Гордон Диксон - Soldier, Ask Not

We had run across a vibration mine. Of course the air-car, like any vehicle designed for use around battlefields, had sensor rods projecting out of it at odd angles; and one of these had set off the mine while we were still a dozen feet from it. But still the air-car now had a tangle of junk for a front end, and the instrument panel was pretty well wrecked by my head; so much so that it was surprising I had not even a cut on my forehead to show for it, though a rather considerable bruise was already rising there.

“I’m all right— I’m all right! ” I said irritably to Dave. And then I swore at the air-car for a few minutes to relieve my feelings.

“What do we do now?” asked Dave when I was finished.

“Head for the Friendly lines on foot. They’re the closest!” I growled. The warning of the Force-Leader came back to my mind, and I swore again. Then, because I had to take it out on somebody, I snapped at Dave. “We’re still out here to get a newsstory, remember?”

I turned and stalked away in the direction the air-car had been headed. There were probably other vibration mines around, but walking on foot, I would not have the weight or disturbance to spring them. After a moment Dave caught up with me and we walked along in silence together over the mosslike groundcover, between the enormous tree trunks, until glancing back, I saw that the air-car was out of sight behind us.

It was only then, when it was too late, that it occurred to me that I had forgotten to check my wrist director with the direction indicator in the air-car. I glanced at the director on my wrist now. It seemed to indicate the Friendly lines as just ahead. If it had kept correlation with the direction indicator in the air-car, all was well. If not—among these huge pillars of tree trunks, on this soft, unending, mossy carpet, every direction looked alike. Turning back to search for the air-car to correct the correlation could make us lost in a real sense.

Well, there was nothing to be done about it now. The important thing was to keep on in a straight line forward through the dimness and silence of the forest. I locked the wrist director to our present line of march and hoped for the best. We kept on—toward the Friendly battle line, I hoped, wherever that might be.

I had seen enough of this part of the territory from the air-car to be fairly sure that whatever was going on, either in the movement of Friendly or Cassidan forces, was not taking place in the open. So we stuck to the trees, moving from one grove to another.

Necessarily, this meant that we were not able to go straight in the direction the patrol’s Force-Leader had pointed, but zigzagged to it as the wooded cover permitted. It was slow going, on foot.

By noon, disgusted, I sat down with Dave to eat the cold lunch we had packed along. By noon we had seen no one since the Cassidan patrol earlier, heard nothing, discovered nothing. We had moved forward from the point where we left the air-car only about three kilometers, but because of the arrangement of the wooded patches, we had angled south about five kilometers.

“Maybe they’ve gone home—the Friendlies, I mean,” suggested Dave.

He was joking, with a grin on his face that I saw as I jerked up my head from my sandwich to stare at him. I managed a grin in return, feeling I owed him at least that. The truth of the matter was that he had been an unusually good assistant, keeping his mouth shut and avoiding the making of suggestions born in ignorance not only of warfare but of Newswork.—

“No,” I said, “something’s up—but I was an idiot to let myself get separated from that air-car. We just can’t cover enough territory on foot. The Friendlies have pulled back for some reason, at least at this end of the front. Probably it was to draw the Cassidan levies in after them, would be my guess. But why we haven’t seen black uniforms counterattacking before now—”

“Listen!” said Dave.

He had turned his head and held up his hand to stop me talking. I broke off and listened. Sure enough, at some distance off, I heard a wump , a muffled, innocuous sound like a blanket snapping, as if it were being shaken out by an energetic housewife.

“Sonics!” I said, scrambling to my feet and leaving the rest of our picnic lunch lying. “By God, they’re starting to get some action on after all! Let’s see.” I pivoted, trying to aim myself at the direction the noise had come from. “That sounded about a couple of hundred meters off, and over to our right—”

I never finished speaking. Suddenly, Dave and I were caught in the heart of a thunderclap. I found myself lying on the moss without remembering how I had got there. Five feet away, Dave was lying sprawled out; and less than forty feet away was a shallow, scooped area of torn-up earth, surrounded by trees that appeared to have exploded from internal pressure, with the white wood of their insides showing splintered and spread.

“Dave!” I got to him, and turned him over. He was breathing, and, as I watched, his eyes opened. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was bleeding from the nose. At the sight of his blood I became conscious of a wetness of my own upper lip, a salt taste in my mouth, and, putting up my hand, felt the blood dripping from my own nose.

I wiped it away with one hand. With the other hand, I pulled Dave to his feet.

“Barrage!” I said. “Come on, Dave! We’ve got to get out of here.” For the first time, the reaction of Eileen if I should fail to bring him safely home to her presented itself to my mind in vivid image. I had been sure of the protection .my skilled mind and tongue could provide for Dave between the battle lines. But you cannot argue with a sonic cannon, firing from five to fifty kilometers away.

He made it to his feet. He had been closer to the “burst” of the sonic capsule than I had, but luckily the effective zone of a sonic explosion is bell-shaped, with the wide mouth of the bell-area downward. So we had both been in the rim-part of that sudden imbalance of internal and external pressures. He was only a little more dazed than I was. And shortly, recovering somewhat as we went, we were both legging it away from the area, back at an angle toward where figuring from my wrist director indicated the Cassidan lines should be.

We stopped, finally, out of breath, and sat down for a moment, panting. We could hear the wump , wump of the barrage bursts continuing, some little distance behind us.

“—’s all right,” I panted to Dave. “They’ll lift the barrage and send in troops before they follow up with armor. Troops we can talk sense to. With sonic cannon and armored vehicles we’d never have a chance. Might as well sit here and pull ourselves together, then strike sideways along the lines to join up with either a Cassidan force, or the first wave of Friendlies—whichever we run into first.”

I saw him looking at me with an expression I could not fathom at first. Then, to my astonishment, I recognized it as admiration.

“You saved my life back there,” he said.

“Saved your—” I broke off. “Look, Dave, I’m the last man to turn down credit when credit is due. But that sonic only knocked you out for a second.”

“But you knew what to do when we came to,” he said. * ‘And you didn’t just think of doing it for yourself. You waited to get me on my feet and help me get out of there, too.”

I shook my head, and let it go at that. If he had accused me instead of deliberately trying to save myself first, I would not have thought it worth the trouble to change his mind. So, since he had chosen to go the other way in his opinion, why should I bother to change that, either? If he liked to consider me a selfless-minded hero, let him.