Laumer, Keith - Galactic Odyssey

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Odyssey

By Keith Laumer

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Galactic Odyssey (aka Spaceman!) was first serialized in IF magazine (May–July,

1967) and first published in novel form by Berkley in 1967. “A Trip to the City” (aka “It

Could Be Anything”) was first published in Amazing, January 1963. “Hybrid” was first

published in The Magazine of F&SF in November 1961. “Combat Unit” (aka

“Dinochrome”) was first published in The Magazine of F&SF in November 1960. “The

King of the City” was first published in Galaxy in August 1961. “Once There Was a

Giant” was first published in The Magazine of F&SF in November 1968. Dinosaur

Beach was first published by Scribner's in 1971.

any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-3527 -3

Cover art by Richard Martin

First printing, March 2002

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN . . .

To the untrained eye, a Class-One Karg robot—the only kind ever used in Timesweep work—was

undistinguishable from any other citizen. But my eye wasn’t untrained. He was the same Karg I’d left

in the hotel room back in 1936 with a soft-nosed slug in his head. Now here he was, with no hole in his

head, climbing down onto the deck of the ship as neat and cool as if it had all been in fun. I hugged the

deck and tried to look hors de combat.

I was just beginning to form a hopeless plan for creeping out of sight when the door I was lying

against opened. Tried to open, that is. I was blocking it. Somebody inside gave it a hearty shove and

started through.

The Karg’s head had turned at the first sound. He whipped up a handsome pearl-mounted, wheel-

lock pistol. The explosion was like a bomb. I heard the slug hit; a solid, meaty smack, like a well-hit ball

hitting the fielder’s glove. The fellow in the door plunged through and went down hard on his face.

The Karg turned back to his men and rapped out an order. The Karg was by the weather rail, calmly

stripping the safety foil from a thermex bomb. He dropped it through the open hatch, then scrambled

with commendable agility back to his ship. Quite suddenly I was alone, watching the attacking ship

recede downwind under full sail.

Smoke billowed from the hatch, with tongues of pale flame in close pursuit. I got a pair of legs

under me. A gun lay a yard from the empty hand of the man the Karg had shot. It was a .01 microjet of

Nexx manufacture, with a grip that fitted my hand perfectly.

It ought to. It was my gun. I didn’t like doing it, but I turned the body over and looked at the face.

It was my face. (from Dinosaur Beach)

BAEN BOOKS by KEITH LAUMER

Retief!

Odyssey

PREFACE

Discerning people have always read Keith Laumer for a lot of reasons, and I am delighted that

Baen Books is making his works available to be read yet again.

As David Drake pointed out in the preface to the first volume in this series, those with some

knowledge of Laumer’s life (and of history) can appreciate the telling accuracy of his trenchant,

experience-based observations of the lunacies of real-world diplomacy in the Retief novels.

Regarded by many, perhaps even most, of his readers as the crown jewels of his literary legacy,

the Retief stories used frequently devastating humor to underscore the not particularly humorous

dilemma of a tough-minded, principled pragmatist trapped on the far side of the Looking Glass.

And as the best satire always is, they were teaching tools, as well.

Along with the humor, however, Retief communicated something else which was common to

all of Laumer’s work. In addition to his highly capable pragmatism, his realism, or even his

occasional cynicism, Retief, like Poul Anderson’s Flandry, embodied the other qualities which

Laumer obviously believed were the true measure of a human being: self-reliance, unswerving

devotion to one’s principles (however unfashionable those principles might be, or however

uncomfortable one might be admitting that one held them), and gallantry. Always gallantry.

Something which is overlooked almost as often as the sheer scope of Laumer’s work, is the

spare, clean prose style and muscular storytelling technique which he shared with those other

high prophets of human capability, H. Beam Piper and Robert Heinlein. There was a seeming

simplicity to the way he wove his tales, coupled with a very real, often first-person colloquialism,

which both moved events rapidly and deceived the eye into missing the complexity of what he had

to tell us. Characterization in a Laumer story flows so simply and so naturally that its depths creep

up upon us almost unnoticed. Yet it is the vibrancy of the characters which truly holds us, and

when the final word is read, the reader comes away with both a sense of completion and a desire

for the tale to go on . . . forever, if possible.

In my own opinion, that result stems not simply, or even primarily, from his undoubted skill as

a literary craftsman so much as from his ability to touch the innermost chords of what makes all

of us human. Whether it’s Retief’s biting wit, or Billy Danger’s unwavering determination, or the

unbreakable gallantry of his Bolos, Laumer’s characters not only live and breathe but challenge.

He was capable of bleakness and the recognition that triumph was not inevitable, however great

one’s determination might be, or that power could seduce even the most selfless, as in the case of

Steve Dravek in “The Day Before Forever” or the protagonist of the chilling little gem “Test to

Destruction” (which is one of my favorite Laumer pieces, despite its darkness). Yet in an era of

cynicism and “enlightened” distrust of and even contempt for heroic virtues, Laumer’s characters

went about the day-to-day business of living up to those virtues with absolutely no sense that

doing so made them special in any way. It was simply what responsible human beings did, and

the profound simplicity of that concept made Laumer, like Piper, an author who was in many

ways an uncomfortable fit in the America of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps that’s one reason Retief

tended to overshadow other works of his, like Galactic Odyssey, A Plague of Demons, “The Night

of the Trolls,” Planet Run, and other stories and nov els too numerous to mention. Humor and

satire were more acceptable techniques for sliding the author’s sometimes discomforting precepts

into the reader’s consciousness, especially when they were wielded so deftly. Yet the very qualities

which made Laumer’s other characters misfits at the time he wrote are the same qualities which

give them their classic timelessness.

At the end of the day, fate hit Keith Laumer with failing health that was a particularly savage

blow to a man who had always celebrated human capability and the ability to triumph over

seemingly unbeatable odds. It was a final battle which he did not win, yet in its own way, and for

all the bitter irony it must have held for the teller of such tales, it could diminish neither the

message nor the messenger, because the true essence of the tales Laumer told were actually less about

triumph, in the end, than they were about an individual’s ironclad responsibility to try. Like his

Bolos, or the protagonist of A Plague of Demons, who chose to fight his hopeless battle to the

death rather than permit his friend to die alone, Keith Laumer believed that the ability to confront

challenges and adversities, however extreme and however remote the chance of final victory, were

the ultimate measure of a human being. I suppose that’s the reason I consider him to have been

one of the three or four authors who had the greatest influence upon me throughout my life, as

both a reader and a writer.

And it’s also the reason that the title of one of the stories in this v olume strikes me as a most

fitting epitaph for him, because it’s true.

“Once There Was a Giant.”

David Weber

September, 2001

GALACTIC ODYSSEY

CHAPTER ONE

I remember hearing somewhere that freezing to death is an easy way to go; but the guy that

said that never tried it. I’d found myself a little hollow where a falling-down stone wall met a dirt-

bank, and hunkered down in it; but the wall wasn’t high enough to keep the wind off or stop the

sleet from hitting my neck like buckshot and running down cold under my collar. There were

some moldy leaves drifted there, and I used the last of my lighter fluid trying to get a little blaze

going, but that turned out like everything else I’d tried lately: a fizzle. One thing about it: My feet

were so numb from the cold I couldn’t feel the blisters from the eighteen miles I’d hiked since my

last ride dumped me at a crossroads, just before dawn.

I had my collar turned up, for what good that might do, which wasn’t much; the coat felt like

wet newspaper. Both elbows were out of it, and two of the buttons were gone. Funny; three weeks

ago it had been decent-looking enough to walk into a second-class restaurant in without attracting

more than the usual quota of hostile stares. Three weeks: That’s all it took to slide from a shaky

toehold in the economic cycle all the way to the bottom. I’d heard of hitting the skids, but I never

knew before just what it meant. Once you go over that invisible edge, it’s downhill all the way.

It had been almost a year since I’d quit school, when Uncle Jason died. What money I had went

for the cheapest funeral the little man with the sweet, sad smile could bear to talk about. After

that, I’d held a couple of jobs that had wafted away like the morning mist as soon as the three

months “tryout” was over and the question of regular wages came up. There’d been a few months

of scrounging, then; mowing lawns, running errands, one-day stands as a carpenter’s helper or

assistant busboy while the regular man was off. I’d tried to keep up appearances, enough not to

scare off any prospective employers, but the money barely stretched to cover food and what the

sign said was a clean bed. Then one day I’d showed up looking just a little too thin, a little too

hungry, the collar just a little too frayed.

And now I was here, with my stomach making whimpering sounds to remind me of all the

meals it hadn’t had lately, as far as ever from where I was headed—wherever that was. I didn’t

really have a destination. I just wanted to be where I wasn’t.

And I couldn’t stay here. The wall was worse than no protection at all, and the wind was

blowing colder and wetter all the time. I crawled out and made it back up the slope to the road.

There were no headlights in sight; it wouldn’t have helped if there were. Nobody was going to stop

in a sleetstorm in the middle of nowhere to give a lift to a hobo like me. I didn’t have any little sign

to hold up, stating that I was a hardship case, that comfortable middle-class conformity was my

true vocation, that I was an honest young fellow with a year of college who’d had a little hard luck

lately; all I had were the clothes I stood in, a bad cough, and a deep conviction that if I didn’t get

out of the weather, fast, by morning I’d be one of those dead-of-exposure cases they’re always

finding in alleys back of cut-rate liquor stores.

I put my back to the wind and started off, hobbling on a couple of legs that ended somewhere

below the knee. I didn’t notice feeling tired anymore, or hungry; I was just a machine somebody

had left running. All I could do was keep putting one foot in front of the other until I ran down.

I saw the light when I came up over a rise, just a weak little spark, glowing a long way off in the

big dark beyond the trees. I turned and s tarted off across the open field toward it.

Ten minutes later, I came up behind a big swaybacked barn with a new-looking silo beside it

and a rambling two story house beyond. The light was shining from a ground-floor window. There

was a pickup parked in the side yard near the barn, and a late-model Cadillac convertible, with the

top down. Just looking at it made me ten degrees colder. I didn’t have any idea of knocking on the

door, introducing myself: “Billy Danger, sir. May I step inside and curl up in front of the fire?”—

and being invited to belly up to a chicken dinner. But there was the barn; and where there were

barns, there was hay; and where there was hay, a man could snuggle down and sleep, if not warm,

at least not out in the freezing rain. It was worth a try.

The barn door looked easy enough: just warped boards hanging on big rusted-out hinges; but

when I tried it, nothing budged. I looked closer, and saw that the hinges weren’t rotted after all;

they were just made to look that way. I picked at a flake of paint on the door; there was bright

metal underneath. That was kind of strange, but all it meant to me then was that I wouldn’t be

crawling into that haystack after all.

The sleet was coming down thicker than ever now. I put my nose up and sniffed, caught a whiff

of frying bacon and coffee that made my jaws ache. All of a sudden, my stomach remembered its

complaint and tried to tie itself into a hard knot. I went back through tall weeds past some rusty

iron that used to be farm machinery, and across a rutted drive toward the silo. I didn’t know much

about silos except that they were where you stored the corn, but at least it had walls and a roof. If

I could get in there, I might find a dry spot to hide in. I reached a door set in the curved wall; it

opened and I slid inside, into dim light and a flow of warm air.

Across the room, there was an inner door standing open, and I could see steps going up: glass

steps on chrome-plated rails. The soft light and the warm air were coming from there. I went up,

moving on instinct, like the first fish crawling out on land, reached the top and was in a room full

of pipes and tubes and machinery and a smell like the inside of a TX set. Weary as I was, this

didn’t look like a place to curl up in.

I made it up another turn of the spiral stair, came out in a space where big shapes like cotton

bales were stacked, with dark spaces between them. There was a smell like a fresh-tarred road

here. I groped toward the deepest shadow I could find, and my hand touched something s oft. In the

faint light from the stairwell it looked like mink or sable, except that it was an electric-blue color. I didn’t

let that worry me. I crawled up on top of the stack and put my face down in the velvety fluff and

let all the strings break at once.

In the dream, I was a burglar, holed up in somebody else’s house, hiding in the closet, and in a

minute they’d find me and haul me out and ride me into town in a police car to sit under the lights

and answer questions about every unsolved chicken-stealing in the county in the past five years.

The feet were coming up the stairs, coming closer. Somebody said something and a woman’s voice

answered in a foreign language. They went away and the dream faded. . . .

. . . And then the noise started.

It was a thin, high-pitched shrilling, like one of those whistles you call the dog with. It went

right between my bones and pried at the joints. It got louder, and angrier, like bees boiling out of

a hive, and I was awake now, and trying to get up; but a big hand came down and mashed me flat.

I tried to get enough breath in to yell, but the air had turned to syrup. I just had time to remember

the day back in Pineville when the Chevy rolled off the rack at Uncle Jason’s gas station and

pinned a man under the back bumper. Then it all went red and I was someplace else, going over

Niagara Falls in a big rubber balloon, wearing a cement life jacket, while thousands cheered.

When I woke up, I heard voices.

“ . . . talking rot now. It’s nothing to do with me.” This was a man’s voice, speaking with an

English accent. He sounded as if he were a little amused by something.

“I mark well t’was thee I charged with the integrity o’ the vessel!” This one sounded big, and

mad. He had a strange way of talking, but I could understand most of the words all right. Then a

girl spoke, but in another language. She had a nice, clear, sweet voice. She sounded worried.

“No harm done, Desroy.” The first man gave a soft laugh. “And it might be a spot of good luck,

at that. Perhaps he’ll make a replacement for Jongo.”

“I don’t omit thy ill-placed japery, Orfeo! Rid me this urchin, ere you vex me out of all humor!”

“A bit of a sticky wicket, that, old boy. He’s still alive, you know. If I nurse him along—”

“How say you? What stuff is this! Art thou the parish comfort, to wax chirurgeonly o’er this

whelp?”

“If he can be trained—”

“You o’ertax my patience, Orfeo! I’d make a chough of as deep chat!”

“He’ll make a gun-boy, mark my words.”

“Bah! You more invest the misadventure than a marketplace trinket chafferer! In any case, the

imp’s beyond recovery!”

Part of me wanted to just skip over this part of the dream and sink back down into the big, soft

black that was waiting for me, but a little voice somewhere back behind my eyes was telling me to

do something, fast, before bad things happened. I made a big effort and got one eyelid open.

Everything looked red and hazy. The three of them were standing ten feet away, near the door.

The one with the funny way of speaking was big, built solid as a line-backer, with slicked-back

black hair and a little moustache. He wore a loose jacket covered with pockets; he looked like

Clark Gable playing Frank Buck.

The other man was not much older than me; he had a rugged jawline, a short nose, curly

reddish-brown hair, wide shoulders, slim hips in a form-fitting gray coverall. He was pretty

enough to be a TV intern.

The girl . . . I had to stop and get the other eyelid up. No girl could be that pretty. She had jet

black hair and smoky gray eyes big enough to go wading in; an oval face, mellow ivory-colored

skin, features like one of those old statues. She was wearing a white coverall, and the form it fit

was enough to break your heart.

I made a move to sit up and pain broke over me like a wave. It seemed to be coming mostly

from my left arm. I took hold of the wrist with my other hand and got up on one elbow with no

more effort than it takes to swing a safe in your teeth.

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摘要：

OdysseyByKeithLaumerThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©2002bytheestateofKeithLaumerGalacticOdyssey(akaSpaceman!)wasfirstserializedinIFmagazine(May–July,1967)andfirstpublishedinnovelformb...

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Laumer, Keith - Galactic Odyssey

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