“What the hell do you want?” Don slurred.
“Everything you’ve got, you funker,” the largest one growled lowly. “Hand it over, or we take it the hard way for you.”
Don tried to rally himself. He said in a belligerent slur, “Look, you three, I’m a One Man Scout pilot, and officer. If you don’t clear out, I’ll summon the SP and it’ll be your ass.”
One of the others grinned nastily. “You reach for your transceiver,
Don Mathers wavered on his feet. Three of them, damn it, and he was drenched to the gills. He backed up against the wall of the building he had been walking along at their approach. He realized that if he’d had good sense he would do what they demanded. Precious little he had on him anyway, and most of it personal rather than being of much value; his transceiver, his class ring, his wrist chronometer, a gold stylo Dian had given him for his birthday a year ago when she still thought she was in love with him. It was the stylo that decided him; he didn’t want to give it up.
He put up his hands in a drunken effort to defend himself.
It wasn’t actually an age of personal physical violence. Don Mathers couldn’t remember having hit anybody since childhood, and early childhood at that. Pugilism was no longer practiced as a sport, nor was wrestling, not to speak of judo or karate. Even football, basketball and hockey had been so modified as to minimize the danger of any of the contestants being hurt. Bullfighting and even auto racing were unknown. Men didn’t kill each other, or get themselves killed in sports… when the Kradens were out there. Oh, he’d had some hand to hand combat while in cadet training, but not as it had been in the old days.
The three of them moved in on him carefully, and spaced out so that he couldn’t face them all at once. They were going to be able to do whatever they wanted with him.
Suddenly, one reached out with his truncheon and whacked Don across the belly, hard.
Don’s face went white. He brought his hands down over his guts and doubled forward. He vomited onto the sidewalk, the contents of his stomach burning acid and alcohol as it spewed out of his mouth. Even in his agony, his mind was clear enough to anticipate another blow of the club on his head momentarily. There was nothing that he could do about it.
But it was then that Thor Bjornsen exploded onto the scene. Where he came from none of the four participants in the drama ever comprehended. It was as though magically a giant had materialized in their midst. A berserk giant. And, in spite of his size, a veritable flurry of movement.
Don Mathers, still in agony, never did quite comprehend the next few minutes—if it lasted that long. Blows were struck and received, most of them going one way—from the giant out. In a moment, two men were down on the sidewalk, one sitting and looking startled, one sprawled flat.
And the next thing Don knew, the giant was chasing his three attackers down the street, one of the truncheons in hand and whacking them unmercifully on their buttocks as they went.
He returned shortly, chuckling. He cut off the laughter when he saw Don sitting on the curb and said, “Are you all right?”
“No,” Don said. “I’m sick.”
“You smell drenched.”
“I am… or was.”
The other peered down at him, quizzically. He said finally, “Well, whether or not, you’re in no shape to be getting yourself home. My apartment’s nearby. Come on over there. You can sleep on the couch. By morning, you should be able to hold down an Anti-Ale. I’ve got some. I too, in my time, have been drenched.”
He helped Don to his feet, and, still holding him by one arm led him along.
The big man said, “What did those three want?”
“They said they wanted everything I had.”
Thor Bjornsen grunted. “You’re fairly well dressed. They probably figured they could hock your things for enough pseudo-dollar credits to buy a few drinks. It’s a queer world we’re living in. For half a century we’ve been at peace, but preparing for war. We’re in continual training for conflict that doesn’t come. Violence is in the air and can’t be sublimated with real violence against an enemy. So it sometimes comes out in some type of manufactured real violence, in short, masochism. Those three that jumped you didn’t really need what little credits they would have realized. What they really wanted was the fun of working you over.”
The other’s apartment was in one of the older of Center City’s buildings, rather than in one of the new hi- rises. And, being of an earlier era, the apartments were larger. Although a single, the place must have been twice the size of Don’s mini-apartment. And it was considerably more comfortably furnished and decorated, for that matter.
His rescuer got Don into a chair and looked down at him, fists resting on his hips.
He said, “Can I get you anything?”
“No. I’ll be all right in a minute or so.” But Don doubted it!
“You don’t think you could hold anything, any food, on your stomach?”
“Almighty Ultimate, no.”
The other said, “My name’s Thor Bjornsen.”
Don looked up at him. “You look like Thor. I’m Sub-lieutenant Donal Mathers.”
“Space Forces?”
“Pilot of a One Man Scout.”
“Oh? I don’t envy you that job.”
Thor Bjornsen lived up to the first impression he had made on both Don and his attackers. He was a giant of a man in the Viking way. Red of hair, square of face, light blue of eye, graceful of carriage in spite of his brawn. Neither of them would have known, but physically he was a Norse version of the Joe Louis of an earlier time. In age he must have been roughly the same as Don Mathers, but his face had a boyish quality that made him seem more youthful.
He went over to an old-fashioned autobar set in the corner, rather than built-in, and dialed himself a drink, a stein of dark beer, and returned with it. He sat down on the couch across from Don’s comfort chair.
He took a pull at the beer and said, “What in the hell were you out on the streets in this condition for?”
“I was drowning my sorrows,” Don said ungraciously. “I should thank you for coming to the rescue. How could you possibly have taken on three men, two of them armed, and run them off?”
“Nobody knows how to fight any more,” the other told him. “I make a hobby of it. I’d rather be able to knock down my enemies than drink my friends under the table. What sorrows?”
Don wondered if he felt like answering that. It was none of the big man’s business. However, he said, “My girl left me to take a job on Callisto. And my commodore’s down on me because I’ve had a series of troubles with my One Man Scout and have come in several times from patrol prematurely.”
Thor Bjornsen finished his beer and stood again. “You look like hell,” he said. “The bathroom’s over there. I’ll order some bedding from the ultra-market and well fix up that couch for you. You’ll be better in the morning. Hell, by the looks of you you couldn’t be worse.”
In the morning, Don Mathers did feel worse, but in a different way. By the time he awoke, his host had already dressed.
He stood next to the couch, with a small bottle in his hand and shook a pill from it. “Anti-Ale,” he said. “Here, take it down.”
“It’s against regulations for an officer of the damned Space Service to take the stuff,” Don told him.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I think they want you to suffer. If you suffer enough from drinking, maybe you’ll do less drinking, and they don’t like pilots, in particular, to have their reflexes slowed up with guzzle.”
Thor reached out the pill again, and a glass of water. “Tell them to get poked.”
Don downed it, choking slightly, flushed it on through with the water. He began to feel better almost immediately, as he knew he would. He had taken the sober-up before, and many a time, in spite of what he had said about regulations.
The big man eyed him carefully and said, “You don’t like the Space Service, do you?”
Don Mathers considered that for a minute before saying, “Well, no. But what can you do?”
“Get out. I did.”
