Гордон Диксон - Soldier, Ask Not

“Come on in,” he said. “Let me fix you up with a drink. Janol,” he added to my mercenary Commandant from New Earth, “no need for you to stick around. Go on to chow. And tell the rest of them in the outer office to knock off.”

Janol saluted and went. I sat down as Graeme turned to a small bar cabinet behind his desk. And for the first time in three years, under the magic of the unusual fighting man opposite me, a little peace came into my soul. With someone like this on my side, I could not lose.

“Credentials ?” asked Graeme as soon as we were settled with drinks of Dorsai whisky—which is a fine whisky—in our hands.

I passed my papers over. He glanced through them, picking out the letters from Sayona, the Bond of Kultis, to “Commander—St. Marie Field Forces.” He looked these over and put them aside. He handed me back the Credentials folder.

“You stopped at Joseph’s Town first?” he said.

I nodded. I saw him looking at my face, and his own sobered.

“You don’t like the Friendlies,” he said.

His words took my breath away. I had come prepared to fence for an opening to tell him. It was too sudden. I looked away.

I did not dare answer right away. I could not. There was either too much or too little to say if I let it come out without thinking. Then I got a grip on myself.

“If I do anything at all with the rest of my life,” I said, slowly, “it’ll be to do everything in my power to remove the Friendlies and all they stand for from the community of civilized human beings.”

I looked back up at him. He was sitting with one massive elbow on his desktop, watching me.

“That’s a pretty harsh point of view, isn’t it?”

“No harsher than theirs.”

“Do you think so?” he said seriously. “I wouldn’t say so.”

“I thought,” I said, “you were the one who was fighting them.”

“Why, yes.” He smiled a little. “But we’re soldiers on both sides.”

“I don’t think they think that way.”

He shook his head a little.

“What makes you say that?” he said.

“I’ve seen them,” I answered. “I got caught up front in the lines near Dhores on New Earth, three years ago. You remember that conflict.” I tapped my stiff knee. “I got shot and I couldn’t navigate. The Cassidans around me began to retreat—they were mercenaries, and the troops opposing them were Friendlies hired out as mercenaries.”

I stopped and took a drink of the whisky. When I took the glass away, Graeme had not moved. He sat as if waiting.

“There was a young Cassidan, a buck soldier,” I said. “I was doing a series on the campaign from an individual point of view. I’d picked him for my individual. It was a natural choice. You see”—I drank again, and emptied the glass—“my younger sister went out on contract as an accountant to Cassida five years before that, and she’d married him. He was my brother-in-law.”

Graeme took the glass from my hand and silently replenished it.

“He wasn’t actually a military man,” I said. “He was studying shift mechanics and he had about three years to go. But he stood low on one of the competitive examinations at a time when Cassida owed a contractual balance of troops to New Earth.” I took a deep breath. “Well, to make a long story short, he ended up on New Earth in this same campaign I was covering. Because of the series I was writing, I got him assigned to me. We both thought it was a good deal for him, that he’d be safer that way.”

I drank some more of the whisky.

“But,” I said, “you know, there’s always a better story a little deeper in the combat zone. We got caught up front one day when the Cassidan troops were retreating. I picked up a needle through the kneecap. The Friendly armor was moving up and things were getting hot. The soldiers around us took off toward the rear in a hurry, but Dave tried to carry me, because he thought the Friendly armor would fry me before they had time to notice I was a non-combatant. Well”—I took another deep breath—“the Friendly ground troops caught us. They took us to a sort of clearing where they had a lot of prisoners and kept us there for a while. Then a Groupman—one of their fanatic types, a tall, starved-looking soldier about my age—came up with orders they were to reform for a fresh attack.”

I stopped and took another drink. But I could not taste it.

“That meant they couldn’t spare men to guard the prisoners. They’d have to turn them loose back of the Friendly lines. The Groupman said that wouldn’t work. They’d have to make sure the prisoners couldn’t endanger them.”

Graeme was still watching me.

“I didn’t understand. I didn’t even catch on when the other Friendlies—none of them were noncoms like the Groupman—objected.” I put my glass on the desk beside me and stared at the wall of the office, seeing it all over again, as plainly as if I looked through a window at it. “I remember how the Groupman pulled himself up straight. I saw his eyes. As if he’d been insulted by the others’ objecting.

“Are they Chosen of God?’ he shouted at them. ‘Are they of the Chosen?”

I looked across at Kensie Graeme and saw him still motionless, still watching me, his own glass small in one big hand.

“You understand?” I said to him. “As if because the prisoners weren’t Friendlies, they weren’t quite human. As if they were some lower order it was all right to kill.” I shook suddenly. “And he did it! I sat there against a tree, safe because of my News Correspondent’s uniform, and watched him shoot them down. All of them. I sat there and looked at Dave, and he looked at me, sitting there, as the Groupman shot him!”

I quit all at once. I hadn’t meant to have it all come out like that. It was just that I’d been able to tell no one who would understand how helpless I had been. But something about Graeme had given me the idea he would understand.

“Yes,” he said after a moment, and took and filled my glass again. “That sort of thing’s very bad. Was the Groupman found and tried under the Mercenaries’ Code?”

“After it was too late, yes.”

He nodded and looked past me at the wall. “They aren’t all like that, of course.”

“There’s enough to give them a reputation for it.”

“Unfortunately, yes. Well”—he smiled slightly at me—” we’ll try and keep that sort of thing out of this campaign.”

“Tell me something,” I said, putting my glass down. “Does that sort of thing—as you put it—ever happen to the Friendlies themselves?”

Something took place then in the atmosphere of the room. There was a little pause before he answered. I felt my heart beat slowly, three times, as I waited for him to speak.

He said at last, “No, it doesn’t.”

“Why not?” I said.

The feeling in the room became stronger. And I realized I had gone too fast. I had been sitting talking to him as a man and forgetting what else he was. Now I began to forget that he was a man and became conscious of him as a Dorsai—an individual as human as I was, but trained all his life, and bred down the generations to a diiference. He did not move or change the tone of his voice, or any such thing; but somehow he seemed to move off some distance from me, up into a higher, colder, stonier land into which I could venture only at my peril.

I remembered what was said about his people from that small, cold, stony-mountained world: that if the Dorsai chose to withdraw their fighting men from the services of all the other worlds, and challenge those other worlds, not the combined might of the rest of civilization could stand against them. I had never really believed that before. I had never even really thought much about it. But sitting there just then, because of what was happening in the room, suddenly it became real to me. I could feel the knowledge, cold as a wind blowing on me off a glacier, that it was true; and then he answered my question.