White, James – Sector General 05 – Sector General

gravity requirements and they should, at least, have been ac­knowledging each

others’ presence even if they did not openly display the curiosity they must be

feeling toward each other. Angrily, MacEwan turned away to examine the traffic

move­ments display.

There was an lllensan factory ship in orbit, a great, ungainly nonlander whose

shuttle had touched down a few minutes ear­lier, and a Nidian ground transporter

fitted with the chlorine breathers’ life-support was on the way in to pick up

passengers. Their Tralthan-built and crewed passenger ship was nearly ready to

board and stood on its apron on the other side of the main aircraft runway. It

was one of the new ships which boasted of providing comfortable accommodation

for six different oxygen-breathing species, but degrees of comfort were relative

and MacEwan, Grawlya-Ki, and the other non-Tralthans in the lounge would shortly

be judging it for themselves.

Apart from the lllensan shuttle and the Tralthan vessel, the only traffic was

the Nidian atmosphere craft which took off and landed every few minutes. They

were not large aircraft, but they did not need to be to hold a thousand Nidians.

As the aircraft differed only in their registration markings, it seemed that the

same machine was endlessly taking off and landing.

Angry because there was nothing else in the room to engage his attention fully,

and because it occupied such a prominent Position in the center of the lounge

that all eyes were naturally drawn to it, MacEwan turned finally to look once

again at that frightful and familiar tableau.

Grawlya-Ki had already done so and was whining softly to itself.

It was a life-sized replica of the old Orligian war memorial, one of the

countless thousands of copies which occupied public places of honor or appeared

in miniature on the desks or in the homes of responsible and concerned beings on

every world-of the Federation. The original had stood within its protective

shield in the central Plaza of Orligia’s capital city for more than two

centuries, during which a great many native and vis­iting entities of

sensitivity and intelligence had tried vainly to describe its effect upon them.

For that war memorial was no aesthetic marble poem in which godlike figures

gestured defiance or lay dying nobly with limbs arranged to the best advantage.

Instead it consisted of an Orligian and an Earthman, surrounded by the

shattered, remnants of a Control Room belonging to a type of ship now long

obsolete.

The Orligian was standing crouched forward, the fur of its chest and face matted

with blood. A few yards away lay the Earth-human, very obviously dying. The

front of his uniform was in shreds, revealing the ghastly injuries he had

sustained. Abdominal organs normally concealed by skin, layers of sub­cutaneous

tissue and muscle were clearly visible. Yet this man, who had no business being

alive much less being capable of movement, was struggling toward the Orligian.

Two combatants amid the wreckage of a warship trying to continue their battle

hand to-hand?

The dozens of plaques spaced around the base of the tableau described the

incident in all the written languages of the Fed­eration .

They told of the epic, single-ship duel between the Orligian and the Earth-human

commanders. So evenly matched had they been that, their respective crew members

dead, their ships shot to pieces, armaments depleted and power gone, they had

crash-landed close together on a world unknown to both of them. The Orligian,

anxious to learn all it could regarding enemy ship systems, and driven by a more

personal curiosity about its opponent, had boarded the wrecked Earth ship. They

met.

For them the war was over, because the terribly wounded Earth-human did not know

when he was going to die and the Orligian did not know when, if ever, its

distress signal would

bring rescuers. The distant, impersonal hatred they had felt toward each other

was gone, dissipated by the six-hour period* of maximum effort that had been

their duel, and was replaced by feelings of mutual respect for the degree of

professional competence displayed. So they tried to communicate, and suc­ceeded.

It had been a slow, difficult, and extraordinarily painful process for both of

them, but when they did talk they held nothing back. The Orligian knew that any