Mack Reynolds: Galactic Medal of Honor

Actually, there’s something that I wanted to ask you about. Something in particular. It might change your mind about Callisto. I don’t know why you’re going, anyway. I’ve been there. It’s a terrible place, Di. There’s no atmosphere. You live under what amounts to a giant inverted plastic fishbowl.”

“I’ve read up on Callisto,” she said in irritation. “I know it’s no paradise. But somebody has to do the work there and I’m a trained secretary. Don, I’m packing. I simply don’t have the time to see you again. I thought that we said our goodbyes six days ago.”

“This is important, Dian.” His voice was urgent.

She tossed the two sweaters she was holding into a chair, or something, off-screen, and faced him, her hands on her hips.

“No it isn’t, Don Mathers. Not to me, at least. We’ve been all over this. Why keep torturing yourself? You’re not ready for marriage, Don. I don’t want to hurt you, but you simply aren’t. Look me up, Don, in a few years.”

“Di! Just a couple of hours this afternoon.” He was desperate.

Dian Keramikou looked him full in the face and said, “Colin Casey finally died of his burns and wounds this morning. The President has asked for five minutes of silence at two o’clock. Don, I plan to spend that time here alone in my apartment, possibly crying a few tears for a man who died for me and the rest of the human race under such extreme conditions of gallantry that he was awarded the highest honor of which man has ever conceived. I wouldn’t want to spend that five minutes while on a date with another member of my race’s armed forces who had deserted his post of duty.”

Don Mathers turned, after the screen had gone blank and walked stiffly back to the bar. He got up on the stool again and called flatly to Harry, “Another tequila. A double tequila. And don’t bother with that lime and salt routine.”

By evening he was drenched, as the expression went these days. When Harry had closed the Nuevo Mexico at two o’clock, in memory of Colin Casey, Don Mathers had summoned a hovercab and dialed the hi-rise apartment house where he quartered himself in Center City.

He took one of the vacuum elevators up to the 45th floor and staggered to his mini-apartment. A mini-apartment was all he could afford on his sublieutenant’s pay. In fact, he shouldn’t have afforded that. He could have stayed considerably cheaper, living in bachelor’s quarters on the base. But in the last year he had become so fed up with the Space Service that he preferred to stay away from any contact whenever he could. Besides, he’d had high hopes of Dian capitulating to him, with or without marriage, and wanted a place to be able to bring her.

She was a strange one, he had long since decided, when it came to sex matters. So far as he knew, she was a virgin, in an age where it was no longer considered necessary or even very sensible to remain one after your mid-teens; though of recent date there had been somewhat of a swing of the pendulum in that regard, a newly swelling Victorianism, a return to the old virtues. Don Mathers supposed that it was a result of the Kraden threat and the possibility of human annihilation. The Universal Reformed Church was said to be growing in all but a geometric progression.

His identity screen picked him up, upon his approach, and the door automatically opened.

He entered the apartment and looked about distastefully. Wasn’t it bad enough spending weeks at a time in a One Man Scout to have to return to quarters as small as this automated mini-apartment? Functional it might be, attractive it was not. A living room-cum-bedroom-cum study. A so-called kitchenette with small dining alcove; so-called because he never utilized it for more than making coffee. A small bath. Most of the furniture built in, very neatly, very efficiently.

He stripped off his uniform and hung it in the closet and brought forth civilian garb and redressed. The SPs, the Space Police, took a dim view of any spaceman, even an officer pilot, being seen in public intoxicated, and Don Mathers was already drenched and had every intention of getting more so. Everything and its cousin was going wrong. Dian was leaving tomorrow for the ridiculous job on the Jupiter satellite, Callisto. He was on the commodore’s S-list and most likely would be on it in capital letters shortly, because the fact of the matter was he was rapidly getting to the point where he couldn’t bear the space patrols. Sooner or later, Bernklau was going to insist on a psych on him. Then the fat would really be in the fire, because under a psych they broke you down completely, entirely, and when they did that the medicos were going to find out that Don Mathers, for some time, had been planning on desertion.

In actuality, he would have gone over the hill long since had he been able to figure out some method of swinging it. In this day of International, actually Interplanetary, Data Banks, it wasn’t the simplest thing in the world to try and disappear and take up a new identity. With Solar System wide unity, you couldn’t run to some country where they wouldn’t extradite you. And, for another thing, you simply couldn’t survive without a Universal Credit Card. Money, as known in the past, was non-existent. Everything, but everything, was bought with your credit card. When you made some money, some pseudo-dollars, it was deposited to your account in the data banks. When you bought either an item or a service, the amount was deducted.

And for still another thing, every bit of information about you since your day of birth was in the data banks, on your Dossier Complete. Hell, before your birth. They also had complete rundowns on not only your parents, but—according to your age-usually your grandparents as well.

Of course, theoretically he could take off to some remote spot, and there were few enough left in the world, and live a hermit’s life. He could become a present day Robinson Crusoe. Theoretically. But that life didn’t seem a particularly attractive prospect.

However, he was checking out an alternative. There were some areas, for instance the Amazon basin in what was formerly called Brazil, which were now being developed in an all-out manner. It was said to be chaotic there. Everything fouled up. He was investigating the possibilities of getting down there and assuming a new identity. Possible? Maybe.

But now, immediately, he had three weeks before him to supposedly recuperate from his last patrol, even though he had spent only a fraction of it in space.

He could have done his additional drinking right here in his mini-apartment. His small autobar would have supplied him with all the ersatz guzzle he could dial. But he didn’t want that. He didn’t want to be completely alone after even, only five days of patrol. He wanted people around, even though they didn’t talk to him, associate with him. He just wanted them around. As a matter of fact, he didn’t particularly want companionship, save that of Dian Keramikou. In his present state of mind. He wanted to suffer in silence.

He had lied to Harry Amanroder, in the Nuevo Mexico. He wasn’t particularly short financially. He had put his drinks on the cuff so that he could hold onto enough pseudo-dollar credit to show Dian a really big time. He had planned to take her to the Far-Out Room, located in the biggest hotel in Center City, and blow her to the finest spread possible. No whale steak, no synthetics. The real thing. From hors d’oeuvres to real fruit for dessert.

But now he planned to blow it on more guzzle.

And not in this building, either. There were several dozen bars, nightclubs and restaurants in the high-rise and he had, in his time, been in all of them. But not tonight. Tonight, he wanted to pub crawl, and preferably in the cheapest areas of town. Why, he didn’t know, but he felt like slums, or the nearest thing to them the present world had to offer.