Mack Reynolds: Galactic Medal of Honor

He went over to an old-fashioned autobar set in the corner, rather than built-in, and dialed himself a drink, a stein of dark beer, and returned with it. He sat down on the couch across from Don’s comfort chair.

He took a pull at the beer and said, “What in the hell were you out on the streets in this condition for?”

“I was drowning my sorrows,” Don said ungraciously. “I should thank you for coming to the rescue. How could you possibly have taken on three men, two of them armed, and run them off?”

“Nobody knows how to fight any more,” the other told him. “I make a hobby of it. I’d rather be able to knock down my enemies than drink my friends under the table. What sorrows?”

Don wondered if he felt like answering that. It was none of the big man’s business. However, he said, “My girl left me to take a job on Callisto. And my commodore’s down on me because I’ve had a series of troubles with my One Man Scout and have come in several times from patrol prematurely.”

Thor Bjornsen finished his beer and stood again. “You look like hell,” he said. “The bathroom’s over there. I’ll order some bedding from the ultra-market and well fix up that couch for you. You’ll be better in the morning. Hell, by the looks of you you couldn’t be worse.”

In the morning, Don Mathers did feel worse, but in a different way. By the time he awoke, his host had already dressed.

He stood next to the couch, with a small bottle in his hand and shook a pill from it. “Anti-Ale,” he said. “Here, take it down.”

“It’s against regulations for an officer of the damned Space Service to take the stuff,” Don told him.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I think they want you to suffer. If you suffer enough from drinking, maybe you’ll do less drinking, and they don’t like pilots, in particular, to have their reflexes slowed up with guzzle.”

Thor reached out the pill again, and a glass of water. “Tell them to get poked.”

Don downed it, choking slightly, flushed it on through with the water. He began to feel better almost immediately, as he knew he would. He had taken the sober-up before, and many a time, in spite of what he had said about regulations.

The big man eyed him carefully and said, “You don’t like the Space Service, do you?”

Don Mathers considered that for a minute before saying, “Well, no. But what can you do?”

“Get out. I did.”

Don was surprised. “Were you in space?”

“I used to work on the radio interferometers on Luna. They’re radio telescopes in which two or more antennas are connected to a single receiver. Our job was scanning space for signs of Kradens.”

“I know what they are,” Don growled. “How did you get out? That’s a hell of a job, being stuck there in those underground towns on the moon.”

“Medical discharge.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me, damn it.”

Thor looked at him. “Would you think that there’s anything wrong with me? I have a doctor friend. He can make something wrong with you, or seem to be. And he’s available.”

Don brushed it all off. He said, “I don’t have any large lump sum of pseudo-dollars to pay out. All I have is my sub-lieutenant’s pay.”

“No charge.”

Don contemplated him for a long, long moment. He was on delicate ground now, in view of his own thoughts about desertion. And he didn’t really know this man. He said carefully, “You don’t sound very patriotic, Thor. You forget the Kradens.”

Thor Bjornsen shook his head. “No I don’t. You can’t forget something that doesn’t exist.”

Don fixed his eyes on him as though the other was demented. He said and his voice was angry, “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

The other said, “I think it does. Keep quiet for a minute while we have some background.” He thought about it for a minute before saying, “I’m not contending that the Kradens didn’t once appear. Obviously, they did. Almost fifty years ago. Out of a clear sky—or, rather, out of clear space—they came. About twenty of their various sized and shaped spaceships. In spite of our radio telescopes trying to pick up intelligent broadcasts from space, and in spite of our own tight beam laser broadcasts sending out our own messages, the human race couldn’t have been more surprised if we had one and all suddenly sprouted rhinoceros horns. We were floored—momentarily.

“At the time there were four spacepowers, if we can call them powers. They were pretty much in their infancy, so far as the military in space is concerned. They were the United States of the Americas, the Soviet Complex, Common Europe and China, in that order. The Asian Alliance and India also had embryonic space warcraft but they hardly counted at the time.

“In actuality, from the first man’s explosion into space was basically a military and national prestige thing. We did a great deal of oratory about pure science and cooperation between the nations but even from the beginning spy satellites were sent up for military espionage purposes. Before long, first the United States and the Soviet Complex, and later the others, began to send up primitive military spacecraft armed with such weapons as could be designed for space combat at that time, largely missiles with nuclear warheads. Before very long, the early two or three man ships evolved into small cruisers with eight or so men aboard. Weapons became more sophisticated and we saw laser beam weapons, popularly called death rays, developed.

“We were at that stage, when the Kradens materialized. What they wanted well possibly never find out.”

“We know what they wanted,” Don protested.

Thor Bjornsen ignored him. “It was immediately assumed, the human mentality being the human mentality that they had come to conquer Earth. Why they would want to the Almighty Ultimate only knows. Perhaps they were an exploring expedition; perhaps they were a colonizing expedition looking for new worlds, which doesn’t mean, necessarily, that they would take over a suitable world by force, if it was already supporting an intelligent life form. It is to be assumed that if they had the technical ability to cross space, they would have a more sophisticated ethic than we possess. A culture does not progress technically without also progressing ethically. If it didn’t, it would probably blow itself up, as we almost did on Earth shortly after the discovery of such super-weapons as nuclear bombs.”

“Come on, come on,” Don protested. “I don’t need a lecture on ethics.”

“Very well. Each of the four Earth powers with space fleets had patrols out at all times. Of a sudden, they were no longer four space fleets but one. And as a man they thundered in on the strangers from space. I would assume that it took the extraterrestrials by shock. Suddenly they were under attack, and under attack by the equivalent of the Japanese kamikaze fighters of the Second World War. Perhaps the Kradens attempted to defend themselves, but we aren’t even sure of that. We don’t really know if they were armed, and some strange tales and rumors have drifted down to us.”

Don said indignantly, “Are you completely drivel-happy? They destroyed more than twenty of our spacecraft!”

The other looked at him thoughtfully. “I can’t prove it, but I’ve often wondered whether our spacecraft didn’t shoot each other down, or blow each other up, by mistake. Please remember that though they thought themselves fighting a common foe, they weren’t coordinated. They entered the fight as four different space forces. Many couldn’t even speak the languages of the other Earth craft involved. All was confusion, everyone shooting every which way. As we know, several, at least, of the extraterrestrials were destroyed. The rest disappeared from whence they came, it is to be supposed, in a burst of speed beyond our own ships.”