Альфред Бестер: Star of Stars [Anthology]

"Yes, sir, a little bit here and there," he said, chuckling. "Yeahp, I've taken plenty in my time."

"So I should think, Corporal. The first time I saw you I was under the impression that you'd got caught up in some machinery, or something of the sort."

"What do you mean, machinery?"

"Oh, no offense, Corporal, but those wounds on your head and face and neck haven't the appearance of wounds such as you might get from any weapon of modern warfare…"

"Who said they were?" said Corporal Cuckoo, roughly. Then he filled his lungs with air, and blew out a great breath which ended in an exclamation: "Phoo-wow! What was that stuff you gave me to drink?"

"Good Scotch. Why?"

"It's good all right. I didn't ought to drink it. I've laid off the hard stuff for God knows how many years. It goes to my head. I didn't ought to touch it."

"Nobody asked you to empty a twelve-ounce ginger-ale bottle full of Scotch in two drinks," I said resentfully.

"I'm sorry, mister. When we get to New York, I'll buy you a whole bottle, if you like," said Corporal Cuckoo, squinting as if his eyes hurt and running his fingers along the awful crevasse of that scar in his head.

I said, "That was a nasty one you got, up there."

"What? This?" he said, carelessly striking the scar with the flat of a hard hand. "This? Nasty one? I'll say it was a nasty one. Why, some of my brains came out. And look here—" He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled up his undershirt with his left hand, while he opened and lit a battered Zippo with his right. "Take a look at that."

I cried out in astonishment. I had never seen a living body so incredibly mauled and mutilated. In the vacillat­ing light of the flame I saw black shadows bobbing and weaving in a sort of blasted wilderness of crags, chasms, canyons and pits. His torso was like a place laid waste by the wrath of God—burst asunder from below, scorched from above, shattered by thunderbolts, crushed by landslides, ravaged by hurricanes. Most of his ribs, on the left-hand side, must have been smashed into fragments no bigger than the last joint of a finger by some tremen­dously heavy object. The bones, miraculously, had knit to­gether again, so that there was a circle of hard, bony knobs rimming a deep indentation; in that light it reminded me of one of the dead volcanoes on the moon. Just under the sternum there was a dark hole, nearly three inches long, about half an inch wide, and hideously deep. I have seen such scars in the big muscles of a man's thigh—but never in the region of the breastbone. "Good God, man, you must have been torn in two and put together again!" I said. Corporal Cuckoo merely laughed, and held his lighter so that I could see his body from stomach to hips. Between the strong muscles, just under the liver, there was an old scar into which, old and healed though it was, you might have laid three fingers. Cutting across this, another scar, more than half as deep but more than twelve inches long, curved away downward toward the groin on the left. Another appalling scar came up from somewhere below the buckle of his belt and ended in a deep triangular hole in the region of the diaphragm. And there were other scars—but the lighter went out, and Corporal Cuckoo buttoned up his shirt.

"Is that something?" he asked.

"Is that something!" I cried. "Why, good God, I'm no medical man, but I can see that the least of those wounds you've got down there ought to be enough to kill any man. How do you manage to be alive, Cuckoo? How is it possible?"

"You think you've seen something? Listen, you've seen nothing till you see my back. But never mind about that now."

"Tell me," I said, "how the devil did you come by all that? They're old scars. You couldn't have got them in this war—“

He slid down the knot of his tie, unbuttoned his collar, pulled his shirt aside, and said, dispassionately, "No. Look—this is all I got this time." He pointed noncha­lantly to his throat. I counted five bullet scars in a cluster, spaced like the fingertips of a half-opened hand, at the base of the throat. "Light machine-gun," he said.

"But this is impossible!" I said, while he readjusted his tie. "That little packet there must have cut one or two big arteries and smashed your spine to smithereens."

"Sure it did," said Corporal Cuckoo.

"And how old did you say you were?" I asked. Corporal Cuckoo replied, "Round about four hundred and thirty-eight."

"Thirty-eight?"

"I said four hundred and thirty-eight."

The man is mad, I thought. "Born 1907?" I asked.

"1507," said Corporal Cuckoo, fingering the dent in his skull. Then he went on, half-dreamily. (How am I to describe his manner? It was repulsively compounded of thick stupidity, low cunning, anxiety, suspicion and sordid cal­culation—it made me remember a certain peasant who tried to sell me an American wristwatch near Saint Jacques in 1944. But Corporal Cuckoo talked American, at first leering at me in the dim light, and feeling his shirt as if to assure himself that all his scars were safely buttoned away.) He said, slowly, "Look . . . I'll give you the outline. It's no use you trying to sell the outline, see? You're a newspaperman. Though you might know what the whole story would be worth, there's no use you trying to sell what I'm giving you now, because you haven't got a hope in hell. But I've got to get back to work, see? I want some dough."

I said, "For roses, chickens, bees and turpentine?"

He hesitated, and then said, "Well, yes," and rubbed his head again.

"Does it bother you?" I asked.

"Not if I don't touch that stuff you gave me," he replied, dreamily resentful.

"Where did you get that scar?" I asked.

"Battle of Turin," he said.

"I don't remember any Battle of Turin, Corporal Cuckoo. When was that?"

"Why, the Battle of Turin. I got this in the Pass of Suze."

"You were wounded in the Pass of Suze at the Battle of Turin, is that right? When was that?" I asked. "In 1536 or 1537. King Francois sent us up against the Marquess de Guast. The enemy was holding the pass, but we broke through. That was my first smell of gunpowder."

"You were there of course, Corporal Cuckoo?"

"Sure I was there. But I wasn't a corporal then, and my name was not Cuckoo. They called me Lecocu. My real name was Lecoq. I came from Yvetot. I used to work for a man who made linen—Nicolas, the—"

Two or three minutes passed, while the corporal told me what he thought of Nicolas. Then, having come down curse by curse out of a red cloud of passion, he con­tinued: "... To cut it short, Denise ran off, and all the kids in the town were singing:

Lecoq, lecoq, lecoq,

Lecoq, lecoq, lecocu.

I got the hell out of it and joined the army.... I'm not giving you anything you can make anything of, see? This is the layout, see? . . . Okay. I was about thirty, then, and in pretty good shape. Well, so when King Francois sent us to Turin—Monsieur de Montagan was Colonel-General of Infantry—my Commander, Captain Le Rat, led us up a hill to a position, and we sure had a hot five minutes! It was anybody's battle until the rest cut through, and then we advanced, and I got this."

The Corporal touched his head. I asked, "How?"

"From a halberdier. You know what a halberd is, don't you? It's sort of heavy ax on the end of a ten-foot pole. You can split a man down to the waist with a halberd, if you know how to handle it. See? If it had landed straight well, I guess I wouldn't be here right now. But I saw it coming, see, and I ducked, and just as I ducked my foot slipped in some blood, and I fell sideways. But all the same that halberdier got me. Right here, just where the scar is. See? Then everything went sort of black-and-white, and black, and I passed out. But I wasn't dead, see? I woke up, and there was the army doctor, with a cheap steel breast-plate on—no helmet—soaked with blood up to the elbows. Our blood, you can bet your life—you know what medical officers are?"