The Deserter
by William Tenn
November 10,2039—
Terran Supreme Command communique No. 18-673 for the twenty-four hours ending 0900 Monday, Terran capital time:
…whereupon sector HQ on Fortress Satellite Five ordered a strategic withdrawal of all interceptor units. The withdrawal was accomplished without difficulty and with minimal loss.
The only other incident of interest in this period was the surrender of an enemy soldier of undetermined rank, the first of these creatures from Jupiter to be taken alive by our forces. The capture was made in the course of defending Cochabamba, Bolivia, from an enemy commando raid. Four Jovians were killed in this unsuccessful assault upon a vital tin-supplying area after which the fifth laid down his arms and begged that his life be spared. Upon capture by our forces, the Jovian claimed to be a deserter and requested a safe-conduct to…
Mardin had been briefed on what to expect by the MP officer who’d escorted him into the cave. Inevitably, though, his first view of the tank in which the alien floated brought out a long, whimpering grunt of disbelief and remembered fear. It was at least sixty feet long by forty wide, and it reared off the rocky floor to twice the height of a man. Whatever incredible material its sides had been composed of had hours ago been covered by thick white layers of ice.
Cold air currents bouncing the foul, damp smell of methane back from the tank tweaked his nose and pricked at his ears. Well, after all, Mardin thought, those things have a body temperature somewhere in the neighborhood of minus 2000 Fahrenheit!
And he had felt this cold once before…
He shivered violently in response to the memory and zipped shut the fur-lined coveralls he’d been issued at the entrance. “Must have been quite a job getting that thing in here.” The casualness of his voice surprised him and made him feel better.
“Oh, a special engineer task force did it in—let me see, now—” The MP lieutenant, a Chinese girl in her late teens, pursed soft, coral lips at his graying hair. “Less than five hours, figuring from the moment they arrived. The biggest problem was finding a cell in the neighborhood that was big enough to hold the prisoner. This cave was perfect.”
Mardin looked up at the ledge above their heads. Every ten feet, a squad of three men, highly polished weapons ready for instant action. Atomic cannon squads alternating with men bent down under the weight of dem-dem grenades. Grim-faced young subalterns, very conscious of the bigness of the brass that occupied the platform at the far end of the cave, stamped back and forth along the ledge from squad to squad, deadly little Royster pistolettos tinkling and naked in their sweating hands. Those kids, he thought angrily, so well adjusted to it all!
The ledge ran along three sides of the cave; on the fourth, the low entrance from which Mardin had just come, he had seen five steel Caesars implanted, long, pointed snouts throbbingly eager to throw tremendous gusts of nuclear energy at the Jovian’s rear. And amid the immense rock folds of the roof, a labyrinth of slender, pencil-like bombs had been laid, held in place by clamps that would all open simultaneously the moment a certain colonel’s finger pressed a certain green button…
“If our friend in the tank makes one wrong move,” Mardin muttered, “half of South America goes down the drain.”
The girl started to chuckle, then changed her mind and frowned. “I’m sorry, Major Mardin, but I don’t like that. I don’t like hearing them referred to as ‘friends.’ Even in a joke. Over a million and a half people—three hundred thousand of them Chinese—have been wiped out by those—those ammoniated flatworms!”
“And the first fifty of which,” he reminded her irritably, “were my relatives and neighbors. If you’re old enough to remember Mars and the Three Watertanks Massacre, young lady.”
She swallowed and looked stricken. An apology seemed to be in the process of composition, but Mardin moved past her in a long, disgusted stride and headed rapidly for the distant platform. He had a fierce dislike, he had discovered long ago, for people who were unable to hate wholesomely and intelligently, who had to jog their animus with special symbols and idiotic negations. Americans, during the War of 1914-18, changing sauerkraut into liberty cabbage; mobs of Turks, in the Gibraltar Flare-up of 1985, lynching anyone in Ankara caught eating oranges. How many times had he seen aged men in the uniform of the oldsters’ service, the Infirm Civilian Corps, make the socially accepted gesture of grinding out a worm with their heels whenever they referred to the enemy from Jupiter!
He grimaced at the enormous expanse of ice-covered tank in which a blanket of living matter large enough to cover a city block pursued its alien processes. “Let me see you lift your foot and step on that!” he told the astonished girl behind him. Damn all simplicity-hounds, anyway, he thought. A week on the receiving end of a Jovian question-machine is exactly what they need. Make them nice and thoughtful and give them some inkling of how crazily complex this universe can be!
That reminded him of his purpose in this place. He became thoughtful himself and—while the circular scar on his forehead wrinkled—very gravely reminiscent of how crazily complex the universe actually was…
So thoughtful, in fact, that he had to take a long, relaxing breath and wipe his hands on his coveralls before climbing the stairs that led up to the hastily constructed platform.
Colonel Liu, Mardin’s immediate superior, broke away from the knot of men at the other end and came up to him with arms spread wide. “Good to see you, Mardin,” he said rapidly. “Now listen to me. Old Rockethead himself is here—you know how he is. So put a little snap into your salute and kind of pull back on those shoulders when you’re talking to him. Know what I mean? Try to show him that when it comes to military bearing, we in Intelligence don’t take a—Mardin, are you listening to me? This is very important.”
With difficulty, Mardin took his eyes away from the transparent un-iced top of the tank. “Sorry, sir,” he mumbled. “I’ll—I’ll try to remember.”
“This the interpreter, Colonel Liu? Major Mardin, eh?” the very tall, stiffly erect man in the jeweled uniform of a Marshal of Space yelled from the railing. “Bring him over. On the double, sir!”
Colonel Liu grabbed Mardin’s left arm and pulled him rapidly across the platform. Rockethead Billingsley cut the colonel’s breathless introduction short. “Major Igor Mardin, is it? Sounds Russian. You wouldn’t be Russian now, would you? I hate Russians.”
Mardin noticed a broad-shouldered vice-marshal standing in Billingsley’s rear stiffen angrily. “No, sir,” he replied. “Mardin is a Croat name. My family is French and Yugoslav with possibly a bit of Arab.”
The Marshal of Space inclined his fur-covered head. “Good! Couldn’t stand you if you were Russian. Hate Russians, hate Chinese, hate Portuguese. Though the Chinese are worst of all, I’d say. Ready to start working on this devil from Jupiter? Come over here, then. And move, man, move!” As he swung around, the dozen or so sapphire-studded Royster pistolettos that swung picturesquely from his shoulder straps clinked and clanked madly, making him seem like a gigantic cat that the mice had belled again and again.
Hurrying after him, Mardin noticed with amusement that the stiff, angry backs were everywhere now. Colonel Liu’s mouth was screwed up into a dark pucker in his face; at the far end of the platform, the young lieutenant who’d escorted him from the jet base was punching a tiny fist into an open palm. Marshal of Space Rudolfo Billingsley enjoyed a rank high enough to make tact a function of the moment’s whim—and it was obvious that he rarely indulged such moments. “Head thick as a rocket wall and a mouth as filthy as a burned-out exhaust, but he can figure out, down to the smallest wound on the greenest corporal, exactly how much blood any attack is going to cost.” That was what the line officers said of him.