Stalemate

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  STALEMATE

  BY BASIL WELLS

  _Illustrated by Leo Summers_

  [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of ScienceFiction November 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidencethat the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

  [Sidenote: _The rules of a duel between gentlemen are quite differentfrom the rules of war between nations. Is it because gentlemen do notfight wars, or is it that men in war cease to be gentlemen?_]

  The bullet slapped rotted leaves and dirt into Gram Treb's eyes. Hewormed backward to the bole of a small tree.

  "Missed!" he shouted. He used English, the second tongue of them both."Throw away your carbine and use rocks."

  "You tasted it anyhow," Harl Neilson's shrill young voice cried. "Howwas the sample?"

  "That leaves you two cartridges," taunted Treb. "Or is it only one?"

  The sixth sense that had brought him safely through two of these bloodywar duels here in space made him fling his body to the left. He rolledover once and lay huddled in a shallow depression. He knew all the tinyhollows and ridges--they were his insurance on this mile-wide islandhigh above Earth.

  Something thudded into the tree roots behind him. He hugged the ground,body flattened. His breath eased raggedly outward, and caught. Thewaiting--the seconds that became hours! If the grenade rolled after him,down the slope into his shelter, he was finished.

  There was nothing he could do. His palms oozed sweat....

  The grenade exploded. It was like a fist slammed against his skull. Hewas numbed for a long instant. Then he checked.

  Unharmed. The depression had saved his neck this time. He wanted toshout at Neilson, tell him he was down to a lone grenade, but that waspoor strategy. Now he must withdraw, make Neilson think him injured ordead, and trap him in turn.

  They were the last of the belligerents here within Earth Satellite. Fortwo months, since what would be May on Earth, they had carried on thismad duel. Of the other eighteen who had started the war in November ofthe preceding year, only four had survived their wounds. The UnitedNations' supervisory seconds had transported them to their homes inAndilia and in Baryt....

  Treb wormed his way as noiselessly as possible into the undergrowth,sprawling at last in the shelter of an earthen mound thirty feet fromthe grenade's raw splash. He waited--and thought.

  Memories can be unpleasant. He could see his comrades of the threebattles as they had fallen, wounded or gray with death. Too many of themhad he helped bury. He remembered the treasured photos.

  The draining wound in his right forearm throbbed....

  The enemy dead too. He had killed several of them--more than his share,he thought savagely. They too were young despite the ragged beards someof them cultivated.

  Treb felt like an old man. And he _was_ old. He was twenty-nine. He hada son also named Gram, a boy of five, and little Alse, who was two. Hadlittle Alse's mother lived he would never have volunteered for thisthird United Nations' war duel.

  He would have been with her in the mountain valley of Krekar workinghard, and gradually erasing those other ugly episodes here on EarthSatellite One....

  Minutes crawled by, lumped together into hours. Birds sang in the treesso laboriously maintained here in the satellite's disk-shaped heart.And, a hundred feet overhead, where the true deck of the man-made islandin space began, other birds nested in the girders.

  An ant crawled over Treb's earth-stained hand and passed under hisoutstretched carbine's barrel.

  There was a movement in the clustering trees off to his right. Neilsonhad circled and was coming in from an opposite angle. Treb thumbed offthe safety and waited.

  An earth-colored helmet, with a trace of long pale hair around its rim,came slowly into view. Could be a dummy, Neilson was clever at riggingthem to draw fire. And he had exactly two cartridges. After that itwould be his three grenades, his two-foot needle-knife, that doubled asa bayonet, and the steel bow he had contrived from a strip of springsteel.

  He held his fire. The trees made grenade lobbing a touchy business. Andhis bow was back in one of the dozens of foxholes he had spotted in boththe inner and outer rings of trees.

  In the fantasy stories of adventure in space that he enjoyed reading,the hero could always whip up a weird paralysis ray, a deadly, invisiblerobot bullet, or an intelligent gaseous ally from the void would appear.And out of scrap glass, metal and his shoestrings he could contrive asolar-powered shell that stopped any missile, deadlier than amarshmallow, cold.

  In actual life he was finding it difficult enough to contrive aprimitive sort of bow, a knife-lashed spear, and snares for theincreasingly wary rabbits. Lack of sleep and lack of food supplies weresapping his lanky body of the whiplash swiftness and wiry strength itonce possessed. Nor was the week-old wound any aid to his dulledwits....

  The helmet advanced; he could almost see the twig-stuffed gray shirt'spockets, and he let his nostrils expand as he sucked in a steadyingbreath. Now, a yard behind the fake Andilian, he could see the movingshoulders and skull of Harl Neilson--or so his bloodshot eyes told him.

  He squeezed the trigger. There was a subdued yip, and then a derisivejeer. Missed again--or had he?

  "Sour rocketing, Grampaw," Neilson laughed. "Try again. And then I'mcoming after you."

  Only Neilson wouldn't. Unless he'd miscalculated the number of grenades,he wouldn't come charging at Treb. And he couldn't be sure of the numberof cartridges Treb possessed. He was just talking to keep his nerve up.

  Especially if he was wounded now. That sudden yip....

  * * * * *

  It was night again, an artificial night as artificial as the centralten-acre pool of water, the ring of flowering green trees and grasses,and the final outer ring of forest trees. It was here that the twothousand UN employees and soldiers on Earth Satellite One normally tooktheir recreation periods.

  Only the supervised war-duels, that since 1969 had been the onlyblood-letting permitted between nations, could long keep a Terran fromvisiting the green meadows and trees of this lowest of the threelevels....

  "I'd give half that quarter million," Neilson groaned, across thedarkness, "for a cigarette."

  "You mean," corrected Gram Treb, "half your ten thousand."

  "It's the winner's grant or nothing, Treb. I promised Jane I'd hand itto her. Then we'll marry."

  "But not if you are the loser?"

  "I wouldn't--she wouldn't--it's impossible to think of asking her toshare poverty and disgrace."

  "I'd hardly say that. We lost our first war here on the Satellite. Barytwas obligated to cede a thousand square miles to Tarrance. Most of myten thousand paid off my family's debts.

  "Yet I married. I married Nal who had nursed me back to health. And wewere happy. Until the second war with Duristan. I wanted money forher--for the children--for my impoverished valley."

  Treb broke off. He backed away several feet and shifted noiselessly to anew position. Every night, and sometimes in the artificial sunlight,they talked together. But they never forgot that they were sworn foes.

  "So you won it didn't you?" From his voice Neilson had shifted closerand to the left.

  "Sure. And I wish I were as poor as before. For Nal was kicked todeath--by the horse I should have been using--while I fought here."

  Neilson made a sympathetic sound. Treb felt his lips twitch into a thincrooked line. This is what it meant to be human. To feel sorrow foranother man's misfortunes--and then kill him!

  Sure, Neilson was a good sort. Only twenty-four and in love with a girl,a woman really, wid
ow of a dead lunar explorer. And he was aclean-living sort, nothing dishonorable or hateful about him. They evenhonored the same God.

  But tomorrow, or the next day, or a month from now, he would kill orwound Neilson. Unless, as might well happen, Neilson got to him first.

  He pushed aside a thought that came more and more often of late. Why notsurrender, or let Neilson capture him? He did not considersuicide--little Gram and Alse needed him--although he had not beenthinking of them when he signed for this ugly miniature battle in space.His wife's death had been too vivid yet.

  But, why not surrender? He had enough money. The valley people couldstruggle along without the machines and the dam he had hoped to grantthem with victory. And Baryt could lose the island of Daafa to Andiliawithout crippling herself. The three hundred and fifty inhabitants couldbe transferred to the mainland.

  Treb laughed silently, a laugh that cut