And he, Warren Peace, was the individual who had come into existence as a direct result of Norman signing on for his thirty, forty or fifty years! Peace hurriedly swallowed some more coffee as he tried to sort out the paradoxes involved. If Norman changed his mind about entering the Legion, would Warren Peace cease to exist? Somehow the notion of being erased by a shift in probabilities was more terrible to Peace than that of facing a straightforward, old-fashioned death. A man who was dying normally had the consolation of knowing he would have some kind of memorial, even if it was only a heap of unpaid bills, but facing the possibility of never having existed at all was too much for anybody to…
“What’s the whole point?” Norman said. “Go on—you’ve got me interested.”
“That’s the point,” Peace replied lamely, his mind racing. “That I’ve got you interested. You weren’t interested at first, you see. And now you are.”
“So it was a come-on, after all.” The distracted look appeared in Norman’s eyes as he took out another bill and placed it beside the first. “That’s twenty you’ve got—do you mind if we call it quits now?”
Peace made to brush the money aside, then recalled that if he did so it was destined to end up in the hands of the predatory Captain Widget. He lifted the bills and crammed them into his pocket and tried to conceive a new approach to the main problem. Time was rushing by and he was no nearer to learning the guilty secret which was driving Norman, almost literally, to his wit’s end.
“Thank you,” he said. “It goes against the grain for an old legionary like me to accept a handout, but times are hard.”
“Legionary?” Norman looked at him with renewed curiosity. “But how did you get out?”
“Invalided.” Forgetting the state of his ribs, Peace banged himself on the side of the chest, gave a sharp cry and folded over the table, narrowly avoiding plunging his face into an ashtray.
“Are you all right?” Norman said anxiously.
“Just a twinge.” Peace straightened up, fearful of being evicted by the bartender. “It’s the weather that does it, you know. I’ll be all right in a minute.” To cover his confusion he raised his beaker and sipped more coffee.
Norman toyed for a moment with his glass. “Why did you join up?”
“Ah … I wanted to forget something.”
“What was it?”
“How would I know?” Peace could not understand how the conversational roles had become reversed. “I’ve forgotten it.”
“Of course—I’m sorry.” Norman nodded, and then—as if something had aroused a painful memory—his lower lip began to tremble.
Peace felt strangely guilty, but he sensed the time was right for him to make a move. “Norman,” he said gently, “you’re waiting to join the Legion, aren’t you?”
“I am! I am! Why don’t they open that cursed office? Why do they make us wait so long to lay down our burdens?”
“All in good time,” Peace soothed, glancing around anxiously in case Norman’s emotional outburst had disturbed other customers in the bar. “Listen, Norman, why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”
Norman looked at him with tortured eyes. “It was a terrible thing I did. I can’t talk about it.”
“Of course you can.” Peace placed his free hand over Norman’s. “You can tell me, Norman.
Get it off your chest. You’ll feel much better.”
“If only that were true.”
“It is. It is,” Peace said. “Tell it to me, Norman.”
“You’re sure you really want to hear?”
Peace swallowed nervously. “I do, Norman. I do.”
“All right,” Norman said, in slow, agonized tones. “My crime is…”
“Yes, yes.”
“My crime is …”
“Yes, Norman, yes!”
“… that I deserted from the Legion.”
There came an ear-splitting crash as Peace dropped his coffee beaker on the tiled floor. He gazed strickenly at the top of Norman’s bowed head, unable to speak, then found himself dragged to his feet by the bartender, who had vaulted over the counter.
“All right, youse two,” the barman said, “Outside! I been watching youse two since youse two came in here, and I don’t want the likes o’ youse two in here.”
“It was an accident, a pure accident.” Peace, his mind still in a downward spiral of disbelief, tucked the twenty monits he had taken from Norman into the barman’s shirt pocket and persuaded him to return to his post. The barman gathered up the pieces of ceramic, issued a final warning about holding hands, and shambled away with a number of distrustful backward glances. Peace sat down again and tapped the crown of Norman’s head with a single knuckle.
“Look at me, Norman,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t put me on, would you?”
“No. It’s the truth.”
“But, Norman! Being a deserter from the Legion is nothing to get worked up about.
Practically ever ranker in the outfit dreams of nothing else. It’s their one ambition in life.”
“That’s all right for rankers—it’s expected of them.” Norman raised his face which was crimson with shame. “But I was an officer.”
“An officer?” Peace fell silent, trying to fit the new information into the complex puzzle of his life, but Norman had got into his confessional stride and was speaking faster.
“… and not just any officer, you see. I was Lieutenant Norman Nightingale, only son of General Nightingale himself. My family has a distinguished record of service in the Legion that goes back two centuries. Two centuries! Two hundred years of generals and space marshals, campaigns and courage, medals and honours, glory and greatness. Can you imagine the burden—the unspeakable burden—that tradition placed on me?” Peace shook his head, partly because it was expected of him, partly because a fierce tingling sensation had developed behind his forehead.
“Almost from the minute I was born, certainly from the cradle, I was prepared and groomed for the Legion. My father never spoke to me about anything else. My mother never spoke to me about anything else. My life was totally committed to the Legion—and the terrible thing is that… that I had no love for it. I wanted to do other things.” Norman paused, obviously reflecting on his filial shortcomings.
Peace was glad of the break because the pins-and-needles had grown stronger, and his memory was throwing up images of a Southern-style white-columned house; a stern-faced, grey-haired man, immaculate in the uniform of a Legion staff officer; a pretty woman, reserved to the point of remoteness, whose upright posture was as militarily correct as that of her husband. These, he knew, were visions of his own childhood, and he began to understand why the memory eraser in the recruiting station had blanked out his entire past. If his whole life had been steeped in the tradition of Space Legion service, his guilt over betraying the family ideal would be equally all-pervading. Every incident stored in his memory, every last detail of his upbringing and early career would be a clue to the nature of his crime—and therefore the machine, with electronic scrupulousness, had deleted the lot.
One of his life’s great mysteries had been cleared up, but another had come forward in its place.
“I see the fix you’re in, Norman,” Peace said slowly. “Naturally, with a background like yours, you feel rotten about having gone AWOL—but why go back as a ranker? You don’t need to have any memories wiped out—as soon as you return to the Legion you’ll cease to be a deserter, and you’ll have nothing to feel guilty about. It’s as simple as that.”