were interceptors, led by the eager young Efrid.
'Testing Lunar relay, sir,' said the chief teck.
The wing commander turned to a twelve-inch screen. Unobtrusively, behind him, tecks jockeyed for position. The picture on the screen was something to see. The chief let mercury fill a thick-walled, ceramic tank. There was a sputtering and contact was made.
'Well done,' said Arris. 'Perfect seeing.'
He saw, upper left, a globe of ships—what ships! Some were Service jobs, with extra turrets plastered on them wherever there was room.
Some were orthodox freighters, with the same porcupine-bristle of weapons. Some were obviously home-made crates, hideously ugly—and as heavily armed as the others.
Next to him, Arris heard his aide murmur, 'It's all wrong, sir. They haven't got any pick-up boats. They haven't got any hospital ships. What happens when one of them gets shot up?'
'Just what ought to happen, Evan,' snapped the wing commander.
'They float in space until they desiccate in their suits. Or if they get grappled inboard with a boat hook, they don't get any medical care. As I told you, they're brigands, without decency even to care for their own.'
He enlarged on the theme. 'Their morale must be insignificant compared with our men's. When the Service goes into action, every rating and teck knows he'll be cared for if he's hurt. Why, if we didn't have pick-up boats and hospital ships the men wouldn't—' He almost finished it with 'fight,' but thought, and lamely ended—'wouldn't like it.'
* * *
Evan nodded, wonderingly, and crowded his chief a little as he craned his neck for a look at the screen.
'Get the hell away from here!' said the wing commander in a restrained yell, and Evan got.
The interceptor squadron swam into the field—a sleek, deadly needle of vessels in perfect alignment, with its little cloud of pick-ups trailing, and farther astern a white hospital ship with the ancient red cross.
The contact was immediate and shocking. One of the rebel ships lumbered into the path of the interceptors, spraying fire from what seemed to be as many points as a man has pores. The Service ships promptly riddled it and it should have drifted away—but it didn't. It kept on fighting. It rammed an interceptor with a crunch that must have killed every man before the first bulwark, but aft of the bulwark the ship kept fighting.
It took a torpedo portside and its plumbing drifted through space in a tangle. Still the starboard side kept squirting fire. Isolated weapon blisters fought on while they were obviously cut off from the rest of the ship. It was a pounded tangle of wreckage, and it had destroyed two interceptors, crippled two more, and kept fighting.
Finally, it drifted away, under feeble jets of power. Two more of the fantastic rebel fleet wandered into action, but the wing commander's horrified eyes were on the first pile of scrap. It was going somewhere—
The ship neared the thin-skinned, unarmored, gleaming hospital vessel, rammed it amidships, square in one of the red crosses, and then blew itself up, apparently with everything left in its powder magazine, taking the hospital ship with it.
The sickened wing commander would never have recognized what he had seen as it was told in a later version, thus:
'The crushing course they took
And nobly knew
Their death undaunted
By heroic blast
The hospital's host
They dragged to doom
Hail! Men without mercy
From the far frontier!'
Lunar relay flickered out as overloaded fuses flashed into vapor. Arris distractedly paced back to the dark corner and sank into a chair.
'I'm sorry,' said the voice of Glen next to him, sounding quite sincere.
'No doubt it was quite a shock to you.'
'Not to you?' asked Arris bitterly.
'Not to me.'
'Then how did they do it?' the wing commander asked the civilian in a low, desperate whisper. 'They don't even wear .45's. Intelligence says their enlisted men have hit their officers and got away with it. They elect ship captains! Glen, what does it all mean?'
'It means,' said the fat little man with a timbre of doom in his voice,
'that they've returned. They always have. They always will. You see, commander, there is always somewhere a wealthy, powerful city, or nation, or world. In it are those whose blood is not right for a wealthy, powerful place. They must seek danger and overcome it. So they go out—on the marshes, in the desert, on the tundra, the planets, or the stars. Being strong, they grow stronger by fighting the tundra, the planets or the stars. They—they change. They sing new songs. They know new heroes. And then, one day, they return to their old home.
'They return to the wealthy, powerful city, or nation or world. They fight its guardians as they fought the tundra, the planets or the stars—a way that strikes terror to the heart. Then they sack the city, nation or world and sing great, ringing sagas of their deeds. They always have.
Doubtless they always will.'
'But what shall we do?'
'We shall cower, I suppose, beneath the bombs they drop on us, and we shall die, some bravely, some not, defending the palace within a very few hours. But you will have your revenge.'
'How?' asked the wing commander, with haunted eyes.
The fat little man giggled and whispered in the officer's ear. Arris irritably shrugged it off as a bad joke. He didn't believe it. As he died, drilled through the chest a few hours later by one of Algan's gunfighters, he believed it even less.
The professor's lecture was drawing to a close. There was time for only one more joke to send his students away happy. He was about to spring it when a messenger handed him two slips of paper. He raged inwardly at his ruined exit and poisonously read from them:
'I have been asked to make two announcements. One, a bulletin from General Sleg's force. He reports that the so-called Outland Insurrection is being brought under control and that there is no cause for alarm.
Two, the gentlemen who are members of the S.O.T.C. will please report to the armory at 1375 hours— whatever that may mean—for blaster inspection. The class is dismissed.'
Petulantly, he swept from the lectern and through the door.
The Last Man Left in the Bar
You know him, Joe—or Sam, Mike, Tony, Ben, whatever your deceitful, cheaply genial name may be. And do not lie to yourself, Gentle Reader; you know him too.
A loner, he was.
You did not notice him when he slipped in; you only knew by his aggrieved air when he (finally) caught your eye and self-consciously said 'Shot of Red Top and a beer' that he'd ruffle your working day. (Six at night until two in the morning is a day? But ah, the horrible alternative is to work for a living.)
Shot of Red Top and a beer at 8:35.
And unbeknownst to him, Gentle Reader, in the garage up the street the two contrivers of his dilemma
