Robert Silverberg: Blaze of Glory

They list John Murchison as one of the great heroes of space—a brave man and true, who willingly sacrificed himself to save his ship. He won his immortality on the way back from Shaula II.

One thing’s wrong, though. He was brave, but he wasn’t willing. He wasn’t the self-sacrificing type. I’m inclined to think it was murder, or maybe execution. By remote control, you might say.

I guess they pick spaceship crews at random—say, by yanking a handful of cards from the big computer and throwing them up at the BuSpace roof. The ones that stick get picked. At least, that’s the only way a man like Murchison could have been sent to Shaula II in the first place.

He was a spaceman of the old school, tall, bullnecked, coarse-featured, hard-swearing. He was a spaceman of a type that had never existed except in storytapes for the very young—the only kind Murchison was likely to have viewed. He was our chief signal officer.

Somewhere, he had picked up an awesome technical competence; he could handle any sort of communication device with supernatural ease. I once saw him tinker with a complex little Caphian artifact that had been buried for half a million years, and have it detecting the 21-centimeter “hydrogen song” within minutes. How he knew the little widget was a star-mapping device I will never understand.

But coupled with Murchison’s extraordinary special skill was an irascibility, a self-centered inner moodiness flaring into seemingly unmotivated anger at unpredictable times, that made him a prime risk on a planet like Shaula II. There was something wrong with his circuit-breaker setup: you could never tell when he’d overload, start fizzing and sparking, and blow off a couple of megawatts of temper.

You must admit this is not the ideal sort of man to send to a world whose inhabitants are listed in the E-T Catalogue as “wise, somewhat world-weary, exceedingly gentle, non-aggressive to an extreme degree and thus subject to exploitation. The Shaulans must be handled with great patience and forbearance, and should be given the respect due one of the galaxy’s elder races.”

I had never been to Shaula II, but I had a sharp mental image of the Shaulans: melancholy old men pondering the whichness of the why and ready to fall apart at the first loud voice that caught them by surprise. So it caught me by surprise when the time came to affix my hancock to the roster of the Felicific, and I saw on the line above mine the scribbled words Murchison, John F., Signalman First Class.

I signed my name— Loeb, Ernest T., Second Officer —picked up my pay voucher, and walked away somewhat dizzily. I was thinking of the time I had seen Murchison, John F., giving a Denebolan frogman the beating of his life, for no particular reason at all. “All the rain here makes me sick” was all Murchison cared to say; the frogman lived and Big Jawn got an X on his psych report.

Now he was shipping out for Shaula? Well, maybe so…but my faith in the computer that makes up spaceship complements was seriously shaken.

We were the fourth or fifth expedition to Shaula II. The planet—second of seven in orbit round the brightest star in Scorpio’s tail—was small and scrubby, but of great strategic importance as a lookout spot for that sector of the galaxy. The natives hadn’t minded our intrusion, and so a military base had been established there after a little preliminary haggling.

The Felicific was a standard warp-conversion-drive ship holding thirty-six men. It had the usual crew of eight, plus a cargo of twenty-eight of Terra’s finest, being sent out as replacements for the current staff of the base.

We blasted on 3 July 2530, a warmish day, made the conversion from ion-drive to warp-drive as soon as we were clear of the local system, and popped back into normal space three weeks later and two hundred light-years away. It was a routine trip in all respects.

With the warp-conversion drive, a ship is equipped to travel both long distances and short. It handles the long hops via subspace warp, and the short ones by good old standard ion-drive seat-of-the-spacesuit navigating. It’s a good system, and the extra mass the double drive requires is more than compensated for by the saving in time and maneuverability.

The warp-drive part of the trip was pre-plotted and just about pre-traveled for us; no headaches there. But when we blurped back into the continuum about half a light-year from Shaula the human factor entered the situation. Meaning Murchison, of course.

It was his job to check and tend the network of telemetering systems that acted as the ship’s eyes, to make sure the mass-detectors were operating, to smooth the bugs out of the communications channels between navigator and captain and drive-deck. In brief, he was the man who made it possible for us to land.

Every ship carried a spare signalman, just in case. In normal circumstances the spare never got much work. When the time came for the landing, Captain Knight buzzed me and told me to start lining up the men who would take part, and I signaled Murchison first.

His voice was a slow rasping drawl. “Yeah?”

“Second Officer Loeb. Prepare for landing, double-fast. Navigator Henrichs has the chart set up for you and he’s waiting for your call.”

There was a pause. Then: “I don’t feel like it, Loeb.”

It was my turn to pause. I shut my eyes, held my breath, and counted to three by fractions. Then I said, “Would you mind repeating that, Signalman Murchison?”

“Yes, sir. No, sir, I mean. Hell, Loeb, I’m fixing something. Why do you want to land now?”

“I don’t make up the schedules,” I said.

“Then who in blazes does? Tell him I’m busy!”

I turned down my phones’ volume. “Busy doing what?”

“Busy doing nothing. Get off the line and I’ll call Henrichs.”

I sighed and broke contact. He’d just been ragging me. Once again, Murchison had been ornery for the sheer sake of being ornery. One of these days he was going to refuse to handle the landing entirely.

And that day, I told myself, is the day we’ll crate him up and shove him through the disposal lock.

Murchison was a little island. He had his skills, and he applied them—when he felt like it. But only when he believed that he, Murchison, would profit. He never did anything unwillingly, because if he couldn’t find it in himself to do it willingly he wouldn’t do it at all. It was impossible to make him do something.

Unwisely, we tolerated it. But someday he would get a captain who didn’t understand him, and he’d be slapped with a sentence of mutiny during a fit of temperament. For his sake, I hoped not. The penalty for mutiny in space is death.

With Murchison’s cooperation gratefully accepted, we targeted on Shaula II, which was then at perihelion, and orbited it. Down in his little cubicle Murchison worked like a demon, taking charge of the ship’s landing system in a tremendous way. He was a fantastic signalman when he wanted to be.

Later that day the spinning red ball that was Shaula II hung just ahead of us, close enough to let us see the three blobs of continents and the big, choppy hydrocarbon ocean that licked them smooth. The Terran base on Continent Three beamed as a landing-guide; Murchison picked it up, fed it through the computer bank to Navigator Henrichs, and we homed in for the landing.

The Terran base consisted of a couple of blockhouses, a sprawling barracks, and a good-sized radar parabola, all set in a ring out on an almost mathematically flat plain. Shaula II was a great world for plains; Columbus would have had the devil’s time convincing people this world was round!