Гордон Диксон - Soldier, Ask Not

So it was with Mark Torre. In his case, the muscle had largely wasted away through long illness and lack of use, but the width and length of bone showed the physical strength that he must have had as a young man. There were other people in the room, several of them physicians; but they made way for us as Lisa brought me up to the bedside.

She bent and spoke softly to him.

“Mark,” she said. “Mark!”

For several seconds I did not think he would answer. I remember even thinking that perhaps he was already dead. But then the sunken eyes opened, wandered, and focused on Lisa.

“Tam’s here, Mark,” she said. She moved aside to let me get closer to the bed, and looked over her shoulder at me. “Bend down, Tam. Get close to him,” she said.

I moved in, and I bent down. His eyes gazed at me. I was not sure whether he recognized me or not; but then his lips moved and I heard the ghost of a whisper, rattling deep in the wasted cavern of his once-broad chest.

“Tam—”

“Yes,” I said. I found I had taken hold of one of his hands with one of mine. I did not know why. The long bones were cool and strengthless in my grasp.

“Son …” he whispered, so faintly that I could hardly hear him. But at the same time, all in a flash, without moving a muscle, I went rigid and cold, cold as if I had been dipped in ice, with a sudden, terrible fury.

How dare he? How dare he call me “son”? I’d given him no leave, or right or encouragement to do that to me—me, whom he hardly knew. Me, who had nothing in common with him, or his work, or anything he stood for. How dare he call me “ son “!

But he was still whispering. He had two more words to add to that terrible, that unfair, word by which he had addressed me.

“… take over… .”

And then his eyes closed, and his lips stopped moving, though the slow, slow stir of his chest showed that he still lived. I dropped his hand and turned and rushed out of the bedroom. I found myself in the office; and there I stopped in spite of myself, bewildered, for the doorway out, of course, was still camouflaged and hidden.

Lisa caught up with me there.

“Tam?” She put a hand on my arm and made me look at her. Her face told me she had heard him and that she was asking me now what I was going to do. I started to burst out that I was going to do no such thing as the old man had said, that I owed him nothing, and her nothing. Why, it had not even been a question he had put to me! He had not even asked me—he had told me to take over.

But no words came out of me. My mouth was open, but I could not seem to speak. I think I must have panted like a cornered wolf. And then the phone chimed on Mark’s desk to break the spell that held us.

She was standing beside the desk; automatically her hand went out to the phone and turned it on, though she did not look down at the face which formed in the screen.

“Hello?” said a tiny voice from the instrument. “Hello? Is anyone there? I’d like to speak to Newsman Tam Olyn, if he’s there. It’s urgent. Hello? Is anyone there?”

It was the voice of Piers Leaf. I tore my gaze away from Lisa and bent down to the set.

“Oh, there you are, Tam,” said Piers out of the screen. “Look, I don’t want you to waste time covering the Torre assassination. We’ve got plenty of good men here to do that. I think you ought to get to St. Marie right away.” He paused, looking at me significantly in the screen. “You understand? That information I was waiting for has just come in. I was right, an order’s been issued.”

Suddenly it was back again, washing out everything that had laid its hold upon me in the past few minutes—my long-sought plan and hunger for revenge. Like a great wave, it broke over me once more, washing away all the claims of Mark Torre and Lisa that had clung to me just now, threatening to trap me in this place.

“No further shipments?” I said sharply. “That’s what the order said? No more coming?”

He nodded.

“And I think you ought to leave now because the forecast calls for a weather break within the week there,” he said. “Tam, do you think—”

“I’m on my way,” I interrupted. “Have my papers and equipment waiting for me at the spaceport.”

I clicked off and turned to face Lisa once more. She gazed at me with eyes that shook me like a blow; but I was too strong for her now, and I thrust off their effect.

“How do I get out of here?” I demanded. “I’ve got to leave. Now!”

“Tam!” she cried.

“I’ve got to go, I tell you!” I thrust past her. “Where’s that door out of here? Where—”

She slipped past me as I was pawing at the walls of the room and touched something. The door opened to my right; and I turned swiftly into it.

“Tam!”

Her voice stopped me for a final time. I checked and looked back over my shoulder at her.

“You’re coming back,” she said. It was not a question. She said it the way he, Mark Torre, had said it. She was not asking me; she was telling me; and for a last time it shook me once more to my deepest depths.

But then the dark and mounting power, that wave which was my longing for my revenge, tore me loose again and sent me hurtling on, through the doorway into the farther room.

“I’ll be back,” I assured her.

It was an easy, simple lie. Then the door I had come through closed behind me and the whole room moved about me, carrying me away.

As I got off the spaceliner on Ste, Marie, the little breeze from the higher pressure of the ship’s atmosphere at my back was like a hand from the darkness behind me, shoving me into the dark day and the rain. My Newsman’s cloak covered me. The wet chill of the day wrapped around me but did not enter me. I was like the naked claymore of my dream, wrapped and hidden in the plaid, sharpened on a stone, and carried now at last to the meeting for which it had been guarded over three years of waiting.

A meeting in the cold rain of spring. I felt it cold as old blood on my hands and tasteless on my lips. Above, the sky was low and clouds were flowing to the east. The rain fell steadily.

The sound of it was like a rolling of drums as I went down the outside landing stairs, the multitude of raindrops sounding their own end against the unyielding concrete all around. The concrete stretched far from the ship in every direction, hiding the earth, as bare and clean as the last page of an account book before the final entry. At its far edge, the spaceport terminal stood like a single gravestone. The curtains of falling water between it and me thinned and thickened like the smoke of battle, but could not hide it entirely from my sight.

It was the same rain that falls in all places and on all worlds. It had fallen like this on Athens on the dark, unhappy house of Mathias, and on the ruins of the Parthenon as I saw it from my bedroom vision screen.

I listened to it now as I went down the landing stairs, drumming on the great ship behind me which had shifted me free between the stars—from Old Earth to this second smallest of the worlds, this small terraformed planet under the Procyon suns—and drumming hollowly upon the Credentials case sliding down the conveyor belt beside me. That case now meant nothing to me—neither my papers nor the Credentials of Impartiality I had carried four years now and worked so hard to earn. Now I thought less of these than of the name of the man I should find dispatching groundcars at the edge of the field. If, that is, he was actually the man my Earth informants had named to me. And if they had not lied.

“Your luggage, sir?”

I woke from my thoughts and the rain. I had reached the concrete. The debarking officer smiled at me. He was older man I, though he looked younger. As he smiled, some beads of moisture broke and spilled like tears from the brown visor-edge of his cap onto the tally sheet he held.