Short Fiction

The loft of the feed-house, with its stacked grainsacks, was a B-72, a fort, a foxhole⁠—any number of things, depending on Phildee’s moods.

Today it was a jumping-off place.

Phildee slipped out of his dormitory and ran across the yard to the feed-house. He dropped the big wooden latch behind him, and climbed up the ladder to the loft, depending on the slight strength of his young arms more than on his legs, which had to be lifted to straining heights before they could negotiate the man-sized rungs.

He reached the loft and stood panting, looking out over the farm through the loft door, at the light wooden fences around it, and the circling antenna of the radar tower.

Usually, he spent at least a little time each day crouched behind the grainsacks and being bigger and older, firing cooly and accurately into charging companies of burly, thick-lipped U.E.S. soldiers, or going over on one wing and whistling down on a flight of TT-34’s that scattered like frightened ducks before the fiery sleet of his wing rockets.

But today was different, today there was something he wanted to try.

He stood up on his toes and searched. He felt the touch of Miss Cowan’s mind, no different from that of anyone else⁠—flat, unsystematic.

He sighed. Perhaps, somewhere, there was someone else like himself. For a moment, the fright of loneliness invaded him, but then faded. He took a last look at the farm, then moved away from the open door, letting his mind slip into another way of thinking.

Rocket Row is the Joy Street of three planets. It’s got neon lights, crummy dives, cheap hotels, and women to match. Every man who’s ever rode a ship into space knows about Rocket Row. It runs along the far side of Flushing Spaceport, down toward the Sound.

The New Shanghai was full of dockworkers and crewmen on liberty. It was noisy. I sat on a bar stool and watched the fog trying to infiltrate the open door. It didn’t have a chance against the tobacco smoke that rolled out to meet it. Outside, the streets and alleys would be choked with wet, creeping darkness, full of quiet footsteps, and the cops would find empty-pocketed corpses behind the ashcans in the morning.

But none of that was any of my business. I was sick and tired of fog⁠—the real kind, the kind they grow on Venus⁠—and I was sick of the thought of blood. I’d seen too much of it, soaking into the hot mud, and some of it spilled by my guns. I wanted to forget the night, and fog that gave cover to every kind of dirty deal a man could imagine. I wanted to pull the corners of my world together until all that was left was the drink, the bar stool, and me. But it wasn’t going to work out that way, because I was in the New Shanghai on business.

And my kind of business was the dirtiest, lousiest, most thankless racket in the world.

The bartender moved up to where I was sitting. “Have another one, Ash?” he asked.

“Your Majesty!”

D’hai Merssu, Emperor of All the Suns, Protector of the Galaxy, looked up calmly as his prime minister burst into the room. His lean, brooding face did not change expression as he watched the pale and perspiring man cross the flagstoned floor with a sharp, nervous patter of leather.

“Gently, Tors, gently,” he said quietly, his eyes mocking under their overhang of dark eyebrow. “You’re Prime Minister now⁠—remember that. A prime minister doesn’t come blundering into the palace looking as though the sky was falling. It creates unrest in the population. Try to remember that we’re no longer a pair of obscure rabblerousers, trying to overthrow the Crown. We are the Crown now. Try to act like it.”

“D’hai, the sky is falling!” Tors burst out unheedingly, “I have word that the Earthmen are driving beyond the Rim and into the heart of the Empire itself! Their ships are irresistible. They’re winning battle after battle! And the people are restless! They say it’s time the False Emperor’s rule was overthrown. Some of the garrisons are rebelling!”

Still the Emperor’s expression did not change. “So,” he said calmly, “the Earthmen were not bluffing when they said they’d maintain the rights of the old Emperor.”

“Yes! You said they wouldn’t, D’hai. What are we going to do?”

“I was wrong, Tors,” Merssu said evenly. “No matter. As for what we are going to do, why, I suppose you’d better arrange for another broadcast. Tell the people we have weapons ready if the situation becomes serious, that they have nothing to fear.”

It was just as he saw the Barbarian’s squat black tankette lurch hurriedly into a nest of boulders that young Giulion Geoffrey realized he had been betrayed. With the muzzle of his own cannon still hot from the shell that had jammed the Barbarian’s turret, he had yanked the starboard track lever to wheel into position for the finishing shot. All around him, the remnants of the Barbarian’s invading army were being cut to flaming ribbons by the armored vehicles of the Seaboard League. The night was shot through by billows of cannon fire, and the din of laboring engines, guns, and rent metal was a cacophonic climax to the Seaboard League’s first decisive victory over the inland invaders. Young Geoffrey could justifiably feel that he would cap that climax by personally accounting for the greatest of the inland barbarians; the barbarian general himself. He trained his sights on the scarlet bearpaw painted on the skewed turret’s flank, and laid his hand on the firing lever.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of another tankette rushing up on his port side. He glanced at it, saw its graceful handcrafting, and knew it for one of the League’s own. He could even see the insigne; the mailed heel trampling a stand of wheat; Harolde Dugald, of the neighboring fief.

Know him? Yes, I know him⁠—knew him. That was twenty years ago.

Everybody knows him now. Everybody who passed him on the street knows him. Everybody who went to the same schools, or even to different schools in different towns, knows him now. Ask them. But I knew him. I lived three feet away from him for a month and a half. I shipped with him and called him by his first name.

What was he like? What was he thinking, sitting on the edge of his bunk with his jaw in his palm and his eyes on the stars? What did he think he was after?

Well⁠ ⁠… Well, I think he⁠—You know, I think I never did know him, after all. Not well. Not as well as some of those people who’re writing the books about him seem to.

I couldn’t really describe him to you. He had a duffel bag in his hand and a packed airsuit on his back. The skin of his face had been dried out by ship’s air, burned by ultraviolet and broiled by infra red. The pupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmic rays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body was hard. What did he look like? He looked like a man.

It was after the war, and we were beaten. There used to be a school of thought among us that deplored our combativeness; before we had ever met any people from off Earth, even, you could hear people saying we were toughest, cruelest life-form in the Universe, unfit to mingle with the gentler wiser races in the stars, and a sure bet to steal their galaxy and corrupt it forever. Where these people got their information, I don’t know.