Soldier, ask not

Chapter 10

I had seen enough of this part of the territory from the air-car to be fairly sure that whatever was going on, either in the movement of Friendly or Cassidan forces, was not taking place in the open. So we stuck to the trees, moving from one grove to another.

Necessarily, this meant that we were not able to go straight in the direction the patrol's Force-Leader had pointed, but zigzagged to it as the wooded cover permitted. It was slow going, on foot.

By noon, disgusted, I sat down with Dave to eat the cold lunch we had packed along. By noon we had seen no one since the Cassidan patrol earlier, heard nothing, discovered nothing. We had moved forward from the point where we left the air-car only about three kilometers, but because of the arrangement of the wooded patches, we had angled south about five kilometers.

"Maybe they've gone home - the Friendlies, I mean," suggested Dave.

He was joking, with a grin on his face that I saw as I jerked up my head from my sandwich to stare at him. I managed a grin in return, feeling I owed him at least that. The truth of the matter was that he had been an unusually good assistant, keeping his mouth shut and avoiding the making of suggestions born in ignorance not only of warfare but of Newswork. -

"No," I said, "something's up - but I was an idiot to let myself get separated from that air-car. We just can't cover enough territory on foot. The Friendlies have pulled back for some reason, at least at this end of the front. Probably it was to draw the Cassidan levies in after them, would be my guess. But why we haven't seen black uniforms counterattacking before now-"

"Listen!" said Dave.

He had turned his head and held up his hand to stop me talking. I broke off and listened. Sure enough, at some distance off, I heard a wump, a muffled, innocuous sound like a blanket snapping, as if it were being shaken out by an energetic housewife.

"Sonics!" I said, scrambling to my feet and leaving the rest of our picnic lunch lying. "By God, they're starting to get some action on after all! Let's see." I pivoted, trying to aim myself at the direction the noise had come from. "That sounded about a couple of hundred meters off, and over to our right-"

I never finished speaking. Suddenly, Dave and I were caught in the heart of a thunderclap. I found myself lying on the moss without remembering how I had got there. Five feet away, Dave was lying sprawled out; and less than forty feet away was a shallow, scooped area of torn-up earth, surrounded by trees that appeared to have exploded from internal pressure, with the white wood of their insides showing splintered and spread.

"Dave!" I got to him, and turned him over. He was breathing, and, as I watched, his eyes opened. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was bleeding from the nose. At the sight of his blood I became conscious of a wetness of my own upper lip, a salt taste in my mouth, and, putting up my hand, felt the blood dripping from my own nose.

I wiped it away with one hand. With the other hand, I pulled Dave to his feet.

"Barrage!" I said. "Come on, Dave! We've got to get out of here." For the first time, the reaction of Eileen if I should fail to bring him safely home to her presented itself to my mind in vivid image. I had been sure of the protection .my skilled mind and tongue could provide for Dave between the battle lines. But you cannot argue with a sonic cannon, firing from five to fifty kilometers away.

He made it to his feet. He had been closer to the "burst" of the sonic capsule than I had, but luckily the effective zone of a sonic explosion is bell-shaped, with the wide mouth of the bell-area downward. So we had both been in the rim-part of that sudden imbalance of internal and external pressures. He was only a little more dazed than I was. And shortly, recovering somewhat as we went, we were both legging it away from the area, back at an angle toward where figuring from my wrist director indicated the Cassidan lines should be.

We stopped, finally, out of breath, and sat down for a moment, panting. We could hear the wump, wump of the barrage bursts continuing, some little distance behind us.

"-'s all right," I panted to Dave. "They'll lift the barrage and send in troops before they follow up with armor. Troops we can talk sense to. With sonic cannon and armored vehicles we'd never have a chance. Might as well sit here and pull ourselves together, then strike sideways along the lines to join up with either a Cassidan force, or the first wave of Friendlies - whichever we run into first."

I saw him looking at me with an expression I could not fathom at first. Then, to my astonishment, I recognized it as admiration.

"You saved my life back there," he said.

"Saved your-" I broke off. "Look, Dave, I'm the last man to turn down credit when credit is due. But that sonic only knocked you out for a second."

"But you knew what to do when we came to," he said. * 'And you didn't just think of doing it for yourself. You waited to get me on my feet and help me get out of there, too."

I shook my head, and let it go at that. If he had accused me instead of deliberately trying to save myself first, I would not have thought it worth the trouble to change his mind. So, since he had chosen to go the other way in his opinion, why should I bother to change that, either? If he liked to consider me a selfless-minded hero, let him.

"Suit yourself," I said. "Let's go."

We got back on our feet a little shakily - there was no doubt that same burst had taken it out of us both - and moved off southward at an angle that ought to cut the line of any Cassidan resistance, if indeed we were as far forward of their main posts as our earlier encounter with the patrol had indicated.

After a little while the wump, wump of the barrage moved away from our right on ahead of us and finally died out into the distance. In spite of myself, I found myself sweating a little and hoping we would come upon Cassidans before the Friendly infantry swept over us. The business of the sonic capsule had reminded me of how big a part chance plays in the matter of death and wounds on a battlefield. I would like to get Dave safely under the protective shell of a gun emplacement, so that there would be a chance to talk to any of the black-uniformed men we came upon before any shooting began.

For myself, there was no danger. My billowing Newsman's cloak, the colors of which I had this day set on a dazzling white and scarlet, advertised me as a noncombatant as far as I could be seen. Dave, on the other hand, was still wearing a Cassidan's field-gray uniform, though without insignia or decorations and with a noncombatant's white armband. I crossed my fingers, for luck.

The luck worked; but not to the extent of bringing us to a Cassidan gun-emplacement shell. A small neck of woods running up the spine of a hill brought us to its top and a red-yellow flare, blinding in the dimness under the trees, burst in warning half a dozen feet in front of us. I literally knocked Dave to the ground with a hand in the middle of his back and skidded to a stop myself, waving my arms.

"Newsman!" I shouted. "Newsman! I'm a non-combatant!"

"I know you're a goddam Newsman!" called back a voice tense with anger and stifled with caution. "Get on over here, both of you, and keep your voices down!''

I gave Dave a hand up, and we went, still half-blinded, toward the voice. As we moved, my vision cleared; and twenty steps farther on I found myself behind the eight-foot-thick trunk of an enormous yellow birch, face to face once more with the Cassidan Force-Leader who had warned me about going on toward the Friendly line.

"You again!" we both said in the same second. But then our reactions varied. Because he began telling me in a low, fervent, and determined voice, just what he thought of civilians like myself who got themselves mixed up in the front lines of a battle.

Meanwhile, I was paying little attention and using the seconds to pull my own wits together. Anger is a luxury - the Force-Leader might be a good soldier, but he had not yet learned that elemental fact in all occupations. He ran down finally.

"The point is," he said grimly, "you are on my hands. And what am I going to do with you?"

"Nothing," I answered. "We're here at our own risk, to observe. And observe we will. Tell us where we can dig in out of your way, and that'll be the last you'll have to think of us."

"I'll bet!" he said sourly, but it was merely a last spark of his anger sputtering out. "All right. Over there. Behind the men dug in between those two trees. And stay in your spot once you pick it!"

"All right," I said. "But before we take off, would you answer me one other question? What're you supposed to be doing on this hill?"

He glared at me as if he would not answer. Then, the emotion inside him forced the answer out.

"Holding it!" he said. And he looked as if he would have liked to spit, to clean the taste of those two words out of his mouth.

"Holding it? With a patrol?" I stared at him. "You can't hold a position like this with a dozen or so men if the Friendlies are moving in!" I waited, but he said nothing. "Or can you?"

"No," he answered. And this time he did spit. "But we're going to try. Better lay that cloak out where the black helmets can see it when they come up the hill." He turned away to the man beside him wearing the message unit. "Get Command HQ," I heard him say. "Tell him we've got a couple of Newsmen up here with us!"

I got the name, and unit, and the names of the men in his patrol; then I took Dave off to the spot the Force-Leader had indicated, and we started digging in just like the soldiers around us. Nor did I forget to spread my cloak out in front of our two foxholes as the Force-Leader had said. Pride runs a very slow second to the desire to remain alive.

From our holes, once we were in them, we could look down the steeper slope of the wooded hill toward the direction of the Friendly lines. The trees went all the way down the hill and continued on to the next hill beyond. But halfway down, there was the scar of an old landslip, like a miniature cliff, breaking the even roof of treetops, so that we could look out between the pillars of those tree trunks rising from the upper edge of the landslip and see over

the tops of the trees at the bottom edge, and thus get a view of the whole panorama of wooded slope and open field toward the far green horizon under which probably sat the Friendly sonic cannon Dave and I had run from earlier.

It was our first good look at the general field since I had brought the air-car down to ground level, and I was busy studying it through glasses, when I saw what seemed to be a flicker of movement among the tree trunks at the bottom of the divide between our hill and the next. The flicker was not enough for me to pick out anything definite, but at the same time I saw movement in both of the foxholes ahead of us and knew that the soldiers in them had been alerted by whichever one of them carried the patrol's heat-sensing unit. The screens of which would now be showing the blips of the body heat of men, starting to mix in with the earth vegetation, and other heat of the ground area before us.

The Friendlies had found us. In a few seconds, there was no question of it, for even my glasses picked out flickers of black as their soldiers began to work their way up the slope of the hill toward our front and the weapons of the Cassidan patrol began to whicker and snap in response.

"Down!" I said to Dave.

He had been trying to raise up and see. I suppose he thought that because I was raising up to get a better view and so exposing myself, he could too. It was true that the Newsman's cloak was spread out in front of both our holes; but I also had my beret color controls set on scarlet and white, and in addition I had more faith in my ability to survive than he. All men have such moments when they feel invulnerable; and the moment in that foxhole, with the Friendly troops attacking, was one of mine. Besides, I was expecting the current Friendly attack on us to die down and quit in a moment. And sure enough, it did.