This was my first real chance to examine the hooded garment. The outer shell was about right for what one might laughingly call the technology of Sca, but it was a deception. I should have noticed it at once. That rough-woven fabric next to my much-abused skin would have hurt. But the robe was lined with the same odd material that was still wrapped around my game leg. Except the silvery-gray stuff was buffed up into a velvety nap, the surface noticeably warmer than the night air.
The front edge of the robe slipped between my exploring fingers. I felt a cylindrical lump sewn into the hem. Examining it, I squeezed an end. Instantly the lining cooled to the touch. Dew began to condense, running off in tiny diamond droplets. Frost started to form. It took several tries, twisting, pinching, before the lining began to dry again.
Who were these people, anyway?
-2-
“Who are you people, anyway?” I demanded as I emerged from the semi-privacy of my dressing shrub, uniform draped over my robe-covered arm.
“There you are, Corporal,” Couper was massaging the leg of one of the draft animals, “For a moment there, I thought you’d decided to go AWOL on us. I guess we didn’t finish the introductions after all, did we?”
Lucille was not in sight.
Couper turned to the last of his traveling companions, a portly, gnomish individual, robe open and hood thrown back. He had a broad face, featuring black bushy sideburns that merged at the bottom of his chin.
Couper put his big hands on our shoulders, “Corporal, say hello to Owen Rogers, our weapons tech. Rog, this is Armorer-Corporal Whitey O’Thraight.”
Rogers raised a skeptical eyebrow at my title, as if he had just been introduced to a genuine flint-knapping savage. He nodded civilly enough, then went back to tinkering with one of the group’s incredibly small, impressively potent handweapons. This had wiped out a hundred cavalry? I opened my mouth to speak, but Couper went right on without me.
“I suppose that I ought to add that Owen is also our expedition praxeologist,” he observed, “A very busy citizen indeed, our Mr. Rogers.”
“Don’t call me a citizen, Coup,” Rogers replied in a voice higher, more nasal, than I had expected, “I’m too tired to undertake a duel tonight.”
Rogers took a stiff paper packet from his robe, extracting what appeared to be thin brown twig. With his thumb, he flicked a small mechanical fire-starter, placed the twig in his mouth, lit the end, drew smoke, puffing it out again. He peered critically at a part he had removed from the weapon, polished it on his robe, peered at it again.
I asked for lack of a better topic, “What is a ‘praxeologist’?” Lucille was still among the missing. “More importantly, who in Hamilton’s Holy Name are you people? What kind of ‘expedition’ is this?”
Both men stiffened slightly, as if at something I had said.
“We might ask the same of you, buddy-boy—omitting the damned obscenity.”
I whirled. Lucille was right behind me, having come from another section of the little brook. Her wet hair was plastered down, bunched together into a knot at the back of her neck. Even that way she looked good.
“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” she said, “Tell us something we want to, we’ll tell you something you want to know—maybe.”
I was just about to ask what obscenity, when the Lieutenant began stirring on the cart. He groaned, babbled a few words, tried to sit up against his good arm. Couper hurried over to him, gently pushed him down again, while continuing to address me as he examined my ailing officer.
“Corporal, where we come from, there was once a primitive people who had time and distance somewhat confused in their cosmology.” He glanced over at Rogers. The praxeologist/gunsmith nodded professional confirmation. “You see, they figured that, if you came from far away, then you also came from the distant past. A decidedly odd point of view—”
“Which has its merits,” Rogers interrupted, looking up from his work.
“In this instance, perhaps,” acknowledged Couper.
He peeled the burlap from the Lieutenant’s arm. Underneath was the same rubbery gray dressing I wore. Set into the resilient substance was a small rigid panel of the same color, two centimeters by five, decorated with tiny lights, miniature switches. One by one, as Couper labored over my friend, the little lamps blinked from red to yellow to green.
He returned his attention to me: “Where you come from, Corporal, there will be legends. Stories of a beginning, or an arrival.” It was a statement, not a question. He gave me an evaluative squint that seemed to broadcast, even at its friendliest, that he was not a man to lie to. “There always are. Have you ever heard of a place called ‘Earth’?”
“‘Earth’?” I rolled the unlikely syllable around in my mouth. “Why would anybody name their world ‘dirt’? Is that where you people are from?”
Couper went back to the electronic panel on the Lieutenant’s dressing. Rogers smiled, but it did not disguise a worried look that had accompanied his transformation from artisan to professional—what?
Praxeologist.
“In a manner of speaking, Whitey. Tell me, now, is this Vespucci of yours a city-state, a nation-state, a planet, a planetary system, or —”
“All four by now, most likely. What do you mean by, ‘in a manner of speaking’? I would think that you are either from a planet, or you are—”
“Is that so, Corporal?” Lucille sat on the—what do you call it?—the part of the wagon that is connected with the pulling animals, helping Rogers now to tend the weapons with a sort of absent-minded contentedness that I have seen other women reserve for knitting. I looked down at the ground, suddenly self-conscious, for a variety of reasons.
“What if,” she began, then stopped. “Okay, say a child had been born aboard your ship while you were in transit to this mindforsaken place?”
“He would be a Vespuccian, er ... citizen.” I glanced at Rogers briefly, wondering if the word still offended him. She answered for him.
“I see. Rog, hand me that orifice gauge, will you” This thing sprayed a little light against the cavalry out there, after I stopped it down for the torture-master. Must be some play in the control ring.”
She might have returned to her work without further comment, but I spoke again. “I meant to ask about that. You did not have my reasons for hating the Bailiff. I realize he was about to shout for help, but why—”
“Constitution! I’d planned to fry the scum whether he made a peep or not!” Lucille answered cheerfully, tightening some adjustment at her weapon’s muzzle-end, “That’s standard policy with us—for his kind.”
I must have goggled.
Rogers stepped in: “Lucille’s standard policy, she means. Still, there’s something to be said for that, too. It’s a reliable method of measuring how civilized an individual—or an entire planet—really is. Savage cultures encourage torturers. Merely barbaric ones tolerate them, sometimes torture them back in revenge. While a truly advanced culture—”
“Attempts to rehabilitate them?” I asked, beginning to feel that possibly I understood this fellow. The Vespuccian educational system warns everybody against the few like him at home, overrationalizing, sentimental—
“Just another word for torture,” Rogers replied evenly, jerking my assessment of him out from under me, “Or a subtle variation on it. No, we kill them, as Lucille says, like any other vermin, swiftly and humanely. And it’s also lots cheaper than rehabilitation or any other alternative.”
“A plasma-gun under the armpit,” Lucille added before I could readjust, “simply does wonders for the local rate of cultural advancement.”
Rogers chuckled, “Not to mention underarm odor!”
Suppressing a grin of his own, Couper grunted, wrapped the burlap back around the sleeping Lieutenant’s real bandage, fiddling with the temperature-adjusting lump at the edge of the unconscious officer’s robe.
“Corporal, if I let this conversation go any further without ... ” He stoppe
d, started up again: “Son, bloodthirsty comments to one side, we’re basically a scientific exploration team, assigned to study this garbage-dump of a planet. Other questions—and answers, do I make myself clear, Lucille?—had better wait until we get where we’re going.”
Lucille stuck her tongue out but remained silent.
“Which is where, scientifically speaking?” As I watched, the girl reholstered her weapon somewhere underneath her robe. Rogers began putting his gunsmithing tools away in a fabric roll, took the feed-bags from the animals’ faces, tossed them into the cart beside the Lieutenant.
“That, Corporal, is a pretty good example of a question that’ll have to wait,” Couper replied, “Anyway, doing something is better than just being told about it. Saddle up, scientists, we’ve got miles to make!”
-3-
Thus it was back to the same plodding journey as before.
Only this time, there were certain differences.
I sat up on the end of the wagon, having had the little control panel on my own dressing examined, the burlap cover drawn back over it. All of my lights had been green. Except for the negligible weight of the thing—the burlap on the outside weighed more—plus an occasional surprising deep healing twinge, my broken foot felt good as new. The—Earthians?—did nothing to discourage me from walking on it.
Of course they did nothing to discourage me from doing anything else, either, including lying down beneath the wheels of the moving cart, or blowing my brains out. (Although they did not offer to lend me a pistol.) The subject of parole had not arisen again. They did not seem to care, now, whether I escaped or not. They simply assumed that I would come along with them meekly. They were right about that, too: wherever they were headed had to be a lot better than where I had been.
But now, at least, they talked to me, Also to one another, joking, arguing, even answering more questions that I sneaked in from time to time, almost as if trying to catch up for their earlier stoic silence, the purpose of which remained unexplained. We ate emergency ration bars not terribly different from those I had “enjoyed” on the way from Vespucci.
Theirs actually tasted like something.
Chalk, I think.
Mostly, they asked me questions.
“We haven’t any record of this planet of yours, Whitey, although the name ‘Vespucci’ is certainly familiar enough,” Owen Rogers was explaining to me as he trudged behind the wagon with Couper. Lucille was taking her turn at guiding the animals up front. “It isn’t too surprising, I suppose. This is the farthest we’ve reached into your particular stellar neighborhood so far. About how far is Vespucci from Sca?”
Was the query as innocent as the way it had been put? Or was there some deceit behind the fellow’s open, questioning eyes? I looked over at the unconscious Lieutenant. “I am not sure I should answer that, question, sir. You must understand, I—” The memories of brutal interrogation rose unbidden inside me, choking off the rest. I guessed that now I would find out what sort of people these Earthians truly were.
“Please don’t call me sir, Whitey, call me Owen. And I understand your reluctance perfectly. ‘Leinster’s Dilemma’, we praxeologists call it. For the sake of your home planet’s survival, you dare not take the chance of trusting us, no matter how you may come to feel about us personally.”
Personally? I preferred to watch Lucille, her emerald eyes alert, glittering with intelligence and passion for living, her golden hair drying now, streaming behind her in the quadruple moonlight as she strode purposefully along. With that cascade of hair and the hooded robe, she looked like a ancient witch of yore, a bewitching ancient witch.
“Something like that, sir, I mean ... ” Scientists were officer-caste to me. It was hard addressing him by his first name. I wondered what her body was like under that bulky— “What did you say, er, Rog?”
“I said okay, then tell me about the Navy, Whitey, your Vespuccian Navy.”
“Naval Reserve. Mine—everybody’s, unless they are in the Army Reserve.”
Rogers’ already worried-looking forehead wrinkled further. “You mean that everybody on Vespucci has to spend a certain amount of his life—and her life, too, I’ll bet—we call the practice universal conscription.”
“Ah,” I breathed. “So you have it, too?”
“Absolutely not.” He seemed offended at the idea. “We abolished it long ago, with every other form of slavery. So how old were you when—”
“I was born into the Navy,” I said with what almost amounted to pride, “just like my father before me. That is why Vespucci—the nation state, I mean this time—was able to consolidate the entire planet so easily. Other countries were flabby, undisciplined. We are not.”
A sour expression flashed over the praxeologist’s face for just an instant, then it was carefully rearranged away, although not without some visible effort. What is it about nosy strangers that makes a person want to stand up for all of those familiar, stupid things that he hates the most? I had always despised compulsory service, military rule, as early in my life as my discovery of the carefully-censored fact that other people, other countries did things very differently. I had always wondered afterward what was so wrong with being flabby or undisciplined.
At least occasionally.
“Meaning that in your nation-state of Vespucci, the trains run on time? Well, that would certainly explain the nature of your name, anyway.”
“What is so wrong about my name? I have the name that my father left to me. We were a Gold Nova family, I will have you understand. My father died earning us two extra digits posthumously at the Battle of Kahl’s Pyre. You could not have a better name unless you were born into one of the old, original Command Families, like the Lieutenant, here.”
Couper, lightfooted like a predator, unlike Rogers plodding beside him, spoke, his narrowed eyes never leaving their suspicious sweep of the countryside all around us. “And what would the Lieutenant’s name be?”
The Lieutenant had been a half-corpse so long, I realized I had failed a little in the introduction department. “Enson Sermander, sir. He—”
Couper began laughing. “One of the upper upper crust, hunh? That’s just swell! Corporal, your lieutenant here doesn’t have a ‘real’ name, any more than you do!” He stopped for a moment as we plodded onward, wiping tears from the corners of his eyes, then had to skip to catch up with the cart. “Great Albert’s ghost, the things you run into out here!”
“I do not get it, er, Coup.”
Rogers maintained a hard-won neutral expression.
“Well, let’s see. You’re a corporal, right? And in the Navy? Son, ‘ensign’ is an old time military rank back where we come from—in the ocean navy. About the equivalent of a shavetail, do you savvy? Never mind. Now tell me, son, does your friend here outrank an Army captain?”
“The Army Reserve” I corrected automatically, “Yes, sir, he does.” I was puzzled. What was Couper’s status? “He ranks just below a Navy colonel.”
“Death and taxes, what a world! Nonetheless, I’ll wager you a tall stack of chips that this ‘Sermander’ is nothing more than a corruption of a pair of old-fashioned titles ‘sir’—or maybe ‘sergeant’—and ‘commander’.”
“I never thought about that before,” I replied, not really wanting to think about it now. I wondered what all of this was leading to. If there were no such thing as a free lunch, when would they answer my questions?
Rogers leaned in, smiling his sad old praxeologist’s smile again, obviously wishing that he were back repairing guns. “People seldom do, not about their own cultures. For example, at one time Coup’s name was a title, too: ‘barrel-maker’. And there are ancestors back in Cilly’s family tree named after a huge furry animal. Tell me, Whitey, what do you know about the first settlers to reach your world, Vespucci, the Hamiltonians?”