Between Planets (19 page)

“Well, speak up.”

“Just this—where can I go to enlist?” Busby frowned; Don raced ahead with explanation, insisting that he had been trying to join up when the attack came.

“If you meant to enlist, I should think you would have done so long ago. Anyway, by your own story you’ve lived a major portion of your life on Earth. You’re not one of us.”

“Yes, I am!”

“I think you’re a kid with your head stuffed with romantic notions. You’re not old enough to vote.”

“I’m old enough to fight.”

“What can you do?”

“Uh, well, I’m a pretty good shot, with a hand gun anyway.”

“What else?”

Don thought rapidly; it had not occurred to him that soldiers were expected to have anything more than willingness. Ride horseback? It meant nothing here. “Uh, I talk ‘true speech’ fairly well.”

“That’s useful—we need men who can palaver with the dragons. What else?”

Don thought about the fact that he had been able to make his escape through the bush without disaster—but the Lieutenant knew that; it simply proved that he was truly a fog-eater in spite of his mixed background. He decided that Busby would not be interested in the details of his ranch school education. “Well, I can wash dishes.”

Busby grudged a faint smile. “That is unquestionably a soldierly virtue. Nevertheless, Harvey, I doubt if you’re suited. This won’t be parade-ground soldiering. We’ll live off the country and probably never get paid at all. It means going hungry, going dirty, always on the move. You not only risk being killed in action; if you are captured, you’ll be burned for treason.”

“Yes, sir. I figured that out last night.”

“And you still want to join?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hold up your right hand.”

Don did so. Busby continued. “Do you solemnly swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the Venus Republic against all enemies, domestic and foreign; and to serve faithfully in the armed forces of the Republic for the duration of this emergency unless sooner discharged by competent authority; and to obey the lawful orders of superior officers placed over you?”

Don took a deep breath. “I do.”

“Very well, soldier—get in the boat.”

“Yes, sir!”

There were many, many times thereafter that Don regretted having enlisted—but so has every man who ever volunteered for military service. More of the time he was reasonably content, though he would have denied this sincerely—he acquired considerable talent at the most common of soldiers’ pastimes, griping about the war, the weather, the food, the mud, the stupidities of high command. The old soldier can substitute for recreation, or even for rest or food, this ancient, conventional, and harmless form of literary art.

He learned the ways of the guerilla—to infiltrate without a sound, to strike silently, and to fade back into the dark and the mist before the alarm can be raised. Those who learned it lived; those who did not, died. Don lived. He learned other things—to sleep for ten minutes when opportunity offered, to come fully and quietly awake at a touch or a sound, to do without sleep for a night, or two nights—or even three. He acquired deep lines around his mouth, lines beyond his years, and a white, puckered scar on his left forearm.

He did not stay long with Busby but was transferred to a company of gondola infantry operating between CuiCui and New London. They called themselves proudly “Marsten’s Raiders”; he was assigned as “true speech” interpreter for his outfit. While most colonials can whistle a few phrases of dragon talk—or, more usually, can understand a bit of a pidgin sufficient for buying and selling—few of them can converse freely in it. Don, for all his lack of practice during his years on Earth, had been taught it young and taught it well by a dragon who had taken an interest in him as a child. And both his parents used it as easily as they did Basic English; Don had been drilled in it by daily use at home until he was eleven.

The dragons were of great use to the resistance fighters; while not belligerents themselves, their sympathies lay with the colonials—more accurately, they despised the Federation soldiers. The colonials had managed to make a home on Venus through getting along with the dragons—an enlightened-self-interest policy instituted by Cyrus Buchanan himself. To a human born on Venus there was never any doubt that there existed another race—dragons—as intelligent, as wealthy, and as civilized as their own. But to the great majority of the Federation soldiers, new to the planet, the dragons were merely ugly, uncouth animals, incapable of speech and giving themselves airs, arrogating to themselves privileges that no animal had a right to claim.

This orientation cut below the conscious level; no general order issued to the Federation troops, no amount of disciplinary action for violations, could cope with it. It was stronger and less reasoned than any analogous Earthly trouble—white versus black, gentile versus Jew, Roman versus barbarian, or whatever—had ever been. The very officers issuing the orders could not feel the matter correctly; they were not Venus born. Even the governor’s prime political adviser, the shrewd and able Stanley Bankfield, could not really grasp that one does not ingratiate oneself with a dragon by (so to speak) patting him on the head and talking down.

Two serious incidents had set the pattern on the very day of the original attack; in New London a dragon—the same one Don had seen reading the
Times
’ bulletins—had been, not killed, but seriously damaged by a flamethrower; he had been silent partner in the local bank and lessor of many rich thorium pits. Still worse, in CuiCui a dragon had been killed—by a rocket; through mischance he had had his mouth open. And
this
dragon had been related collaterally to the descendants of the Great Egg.

It does not do to antagonize highly intelligent creatures each of whom is physically equivalent to, say three rhinoceri or a medium tank. Nevertheless they were not themselves belligerents, as our convention of warfare is not part of their culture. They work in different ways to their ends.

When in the course of his duties Don had to speak to dragons he sometimes inquired whether or not this particular citizen or the dragon nation knew his friend “Sir Isaac” using, of course, “Sir Isaac’s” true name. He found that those who could not claim personal acquaintance at least knew of him; he found, too, that it raised his own prestige to claim acquaintanceship. But he did not attempt to send a message to “Sir Isaac”; there was no longer any occasion for it—no need to try to wangle a transfer to a High Guard that no longer existed.

He did try and try repeatedly to learn what had happened to Isobel Costello—through refugees, through dragons, and through the increasingly numerous clandestine resistance fighters who could move fairly freely from one side to the other. He never found her. He heard once that she was confined in the prison camp on East Spit; he heard again that she and her father had been deported to Earth—neither rumor could be confirmed. He suspected, with a dull, sick feeling inside, that she had been killed in the original attack.

He was grieved about Isobel herself—not about the ring that he had left with her. He had tried to guess what it could possibly be about the ring, which would cause him to be chased from planet to planet. He could not think of an answer and concluded that Bankfield, for all his superior airs, had been mistaken; the important thing must have been the wrapping paper but the I.B.I. had been too stupid to figure it out. Then he quit thinking about it at all; the ring was gone and that was that.

As for his parents and Mars—sure, sure, someday! Someday when the war was over and ships were running again—in the meantime why let the worry mice gnaw at one’s mind?

His company was at this time spread out through four islands south-southwest of New London; they had been camped there for three days, about the longest they ever stayed in one place. Don, being attached to headquarters, was on the same island as Captain Marsten and was, at the moment, stretched out in his hammock, which he had slung between two trees in the midst of a clump of broom.

The company headquarters runner sought him out and awakened him—by standing well clear and giving the hammock rope a sharp tap. Don came instantly awake, a knife in his hand. “Easy!” cautioned the runner. “The Old Man wants to see you.”

Don made a rhetorical and most ungracious suggestion as to what the Captain could do about it and slid silently to his feet. He stopped to roll up the hammock and stuff it into his pocket—it weighed only four ounces and had cost the Federation a nice piece of change on cost-plus contract. Don was very careful of it; its former owner had not been careful and now had no further need for it. He gathered up his weapons as well.

The company commander was sitting at a field desk under a screen of boughs. Don slid into his presence and waited. Marsten looked up and said, “Got a special job for you, Harvey. You move out at once.”

“Change in the plan?”

“No, you won’t be on tonight’s raid. A high mugamug among the dragons wants palaver. You’re to go to see him. At once.”

Don thought it over. “Cripes, Skipper, I was looking forward to tonight’s scramble. I’ll go tomorrow—those people don’t care about time; they’re patient.”

“That’ll do, soldier. I’m putting you on leave status; according to the despatch from HQ, you may be gone quite a while.”

Don looked up sharply. “If I’m ordered to go, it’s not leave; it’s detached duty.”

“You’re a mess hall lawyer at heart, Harvey.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Turn in your weapons and take off your insignia; you’ll make the first leg of the trip as a jolly farmer boy. Pick up some props from stores. Larsen will boat you. That’s all.”

“Yes sir.” Don tamed to go, adding, “Good hunting tonight, Skipper.”

Marsten smiled for the first time. “Thanks, Don.”

The first part of the trip was made through channels so narrow and devious that electronic seeing devices could reach no further than could the bare eye. Don slept through most of it, his head pillowed on a sack of sour-corn seed. He did not worry about the job ahead—no doubt the officer he was to interpret for, whoever he was, would rendezvous and let him know what he was to do.

Early in the next afternoon they reached the brink of the Great South Sea and Don was transferred to a crazy wagon, a designation which applied to both boat and crew—a flat, jet-propelled saucer fifteen feet across manned by two young extroverts who feared neither man nor mud. The upper works of the boat were covered by a low, polished cone of sheet metal intended to reflect horizontal radar waves upward, or vice versa. It could not protect against that locus in the sky, cone-shaped like the reflector itself, where reflections would bounce straight back to originating stations—but the main dependence was on speed in any case.

Don lay flat on the bottom of the boat, clinging to hand holds and reflecting on the superior advantages of rocket flight, while the crazy wagon skipped and slid over the surface of the sea. He tried not to think about what would happen if the speeding boat struck a floating log or one of the larger denizens of the water. They covered nearly three hundred kilometers in somewhat less than two hours, then the boat skidded and slewed to a stop. “End of the line,” called out the downy-cheeked skipper. “Have your baggage checks ready. Women and children use the center escalator.” The anti-radar lid lifted.

Don stood up on wobbly legs. “Where are we?”

“Dragonville-by-the-Mud. There’s your welcoming committee. Mind your step.”

Don peered through the mist. There seemed to be several dragons on the shore. He stepped over the side, went into mud to his boot tops, scrambled up to firmer soil. Behind him, the crazy wagon lowered its cover and gunned away at once, going out of sight while still gathering speed. “They might at least have waved,” Don muttered and turned back to the dragons. He was feeling considerably perplexed; there seemed to be no men around and he had been given no instructions. He wondered if the officer he had expected to find—surely by this time!—had failed to run the gauntlet safely.

There were seven of the dragons, now moving toward him. He looked them over and whistled a polite greeting, while thinking how much one dragon looks like another. Then the center one of the seven spoke to him in an accent richly reminiscent of fish-and-chips. “Donald, my dear boy! How very happy I am to see you! Shucks!”

D
ON
gulped and stared and almost lost track of his manners. “Sir Isaac! Sir Isaac!” He stumbled toward him.

It is not practical to shake hands with a dragon, kiss it, nor hug it. Don contented himself with beating Sir Isaac’s armored sides with his fists while trying to regain control of himself. Long-suppressed emotions shook him, spoiling voice and vision. Sir Isaac waited patiently, then said, “Now, Donald, if I may present my family—”

Don pulled himself together, cleared his throat, and wet his whistle. None of the others had a voder; it was possible that they did not even understand Basic.

“
May they all die beautifully!
”

“We thank you.”

A daughter, a son, a granddaughter, a grandson, a great granddaughter, a great grandson—counting Sir Isaac himself, a four generation welcome, only one short of maximum dragon protocol; Don was overwhelmed. He knew that Sir Isaac was friendly to him, but he decided that this degree of ceremony must be a compliment to his parents. “
My Father and my Mother thank you all for the kindness you do to their egg
.”

“
As the first egg, so the last
. We are very happy to have you here, Donald.”

A dragon visitor, honored by an escort, would have made a leisurely progress to the family seat flanked by the family members. But a dragon’s leisurely progress is about twice as fast as a brisk walk for a man. Sir Isaac settled himself down and said, “Suppose you borrow my legs, dear boy; we have considerable distance to go.”

“Oh, I can walk”

“Please—I insist.”

“Well—”

“‘Upsy-daisy’! then—if I recall the idiom correctly.”

Don climbed aboard and settled himself just abaft the last pair of eyestalks; they turned around and surveyed him. He found that Sir Isaac had thoughtfully had two rings riveted to his neck plates to let him hold on. “All set?”