The Science Fiction anthology. Andre Norton

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СКАЧАТЬ to take something from someone else, or who thinks someone else wants to take something from him. And even the mighty United Galaxies needs guards for expeditions to the unexplored galaxies. But they don’t like us and they don’t want us. They don’t cut off our little fingers anymore, but we have to wear our special black uniforms when we go into United territory under penalty of a quick death. Humane, of course, they just put us to sleep gently and for keeps. And they’ve got a stockpile of ionic bombs ready at all times in case we get out of hand. We don’t have ionic weapons, that’s part of the agreement and they watch us. They came close to using them down there in the frozen waste of Menelaus XII, but thirty thousand of us died without ionics. We killed each other. They liked that, even if they didn’t like what happened.

      Do you know what it means to be lost? Really lost? I’m lost, if that means I know I’ll never go back to live on Earth. But I know that Earth is still there to go back to, and I can dream of going home. Yuan Saltario and the other refugees have no home to go back to. They can’t even dream. They sat in that one ship that escaped and watched their planet turn into a lifeless ball of ice that would circle dead and frozen forever around its burned-out star. A giant tomb that carried under its thick ice their homes and their fields and their loves. And they could not even hope and dream. Or I did not think they could.

      Saltario had been with us a year when we got the contract to escort the survey mission to Nova-Maurania. A private Earth commercial mining firm looking for minerals under the frozen wastes of the dead planet. Rajay-Ben was in on the contract. We took two battalions, one from my Red Company, and one from Rajay-Ben’s Lukanian Patrol. My Sub-Commander was Pete Colenso, old Mike Colenso’s boy. It all went fine for a week or so, routine guard and patrol. The survey team wouldn’t associate with us, of course, but we were used to that. We kept our eyes open and our mouths shut. That’s our job, and we give value for money received. So we were alert and ready. But it wasn’t the attack that nearly got us this time. It was the cold of the dead planet lost in absolute zero and absolute darkness.

      Nova-Maurania was nearly 40 percent uranium, and who could resist that? A Centaurian trading unit did not resist the lure. The attack was quick and hard. A typical Lukanian Patrol attack. My Company was pinned down at the first volley from those damned smoky blasters of the Lukanians. All I could see was the same shimmering lights I had learned to know so well in the War of Survival against Lukania. Someday maybe I’ll find out how to see a Lukan, Rajay-Ben has worked with me a long time to help, but when the attack came this time all I could do was eat ice and beam a help call to Rajay-Ben. That Centaurian trading unit was a cheap outfit, they had hired only one battalion of Arjay-Ben’s Ninth Lukanian Free Patrol, and Rajay-Ben flanked them right off that planet. I got my boys on their feet and we chased Arjay’s men half way back to Salaman with Rajay-Ben laughing like a hyena the whole way.

      “Dip me in mud, Red boy, I’d give a prime contract for one gander at old Arjay-Ben’s face. He’s blowing a gasket!”

      I said, “Nice flank job.”

      Rajay-Ben laughed so hard I could see his pattern of colored light shaking like a dancing rainbow. “I took two Sub-Commanders, wait’ll I hit that bullet-head for ransom!”

      Then we stopped laughing. We had won the battle, but Arjay-Ben was a crafty old soldier and his sabotage squad had wrecked our engines and our heating units. We were stuck on a frozen planet without heat.

      Young Colenso turned white. “What do we do?”

      I said, “Beam for help and pray we don’t freeze first.”

      They had missed our small communications reactor unit. We sent out our call, and we all huddled around the small reactor. There might be enough heat out of it to let us live five hours. If we were lucky. It was the third hour when Yuan Saltario began to talk. Maybe it was the nearness of death.

      “I was twenty-two. Portario was the leader on our planet. He found the error when we had one ship ready. We had three days. No time to get the other ships ready. He said we were lucky, the other planets didn’t have even one ship ready. Not even time for United Galaxies to help. Portario chose a thousand of us to go. I was one. At first I felt very good, you know? I was really happy. Until I found out that my wife couldn’t go. Not fit enough. United Galaxies had beamed the standards to us. Funny how you don’t think about other people until something hurts you. I’d been married a year. I told them it was both of us or neither of us. I told Portario to tell United Galaxies they couldn’t break up a family and to hell with their standards. They laughed at me. Not Portario, the Council. What did they care, they would just take another man. My wife begged me to go. She cried so much I had to agree to go. I loved her too much to be able to stay and see the look on her face as we both died when she knew I could have gone. On the ship before we took off I stood at a port and looked down at her. A small girl trying to smile at me. She waved once before they led her away from the rocket. All hell was shaking the planet already, had been for months, but all I saw was a small girl waving once, just once. She’s still here, somewhere down there under the ice.”

      The cold was slowly creeping into us. It was hard to move my mouth, but I said, “She loved you, she wanted you to live.”

      “Without her, without my home, I’m as dead as the planet. I feel frozen. She’s like that dead sun out there, and I’ll circle around her until someone gets me and ends it.” Saltario seemed to be seeing something. “I’m beginning to forget what she looked like. I don’t want to forget! I can’t forget her on this planet. The way it was! It was a beautiful place, perfect! I don’t want to forget her!”

      Colenso said, “You won’t have long to remember.”

      But Colenso was wrong. My Third Battalion showed up when we had just less than an hour to live. They took us off. The Earth mining outfit haggled over the contract because the job had not been finished and I had to settle for two-third contract price. Rajay-Ben did better when he ransomed Arjay-Ben’s two Sub-Commanders. It wasn’t a bad deal and I would have been satisfied, except that something had happened to Yuan Saltario.

      Maybe it made him realize that he did not want to die after all. Or maybe it turned him space-happy and he began to dream. A dream of his own born up there in the cold of his dead planet. A dream that nearly cost me my Company.

      I did not know what that dream was until Saltario came into my office a year later. He had a job for the Company.

      “How many men?” I asked.

      “Our Company and Rajay-Ben’s Patrol,” Saltario said.

      “Full strength?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “Price?”

      “Standard, sir,” Saltario said. “The party will pay.”

      “Just a trip to your old planet?”

      “That’s all,” Saltario said. “A guard contract. The hiring party just don’t want any interference with their project.”

      “Two full Companies? Forty thousand men? They must expect to need a lot of protecting.”

      “United Galaxies opposes the project. Or they will if they get wind of it.”

      I said, “United opposes a lot of things, what’s special about this scheme?”

      Saltario hesitated, then looked at me with those flat black eyes. “Ionics.”

      It’s not a word you say, or hear, without a chill somewhere СКАЧАТЬ