3

The journey from Fort Eccles to the spacefield was uncomfortable.

There were no windows in the passenger compartment of the personnel carrier, which meant the recruits were denied the meagre solace of being able to watch the scenery, and for the most part they maintained a broody silence which was broken only by an occasional moan of despair or an outburst of bickering between Ryan and Farr. One man, with a Latin cast of features and temperament to match, even jumped to his feet with a loud cry of “Mamma mia!” and began banging his head on the metal wall of the compartment. This action, emotionally cathartic though it may have been, produced such thunderous reverberations—plus showers of rust flakes and condensation from the ceiling—that he was quickly prevailed upon to return to his seat.

In contrast to the obvious misery of his companions, all of whom had been nursing secret hopes of beating the system, Peace began to feel perversely cheerful. Leaving Porterburg and Earth was no wrench for him, because he had no memory at all of his previous life, and the prospect of boarding a starship and voyaging away to another part of the galaxy was both glamorous and exciting. He could not recollect ever having seen a spaceship, but he had no difficulty in visualizing the tall, graceful ships with prows like gleaming spires reaching towards the heavens. And here he was—decked out with a helmet, magnificent boots and a rifle— on his way to the stars, sworn to do battle with the enemies of Earth.

Sitting upright on the hard seat, almost relishing its spartan discomfort, Peace began to feel like a real soldier. The effect would have been more complete had he been given a full uniform to wear in place of his houndstooth check jacket and hose, but he knew it was the calibre of the man within that really mattered. As he glanced down at his clothes Peace was struck by the notion that they might contain some information about his identity. He looked inside his jacket and found that the manufacturer’s label had been removed— seemingly proof that his former self had been determined to make a complete break with the past. What could I have done that was so awful? he wondered as he plucked out the severed threads which had held the label. His curiosity aroused, he began searching his pockets and found that one after another was empty except for a few coins. It appeared that before joining the Legion he had deliberately rid himself of all personal possessions, apart from the money and cigarettes which had been appropriated by Captain Widget. But why? Had he been hiding out from the police?

Peace checked his breast pocket last. As is often the case with such pockets, it was too deep and narrow for his hand to reach the bottom, and he was on the point of abandoning the search when a fingertip touched something smooth and hard. Grunting with the effort, he scrabbled the object up into the light and found he was holding a small toad molded in blue plastic. He gazed at it in perplexity. The toad must have been pressed from a memory-plastic which was activated by the heat of his hand, for—as he was trying to decide its significance—it gathered its haunches and sprang on to the neck of the recruit in front of him. Whimpering with panic, the man—whose name was Benger—swiped the little creature to the floor and stamped on it, reducing it to a shapeless blob.

“Who’s trying to be funny?” Benger demanded, swinging round. “I’ll tear… Oh, it’s you, Warren.” He gave a sickly smile. “That was a good one, Warren—you nearly scared the tripes out of me.”

Peace withheld his instinctive apology, deciding to let his fearsome reputation go on smoothing the way for him. “You didn’t have to flatten it, did you?”

“Sorry, Warren. I’ll buy you another one first chance I get.”

Peace retrieved the piece of plastic, becoming interested. “You’ve seen them on sale somewhere?”

“No, but toys like that can’t be too hard to…” Benger broke off and a doleful expression appeared on his face as the truck swerved and came to a halt. “We must be at the spacefield.”

Peace forgot about the destruction of his single personal possession as the compartment’s automatic doors began to open, giving him his first glimpse of a bustling interstellar port. He hurried to the door and eagerly looked out, only to experience a pang of disappointment as he discovered he had apparently arrived at a slack period. There were no starships to be seen anywhere on the expanse of frozen mud. A dozen shabby seagulls wandered dispiritedly on the barren ground, emitting raucous cries of disapproval. The sole human presence was that of a Space Legion lieutenant who— judging by the corpse-like pallor of his face—had been awaiting the personnel carrier for some time. He was standing at the entrance to a low, window-less metal building which was about two hundred metres long and had a raised section at each end. Its heavily welded seams gave it the appearance of a hastily constructed air-raid shelter.

“This way, you men,” the lieutenant ordered, opening a steel door. “In here.”

Peace led a reluctant file of men into the building and discovered that, for a space terminal, it was singularly lacking in amenities. He was in a long narrow room which had a door at each end, transverse rows of benches, and a lone coffee machine. The lieutenant, who remained outside, slammed the entrance door behind them and there followed the sound of bolts clunking into place. A klaxon howled briefly, wringing a fresh chorus of moans from Peace’s companions. Puzzled by and slightly contemptuous of their nerviness, he sat down slightly apart from the others and composed himself to wait for the arrival of the spaceship which was to carry him across the oceans of infinity. He was disappointed that the terminal building had no windows through which he would be able to view the great vessel descending from the sky, but consoled himself with the thought that as a legionary he would have lots of other opportunities to admire the tall ships.

Thirty minutes went by before Peace became restless. He toyed with the flattened corpse of his plastic toad, threw it irreverently to the floor, went to the coffee machine and found it was empty, then walked around the room several times, growing more and more impatient. The gloomy torpor of the other recruits, who remained slumped on the benches, served to heighten his annoyance and resentment at being penned up like an animal. Finally, losing his temper altogether, he went to the door by which he had entered the room and tried to throw it open. It refused to move. He slid his hand into a recess in the metal, pressed down on a lever within and began hitting the door with his shoulder.

“Hey, look at old Warren,” somebody said in the background. “He’s pretending to open the door.”

“That’s Warren for you,” Benger commented. “Anything for a laugh.”

“Wait a minute,” cut in another voice, “I think he’s really trying to…”

“My God! He’s trying to open the door!”

A bench was knocked over and an instant later Peace found himself lying on the floor, with Vernie Ryan sitting on his chest. Another recruit was sprawled across his legs, immobilizing him.

“Sorry to have to do this, Warren,” Ryan said, panting. “I know a guy like you doesn’t care about anything, but the rest of us aren’t ready to die.”

“Die? What are you talking about?” Peace found it difficult to speak with Ryan’s bulk compressing his ribcage. “I just wanted to look for our ship.”

Ryan exchanged glances with the onlookers. “This is our ship, Warren. We’re in it. Didn’t you know we took off half an hour ago?”

“In this tin box!” Peace sneered his disbelief. “Do I look like an idiot?”

Fair’s dark face came into view. “Which idiot do you mean?”

“That’s enough, Coppy,” Ryan said. “Remember Warren’s memory has been wiped out. He knows hardly anything about anything.”

Peace fought for breath. “I know this isn’t a spaceship, that’s for sure. It isn’t even the right shape.”

“It doesn’t have to be any special shape,” Ryan explained. “It doesn’t have to be streamlined—not when it doesn’t move.”

“Got you!” Peace said triumphantly. “You said we took off. How can we take off in something that doesn’t move?”

Fair appeared again. “This boy was in orbit before we started.”

“Lay off him, Coppy.” Ryan looked down at Peace with a kindly, pleading expression on his face, like a junior school teacher giving special attention to a dull child. “Don’t you see, Warren, that a spaceship which moved would never get you anywhere?”

“No, I…” In view of Ryan’s obvious sincere ity, Peace began to doubt his own position.

“Who said so?”

“Albert Einstein, among others. Oh, you could do a bit of local planet-hopping like they did in the old days, but your ship would never be able to go faster than the speed of light, which means it would be pretty useless for interstellar work. The light barrier would see to that.”

“So you get around the light barrier by using a ship which doesn’t move?”

“That’s it!” Ryan looked pleased. “You’re getting the idea.”

“I am?”

“Of course you are. A brainy character like you… Already you’ll be asking yourself what a spaceship designer would do if all the conventional forms of locomotion were ruled out.”

“That’s right,” Peace admitted. “That’s what I’m asking myself.”

“I knew it! And already your mind will be sifting through the various possibilities…”

“Yes, yes,” Peace said, compliantly, feeling the growing excitement of intellectual adventure.

“… spurning one unsatisfactory solution after another …”

“Yes, yes.”

“… until it finally settles on …”

“Yes, yes.”

“… non-Elucidean tachyon displacement.”

“Oh!” Peace tried to conceal his disappointment.

“Non-Elucidean tachyon displacement.”

Ryan nodded eagerly. “Which, of course, is just another way of saying instantaneous matter transmission.”

Peace’s hopes picked up, but only momentarily. “If it’s instantaneous why have we been sitting around in here for so long?”

“Well, it can’t be completely instantaneous— that would involve us with the logical absurdity of being in two different places at once. But it’s so close to instantaneous that you wouldn’t notice the difference.”

“I notice the difference,” Peace said. “It seems to me that forty minutes…”

“Ah, but you haven’t thought it through, Warren. We don’t complete journeys in one jump.”

“Why not?”

“Because you can’t have too great a distance between your transmitting station and your receiving station. Above a certain range there’s a loss of fidelity, and a risk of incomplete reception.” A solemn expression flitted across Ryan’s face. “That could be very nasty.”

“So what sort of distance do we transmit across?”

“Two hundred metres.”

“Two hun…!” Peace renewed his efforts to wriggle free, but fell back, exhausted.

“I’m sorry, Warren—we can’t risk letting you up until you understand that we’re out in space and would all be killed if you opened that door.”

“All right,” Peace said in a strangled voice. “Tell me the rest. Tell me we’ve got chains of matter transceivers all over the galaxy… trillions of them… two hundred metres apart.”

“Now you’re being silly,” Ryan reproved. “Just when you were doing so well, too.”

“I’m sorry—I won’t argue again. Teach me how it all works.”

“I wouldn’t presume to try teaching anything to a well-educated guy like you, Warren. You’re working it out for yourself. Remember?”

“Yes, but…” Peace gazed up into Ryan’s watchful eyes, seeking inspiration. “Give me a clue, Vernie.”

Ryan glanced at the others, most of whom, Peace was relieved to see, were nodding vigorously. “All right, then. Tell me what you noticed about this ship when you got down out of the personnel carrier.”

“Let’s see,” Peace said, anxious to co-operate. “It looked like a long, narrow metal box with a sort of low tower at each end.”

“Very good, Warren. Very observant. And how far apart would you say those towers were?”

“About two hundred metres, but I don’t see…” Peace stopped speaking as he noticed that Ryan’s eyes had brightened expectantly. “Two hun…” He broke off again, partly because the idea which had sprung into being in his mind was too preposterous for words, partly because Ryan had begun to bounce encouragingly on his chest, driving the air from his lungs.

“Go on, Warren,” Ryan urged. “It’s a privilege and a pleasure for me to see a first-class brain at work.”

“There’s a matter transmitter at the back of the ship,” Peace said in dazed tones. “And a matter receiver at the front of the ship. And the ship transmits itself forward two hundred metres at a time. And receives itself.”

“Stand up, Warren.” Ryan’s face glowed with vicarious pride as he got off Peace’s chest and helped him to his feet. “I knew you could figure it out for yourself, a bright boy like you.”

“Thank you.” Silent shrieks of disbelief were ringing through every compartment of Peace’s mind, but he guessed the penalty for showing his true feelings would be another interlude on the floor. “Of course,” he said tentatively, seeking a neutral form of words, “it’s not quite as simple as that.”

“You’re right there, Warren.” Ryan brushed dust from Peace’s clothes. “I can see your mind is busy delving into the implications of the basic principle.”

Peace nodded. “Naturally.”

“You’re probably delving into stuff that even I don’t really understand—stuff about how it’s stellar-type condensation of matter around the ship’s centre of gravity that produces spatial displacement with every jump, stuff about the need to make one and a half million jumps a second to give an apparent velocity equal to that of light, stuff about the artificial gravity generators…”

“Yes—all that kind of thing,” Peace said faintly, turning away and making for the nearest seat.

Somewhere along the line he had become convinced of the truth of Ryan’s words, and the knowledge that his own body was being torn apart and rebuilt millions of times every second made him feel weak at the knees. This is terrible, he thought. The erasure of all conscious memory meant that his world-picture was being formed in his subconscious—and it appeared that his subconscious self was an impractical, romantic twit with no idea of how anything worked in the real universe. His earlier pleasure at being a legionary had been based on the notion of crusading through the galaxy—in one piece—in a beautiful silver ship, not being wafted from star to star as a cloud of particles inside a steel lunchbox. The adjustment was a difficult one to make, and peace longed for the solace of a cigarette.

“What’s the matter, Warren?” Ryan sat down nearby. “Not feeling so good?”

Peace jumped to his feet to prove there was nothing wrong with him, but he was unable to resist the sympathetic expression on Ryan’s plump face. “Everything’s all wrong,” he said.

“I’m dying for a smoke … and I didn’t know I’d be fighting for a ketchup manufacturer.”

“Please don’t mention fighting,” Ryan said, looking apprehensive. “Anyway, you’ll be … doing what you said … for the Legion. Triple-Ess only kits out the regiment.”

“It’s a bit degrading, isn’t it?”

Ryan pondered for a moment. “For the likes of you, perhaps.”

“What do you mean for the likes of me? Having no memory doesn’t make me special.”

“All I meant was you weren’t cut out to be a ranker, Warren. I can tell from the way you talk you’ve been to college. You must be a bright boy—not like old Coppy over there. I mean, when you joined the Legion you knew there was no way out. Old Coppy talked me into believing we could duck out any time we…”

“College, you say?” Peace turned the new fact over in his mind, but failed to draw any comfort from it. “From the cloisters to the sauce works.”

“Forget about sauce, will you? Look, would you feel better if things hadn’t changed since the seventeenth century and this outfit was called the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment?”

“Daresay I would.”

“Right. And would it make any difference that the Duke who equipped the regiment got most of his money from the revenues of his family estate?”

“No.”

“And what if the Duke’s biggest tenant was a sauce factory?”

“That’s different,” Peace said, feeling he had been tricked. “Anyway the Duke of Wellington would have given me a better uniform than this.”

“You look great the way you are, Warren.”

“Think so?” Mollified by the compliment, Peace glanced down at himself and wished he had been blessed with thicker legs or that his red-and-gold boots had been ten sizes smaller.

“No kidding, Warren—you look as smart as old General Nightingale himself.” In his enthusiasm, Ryan turned to Copgrove Farr, who had dropped on to the bench beside him.

“How do you think he looks?”

Farr examined Peace with a lacklustre eye. “With those legs—like a jaybird standing in two empty shotgun shells.”

“Aw, come on, Coppy—I’d say he’s a real Beau Geste.”

“Beau who?”

“You know—Beau Geste.”

Farr’s face became darker. “More like Bo Peep.”

“Now see here!” Peace advanced on Farr, trying to avoid stepping out of his boots as he did so. “Don’t forget who I am.”

“Why not?” Farr said. “You’ve done it.”

“I know, but…”

“I don’t believe you’re such a hard case, anyway,” Farr continued, sneering. “For all we know you’ve just got a lousy memory.”

Ryan raised a placating hand. “Look at the way he faced up to Sergeant Cleet.”

“Anybody can do that.” Farr crooked his fingers and a look of savage anticipation appeared on his face. “The next sergeant I meet I’m gonna…” The klaxon blared out suddenly, obliterating Farr’s words and causing other recruits to scuttle to their seats.

“Attention, men,” an amplified voice said. “We have reached the planet Ulpha and are going into the landing phase. If your seat has a safety belt, fasten it and remain seated until the door opens.”

Peace looked down at his bench and noted that it had ringlike anchorages at intervals along the back, but no straps of any kind. A commotion broke out all around him as men, Ryan and Farr among them, scrambled for the few places on other benches where straps were still in evidence. The panic died down momentarily and then flared up again as most of those who had begun securing themselves discovered they had only one strap each and were unable to complete their restraining loops. The Legions field officers, he decided, would need every last gram of their battle experience and leadership to weld the class often a.m. into an efficient fighting unit. He had no relish for the idea of going into combat, but at least it would be a relief to see the reins taken up by the strong hands of a professional commander, a man who had been honed and tempered and toughened by his years in the front line.

The floor lurched gently, the first indication of movement the ship had given, and Peace sat upright, his heart quickening as the ship seemed to drop a few centimetres, like an elevator with a faulty control mechanism coming to rest, and the metal door sprang open. Beyond it was a swirling of blue-white vapours through which came running a humanoid figure with huge black eyes and a short, wrinkled trunk where its nose and mouth should have been. A multiple gasp of fear arose from the watching recruits.

Peace grabbed nervously for his rifle, then realized the dreadful figure was actually a Legion officer whose face was hidden by a gas mask. The officer staggered into the ship and slammed the door behind him, dispersing little whorls of the blue-white mist through the room. He slumped against the door for a moment, breathing heavily, before taking off the respirator and scanning the group with red-rimmed eyes.

“I’m Lieutenant Merriman,” he said in a thin, fluting voice which was in ill accord with the stained and dust-streaked uniform of a front-line veteran. “You men have arrived just in time—the Ulphans are hitting us with everything they’ve got.” He paused and knuckled his streaming eyes. “Where are your respirators?”

“Respirators, sir?” Peace took his athlete’s protective cup from his pocket and dangled it by its elasticated straps. “This is the only extra equipment we got.”

Merriman gave an impatient wave. “You’ll just have to manage without. All of you follow me— we’re going into action.”

“But, sir…” Even as he spoke, Peace felt the now-familiar sandpapering sensation on the surface of his brain, and knew he was unable to disobey the order. The other rankers shuffled uneasily, faces revealing their mental torment.

“Hurry it up,” Merriman piped, impatience nudging his voice into the falsetto ranges. “You’ll have to be sharper than this when you’re fighting for Terra.”

“Excuse me, sir.” Benger held up his hand. “There must be some mistake—we’re from Earth.”

“I know that, you fool.”

Benger glanced around him in perplexity. “But you just said we’d be fighting for some place I never even…”

“Are you trying to be funny?” Merriman moved closer to Benger and read his name badge.

“Give yourself three tweaks, Benger.”

While the unfortunate Benger was administering his own punishment, Peace had time to look more closely at Merriman and was dismayed to see that, underneath the grease and grime of battle, the lieutenant was a baby-faced youth of about eighteen. He had blue eyes of an idealistic clarity, and girlish lips which were permanently parted to reveal exceptionally large square teeth, and if he had been honed and tempered and toughened by his time in the front line it certainly did not show. Peace was beginning to feel anxious about serving under someone as inexperienced as Merriman when he noticed a tantalizing aroma drifting in the air. He sniffed at it disbelievingly.

“We can’t delay any longer.” Merriman gazed critically at his men, who stared back over the rims of their improvised masks. “It’s too bad you don’t even have goggles to protect your eyes.

That stuff out there really goes for the eyes.”

“Excuse me, sir.” Peace raised a tentative hand. “It smells like tobacco smoke.”

Merriman nodded. “Quick work, Peace—that’s exactly what it is.”

“Ordinary tobacco smoke, sir.”

“There’s no such thing as ordinary tobacco smoke, Peace,” Merriman said impatiently, the ellipse of his mouth changing position slightly with respect to the wall of teeth behind it. “It all stunts your growth. It’s all carcinogenic, and did you know that, weight for weight, nicotine is practically the deadliest poison known to man?”

“It doesn’t bother me, sir—I like it.”

“You mean … you’re a smoker?

“Yes, sir, I think so, sir.”

“Goodness gracious!” Merriman’s lips tightened in disapproval and actually succeeded in meeting for an instant, but the outward pressure of the teeth within was too great and after a convulsive twitch his mouth sprang open once more. Peace was reminded of somebody struggling to close the zip on an overfull holdall.

“Goodness gracious!” Merriman repeated, relieving his anger by what he apparently regarded as strong language. “A victim of the weed! You’ll have no stamina. No wind. What sort of wretches is Terra reduced to sending us?”

“You’ve said it again, sir,” Benger put in doggedly. “Are you sure there isn’t a mistake? We’re definitely from Earth and not from…”

“Six more tweaks, Benger,” Merriman snapped without turning his head. “All right, you men, we’ve wasted enough time. Follow me!”

He pulled his gas mask up over his face and flung open the metal door. Blue-white smoke wreathed outside, occasionally lit up by orange flashes, and there was the sound of explosions and old-fashioned gunfire. Merriman, quite unnecessarily, windmilled his right arm once in slow motion—a signal which Peace was certain had been culled from twentieth-century war movies, dropped into a crouch and ran forward. His squad of recruits nervously adopted similar attitudes and scuttled along behind him. Ryan, plumply incongruous in his green glitter suit, was snorting with effort before he had taken a dozen paces, and Benger, who was still tweaking himself, kept leaping in the air and emitting yelps of pain.

Peace heard the ship’s door clang shut behind him. He glanced back and saw the long metal structure sail up into the sky in a blurred arc described by fast-fading images of itself. In a second it had vanished, leaving him no recourse but to follow his companions into whatever straits a sardonic destiny had prepared for them.

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