (!) as was the case where situations were reversed. Maybe more so, but censorship made it impossible to discover the truth of that.
He was glad to be out of the spaceship and able to stride about freely, in safety. However, he found little to do on leave. Barton had a few night clubs, live theaters, and whatnot. If you’d been on Earth, they seemed dull, crowded, overpriced. It was easier to stay on base and watch a 3V recording. A couple of philanthropic organizations made an effort to get the citizens and their new allies acquainted, by way of dances and invitations to homes. By and large, the results made Conway uncomfortable. These were good folks, no doubt; their courage and devotion were fantastic; but weren’t they, well, rather dour?
A girl asked while she danced with him: “Why have no more of you come?”
Another girl declined his suggestion of an evening out:
“I’m in war production, you know, working every day, No, please don’t feel sorry for me. This is what I want to do—serve. It’s different for you, of course. You’ve always been rich and safe.”
His host at dinner got a tad drunk and said: “Yes, I’ve lost one boy already. Two more are down there. Earth supplies weapons, we supply warm bodies.” He grew indignant when Conway remarked that this was equally true of Naqsa and the Tsheyakkans.
The countryside offered roads where a person might like. But Conway thought it unattractive. No matter how thoroughly terraformed, the district remained flat, hot, wet, almost always thickly overcast. Amidst regimented trees and fields, green though they were, he missed Ishtar’s wild red and gold; he missed a sight of sun, moons, stars. Naturally the Eleutherians were emotional about their homeland. But did he have to be?
The unit was ordered to the front. Action was rising afresh.
Yet “the front” was nearly a meaningless noise. Tsheyakkans held parts of southern Sigurdssonia. Occasionally they would withdraw before an Eleutherian advance—or vice versa—whether as the consequence of a battle or as a phase in a larger plan. Humans had leap-frogged to a similar spotty occupation of western Hat’hara and islands near that continent. Besides those lands, the ocean and skies between saw engagements.
Conway’s squadron did on its first patrol. When his headset informed him that detectors registered hostile craft bound this way, he felt crazily that it couldn’t be real, he was trapped in a fever dream, nobody could want to kill him whom so many people loved. Meanwhile his fingers did what was needful with drilled-in skill. And that was strange too, being a passenger in his body. Then the Tsheyakkans arrived and the dogfight erupted. He forgot to be afraid.
He noticed himself enjoying what he did, as if this were a poker game for stakes higher than he could afford to lose—
—where he suddenly drew a fourth queen. The enemy flyers were mean-looking elongated teardrops, against lead sky and mercury sea; but they were no better than his Shark, and their pilots didn’t have even his hasty operant training. One plunged at him. He slipped aside from the rake of tracers, roiled about and got the bandit in his sights; automatons did the rest, fireworks and a long, long smoking spiral down into the drink. Accelerations made him giddy, quasi-drunk. He whooped his joy till the next opponent showed, whereupon he became strictly business.
He couldn’t swear that he made a second kill. He did know that his outfit won hands down and went jubilant back to an otherwise dismal base in the jungle. At small cost to themselves, they’d practically wiped out the croaker escadrille.
Small cost… Trouble was, it included Eino Salminen, who was Conway’s best friend in the service and who’d gotten married very shortly before leaving Earth. Twice Conway tried to write a letter to Finland. He never completed it. Each time, he’d start wondering if that pilot who burned under his guns had been married, too. Not that I feel like a murderer or anything. It was him or me, in a war. I only wonder about him.
Rain roared on the barrack. Its unconditioned interior was a steam bath full of swamp stenches. Men who huddled near the 3V were stripped to their skivvies. Nobody dared go nude, Conway suspected—at least, he himself would have been afraid the others might think he was projecting a proposition—or was that merely a quirk he’d acquired? An environment both womanless and weird did things to your mind. Ah, well, probably his bare ass wouldn’t like direct contact with a chair anyway.