Behold the Stars

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

White Flag for Earthmen Man had discovered a means of colonising the galaxy. Through a system of instantaneous matter transmission, men, machines, anything, could be sent light years away in seconds! Only, men were not the only beings in the galaxy who were expanding, and at 200 light years from Earth the alien Gershmi people made their claims clear, with guns! It would have been a fair fight between equally matched races, had not the very matter transmitter boxes which had made mankind's expansion possible, suddenly began to put men back together, 200 light years from Earth, with their will to fight removes, so that Earthmen were marching with white flags of truce straight into Gershmi fire!

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 116

Sample

EVERY YEAR the reunion was held in a private room of a small secluded club where they sought fragmentarily for the comradeship that had really existed out there among the stars.

This year the reunion would be different. They’d still congregate happily together and sing the old songs and remember; but this year the rejoicing held a sharper, a more poignant, an urgent note.

For a few days before the reunion David Ward would think back happily and nostalgically to those days of violence, and would forget the violence and think only of how old Pinky Dawson had commandeered a Navy scow for planet leave and of how old Kicker Sloane and he had walked off with the only two eligible girls on Dirthram TV, and of a hundred other quizzical comical sadly merry little incidents of those four jagged years of his life.

He would look forward to the reunion hopefully, as each year passed and his buddies filled out and married and became good citizens—they really had been a tear-away bunch. He would go along to enjoy himself in the old talk and the jargon and the memories. But each year brought the same jokes and the same memories that yet were subtly not the same, so that the outlines blurred and--was it Johnny Red who got that Venie gunner on their forward base or was it Jackie Franks?—no, he bought it in the drop on Suvla—surely that was when that new blond young shavetail got his when his parapack roman-candled—no, you’re thinking of that guy, what was his name? was always sick when we went through the box …

And so on.

He would come away from the reunions, happily fogged on his alcohol limit, whistling one of the old songs that sounded so damned embarrassing any other time, feeling somnolently good; they were a good bunch of guys. But the next day he’d wonder why he’d bothered, at a loss to explain why he hadn’t foreseen this let-down feeling and had the nous to duck out of it.

A little of that anticlimax feeling pervaded him as he strolled into the foyer of the club and was directed to the private room on the twentieth storey.

“Hi, Dave!”

It was Crombie.

“Hi, Alex,” said Ward, smiling, shaking hands. “You look sleeker than a mouse-fed kitten. What’s your secret?”

“A clear conscience, and a good night’s rest.” Crombie winked. “And that’s what I tell my wife, for the record.”

David Ward had not seen Alex Crombie since last year’s reunion; he didn’t keep up the old contacts as some did—about the only ex-trooper he saw at all regularly was Steve Jordan, and that because Jordan had been his oppo and was still his best friend in a lonely life. Now Ward smiled at Crombie as though at a bosom comrade and, throwing off that chill depression he was feeling, went with him into the elevator and so to the private room.

The noise hit them before the cage stopped at the twentieth floor.

“The boys are whooping it up already.” Crombie couldn’t wait for the gates to open. “And I’m as dry as Mars! Come on, Dave.”

“Right with you.”

“Where’s Steve?” Crombie reached the door and hammered on it, disdaining the ident robot. “Thought for sure you two’d turn up together as always.”

“I don’t know. I was waiting for him down below …”

The door opened, emitting a blast of heat and sound, and effectively preventing Ward from continuing.

Jim Wichek stood welcoming them inside the room, red-haired, squat, thick, tough and with hands that could assemble a transistorized printed-circuit lashup with tremor-less delicacy under nuclear attack. He wore the regulation issue enormous smile from ear to ear.

“Alex. Dave. Come on in.”

Familiar faces popped shining from the haze as men circulated, orbiting on the bar at the end of the room and talking, talking, talking. Heart-warming stuff. The right session for a man to forget today and remember the more glorious past. Nobody wore medals, of course; they weren’t gong-hunters. But had they done so, the starry glare would have been brilliant. They were an elite. They were, in their own unspoken estimation, the elite.

Dinner was served. Ward tucked in, determined to enjoy it The thought scarcely crossed his mind that this good food had been processed in vast factories, manufactured by bacteria and viruses, perhaps barely a quarter growing naturally on fields in the open air. It tasted fine. Turtle soup. Crisp golden-brown rolls with white fluffy bread, thick richly-smooth butter. Dover Sole. Steaks—of varying cuts and degrees of cooking, on demand from the robots to suit individual tastes. Sweets, Zabaglioni. Liqueurs, coffee, brandy; the whole works. Each man present eating a meal of his own choosing, and yet sharing it with his comrades as a part in a joint function.

A Man’s meal.

Leaning back, replete, satisfied in body but still troubled in mind, Ward thought again of Steve Jordan, glanced uneasily at the single empty chair and place setting.

As soon as he decently could after the meal, when the ex-troopers were once again standing and sitting around the bar and looking forward to a night of it, Ward walked through to the phone booths. Snatches of conversation rode tag on him, like sheepdogs herding along an ungainly flock: First time I went through the box I couldn’t tell my elbow from my—those poor Navy slobs thought we were a bunch of ghosts—but there’s nothing like sleeping in your own bed at nights …

He called Jordan’s home first. He couldn’t understand why Jordan hadn’t left his destination on his phone robot; he’d expected to hear: “Mr. Stephen Jordan is attending an Army reunion tonight and requests messages be left.” But this blank ding ding of the call bell infuriated and alarmed him. He called Stella Ransome’s number and again that mocking ding ding was all his reward. Common sense told him that they were out together. This vague dyspeptic feeling of unrest that had dogged him all evening must be growing blackly from his own awareness that he didn’t possess a girl like Stella, that he wasn’t progressing in civilian life like Steve Jordan and the rest of his buddies, that life was slipping past and nothing had been done.

At last, and feeling irrationally that he was prying, he called Jordan’s office.

“Ransome Stellar Corporation.”

At least here he had a reply, even if it was only a robot.

“Mr. Stephen Jordan, please.”

“Mr. Stephen Jordan. He is attending an Army reunion tonight—”

“Thank you; but he isn’t. Will you check if he is still in the offices.”

The robot could carry out that simple internal office check in fifteen seconds.

“I am sorry, sir. Mr. Jordan is not on the premises.”

If he asked the robot to check if anyone knew where Steve had gone it might raise questions better left unposed. After all, he wasn’t Steve’s keeper…. Just that it wasn’t like the guy…

“Thank you,” he said and cut the connection.

Jack Tracy was talking to a circle of men whose faces looked serious and in strange contrast to their previous gay hilarity. After one or two words Ward knew why. Tracy was talking about the threat hanging over them, the unspoken fears thronging all their brains, the dark shadow that made this reunion so different from all the previous ones.

“… secrets.” Tracy looked up as Ward joined the circle and he did not smile a welcome. He went on evenly: “I’m not spilling anything that you all won’t know pretty soon and I wouldn’t be telling you guys even this much if I didn’t know you all. After all—you may be ex-troopers but you’re still Army.”

“They won’t get me back in the mob, that I swear,” someone said on a note of grim determination.

“Let’s hope there’s no need. But out beyond Ramses we’re beginning a build up. The poor old Navy is chasing its tail as usual and getting really fouled up in the process. If it wasn’t for the Army I’d almost sign up with the Gershmi myself—” He shook his head. “Stupid talk. Those aliens may look like us and the Venies and the Centaurians and Procyns and a dozen other local stellar races; but they’re more alien, if you allow a vague statement like that—”

“We know what you mean.” Crombie sat quietly with the others now, his usual liveliness not evident. “We remember the Venies as they were—oh—ten years ago. But today they’re just another friendly race in our local interstellar civilization. Sometimes you can make contact with an alien race and remain friends and sometimes there just has to be a dumb stupid war. But so far we haven’t bumped into any alien aliens so hostile that they won’t see sensé.”

“And so these Gershmi, too, will become our friends! George Appleby spoke quietly but with complete conviction.

“Say, Jack,” Crombie broke in, “are we at war with the Gershmi or aren’t we?”

“I don’t know.” Tracy held up his hands in bafflement. No one does. We’ve tangled a few times out past Ramses. One or two ships have been reported missing. But we don t want another war, it’s too darned soon after the Venie clash. But they might think we are at war. And that would make the difference.”

“If there is a war with the Gershmi then well be in it,” someone put in. in.

“And,” Tracy added evenly, “their transit equipment is right up there with ours. Good. What we can do, they can do too. We had a fractional edge over the Venies. But not with these boys.”

“Well,” said Vince Macklin belligerently, were all young enough to be called back into the Army and we’re all capable of making a box drop. If these damned Gershmi are asking for it then I for one am prepared to hand it to them—and not worry too much how damaged they get. Right?”

Only when he was shrugging on his coat to leave and shouting good-byes and promises to ring friends and to turn up faithfully next year did David Ward think that if war with the Gershmi became a fact he, too, would once more have to don the green Army uniform and drop through hellfire onto a hostile planet “

THE FIRST THING David Ward did the following morning was to ring Steve Jordan’s apartment to give him a piece of his mind.

The answerobot said: “Mr. Stephen Jordan has left town and it is not certain when he will be back. Will you please leave any message.”

Ward opened his mouth to reply, cursed, and slammed the receiver back. What the hell? Still, it wasn’t his business. If Jordan wanted to take a trip then that was up to him.

Ward left for work. He was three minutes early and that made him smile. The front office would start thinking that at last David Ward was trying to make something of himself.

“ His footfalls soundless on the deep pile of the carpet in reception, he walked past the robots already handling routine staff duties at the counters and headed for the elevator banks. He had an hours office work before his first trip. All about him rose the monstrous hundred and fifty storey edifice of Solterran Space Agency. Here many-thousands of men and women attended to the needs and problems of Earth’s position in space. Here policies were initiated and investigated and mat. . .