“Great stuff, Warren,” Ryan said. “The way things were going here we wouldn’t have lasted a week. Now it looks like victory celebrations all the way. I’ve always fancied riding into town on the side of a tank. Girls throwing flowers at me … girls throwing cigarettes at me … girls throwing girls at me…” He broke off, his attention caught by the slight but unmistakable argumentative tone which was creeping into Lieutenant Merriman’s radio conversation. The note of dissension was all the more noticeable for being completely unexpected.
“With all due respect, sir,” Merriman was saying, “I don’t believe the Ulphans would feel any daunting psychological impact when they heard we had marched line abreast and unafraid against their robot guns. As a matter of fact, I think they would laugh their heads off. I realize how disappointed you must be at not getting another chance to prove your tactical theories, but…”
Merriman had to stop and listen for a moment, nodding his head. “I didn’t mean to imply that you were…”
He listened again, still nodding, and— incredibly—his shoulders began to droop. “Yes, sir. I know it’s a privilege to die for Terra.”
Ryan clutched Peace’s arm. “I don’t like the sound of this, Warren.”
Lieutenant Merriman signed off and turned to face the others. He removed his gas mask, somehow managing not to cough, and his mouth travelled upwards and to the right on the fire curtain of teeth, assuming a comma-shape which was indicative of blighted illusion. Peace suddenly felt sorry for him.
“Captain Handy sends his congratulations,” the lieutenant said after a brief pause. “You have proved yourselves such a valuable and resourceful combat team that you’re to be trans-shipped immediately to the planet Threlkeld. You’ll be there in a couple of hours. I’m going with you, of course.”
Ryan wiggled his fingers to attract the lieutenant’s attention. “Is Threlkeld an R&R world, sir?”
“Not unless you’ve got your own ideas about how to spell death and destruction—we’re losing men there faster than we can ship them in.”
“Oh, God!” Ryan turned to Peace and his eyes hardened with accusation. “This is your fault, Warren—we’re on our way to a second war and we haven’t even had a cup of coffee yet.”
Peace replied with the crudest swear word he could summon to mind, but he did it in an abstracted manner. It had become clear to him that he had only one chance of achieving a reasonable life span. No matter how impossible the task might appear, no matter how many difficulties lay in the way, he would have to regain his memory and thus invalidate his contract with the Legion. The problem was that there was simply nowhere for him to begin, and now that he was no longer on Earth the chances of finding someone who had known him in his previous existence seemed vanishingly small.
While he was trudging with the rest of the unit towards the embarkation point, Peace’s thoughts returned to the mystery surrounding his past. People kept assuring him that he must have been steeped in evil, but—on taking mental inventory—he was unable to find any antisocial urges within himself. This set him a philosophical poser—would he be able to recognize a criminal tendency if it was handed to him on a plate? Did any individual consciously think of himself as “bad”? When even the most hardened wrongdoer was setting out to commit a misdeed, did he not feel as justified and as “good” as any other member of society?
His speculations came to an end when the ship appeared, an angular dumb-bell which came down from the sky in a blurred arc and clumped into place on the soft ground. Its central doors sprang open without any visible human agency and Merriman gave the order for everybody to go on board.
Peace trooped into the ship, wincing as his unshod feet encountered the chill of the metal floor, and dropped dejectedly onto a bench without taking part in the scramble for serviceable seat belts. The hazards of space flight were negligible compared to those of the battle zone and, being coldly realistic, he had less hope of escape than any other ranker in the entire Legion. Without a single clue to help him solve the mystery of his past, he was doomed to flit about the galaxy in ugly, identical-seeming ships and…
Peace’s eyes suddenly focused on a small blue object on the floor in front of him, and he realized the ship was actually the same one which had brought him to Ulpha. The last time he had seen the little plastic toad it had been squashed flat, but its molecular memory had enabled it to return to its original shape. Wishing he could be equally indestructible, Peace gathered up the little toad and gazed at it with something akin to affection—had it been able to speak it might have told him something about the person he used to be.
“What did you find?” Dinkle, who had sat down near him unnoticed, leaned sideways for a better look. “Huh! Somebody’s been living it up.”
Peace gripped the toad just in time to prevent it springing away. “What do you mean?”
“They give those things out at the Blue Toad on Aspatria.”
“The Blue Toad?” Peace felt a stirring of excitement. “Is that a bar? Restaurant? Night Club?”
Dinkle nodded. “The fanciest in Touchdown City. In fact, on the whole of Aspatria. It beats me why anybody would want to go to a place like that on a ranker’s pay.”
“It all depends on how you look at things,” Peace said, dropping the toad safely into his pocket as he reached a secret decision. “Some people can’t stay away from places like that.”
5
In some ways the yellow-skied planet of Threlkeld was less of a nightmare than Peace had expected.
The Ulphan campaign was a police action against dissident colonists—and Peace had been dismayed at the idea of humans fighting humans—but on Threlkeld the Legion was merely engaged in rendering a jungle continent safe for mining operations. Further easing his conscience was the fact that there was no intelligent species indigenous to the planet, the opposition to commercial development coming from an assortment of wild animals. And it was there that the list of good points about service life on Threlkeld came to an abrupt end.
The denizens of the Threlkeldian jungle were so ferocious, ugly and diverse as to create the impression that Nature had made the world a kind of sampler of animal nastiness. In her ingenuity she had produced beasts which trapped their prey by looking like plants, and carnivorous plants which trapped their prey by looking like animals. There were insects which actually thrived on being crushed underfoot, because their internal secretions could burn through a plastic sole in less than a second and also contained eggs which, on the instant of contacting flesh, produced hundreds of ravenous grubs which could reduce a human foot to a bootful of bones in less than a minute.
There were electric snakes, garrotte snakes and dagger snakes—all of which lived up to their names; grenade birds, tomahawk birds and skullpeckers—all of which lived up to their names; and armoured monsters so tenacious of life that even when they were sliced up by rayitzers their individual limbs leaped about like giant demented jackboots for as long as half a day, often enabling the parent to commit more mayhem in kit form than it had been capable of as a single entity.
Every man in the 203rd had his own particular bete noire, an there were lots of those around as well. Peace’s greatest dislike was reserved for the multichew, a composite beast which at first glance looked like a huge caterpillar, but whose segments were animals in their own right. Each module was roughly cheese shaped, with four powerful stubby legs, a vicious set of jaws, and neural interfaces on the upper and lower surfaces. Segments were dangerous enough as individuals—scuttling, malevolent footstools which were difficult to hit with rifle fire—but when ten or twelve of them formed a chain and became a full-blown multichew, their fearsomeness was increased in proportion. Peace had found it necessary to destroy at least half of the composite animal to bring it down, whereupon the undamaged segments would promptly separate and renew the attack from all sides. It was at this stage he felt a belated gratitude towards Savoury Shrimp Sauce Inc. for spending its meagre funds on protective cups rather than on more decorative but less functional items of apparel.