Laumer, Keith - 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

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

November 1968.

Dinosaur Beach

was first published by Scribner's in 1971.

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 novels 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 volume 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 started 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 soft. 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.

Nobody seemed to notice; when the whirly lights settled down, they were still standing there, still arguing.

“ . . . a spot of bother, Desroy, but it’s worth a go.”

“Methinks sloth instructs thee, naught else!” The big fellow turned and stamped off. The young fellow

grinned at the girl.

“Just twisting the old boy’s tail. Actually, he’s right. You nip off and soothe him down a bit. I’ll attend to

this.”

I slid over the edge of my nest and kind of fell to the floor. At the noise, they both whirled on me. I got

hold of the floor and swung it around under me.

“I just came in to get out of the weather,” I meant to say, but it came out as a sort of gargly sound. The

man took a quick step toward me and over his shoulder said, “Pop off now, Milady.” He had a hand on a

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摘要：

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

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