Dickson, Gordon - Soldier Ask Not

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Note: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this

book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the

publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment

for this "stripped book."

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

book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely

coincidental.

SOLDIER, ASK NOT

thereof, in any form.

Cover art by Royo

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10010

Tor * is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

ISBN: 0-812-50400-3

First Tor edition: April 1993

Printed in the United States of America

0987654321

CHAPTER 1

, Sect, Kij\Tjia&€u 'AxtXijo?—begins the Iliad of Homer, and its story of

thirty-four hundred years ago. This is the story of the wrath of Achilles.—And

this is the story of my wrath; I, Earthman, against the people of the two

worlds so-called The Friendlies, the conscript, fanatic, black-clad soldiers

of Harmony and Association. Nor is it the story of any small anger. For like

Achilles, I am a man of Earth.

That does not impress you? Not in these days when the sons of the younger

worlds are taller, stronger, more skilled and clever than we of the Old World?

Then, how little you know Earth, and the sons of Earth. Leave your younger

worlds and come back to the Mother Planet, once, and touch her. She is still

here and still the same. Her sun still shines on the waters of the Red Sea mat

parted before the Children

• Gordon R. Dickson

of the Lord. The wind still blows in the Pass of Thermopylae, where Leonidas

with the Spartan Three Hundred held back the hosts of Xerxes, King of the

Persians, and changed history. Here, men fought and died and bred and buried

and built for more than five hundred thousand years before your newer worlds

were even dreamed of by man. Do you think those five centuries of tens-of-

centuries, generation upon generation, between the same sky and soil left no

special mark on us in blood and bone and soul?

The men of the Dorsai may be warriors above imagining. The Exotics of Mara and

Kultis may be robed magicians who can turn a man inside out and find answers

outside philosophy. The researchers in hard sciences on Newton and Venus may

have traveled so far beyond ordinary humans that they can talk to us only

haltingly, nowadays. But we—we duller, shorter, simpler men of Old Earth still

have something more than any of these. For we are still the whole being of

man, the basic stock, of which they are only the refined parts—flashing, fine-

honed, scintillant parts. But parts.

But, if you still are one of those, like my uncle Mathias Olyn, who think us

utterly bypassed, then I direct you to the Exotic-supported Enclave at St.

Louis, where forty-two years ago, an Earthman named Mark Torre, a man of great

vision, first began the building of what a hundred years from now will be The

Final Encyclopedia. Sixty years from now will see it too massive and

complicated and delicate to endure Earth's surface. You will start to find it

then in orbit about the Mother Planet. A hundred years from now and it will—

but no one knows for sure what it will do. Mark Torre's theory is that it

SOLDIER, ASK NOT •

will show us the back of our heads—some hidden part of the basic Earth human

soul and being that those of the younger worlds have lost, or are not able to

know.

But see for yourself. Go there now, to the St. Louis Enclave, and join one of

the tours that take you through the chambers and research rooms of the

Encyclopedia Project; and finally into the mighty Index Room at their very

center, where the vast, curving walls of that chamber are already beginning to

be charged with leads to the knowledge of the centuries. When the whole

expanse of that great sphere's interior is finally charged, a hundred years

from now, connections will be made between bits of knowledge that never have

been connected, that never could have been connected, by a human mind before.

And in this final knowledge we will see—what?

The back of our heads?

But as I say, never mind that now. Simply visit the Index Room—that is all I

ask you to do. Visit it, with the rest of the tour. Stand in the center of it,

and do as the guide tells you.

—Listen.

Listen. Stand silent and strain your ears. Listen— you will hear nothing. And

then finally the guide will break the reaching, almost unendurable silence,

and tell you why he asked you to listen.

Only one man or woman in millions ever hears anything. Only one in millions—of

those born here on Earth.

But none—no one—of all those born on the younger worlds who has ever come here

to listen has ever heard a thing.

It still proves nothing, you think? Then you think

• Gordon R. Dickson

wrong, my friend. For I have been one of those who heard—what there was to

hear—and the hearing changed my life, as witness what I have done, arming me

with self-knowledge of power with which I later turned in fury to plan the

destruction of the peoples of two Friendly worlds.

So do not laugh if I compare my wrath to the wrath of Achilles, bitter and

apart among the boats of his Myrmidons, before the walls of Troy. For there

are other likenesses between us. Tarn Olyn is my name and my ancestry is more

Irish than otherwise; but it was on the Peloponnesus of Greece that I, like

Achilles, grew to be what I became.

In the very shadow of the ruins of the Parthenon, white over the city of

Athens, our souls were darkened by the uncle who should have set them free to

grow in the sun. My soul—and that of my younger sister, Eileen.

CHAPTER 2

It was her idea—my sister Eileen 's—that we visit the Final Encyclopedia that

day, using my new travel pass as a worker in Communications. Ordinarily,

perhaps, I might have wondered why she wanted to go there. But in this

instance, even as she suggested it, the prospect struck forth a feeling in me,

deep and heavy as the sudden note of a gong—a feeling I had never felt before—

of something like dread.

But it was not just dread, nothing so simple as that. It was not even wholly

unpleasant. Mostly, it resembled that hollow, keyed-up sensation that comes

just before the moment of being put to some great test. And yet, it was this—

but somehow much more as weli. A feeling as of a dragon in my path.

For just a second it touched me; but that was enough. And, because the

Encyclopedia, in theory, represented all hope for those Earth-born and my

• Gordon K. Dickson

uncle Mathias had always represented to us all hopelessness, I connected the

feeling with him, with the challenge he had posed me during all the years of

our living together. And this made me suddenly determined to go, overriding

whatever other, little reasons there might be.

Besides, the trip fitted the moment like a celebration. I did not usually take

Eileen places; but I had just signed a trainee work-contract with the

Interstellar News Services at their Headquarters Unit here on Earth. This,

only two weeks after my graduation from the Geneva University of

Communications. True, that University was first among those like it on the

sixteen worlds of men, including Earth; and my scholastic record there had

been the best in its history. But such job offers came to young men straight

out of school once in twenty years—if that often.

So I did not stop to question my seventeen-year-old sister as to why she might

want me to take her to the Final Encyclopedia, on just that particular day and

hour she specified. I suppose perhaps, as I look back on it now, I told myself

she on!y wanted to get away from the dark house of our uncle, for the day. And

that, in itself, was reason enough for me.

For it had been Mathias, my father's brother, who had taken us in, Eileen and

me, two orphan children after the death of our parents in the same air-car

crash. And it was he who had broken us during our growing years that followed.

Not that he had ever laid a finger on us physically. Not that he had been

guilty of any overt or deliberate cruelty. He did not have to be.

He had only to give us the richest of homes, the choicest of food, clothing

and care—and make sure

SOLDIER, ASK NOT •

that we shared it all with him, whose heart was as sunless as his own great,

unpierced block of a house, sunless as a cave below the earth's surface that

has never felt the daylight, and whose soul was as cold as a stone within that

cave.

His bible was the writings of that old twenty-first century saint or devil,

Walter Blunt—whose motto was "DESTRUCT!"—and whose Chantry Guild later gave

birth to the Exotic culture on the younger worlds of Mara and Kultis. Never

mind that the Exotics had always read Blunt's writings with a difference,

seeing the message in them to be one of tearing up the weeds of the present,

so that there would be room for the flowers of the future to grow. Mathias,

our uncle, saw only as far as the tearing; and day by day, in that dark house,

he drummed it into us.

But enough about Mathias. He was perfect in his emptiness and his belief that

the younger worlds had already left us of Earth behind them to dwindle and

die, like any dead limb or atrophied part. But neither Eileen nor I could

match him in that cold philosophy, for all we tried as children. So, each in

our own way, we fought to escape from him and it; and our escape routes

brought us, that day, together to the Exotic Enclave at St. Louis, and the

Final Encyclopedia.

We took a shuttle flight from Athens to St. Louis and the subway from St.

Louis to the Enclave. An airbus took us to the Encyclopedia courtyard; and I

remember that, somehow, I was last off the bus. As I stepped to the circle of

concrete, it struck again, that deep, sudden gong-note of feeling inside me. I

stopped dead, like a man struck into a trance.

"—Pardon me?" said a voice behind me. "You're

• Gordon R. Dickson

part of the tour, aren't you? Will you join the rest over here? I'm your

guide."

I turned sharply, and found myself looking down into the brown eyes of a girl

in the blue robes of an Exotic. She stood there, as fresh as the sunlight

about her—but something in her did not match.

"You're not an Exotic!" I said suddenly. No more she was. The Exotic-born have

their difference plain about them. Their faces are more still than other

people's. Their eyes look more deeply into you. They are like Gods of Peace

who sit always with one hand on a sleeping thunderbolt they do not seem to

know is there.

"I'm a co-worker," she answered. "Lisa Kant's my name.—And you're right. I'm

not a born Exotic." She did not seem bothered by my penetrating her difference

from the robe she wore. She was shorter than my sister, who was tall—as I am

tall— for a man from Earth. Eileen was silver-blond, while, even then, my hair

was dark. It was the same color as hers when our parents died; but it darkened

over the years in Mathias' house. But this girl, Lisa, was brown-haired,

pretty and smiling. She intrigued me with her good looks and Exotic robes—and

she net-tied me a little as well. She seemed so certain of herself.

I watched her, therefore, as she went about round-ing up the other people who

were waiting for the guided tour through the Encyclopedia; and once the tour

itself was underway, I fell into step beside her and got her talking to me,

between lecture spots.

She showed no hesitation in speaking about herself. She had been born in the

North American Midwest, just outside of St. Louis, she told me. She had

• 8

SOLDIER, ASK NOT •

gone to primary and secondary schools in the Enclave and became convinced of

the Exotic philosophies. So she had adopted their work and their ways. I

thought it seemed like a waste of a girl as attractive as herself—and bluntly

I told her so.

"How can I be wasting myself," she said, smiling at me, "when I'm using my

energies to the full this way—and for the best purposes?"

I thought that perhaps she was laughing at me. I did not like that—even in

those days, I was no one to laugh at.

"What best purposes?" I asked as brutally as I could. "Contemplating your

navel?"

Her smile went away and she looked at me strangely, so strangely that I always

remembered that look, afterward.

It was as if she had suddenly become aware of me—as of someone floating and

adrift in a night time sea beyond the firm rock shore on which she stood. And

she reached out with her hand, as if she would touch me, then dropped her hand

again, as if suddenly remembering where we were.

* 'We are always here,'' she answered me, strangely. "Remember that. We are

always here."

She turned away and led us on through the spread-out complex of structures

that was the Encyclopedia. These, once moved into space, she said, speaking to

us all now as she led us on, would fold together to form a roughly spherical

shape, in orbit a hundred and fifty miles above the Earth's surface. She told

us what a vast expense it would be to move the structure into orbit like that,

as one unit. Then she explained how, expensive as this was, the cost was

justified by the savings during the first hundred years of con-

• Gordon R. Dickson

struction and information-charging, which could be done more economically here

on the ground.

For the Final Encyclopedia, she said, was not to be just a storehouse of feet.

It would store facts, but only as a means to an end—that end being the

establishment and discovery of relationships between those facts. Each

knowledge item was to be linked to other knowledge items by energy pulses

holding the code of the relationship, until these interconnections were

carried to the fullest extent possible. Until, finally, the great

interconnected body of man's information about himself and his universe would

begin to show its shape as a whole, in a way man had never been able to

observe it before.

At this point, Earth would then have in the Encyclopedia a mighty stockpile of

immediately available, interrelated information about the human race and its

history. This could be traded for the hard science knowledge of worlds like

Venus and Newton, for the psychological sciences of the Exotic Worlds—and all

the other specialized information of the younger worlds that Earth needed. By

this alone, in a multi-world human culture in which the currency between

worlds was itself the trading of skilled minds, the Encyclopedia would

eventually pay for itself.

But the hope that had led Earth to undertake its building was for more than

mis. It was Earth's hope-the hope of all the people of Earth, except for such

as Mathias, who had given up all hope—that the true payment from the

Encyclopedia would come from its use as a tool to explore Mark Torre's theory.

And Torre's theory, as we all should know, was a theory which postulated that

there was a dark area

• 10

SOLDIER, ASK NOT •

in Man's knowledge of himself, an area where man's vision had always failed,

as the viewing of any perceptive device fails in the blind area where it,

itself, exists. Into man's blind area, Torre theorized, the Final Encyclopedia

would be able to explore by inference, from the shape and body of total known

knowledge. And in that area, said Torre, we would find something—a quality,

ability or strength—in the basic human stock of Earth that was theirs alone,

something which had been lost or was not available to the human splinter types

on the younger worlds that now seemed to be fast out-stripping our parent

breed in strength of body or mind.

Hearing all this, for some reason I found myself remembering the strange look

and odd words of Lisa to me earlier. I looked around the strange and crowded

rooms, where everything from heavy construction to delicate laboratory work

was going on, as we passed; and the odd, dread-like feeling began to come back

on me. It not only came back, it stayed and grew, until it was a sort of

consciousness, a feeling as if the whole Encyclopedia had become one mighty

living organism, with me at its center.

I fought against it, instinctively; for what I had always wanted most in life

was to be free—to be swallowed by nothing, human or mechanical. But still it

grew on me; and it was still growing as we came at last to the Index Room,

which in space would be at the Encyclopedia's exact center.

The room was in the shape of a huge globe so vast that, as we entered it, its

farther wall was lost in dimness, except for the faint twinkling of firefly

lights that signaled the establishment of new facts and associations of fact

within the sensitive recording fab-

111

• Gordon R. Dickson

ric of its inner surface, that endless surface curving about us which was at

once walls, ceiling and floor.

The whole reaching interior of this enormous spherical room was empty; but

cantilevered ramps led out and up from the entrances to the room, stretching

in graceful curves to a circular platform poised in the midst of the empty

space, at the exact center of the chamber.

It was up one of these ramps that Lisa led us now until we came to the

platform, which was perhaps twenty feet in diameter.

"... Here, where we're now standing," said Lisa as we halted on the platform,

"is what will be known as the Transit Point. In space, all connections will be

made not only around the walls of the Index Room, but also through this

central point. And it's from this central point that those handling the

Encyclopedia then will try to use it according to Mark Torre's theory, to see

if they can uncover the hidden knowledge of our Earth-human minds."

She paused and turned around to locate everyone in the group.

"Gather in closely, please," she said. For a second her gaze brushed mine—and

without warning, the wave of feeling inside me about the Encyclopedia suddenly

crested. A cold sensation like fear washed through me, and I stiffened.

"Now," she went on, when we were all standing close together, "I want you all

to keep absolutely still for sixty seconds and listen. Just listen, and see if

you hear anything.''

The others stopped talking and the vast, untouchable silence of that huge

chamber closed in about us. It wrapped about us, and the feeling in me sang

sud-

• 12

SOLDIER, ASK NOT •

denly up to a high pitch of anxiety. I had never been bothered by heights or

distances, but suddenly now I was wildly aware of the long emptiness below the

platform, of all the space enclosing me. My head began to swim and my heart

pounded. I felt dizziness threatening me.

"And what're we supposed to hear?" I broke in loudly, not for the question's

sake, but to snap the vertiginous sensation that seemed to be trying to sweep

me away. I was standing almost behind Lisa as I said it. She turned and looked

up at me. There was a shadow in her eyes again of that strange look she had

given me earlier.

"Nothing," she said. And then, still watching me strangely, she hesitated. "Or

maybe—something, though the odds are billions to one against it. You'll know

if you hear it, and I'll explain after the sixty seconds are up." She touched

me lightly, request-ingly on the arm with one hand. "Now, please be quiet—for

the sake of the others, even if you don't want to listen yourself."

"Oh, I'll listen," I told her.

I turned from her. And suddenly, over her shoulder, behind us, below me, small

and far off by that entrance to the Index Room by which we had come in, I saw

my sister, no longer with our group. I recognized her at that distance only by

the pale color of her hair and her height. She was talking to a dark, slim man

dressed all in black, whose face I could not make out at that distance, but

who stood close to her.

I was startled and suddenly annoyed. The sight of the thin male figure in

black seemed to slap at me like an affront. The very idea that my sister would

131

• Gordon R. Dickson

drop behind our group to speak to someone else after begging me to bring her

here—speak to someone who was a complete stranger to me, and speak as

earnestly as I could see she was speaking, even at this distance, by the

tenseness of her figure and the little movements of her hands—seemed to me

like a discourtesy amounting to betrayal. After all, she had talked me into

coming.

The hair on the back of my neck rose, a cold wave of anger rose in me. It was

ridiculous; at that distance not even the best human ears ever bora could have

overheard their conversation, but I found myself straining against the

enclosing silence of the vast room, trying to make out what it was they could

be talking about.

And then—imperceptibly, but growing rapidly louder—I began to hear. Something.

Not my sister's voice, or the voice of the stranger, whoever he was. It was

some distant, harsh voice of a man speaking in a language a little like Latin,

but with dropped vowels and rolled r's that gave his talk a mutter, like the

rapid rolling of the summer thunder that accompanies heat lightning. And it

grew, not so much louder, as closer—and then I heard another voice, answering

it.

And then another voice. And another, and another and another.

Roaring, shouting, leaping, like an avalanche, the voices leaped suddenly upon

me from every direction, growing wildly greater in number every second,

doubling and redoubling—all the voices in all the languages of all the world,

all the voices that had ever been in the world—and more than that. More— and

more—and more.

SOLDIER, ASK NOT •

They shouted in my ear, babbling, crying, laughing, cursing, ordering,

submitting—but not merging, as such a multitude should, at last into one

voiceless, if mighty, thunder like the roar of a waterfall. More and more as

they grew, they still remained all separate. / heard each one! Each one of

those millions, those billions of men's and women's voices shouted

individually in my ears.

And the tumult lifted me at last as a feather is lifted on the breast of a

hurricane, swirling me up and away out of my senses into a raging cataract of

unconsciousness.

CHAPTER 3

I remember I did not want to wake up. It seemed to me I had been on a far

voyage, that I had been away a long time. But when, at last, reluctantly, I

opened my eyes, I was lying on the floor of the chamber and only Lisa Kant was

bending over me. Some of the others in our party had not yet finished turning

around to see what had happened to me.

Lisa was raising my head from the floor.

"You heard\" she was saying, urgently and low-voiced, almost in my ear. "What

did you hear?"

"Hear?" I shook my head, dazedly, remembering at that, and almost expecting to

hear that uncountable horde of voices flooding back in on me. But there was

only silence now, and Lisa's question. "Hear?" I said, "—them."

"Them?"

I blinked my eyes up at her and abruptly my mind

• 16

SOLDIER, ASK NOT •

cleared. All at once, I remembered my sister Eileen; and I scrambled to my

feet, staring off into the distance at the entrance by which I had seen her

standing with the man in black. But the entrance and the space about it was

empty. The two of them, together—they were gone.

I scrambled to my feet. Shaken, battered, torn loose from my roots of self-

confidence by that mighty cataract of voices in which I had been plunged and

carried away, the mystery and disappearance of my sister shook me now out of

all common sense. I did not answer Lisa, but started at a run down the ramp

for the entrance where I had last seen Eileen talking to the stranger in

black.

Fast as I was, with my longer legs, Lisa was faster. Even in the blue robes,

she was as swift as a track star. She caught up with me, passed me and swung

around to bar the entrance as I reached it.

"Where are you going?" she cried. "You can't leave—just yet! If you heard

something, IVe got to take you to see Mark Torre himself! He has to talk to

anyone who ever hears anything!"

I hardly heard her.

"Get out of my way," I muttered, and I pushed her aside, not gently. I plunged

on through the entrance into the circular equipment room beyond the entrance.

There were technicians at work in their colored smocks, doing incomprehensible

things to inconceivable tangles of metal and glass—but no sign of Eileen, or

the man in black.

I raced through the room into the corridor beyond. But that, too, was empty. I

ran down the corridor and turned right into the first doorway I came to. From

desks and tables a few people, reading and

17 •

• Gordon R. Dickson

transcribing, looked up at me in wonder, but Eileen and the stranger were not

among them. I tried another room and another, all without success.

At the fifth room, Lisa caught up with me again.

"Stop!" she said. And this time she took actual hold of me, with a strength

that was astonishing for a girl no larger than she was. "Will you stop?—And

think for a moment? What's the matter?"

"Matter!" I shouted. "My sister—" and then I stopped. I checked my tongue. All

at once it swept over me how foolish it would sound if I told Lisa the object

of my search. A seventeen-year-old girl talking to, and even going off from a

group with, someone her older brother does not know, is hardly good reason for

a wild chase and a frantic search—at least in this day and age. And I was not

of any mind to rehearse for Lisa's benefit the cold unhappiness of our

upbringing, Eileen's and mine, in the house of my uncle Mathias.

I stood silent.

"You have to come with me," she said urgently after a second. "You don't know

how terribly, inconceivably rare it is when someone actually hears something

at the Transit Point. You don't know how much it means now to Mark Torre-—to

Mark Torre, himself—to find someone who's heard!"

I shook my head numbly. I had no wish to talk to anyone about what I had just

been through, and least of all to be examined like some freak experimental

specimen.

"You have to!" repeated Lisa. "It means so much. Not just to Mark, to the

whole project. Think! Don't just run off! Think about what you're doing

first!"

The word "think" got through to me. Slowly my

• IS

SOLDIER, ASK NOT •

mind cleared. It was quite true what she said. I should think instead of

running around like someone out of his wits. Eileen and the black-dressed

stranger could be in any one of dozens of rooms or corridors—they could even

be on their way out of the Project and the Enclave completely. Besides, what

would I have said if I had caught up with them, anyway? Demand that the man

identify himself and state his intentions toward my sister? It was probably

lucky I had not been able to find them.

Besides, there was something else. I had worked hard to get the contract I had

signed three days ago, just out of the University, with the Interstellar News

Services. But I had a far way to go yet, to the place of my ambitions. For

what I had wanted—so long and so fiercely that it was as if the want was

something live with claws and teeth tearing inside me— was freedom. Real

freedom, of the kind possessed only by members of planetary governments—and

one special group, the working Guild members of the Interstellar News

Services. Those workers in the communications field who had signed their oath

of nonallegiance and were technically people without a world, in guarantee of

the impartiality of the News Services they operated.

For the inhabited worlds of the human race were split—as they had been split

for two hundred years now—into two camps, one which held their populations to

* 'tight'' contracts and the other who believed in the so-called loose

contract. Those on the tight-contract side were the Friendly worlds of Harmony

and Association, Newton, Cassida and Venus, and the big new world of Ceta

under Tau Ceti. On the loose side were ranged Earth, the Dorsai, the Exotic

19 •

• Gordon R. Dickson

worlds of Mara and Kultis, New Earth, Freiland, Mars and the small Catholic

world of Ste. Marie.

What divided them was a conflict of economic systems—an inheritance of the

divided Earth that had originally colonized them. For in our day

interplanetary currency was only one thing—and that was the coin of highly

trained minds.

The race was now too big for a single planet to train all of its own

specialists, particularly when other worlds produced better. Not the best

education Earth or any other world could provide could produce a professional

soldier to match those turned out by the Dorsai. There were no physicists like

the physicists from Newton, no psychologists like those from the Exotics, no

conscript hired troops as cheap and careless of casualty losses as those from

Harmony and Association—and so on. Consequently, a world trained one kind or

type of professional and traded his services by contract to another world for

the contract and services of whatever type of other professional the world

needed.

And the division between the two camps of worlds was stark. On the "loose"

worlds a man's contract belonged in part to him; and he could not be sold or

traded to another world without his own consent— except in a case of extreme

importance or emergency. On the "tight" worlds the individual lived at the

orders of his authorities—his contract might be sold or traded at a moment's

notice. When this happened, he had only one duty—and that was to go and work

where he was ordered.

So, on all the worlds, there were the non-free and the partly free. On the

loose worlds, of which as I say Earth was one, people like myself were partly

• 20

SOLDIER, ASK NOT •

free. But I wanted full freedom, of the sort only available to me as a Guild

member. Once accepted into the Guild, this freedom would be mine. For the

contract for my services would belong to the News Services, itself, during the

rest of my lifetime.

No world after that would be able to judge me or sell my services, against my

will, to some other planet to which it owed a deficit of trained personnel. It

was true that Earth, unlike Newton, Cassida, Ceta and some of the others, was

proud of the fact that it had never needed to trade off its university

graduates in blocks for people with the special trainings of the younger

worlds. But, like all the planets, Earth held the right to do so if it should

ever become necessary—and there were plenty of stories of individual

instances.

So, my goal and my hunger for freedom, which the years under the roof of

Mathias had nourished in me, could be filled only by acceptance into the News

Services. And in spite of my scholastic record, good as it was, that was still

a far, hard, chancy goal to reach. I would need to overlook nothing that could

help me to it; and it came to me now that refusing to see Mark Torre might

well be to throw away a chance at such help.

"You're right," I said to Lisa. "I'll go and see him. Of course. I'll see him.

Where do I go?"

"I'll take you," she answered. "Just let me phone ahead." She went a few steps

away from me and spoke quietly into the small phone on her ring finger. Then

she came back and led me off.

"What about the others?" I asked, suddenly remembering the rest of our party

back in the Index Room.

21 •

• Gordon R. Dickson

"I've asked someone else to take them over for the rest of the tour," Lisa

answered without looking at me. "This way."

She led me through a doorway off the hall and into a small light-maze. For a

moment this surprised me and then I realized that Mark Tbrre, like anyone in

the public eye constantly, would need protection from possibly dangerous

crackpots and cranks. We came out of the maze into a small empty room, and

stopped.

The room moved—in what direction, I could not say—and then stopped.

"This way," said Lisa again, leading me to one of the walls of the room. At

her touch, a section of it folded back and let us into a room furnished like a

study, but equipped with a control desk, behind which sat an elderly man. It

was Mark Torre, as I had often seen him pictured in the news.

He was not as old in appearance as his age might have made him appear—he was

past eighty at the time—but his face was gray and sick-looking. His clothes

sat loosely on his big bones, as if he had weighed more once than he did now.

His two really extraordinarily large hands lay limply on the little flat space

before the console keys, their gray knuckles swollen and enlarged by what I

later learned was an obscure disease of the joints called arthritis.

He did not get up when we came in, but his voice was surprisingly clear and

young when he spoke and his eyes glowed at me with something like scarcely

contained joy. Still he made us sit and wait, until after a few minutes

another door to the room opened and there came in a middle-aged man from one

of the Exotic worlds—an Exotic-born, with penetrating

• 22

SOLDIER, ASK NOT •

hazel-colored eyes in his smooth, unlined face under close-cropped white hair,

and dressed in blue robes like those Lisa was wearing.

"Mr. Olyn," said Mark Torre, "this is Padma, OutBond from Mara to the St.

Louis Enclave. He already knows who you are."

"How do you do?" I said to Padma. He smiled.

"An honor to meet you, 1km Olyn," he said and sat down. His light, hazel-

colored eyes did not seem to stare at me in any way—and yet, at the same time,

they made me uneasy. There was no strangeness about him—that was the trouble.

His gaze, his voice, even the way he sat, seemed to imply that he knew me

already as well as anyone could, and better than I would want anyone to know

me, whom I did not know as well in return.

For all that I had argued for years against everything my uncle stood for, at

that moment I felt the fact of Mathias' bitterness against the peoples of the

younger worlds lift its head also inside me, and snarl against the implied

superiority in Padma, OutBond from Mara to the Enclave at St. Louis, on Earth.

I wrenched my gaze away from him and looked back at the more human, Earth-born

eyes of Mark Torre.

"Now that Padma's here," the old man said, leaning forward eagerly toward me

over the keys of his control console, "what was it like? Tell us what you

heard!"

I shook my head, because there was no good way of describing it as it really

had been. Billions of voices, speaking at once, and all distinct, are

impossible.

"I heard voices," I said. "All talking at the same time—but separate."

23 •

• Gordon R. Dickson

"Many voices?" asked Padma.

I had to look at him again.

"All the voices there are," I heard myself answering. And I tried to describe

it. Padma nodded; but, as I talked I looked back at Torre, and saw him sinking

into his seat away from me, as if in confusion or disappointment.

"Only . . . voices?" the old man said, half to himself when I was done.

"Why?" I asked, pricked into a little anger. "What was I supposed to hear?

What do people usually hear?"

"It's always different," put in the voice of Padma soothingly from the side of

my vision. But I would not look at him. I kept my eyes on Mark Torre.

"Everyone hears different things."

I turned to Padma at that.

"What did you hear?" I challenged. He smiled a little sadly.

"Nothing, Tarn," he said.

"Only people who are Earth-born have ever heard anything," said Lisa sharply,

as if I should know this without needing to be told.

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