Dickson Gordon – Forever Man
THE PHONE WAS RINGING. HE CAME UP OUT OF A SLEEP AS DARK
as death, fumbled at the glowing button in the phone’s base with numb fingers and punched it. The ringing ceased.
“Wander here,” he mumbled. An officer he did not recognize showed on the screen.
“Major, this is Assignment. Lieutenant Van Lee. Laagi showing upward of thirty ships facing our sector of the Frontier. Scramble, sir.”
“Right,” he muttered.
There was no reason for the Laagi to start putting extra ships into that part of their territory that faced the North American Sector, and necessitate an all-personnel callout of the ship-handling crews-including people like himself who had just come back in off patrol out there six hours ago.
But then, attacking or running, the Laagi made no sense. They never had.
“You’re to show in Conference Room K at four hundred hours. Bring your personals.”
“Right.” Groggily he rolled over on his stomach and squinted at his watch in the glow from the button on the phone. In the pale light, the figures on his wrist-com stood at
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twelve minutes after three-three hundred twelve hours. Enough time.
“Understood, sir?”
“Understood, Lieutenant,” he said.
“Very good, sir. Out.”
The phone went dead. For a moment the desire for sleep sucked at Jim Wander like some great black bog; then with a convulsive jerk he threw it and the covers off him in one motion and sat up on the edge of his bed in the darkness, scrubbing at his face with an awkward hand.
After a second, he turned the light on, got up, showered and dressed. As he shaved, he watched his face in the mirror. It was still made up of the same roughly squarish, large-boned features he remembered, but the lines about the mouth and between the eyebrows seemed deepened with the sleep, under the tousled black hair, coarsely curling up from his forehead. It could not be drink, he thought. He never drank except on leave, nowadays. Alcohol at other times did nothing for him anymore. It was just that now he slept like a log-like a log watersoaked and drowning in some bottomless lake.
He had not gone stale. Out on the Frontier he was as good as ever. But he needed something-what, he could not specify. He felt the lack of it, like the emptiness of a long-empty stomach inside him. But it was not hunger, because he was fed regularly; and it was not women, as his friends suggested, because he had no trouble finding women on his leaves from duty. What he wanted was to come to grips with something. That was it, to have a wall behind him he could set his back against and a job to do in front of him, where he could see himself getting it done-instead of fighting an endless war and getting nowhere, surrounded by those who found simply being in the war enough to justify their existence.
He ceded to accomplish something and find someone who understood what it was like to have that need.
He got up and started getting himself ready for duty.
When he was finally dressed, he strapped on last of all his “personals”-his sidearm, the painkiller kit, the little green thumbnailsquare box holding the x-capsule. Then he left his room, went down the long, sleeping corridor of the officers’
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quarters and out a side door into the darkness of predawn and the rain.
He could have gone around by the interior corridors to the Operations building, but it was a short cut across the quadrangle and the rain and chill would wake him, drive the last longing for sleep from his bones. As he stepped out of the door the invisible rain, driven by a light wind, hit him in the face. Beyond were the blurred lights of the Operations building across the quadrangle.
Far off to his left thunder rolled. Tinny thunder-the kind heard at high altitudes, in the mountains. Beyond the rain and darkness were the Rockies. Above the Rockies, the clouds. And beyond the clouds, space, stretching lightyears of distance to the Frontier.
-To where he would doubtless be before the dawn rose, above this quadrangle, above these buildings, these mountains, and this Earth.
He entered the Operations building, showed his identification to the Officer of the Day, and took the lift tube up to the fourth floor. The frosted pane of the door to Conference Room F glowed with a brisk, interior light. He knocked on the door and went in without waiting for an answer. Inside, the room was half-full of pilots like himself and their gunners.
“Oh, Jim!” said the colonel behind the briefing desk. “Not here. They want you in Conference Room K, this time.”
Jim grunted. He had forgotten. He went out. One floor down and halfway down the corridor to the right was Conference K. Jim went in this time without even knocking-and stopped. Like all conference rooms in Operations, it had one desk and many chairs. This room also had two people, one of whom was General Louis Mollen, Sub-Chief of Operations, and the other was a woman Jim did not know.
Mollen, round and hard-bodied as a medicine ball, with a head to match, sat behind the desk; and in a chair half-facing him was a woman in military flight clothes, in her midtwenties,lean and highforeheaded, with the fresh skin and clear eyes of someone who has spent most of her years inside walls, sheltered from the weather. Under reddish blond hair her eyes were blue-green, in a face that was rectangular, with the jawlines sloping straight down to a small, square chin. It was not
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a remarkable face. Nor was it unremarkable. It was a strong, determined face.
“Sony, sir. I should have knocked,” said Jim.
“Not important,” said Mollen. “Come in.”
Jim came in and both the other two stood up as he approached the desk. They watched him closely, and Jim found himself examining the woman. The flight coveralls she wore had been fitted to her, which meant she was not just a civilian fitted out by the -supply depot for this occasion. At the same time something about her did not belong in the Operations building; and Jim, out of the dullness of the fatigue that was still on him and the emptiness in him, found himself twinged by a sudden and reasonless resentment at her presence here, at the moment of a scramble. She looked unnaturally wideawake and competent for this dark hour of the morning. Of course, so did Mollen; but that was different.
Jim stopped in front of the desk.
“Jim,” said the general, deep-voiced, his round, snubnosed, pugnacious face unsmiling. “I want you to meet Dr. Mary Gallegher. She’s from the Geriatrics Bureau.”
She would be, thought Jim sourly, reaching out to shake hands with her. Mary Gallegher was almost as tall as Jim himself, who at five feet ten was near the upper limit in height for the cramped quarters of the pilot’s com seat of a fighter ship, and her handshake was not weak. But still … here she was, thought Jim, still resenting her for being someone as young as Jim himself, full of the juices of living, and with all her attention focused on the gray and tottering endyears of life. A bodysnatcher-a snatcher of old bodies from the brink of the grave for a few months or a few years.
“Pleased to meet you, Mary,” he said.
“Good to meet you, Jim.”
“Sit down,” said the general. Jim pulled up a chair and they all sat down once more around the desk.
“What’s up, sir?” asked Jim. “They told me it was a gmeral callout.”
“The callout’s a fake. Just an excuse to put extra ships on the Frontier for something special,” answered Mollen. “The something special’s why Mary’s here. And you. What do you remember about the Sixty Ships Battle?”
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“It was right after we found we had a frontier in common with the Laagi, wasn’t it?” said Jim, slightly puzzled. “Over one hundred years ago or so. Back before we found out logistics made mass spaceship battles unworkable. Sixty of ours met forty-some of theirs beyond the Frontier, as it is now, and theirs were better. What about it?”
“Do you remember how the battle came out?” It was the civilian, Mary Gallegher, leaning forward with an intensity that puzzled him.
Jim shrugged.
“They were better, as I say. Our ships were slower then. We hadn’t started to design them for guarding a frontier, instead of fighting pitched battles. They cut us up and suckered what was left into staying clumped together while they set off a nova explosion,” he said. He looked into her eyes and spoke deliberately. “The ships on the edge of the explosion were burned up like paper cutouts. The ones in the center just disappeared.”