Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (373 page)

“Well, Jeff, you’ve got to look at it the other way, too. Even if there’s only one chance in a thousand that we’ll be doing some good, keeping the Taurans.…

* * * *

“Tench-hut!” we stood up in a raggety-ass fashion, by twos and threes. The door opened and a full major came in. I stiffened a little. He was the highest-ranking officer I’d ever seen. He had a row of ribbons stitched into his coveralls, including a purple strip meaning he’d been wounded in combat, fighting in the old American army. Must have been that Indochina thing, but it had fizzled out before I was born. He didn’t look that old.

“Sit, sit.” He made a patting motion with his hand. Then he put his hands on his hips and scanned the company with a small smile on his face. “Welcome to Charon. You picked a lovely day to land; the temperature outside is a summery eight point one five degrees Absolute. We expect little change for the next two centuries or so.” Some of us laughed half-heartedly.

“You’d best enjoy the tropical climate here at Miami Base, enjoy it while you can. We’re on the center of sunside here, and most of your training will be on darkside. Over there, the temperature drops to a chilly two point zero eight.

“You might as well regard all the training you got on Earth and the Moon as just a warm-up exercise, to give you a fair chance of surviving Charon. You’ll have to go through your whole repertory here: tools, weapons, maneuvers. And you’ll find that, at these temperatures, tools don’t work the way they should, weapons don’t want to fire. And people move v-e-r-y cautiously.”

He studied the clipboard in his hand. “Right now, you have forty-nine women and forty-eight men. Two deaths, one psychiatric release. Having read an outline of your training program, I’m frankly surprised that so many of you pulled through.

“But you might as well know that I won’t be displeased if as few as fifty of you graduate from this final phase. And the only way not to graduate is to die. Here. The only way anybody gets back to Earth—including me—is after a combat tour.

“You will complete your training in one month. From here you go to Stargate collapsar, a little over two lights away. You will stay at the settlement on Stargate I, the largest portal planet, until replacements arrive. Hopefully, that will be no more than a month; another group is due here as soon as you leave.

“When you leave Stargate, you will be going to a strategically important collapsar, set up a military base there, and fight the enemy, if attacked. Otherwise, maintain the base until further orders.

“The last two weeks of your training will consist of constructing such a base, on darkside. There you will be totally isolated from Miami Base: no communication, no medical evacuation, no resupply. Sometime before the two weeks are up, your defense facilities will be evaluated in an attack by guided drones. They will be armed.

“All of the permanent personnel here on Charon are combat veterans. Thus, all of us are forty to fifty years of age, but I think we can keep up with you. Two of us will be with you at all times, and will accompany you at least as far as Stargate. They are Captain Sherman Stott, your company commander, and Sergeant Octavio Cortez, your first sergeant. Gentlemen?”

Two men in the front row stood easily and turned to face us. Captain Stott was a little smaller than the major, but cut from the same mold; face hard and smooth as porcelain, cynical half-smile, a precise centimeter of beard framing a large chin, looking thirty at the most. He wore a large, gunpowder-type pistol on his hip.

Sergeant Cortez was another story. His head was shaved and the wrong shape; flattened out on one side where a large piece of skull had obviously been taken out. His face was very dark and seamed with wrinkles and scars. Half his left ear was missing and his eyes were as expressive as buttons on a machine. He had a moustache-and-beard combination that looked like a skinny white caterpillar taking a lap around his mouth. On anybody else, his schoolboy smile might look pleasant, but he was about the ugliest, meanest-looking creature I’d ever seen. Still, if you didn’t look at his head and considered the lower six feet or so, he could pose as the “after” advertisement for a body-building spa. Neither Stott nor Cortez wore any ribbons. Cortez had a small pocket-laser suspended in a magnetic rig, sideways, under his left armpit. It had wooden grips that were worn very smooth.

“Now, before I turn you over to the tender mercies of these two gentlemen, let me caution you again.

“Two months ago there was not a living soul on this planet, a working force of forty-five men struggled for a month to erect this base. Twenty-four of them, more than half, died in the construction of it. This is the most dangerous planet men have ever tried to live on, but the places you’ll be going will be this bad and worse. Your cadre will try to keep you alive for the next month. Listen to them…and follow their example; all of them have survived here for longer than you’ll have to. Captain?” The captain stood up as the major went out the door.

“Tench-hut!” The last syllable was like an explosion and we all jerked to our feet.

“Now, I’m only gonna say this once so you better listen,” he growled. “We are in a combat situation here and in a combat situation there is only one penalty for disobedience and insubordination.” He jerked the pistol from his hip and held it by the barrel, like a club. “This is an Army model 1911 automatic pistol caliber .45 and it is a primitive, but effective, weapon. The sergeant and I are authorized to use our weapons to kill to enforce discipline, don’t make us do it because we will. We will.” He put the pistol back. The holster snap made a loud crack in the dead quiet.

“Sergeant Cortez and I between us have killed more people than are sitting in this room. Both of us fought in Vietnam on the American side and both of us joined the United Nations International Guard more than ten years ago. I took a break in grade from major for the privilege of commanding this company, and First Sergeant Cortez took a break from sub-major, because we are both combat soldiers and this is the first combat situation since 1974.

“Keep in mind what I’ve said while the First Sergeant instructs you more specifically in what your duties will be under this command. Take over, Sergeant.” He turned on his heel and strode out of the room, with the little smile on his face that hadn’t changed one millimeter during the whole harangue.

The First Sergeant moved like a heavy machine with lots of ball bearings. When the door hissed shut he swiveled ponderously to face us and said, “At ease, siddown,” in a surprisingly gentle voice. He sat on a table in the front of the room. It creaked—but held.

“Now, the captain talks scary and I look scary, but we both mean well. You’ll be working pretty closely with me, so you better get used to this thing I’ve got hanging in front of my brain. You probably won’t see the captain much, except on maneuvers.”

He touched the flat part of his head. “And speaking of brains, I still have just about all mine, in spite of Chinese efforts to the contrary. All of us old vets who mustered into UNEF had to pass the same criteria that got you drafted by the Elite Conscription Act. So I suspect all of you are smart and tough—but just keep in mind that the captain and I are smart and tough and experienced.”

He flipped through the roster without really looking at it. “Now, as the captain said, there’ll be only one kind of disciplinary action on maneuvers. Capital punishment. But normally we won’t have to kill you for disobeying. Charon’ll save us the trouble.

“Back in the billeting area, it’ll be another story. We don’t much care what you do inside, but once you suit up and go outside, you’ve gotta have discipline that would shame a Centurion. There will be situations where one stupid act could kill us all.

“Anyhow, the first thing we’ve gotta do is get you fitted to your fighting suits. The armorer’s waiting at your billet; he’ll take you one at a time. Let’s go.”

4

“Now, I know you got lectured and lectured on what a fighting suit can do, back on Earth.” The armorer was a small man, partially bald, with no insignia of rank on his coveralls. Sergeant Cortez told us to call him “sir,” since he was a lieutenant.

“But I’d like to reinforce a couple of points, maybe add some things your instructors Earthside weren’t clear about, or couldn’t know. Your First Sergeant was kind enough to consent to being my visual aid. Sergeant?”

Cortez slipped out of his coveralls and came up to the little raised platform where a fighting suit was standing, popped open like a man-shaped clam. He backed into it and slipped his arms into the rigid sleeves. There was a click and the thing swung shut with a sigh. It was bright green with cortez stenciled in white letters on the helmet.

“Camouflage, Sergeant.”

The green faded to white, then dirty gray. “This is good camouflage for Charon, and most of your portal planets,” said Cortez, from a deep well. “But there are several other combinations available.” The gray dappled and brightened to a combination of greens and browns: “Jungle.” Then smoothed out to a hard light ochre: “Desert.” Dark brown, darker, to a deep flat black: “Night or space.”

“Very good, Sergeant. To my knowledge, this is the only feature of the suit which was perfected after your training. The control is around your left wrist and is admittedly awkward. But once you find the right combination, it’s easy to lock in.

“Now, you didn’t get much in-suit training Earthside because we didn’t want you to get used to using the thing in a friendly environment. The fighting suit is the deadliest personal weapon ever built, and with no weapon it is easier for the user to kill himself through carelessness. Turn around, Sergeant.

“Case in point.” He tapped a square protuberance between the shoulders. “Exhaust fins. As you know, the suit tries to keep you at a comfortable temperature no matter what the weather’s like outside. The material of the suit is as near to a perfect insulator as we could get, consistent with mechanical demands. Therefore, these fins get hot—especially hot, compared to darkside temperatures—as they bleed off the body’s heat.

“All you have to do is lean up against a boulder of frozen gas; there’s lots of it around. The gas will sublime off faster than it can escape from the fins; in escaping, it will push against the surrounding ‘ice’ and fracture it… and in about one hundredth of a second, you have the equivalent of a hand grenade going off right below your neck. You’ll never feel a thing.

“Variations on this theme have killed eleven people in the past two months. And they were just building a bunch of huts.

“I assume you know how easily the waldo capabilities can kill you or your companions. Anybody want to shake hands with the sergeant?” He stepped over and clasped his glove. “He’s had lots of practice. Until
you
have, be extremely careful. You might scratch an itch and wind up bleeding to death. Remember, semi-logarithmic repose: two pounds’ pressure exerts five pounds’ force; three pounds gives ten; four pounds, twenty-three; five pounds, forty-seven. Most of you can muster up a grip of well over a hundred pounds. Theoretically, you could rip a steel girder in two with that, amplified. Actually, you’d destroy the material of your gloves and, at least on Charon, die very quickly. It’d be a race between decompression and flash-freezing. You’d be the loser.

“The leg waldos are also dangerous, even though the amplification is less extreme. Until you’re really skilled, don’t try to run, or jump. You’re likely to trip, and that means you’re likely to die.

“Charon’s gravity is three-fourths of Earth normal, so it’s not too bad. But on a really small world, like Luna, you could take a running jump and not come down for twenty minutes, just keep sailing over the horizon. Maybe bash into a mountain at eighty meters per second. On a small asteroid, it’d be no trick at all to run up to escape velocity and be off on an informal tour of intergalactic space. It’s a slow way to travel.

“Tomorrow morning, we’ll start teaching you how to stay alive inside of this infernal machine. The rest of the afternoon and evening, I’ll call you one at a time to be fitted. That’s all, Sergeant.”

Cortez went to the door and turned the stopcock that let air into the air lock. A bank of infrared lamps went on to keep the air from freezing inside it. When the pressures were equalized, he shut the stopcock, undamped the door and stepped in, clamping it shut behind him. A pump hummed for about a minute, evacuating the air lock, then he stepped out and sealed the outside door. It was pretty much like the ones on Luna.

“First I want Private Omar Almizar. The rest of you can go find your bunks. I’ll call you over the squawker.”

“Alphabetical order, sir?”

“Yep. About ten minutes apiece. If your name begins with Z, you might as well get sacked.”

That was Rogers. She probably
was
thinking about getting sacked.

5

The sun was a hard white point directly overhead. It was a lot brighter than I had expected it to be; since we were eighty AUs out, it was only l/6400th as bright as it is on Earth. Still, it was putting out about as much light as a powerful streetlamp.

“This is considerably more light than you’ll have on a portal planet,” Captain Start’s voice crackled in our collective ear. “Be glad that you’ll be able to watch your step.”

We were lined up, single file, on a permaplast sidewalk connecting the billet and the supply hut. We’d practiced walking inside, all morning, and this wasn’t any different except for the exotic scenery. Though the light was rather dim, you could see all the way to the horizon quite clearly, with no atmosphere in the way. A black cliff that looked too regular to be natural stretched from one horizon to the other, passing within a kilometer of us. The ground was obsidian-black, mottled with patches of white, or bluish, ice. Next to the supply hut was a small mountain of snow in a bin marked
oxygen
.

The suit was fairly comfortable, but it gave you the odd feeling of being simultaneously a marionette and a puppeteer. You apply the impulse to move your leg and the suit picks it up and magnifies it and moves your leg for you.

“Today we’re only going to walk around the company area and nobody will
leave
the company area.” The captain wasn’t wearing his .45, but he had a laser-finger like the rest of us. And his was probably hooked up.

Keeping an interval of at least two meters between each person, we stepped off the permaplast and followed the captain over the smooth rock. We walked carefully for about an hour, spiraling out, and finally stopped at the far edge of the perimeter.