“It is your business, Mr. Kelly,” said Wun. His dark-coated body was almost invisible, close to the basalt and farther from the light flickering from the circumferential. Kelly thought the alien was shivering, however.
“Don’t tell me my business,” the American snapped. “Look, I walked into this, and if I’d been in time I’d’ve done something about it, sure. I don’t need to be tasked before I’ll blow my nose. But it’s gone, fucked – and that’s not my problem.”
“The Soviets will not believe the space station has changed hands, Mr. Kelly,” Wun said with inhumanly-precise enunciation. “They are convinced that the events of the past hours, including the nuclear destruction of the shuttle launching facilities at Luke and Kennedy Space Command bases, are all part of American policy. When the Dienst presses its demands on Russia by attacking major cities in addition to the space launching facilities which have already been destroyed, the Soviets will react against those they believe to be the true aggressors. Your world will survive the result, Mr. Kelly; but your civilization will not, and your race may not.”
Kelly’s mouth opened to repeat that there was nothing he could do about it. Before he spoke the words, he heard them in his mind, being spoken by everyone he’d heard say them in the past, every cowardly shit who wouldn’t act and wouldn’t let Tom Kelly act when something really had to be done.
“Christ,” said the veteran, and he took a deep breath. “All right, what is it that I can do?”
“You must enter Fortress and destroy it,” replied Wun as calmly as if he had not considered that Kelly might make any other answer. “We can bring you from orbit to the structure, but we cannot enter a solid object, and we will not help you further in a work of death.”
“Christ, you’re sweethearts!” Kelly said. “You oughta run for Congress, you’d fit right fuckin’ in with the clean-hands crowd.”
“We do not have to ask you to understand principles, Mr. Kelly,” the alien said. “You have principles yourself. They differ from ours; and yours will permit you to save your world from consequences which could never occur to our race. We will not kill.”
“Yeah, sorry,” the American said, turning his eyes toward the stone, tracing the irregular courses upward till they blended with the sky and the rain washed the embarrassment from his face. They might be crazy, Wun and his buddies, but they were crazy in a better way than most anybody else Kelly knew. You had to draw lines, and no damn body else in the world had a right to complain about lines you drew and chose to live by.
” ‘Fortress’ isn’t a public relations gag,” he said aloud. “If those Nazis’ve really taken it over, then its going to be a bitch to get close without getting blown into dust clouds.”
“We can get you to the satellite unnoticed, Thomas Kelly,” said Wun. “We can do no more.”
“Guess that oughta be enough,” said Kelly, stretching his arms overhead and pulling the wet fingers of one hand against those of the other. He had to think that way; he’d have gone off in a shivering funk years ago if he hadn’t believed at bottom that he could do any job he was willing to undertake.
The movement of Kelly’s body worked the slick metal of the revolver against the base of his spine. “Why me?” he demanded flatly, fixing the alien with his eyes as firmly as he could in the half-light. Now that he’d made his decision, he had to have the background information that anyone with good sense would’ve demanded earlier.
“Because of the physical contact,” the alien said. His hand mimed a face-rubbing gesture, and Kelly recalled the way he had touched the corpse of the alien that night on Fort Meade. He’d done that to prove to the Suits that he wasn’t afraid – and to himself, that he could do whatever he had to do, even if he was scared shitless. . . .
“We could find you then, Mr. Kelly,” Wun was saying, “and even before we found you, we could begin to speak to you, through your mind. You felt us, surely? We are not expert on your race’s psychology. Though we have observed you for a century, it is only in the past three years, since you achieved stardrive, that we have been permitted to interact with you. We still have much to learn.”