Galactic Medal of Honor

II

By evening he was drenched, as the expression went these days. When Harry had closed the Nuevo Mexico at two o’clock, in memory of Colin Casey, Don Mathers had summoned a hovercab and dialed the hi-rise apartment house where he quartered himself in Center City.

He took one of the vacuum elevators up to the 45th floor and staggered to his mini-apartment. A mini-apartment was all he could afford on his sublieutenant’s pay. In fact, he shouldn’t have afforded that. He could have stayed considerably cheaper, living in bachelor’s quarters on the base. But in the last year he had become so fed up with the Space Service that he preferred to stay away from any contact whenever he could. Besides, he’d had high hopes of Dian capitulating to him, with or without marriage, and wanted a place to be able to bring her.

She was a strange one, he had long since decided, when it came to sex matters. So far as he knew, she was a virgin, in an age where it was no longer considered necessary or even very sensible to remain one after your mid-teens; though of recent date there had been somewhat of a swing of the pendulum in that regard, a newly swelling Victorianism, a return to the old virtues. Don Mathers supposed that it was a result of the Kraden threat and the possibility of human annihilation. The Universal Reformed Church was said to be growing in all but a geometric progression.

His identity screen picked him up, upon his approach, and the door automatically opened.

He entered the apartment and looked about distastefully. Wasn’t it bad enough spending weeks at a time in a One Man Scout to have to return to quarters as small as this automated mini-apartment? Functional it might be, attractive it was not. A living room-cum-bedroom-cum study. A so-called kitchenette with small dining alcove; so-called because he never utilized it for more than making coffee. A small bath. Most of the furniture built in, very neatly, very efficiently.

He stripped off his uniform and hung it in the closet and brought forth civilian garb and redressed. The SPs, the Space Police, took a dim view of any spaceman, even an officer pilot, being seen in public intoxicated, and Don Mathers was already drenched and had every intention of getting more so. Everything and its cousin was going wrong. Dian was leaving tomorrow for the ridiculous job on the Jupiter satellite, Callisto. He was on the commodore’s S-list and most likely would be on it in capital letters shortly, because the fact of the matter was he was rapidly getting to the point where he couldn’t bear the space patrols. Sooner or later, Bernklau was going to insist on a psych on him. Then the fat would really be in the fire, because under a psych they broke you down completely, entirely, and when they did that the medicos were going to find out that Don Mathers, for some time, had been planning on desertion.

In actuality, he would have gone over the hill long since had he been able to figure out some method of swinging it. In this day of International, actually Interplanetary, Data Banks, it wasn’t the simplest thing in the world to try and disappear and take up a new identity. With Solar System wide unity, you couldn’t run to some country where they wouldn’t extradite you. And, for another thing, you simply couldn’t survive without a Universal Credit Card. Money, as known in the past, was non-existent. Everything, but everything, was bought with your credit card. When you made some money, some pseudo-dollars, it was deposited to your account in the data banks. When you bought either an item or a service, the amount was deducted.

And for still another thing, every bit of information about you since your day of birth was in the data banks, on your Dossier Complete. Hell, before your birth. They also had complete rundowns on not only your parents, but—according to your age-usually your grandparents as well.

Of course, theoretically he could take off to some remote spot, and there were few enough left in the world, and live a hermit’s life. He could become a present day Robinson Crusoe. Theoretically. But that life didn’t seem a particularly attractive prospect.

However, he was checking out an alternative. There were some areas, for instance the Amazon basin in what was formerly called Brazil, which were now being developed in an all-out manner. It was said to be chaotic there. Everything fouled up. He was investigating the possibilities of getting down there and assuming a new identity. Possible? Maybe.

But now, immediately, he had three weeks before him to supposedly recuperate from his last patrol, even though he had spent only a fraction of it in space.

He could have done his additional drinking right here in his mini-apartment. His small autobar would have supplied him with all the ersatz guzzle he could dial. But he didn’t want that. He didn’t want to be completely alone after even, only five days of patrol. He wanted people around, even though they didn’t talk to him, associate with him. He just wanted them around. As a matter of fact, he didn’t particularly want companionship, save that of Dian Keramikou. In his present state of mind. He wanted to suffer in silence.

He had lied to Harry Amanroder, in the Nuevo Mexico. He wasn’t particularly short financially. He had put his drinks on the cuff so that he could hold onto enough pseudo-dollar credit to show Dian a really big time. He had planned to take her to the Far-Out Room, located in the biggest hotel in Center City, and blow her to the finest spread possible. No whale steak, no synthetics. The real thing. From hors d’oeuvres to real fruit for dessert.

But now he planned to blow it on more guzzle.

And not in this building, either. There were several dozen bars, nightclubs and restaurants in the high-rise and he had, in his time, been in all of them. But not tonight. Tonight, he wanted to pub crawl, and preferably in the cheapest areas of town. Why, he didn’t know, but he felt like slums, or the nearest thing to them the present world had to offer.

One automated bar faded into another. He seldom had more than one drink in any of them. He would sprawl at an empty table, put his Universal Credit Card in the payment slot and dial a tequila, or whatever. By this time he was mixing his drinks and feeling them to the point where he usually had to close one eye to be able to dial.

It was well into the night when the fog rolled out of his brain and he realized that he was zig-zag-ging down the street without remembering the last bar he had been in. He tried to concentrate. Had it been that one where the garish looking girl, or rather woman, had tried to pick him up? The place with the overly loud, harsh canned music and the overly loud, harsh crowd of drunks? He couldn’t remember. He had blacked out, somewhere along the line. He was going to have to get to a metro station and take the vacuum tube back to his apartment house. If he passed out on the street and was thrown in the drunk Nick, they’d turn him over to the Space Police when they learned his identity and then he would be in trouble.

And suddenly he was confronted by three men in the uniforms of Space Platform privates. In the Space Service those who manned the heavily armed Space Platforms which orbited not only Earth but Luna, Mars and the colonized satellites as well, were the low men on the totem pole. Of all the elements in the service, theirs was the least glamorous, the most undesirable. In a way, the platforms were something Like the Foreign Legion forts in the Sahara, a couple of centuries earlier. The space cafard incidence was high, particularly in view of the fact that a tour of duty lasted six months. Six months confined to a Space Platform! Most spacemen shuddered at the idea.

But now, here were three of them. And they stood there, blocking the way of Don Mathers. They averaged about his own build and they, too, were somewhat drenched, though not nearly as far gone as Don.

Two of them carried what appeared to be improvised truncheons, the other, the largest of them, had his fists balled.

“What the hell do you want?” Don slurred.

“Everything you’ve got, you funker,” the largest one growled lowly. “Hand it over, or we take it the hard way for you.”

Don tried to rally himself. He said in a belligerent slur, “Look, you three, I’m a One Man Scout pilot, and officer. If you don’t clear out, I’ll summon the SP and it’ll be your ass.”

One of the others grinned nastily. “You reach for your transceiver, sir, and I’ll bat you over the head with this.”

Don Mathers wavered on his feet. Three of them, damn it, and he was drenched to the gills. He backed up against the wall of the building he had been walking along at their approach. He realized that if he’d had good sense he would do what they demanded. Precious little he had on him anyway, and most of it personal rather than being of much value; his transceiver, his class ring, his wrist chronometer, a gold stylo Dian had given him for his birthday a year ago when she still thought she was in love with him. It was the stylo that decided him; he didn’t want to give it up.

He put up his hands in a drunken effort to defend himself.

It wasn’t actually an age of personal physical violence. Don Mathers couldn’t remember having hit anybody since childhood, and early childhood at that. Pugilism was no longer practiced as a sport, nor was wrestling, not to speak of judo or karate. Even football, basketball and hockey had been so modified as to minimize the danger of any of the contestants being hurt. Bullfighting and even auto racing were unknown. Men didn’t kill each other, or get themselves killed in sports… when the Kradens were out there. Oh, he’d had some hand to hand combat while in cadet training, but not as it had been in the old days.

The three of them moved in on him carefully, and spaced out so that he couldn’t face them all at once. They were going to be able to do whatever they wanted with him.

Suddenly, one reached out with his truncheon and whacked Don across the belly, hard.

Don’s face went white. He brought his hands down over his guts and doubled forward. He vomited onto the sidewalk, the contents of his stomach burning acid and alcohol as it spewed out of his mouth. Even in his agony, his mind was clear enough to anticipate another blow of the club on his head momentarily. There was nothing that he could do about it.

But it was then that Thor Bjornsen exploded onto the scene. Where he came from none of the four participants in the drama ever comprehended. It was as though magically a giant had materialized in their midst. A berserk giant. And, in spite of his size, a veritable flurry of movement.

Don Mathers, still in agony, never did quite comprehend the next few minutes—if it lasted that long. Blows were struck and received, most of them going one way—from the giant out. In a moment, two men were down on the sidewalk, one sitting and looking startled, one sprawled flat.

And the next thing Don knew, the giant was chasing his three attackers down the street, one of the truncheons in hand and whacking them unmercifully on their buttocks as they went.

He returned shortly, chuckling. He cut off the laughter when he saw Don sitting on the curb and said, “Are you all right?”

“No,” Don said. “I’m sick.”

“You smell drenched.”

“I am… or was.”

The other peered down at him, quizzically. He said finally, “Well, whether or not, you’re in no shape to be getting yourself home. My apartment’s nearby. Come on over there. You can sleep on the couch. By morning, you should be able to hold down an Anti-Ale. I’ve got some. I too, in my time, have been drenched.”

He helped Don to his feet, and, still holding him by one arm led him along.

The big man said, “What did those three want?”

“They said they wanted everything I had.”

Thor Bjornsen grunted. “You’re fairly well dressed. They probably figured they could hock your things for enough pseudo-dollar credits to buy a few drinks. It’s a queer world we’re living in. For half a century we’ve been at peace, but preparing for war. We’re in continual training for conflict that doesn’t come. Violence is in the air and can’t be sublimated with real violence against an enemy. So it sometimes comes out in some type of manufactured real violence, in short, masochism. Those three that jumped you didn’t really need what little credits they would have realized. What they really wanted was the fun of working you over.”

The other’s apartment was in one of the older of Center City’s buildings, rather than in one of the new hi-rises. And, being of an earlier era, the apartments were larger. Although a single, the place must have been twice the size of Don’s mini-apartment. And it was considerably more comfortably furnished and decorated, for that matter.

His rescuer got Don into a chair and looked down at him, fists resting on his hips.

He said, “Can I get you anything?”

“No. I’ll be all right in a minute or so.” But Don doubted it!

“You don’t think you could hold anything, any food, on your stomach?”

“Almighty Ultimate, no.”

The other said, “My name’s Thor Bjornsen.”

Don looked up at him. “You look like Thor. I’m Sub-lieutenant Donal Mathers.”

“Space Forces?”

“Pilot of a One Man Scout.”

“Oh? I don’t envy you that job.”

Thor Bjornsen lived up to the first impression he had made on both Don and his attackers. He was a giant of a man in the Viking way. Red of hair, square of face, light blue of eye, graceful of carriage in spite of his brawn. Neither of them would have known, but physically he was a Norse version of the Joe Louis of an earlier time. In age he must have been roughly the same as Don Mathers, but his face had a boyish quality that made him seem more youthful.

He went over to an old-fashioned autobar set in the corner, rather than built-in, and dialed himself a drink, a stein of dark beer, and returned with it. He sat down on the couch across from Don’s comfort chair.

He took a pull at the beer and said, “What in the hell were you out on the streets in this condition for?”

“I was drowning my sorrows,” Don said ungraciously. “I should thank you for coming to the rescue. How could you possibly have taken on three men, two of them armed, and run them off?”

“Nobody knows how to fight any more,” the other told him. “I make a hobby of it. I’d rather be able to knock down my enemies than drink my friends under the table. What sorrows?”

Don wondered if he felt like answering that. It was none of the big man’s business. However, he said, “My girl left me to take a job on Callisto. And my commodore’s down on me because I’ve had a series of troubles with my One Man Scout and have come in several times from patrol prematurely.”

Thor Bjornsen finished his beer and stood again. “You look like hell,” he said. “The bathroom’s over there. I’ll order some bedding from the ultra-market and well fix up that couch for you. You’ll be better in the morning. Hell, by the looks of you you couldn’t be worse.”

In the morning, Don Mathers did feel worse, but in a different way. By the time he awoke, his host had already dressed.

He stood next to the couch, with a small bottle in his hand and shook a pill from it. “Anti-Ale,” he said. “Here, take it down.”

“It’s against regulations for an officer of the damned Space Service to take the stuff,” Don told him.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I think they want you to suffer. If you suffer enough from drinking, maybe you’ll do less drinking, and they don’t like pilots, in particular, to have their reflexes slowed up with guzzle.”

Thor reached out the pill again, and a glass of water. “Tell them to get poked.”

Don downed it, choking slightly, flushed it on through with the water. He began to feel better almost immediately, as he knew he would. He had taken the sober-up before, and many a time, in spite of what he had said about regulations.

The big man eyed him carefully and said, “You don’t like the Space Service, do you?”

Don Mathers considered that for a minute before saying, “Well, no. But what can you do?”

“Get out. I did.”

Don was surprised. “Were you in space?”

“I used to work on the radio interferometers on Luna. They’re radio telescopes in which two or more antennas are connected to a single receiver. Our job was scanning space for signs of Kradens.”

“I know what they are,” Don growled. “How did you get out? That’s a hell of a job, being stuck there in those underground towns on the moon.”

“Medical discharge.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me, damn it.”

Thor looked at him. “Would you think that there’s anything wrong with me? I have a doctor friend. He can make something wrong with you, or seem to be. And he’s available.”

Don brushed it all off. He said, “I don’t have any large lump sum of pseudo-dollars to pay out. All I have is my sub-lieutenant’s pay.”

“No charge.”

Don contemplated him for a long, long moment. He was on delicate ground now, in view of his own thoughts about desertion. And he didn’t really know this man. He said carefully, “You don’t sound very patriotic, Thor. You forget the Kradens.”

Thor Bjornsen shook his head. “No I don’t. You can’t forget something that doesn’t exist.”

Don fixed his eyes on him as though the other was demented. He said and his voice was angry, “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

The other said, “I think it does. Keep quiet for a minute while we have some background.” He thought about it for a minute before saying, “I’m not contending that the Kradens didn’t once appear. Obviously, they did. Almost fifty years ago. Out of a clear sky—or, rather, out of clear space—they came. About twenty of their various sized and shaped spaceships. In spite of our radio telescopes trying to pick up intelligent broadcasts from space, and in spite of our own tight beam laser broadcasts sending out our own messages, the human race couldn’t have been more surprised if we had one and all suddenly sprouted rhinoceros horns. We were floored—momentarily.

“At the time there were four spacepowers, if we can call them powers. They were pretty much in their infancy, so far as the military in space is concerned. They were the United States of the Americas, the Soviet Complex, Common Europe and China, in that order. The Asian Alliance and India also had embryonic space warcraft but they hardly counted at the time.

“In actuality, from the first man’s explosion into space was basically a military and national prestige thing. We did a great deal of oratory about pure science and cooperation between the nations but even from the beginning spy satellites were sent up for military espionage purposes. Before long, first the United States and the Soviet Complex, and later the others, began to send up primitive military spacecraft armed with such weapons as could be designed for space combat at that time, largely missiles with nuclear warheads. Before very long, the early two or three man ships evolved into small cruisers with eight or so men aboard. Weapons became more sophisticated and we saw laser beam weapons, popularly called death rays, developed.

“We were at that stage, when the Kradens materialized. What they wanted well possibly never find out.”

“We know what they wanted,” Don protested.

Thor Bjornsen ignored him. “It was immediately assumed, the human mentality being the human mentality that they had come to conquer Earth. Why they would want to the Almighty Ultimate only knows. Perhaps they were an exploring expedition; perhaps they were a colonizing expedition looking for new worlds, which doesn’t mean, necessarily, that they would take over a suitable world by force, if it was already supporting an intelligent life form. It is to be assumed that if they had the technical ability to cross space, they would have a more sophisticated ethic than we possess. A culture does not progress technically without also progressing ethically. If it didn’t, it would probably blow itself up, as we almost did on Earth shortly after the discovery of such super-weapons as nuclear bombs.”

“Come on, come on,” Don protested. “I don’t need a lecture on ethics.”

“Very well. Each of the four Earth powers with space fleets had patrols out at all times. Of a sudden, they were no longer four space fleets but one. And as a man they thundered in on the strangers from space. I would assume that it took the extraterrestrials by shock. Suddenly they were under attack, and under attack by the equivalent of the Japanese kamikaze fighters of the Second World War. Perhaps the Kradens attempted to defend themselves, but we aren’t even sure of that. We don’t really know if they were armed, and some strange tales and rumors have drifted down to us.”

Don said indignantly, “Are you completely drivel-happy? They destroyed more than twenty of our spacecraft!”

The other looked at him thoughtfully. “I can’t prove it, but I’ve often wondered whether our spacecraft didn’t shoot each other down, or blow each other up, by mistake. Please remember that though they thought themselves fighting a common foe, they weren’t coordinated. They entered the fight as four different space forces. Many couldn’t even speak the languages of the other Earth craft involved. All was confusion, everyone shooting every which way. As we know, several, at least, of the extraterrestrials were destroyed. The rest disappeared from whence they came, it is to be supposed, in a burst of speed beyond our own ships.”

“All right,” Don said, “but you don’t bring into this fanciful story the fact that from time to time they come back.”

“I don’t believe it,” Thor said.

Don was glaring at him now. “Damn it,” he said, “you make less sense by the minute. They’re continually being spotted. Sometimes one at a time, sometimes a small group, sometimes a larger one. What do you think our Sector Scouts are out for, fun and games, or just the ride?”

“Remember the Flying Saucers?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sometimes they called them UFOs, Unidentified Flying Objects. About the middle of the last century, a regular craze went through the United States, in particular. Hundreds and even thousands of UFOs were spotted. They were popularly assumed to be visitors from space. Some viewers went to the extreme of seeing them land and sometimes little green men, or whatever, would come out. In a few cases, crackpots would claim that they were taken aboard and flown off to Jupiter, or wherever, where, surprise, surprise, they spoke Earth languages. But to boil it down, no real proof was ever presented that these UFOs were from other worlds. They never did explain all of them, but there was never proof that they were extraterrestrial.”

Don said belligerently, “Do you mean that all these patrol reports our Space Scouts send in are hysteria, or just plain lying or mistakes?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Don said, “Sometimes our spacecraft fire on these Kradens they spot.”

“Maybe they fire, and at what, I wouldn’t know. But I doubt if they’re firing at Kradens or any other extraterrestrials. I suspect it’s largely trigger-happy space pilots, at nerve’s end, or possibly touched with space cafard.”

Don had another protest. “You forget that some of our ships are missing. Totally missing.”

“I’m not at all surprised at accidents in space. Our ships aren’t that advanced as yet. The fact that a Space Scout disappears is no proof that a Kraden destroyed it.”

Don said, belligerently again, “That could happen on some occasions, but remember Vico Chu and Arch Windemere? They both reported spotting Kradens, and both reported going in to attack, and both were never seen again. We didn’t even find debris from their scouts.”

Thor said stubbornly, ” I have a theory that they spotted each other, took each other for Kradens, panicked, both fired and destroyed each other.”

“Almighty Ultimate,” Don said in disgust.

Thor said, “Where in the hell do we get such names as Kradens? We’ve never been in any kind of contact with them whatsoever.”

Don snorted. “The names just sort of materialized. Nobody seems to know who dreamed up the name Kraden for their species. But their fleet was photographed during that first action and their spaceships were different sizes, so the military gave them different names, just so they’d have some sort of label to work with.”

The big man said, “At any rate, we have no particular reason to think them belligerent. For all we know, maybe they didn’t want anything more than to trade.”

“Trade what?” Don said in rejection. “If they can cross interstellar space, they’re so far ahead of us that we couldn’t have anything they want.”

But the other shook his head. “Possibly they’ve run out of some of the more rare metals or other elements. If their civilization is far beyond our own, it’s probably much older. Even in our own economy, we’re running desperately short of some basic elements. For that matter, possibly they’re highly cultured, and fascinated with the art and artifacts of alien cultures. Possibly they would like to pick up such little items as Leonardo da Vinci’s, or whatever.”

“No,” Don said. “It’s out of the question. If there aren’t any Kradens coming through any more, and they weren’t even belligerent when they turned up half a century ago, it would have come out by now. A whole solar system isn’t so stupid as to fight bogeymen, who don’t exist, for fifty years.”

The big man looked at him thoughtfully and threw his biggest bombshell. He said, “Perhaps there are elements who profit by the false alarm.”