Seven Conquests Read online

  The old blue man sighed, and a smile tugged at his mouth. You didn’t work many centuries in the Service without becoming an idealist and a cynic. So many planets, spinning through night and cold, so many souls huddled on them…a half million full-status worlds, members of interstellar civilization by virtue of knowing that such a civilization existed… and how many millions more who did not know. The duty of true civilization was to guide its brothers in darkness— secretly, gently keeping from them the devastating knowledge that a million-year-old society already existed, until they had matured enough to take that bitter pill and join the League of the older planets.

  —From “Details’

  A BAEN BOOK

  Distributed in Canada by PaperJacks Ltd., a Licensee of the trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  SEVEN CONQUESTS

  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.

  Copyright© 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1964, 1969 by Poul Anderson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. These stories have appeared previously, in a somewhat different form, as follows:

  “Kings Who Die,” Worlds of IF, May 1963. Reprinted in The 8th Annual of the Year’s Best SF, published by Simon & Schuster, © 1963 by Judith Merril.

  “Wildcat,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction, November 1958.

  “Cold Victory,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1957.

  “Inside Straight,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1955.

  “Details,” Worlds of IF, October 1956.

  “License,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1957.

  “Strange Bedfellows” (under the title “To Build A World”), Galaxy Magazine, June 1964.

  A Baen Book

  In Canada distributed by PaperJacks Ltd.,

  330 Steelcase Road, Markham, Ontario

  First Baen printing, October 1984

  ISBN:0-671-55914-1 Cover art by Vincent DiFate

  This edition is reprinted by arrangement with Macmillan Publishing Company, a division of Macmillan, Inc.

  Printed in Canada

  Distributed by

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  MASS MERCHANDISE SALES COMPANY

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, N.Y. 10020

  TO GEORGE W. PRICE

  Contents:-

  Foreword

  Kings Who Die

  Wildcat

  Cold Victory

  Inside Straight

  Details

  License

  Strange Bedfellows

  Foreword

  The first duty of science fiction, as of any art form, is to entertain. But entertainment can involve much besides telling a story. It can be an examination of the real world and the human situation therein. Now reality is more than the little bit we have directly experienced. It includes everything we do not yet know, or never will know—all the infinite possibilities in a space-time that reaches through billions of years and light-years. By suggesting what might conceivably happen, science fiction tries to throw some light on what has already come to pass and what exists at this moment.

  Here lies the justification for a book that might otherwise seem very narrow, a one-author, one-theme, one-genre collection. In effect, we shall be looking at the same thing several times, through the same pair of eyes, but from different angles. Thus we may begin to understand how complex and mysterious the thing must be.

  Our subject is human conflict leading to institutionalized violence. The key word is “institutionalized.” Societies have generally found ways to keep murder, battery, rape, and riot within Some bounds. When they fail to do so, throughout history it has been a symptom of their breakdown; they are soon replaced by new systems or whole new cultures virile enough to guarantee the ordinary peaceful person a measure of security in his daily life. But no government thus far has established a similar protection against war: for this is a proceeding of society itself.

  The prayers, prophecies, denunciations, pleas, studies, conferences, and political restructurings of several thousand years have not done away with war. Our generation is unlikely to get further with its noisy peace parades and its mealy-mouthed observances of United Nations Day. The violence of the state remains legitimatized, and often glorified, because it serves the ends of the state. And these ends are not always evil; ask anyone whom Allied forces liberated from Nazi concentration camps. Such considerations demonstrate the fallacy of pacifism.

  Nevertheless, whether the cause be good, bad, or indifferent, the human flesh caught in the middle is just as dead and maimed, the wealth is just as wasted. In an age of nuclear explosives and nerve gases, it is alike irresponsible to assume that war will come to a permanent end when a number of people speak up for peace and to assume that wars can go on as usual without the gravest consequences.

  In trying to deal with the problem, we are almost fatally handicapped by the fact that we don’t understand the phenomenon. He who claims to have final answers to the questions of why men fight and how to stop them from fighting, is merely showing his own ignorance. Perhaps no one will ever find any solutions; perhaps none exist. But our duty is to keep trying.

  Someday men may succeed in abolishing war—though they may discover that the price is high. Or they may at least work out methods of limiting its destructiveness—to the spirit as well as to the body. If so, for them, as well as for us today, the saving virtues will remain the old-fashioned ones of courage, calm, and compassion, together with the more modem one of open-mindedness.

  It is to this last quality, open-mindedness, the willingness to give a fair hearing to any suggestion whatsoever, that science fiction most appeals. I hope you will enjoy these stories simply as stories. But still more do I hope they will make you think, and come up with better ideas than those you find here.

  POUL ANDERSON

  It is obvious that technological change forces change in the manner of conducting human activities, including war. What is not so obvious is the degree to which it affects the very nature of those activities.

  Kings Who Die

  Luckily, Diaz was facing the other way when the missile exploded. It was too far off to blind him permanently, but the retinal bums would have taken a week or more to heal. He saw the glare reflected in his view lenses. As a ground soldier he would have hit the rock and tried to claw himself a hole. But there was no ground here, no up or down, concealment or shelter, on a fragment of spaceship orbiting through the darkness beyond Mars. Diaz went loose in his armor. Countdown: brow, jaw, neck, shoulders, back, chest, belly…No blast came, to slam him against the end of his lifeline and break any bones whose muscles were not relaxed. So it had not been a shaped charge shell, firing a cone of atomic-powered concussion through space. Or if it was, he had not been caught in the danger zone. As for radiation, he needn’t worry much about that. Whatever particles and gamma photons he got at this distance should not be too big a dose 4 for the anti-X in his body to handle the effects.

  He drew a breath which was a good deal shakier than the Academy satorist would have approved of. (“If your nerves twitch, cadet-san, then you know yourself alive and they need not twitch. Correct?” To hell with that, except as a technique.) Slowly, he hauled himself in until his boots made magnetic contact and he stood, so to speak, upon his raft. Then he turned about for a look.

  “Nombre de Dios” he murmured, a hollow noise in the helmet. For
gotten habit came back, with a moment’s recollection of his mother’s face. He crossed himself.

  Against blackness and a million wintry stars, a gas cloud expanded. It glowed in many soft hues, the center still bright, edges fading into vacuum. Shaped explosions did not behave like that, thought the calculator part of Diaz; this had been a standard fireball type. But the cloud was nonspherical. Hence a ship had been hit, a big ship, but whose?

  Most of him stood in wonder. A few years ago he’d spent a furlough at Antarctic Lodge. He and some girl had taken a snowcat out to watch the aurora, thinking it would make a romantic background. But when they saw the sky, they forgot about each other for a long time. There was only the aurora.

  The same awesome silence was here, as that incandescence which had been a ship and her crew swelled and vanished into space.

  The calculator in his head proceeded with its business. Of those American vessels near the Argonne when first contact was made with the enemy, only the Washington was sufficiently massive to go out in a blast of yonder size and shape. If that was the case, Captain Martin Diaz of the United States Astromilitary Corps was a dead man. The other ships of the line were too distant, traveling on vectors too unlike his own, for their scoutboats to come anywhere close. On the other hand, it might well have been a Unasian bat tie wagon. Diaz had small information on the dispositions of the enemy fleet. He’d had his brain full just directing the torp launchers under his immediate command. If that had indeed been a hostile dreadnaught that got clobbered, surely none but the Washington could have delivered the blow, and its boats would be near-

  There!

  For half a second Diaz was too stiffened by the sight to react. The boat ran black across waning clouds, accelerating on a streak of its own fire. The wings and sharp shape that were needed in atmosphere made him think of a marlin he had once hooked off Florida, blue lightning under the sun…Then a flare was in his hand, he squeezed the igniter, and radiance blossomed.

  Just an attention-getting device, he thought, and laughed unevenly as he and Bernie Stemthal had done, acting out the standard irreverences of high school students toward the psych course. But Bernie had left his bones on Ganymede, three years ago, and in this hour Diaz’s throat was constricted and his nostrils full of his own stench. He sky hooked the flare and hunkered in its harsh illumination by his radio transmitter. Clumsy in their gauntlets, his fingers adjusted controls, set the revolving beams on SOS. If he had been noticed, and if it was physically possible to make the velocity changes required, a boat would come for him. The Corps looked after its own.

  Presently the flare guttered out. The pyre cloud faded to nothing. The raft deck was between Diaz and the shrunken sun. But the stars that crowded on every side gave ample soft light. He allowed his gullet, which felt like sandpaper, a suck from his one water flask. Otherwise he had several air bottles, an oxygen reclaim unit, and a ridiculously large box of Q rations. His raft was a section of inner plating, tom off when the Argonne encountered the ball storm. She was only a pursuit cruiser, unarmored against such weapons. At thirty miles per second, relative, the little steel spheres tossed in her path by some Unasian gun had not left much but junk and corpses. Diaz had found no other survivors. He’d lashed what he could salvage onto this raft, including a shaped torp charge that rocketed him clear of the ruins. This far spaceward, he didn’t need screen fields against solar particle radiation. So he had had a small hope of rescue. Maybe bigger than small, now.

  Unless an enemy craft spotted him first. His scalp crawled with that thought. His right arm, where the thing he might use in the event of capture lay buried, began to itch. But no, he told himself, don’t be sillier than regulations require. That scoutboat was positively American. The probability of a hostile vessel being in detection range of his flare and radio—or able to change vectors fast enough—or giving a damn about him in any event—approached so close to zero as made no difference.

  “Wish I’d found our bottle in the wreckage,” he said aloud. He was talking to Carl Bailey, who’d helped him smuggle the Scotch aboard at Shepard Field when the fleet was alerted for departure. The steel balls had chewed Carl to pieces, some of which Diaz had seen. “It gripes me not to empty that bottle. On behalf of us both, I mean. Maybe,” his voice wandered on, “a million years hence, it’ll drift into another planetary system and owl-eyed critters will pick it up in boneless fingers, eh, Carl, and put it in a museum.” He realized what he was doing and snapped his mouth shut. But his mind continued. The trouble is, those critters wont know about Carl Bailey, who collected antique jazz tapes, and played a rough game of poker, and had a D.S.M. and a gimpy leg from rescuing three boys whose patroller crashed on Venus, and went on the town with Martin Diaz one evening not so long ago when—What did happen that evening, anyhow?

  There was a joint down in the Mexican section of San Diego which Diaz remembered was fun. So they caught a giro outside the Hotel Kennedy, where the spacemen were staying—they could afford swank, and felt they owed it to the Corps—and where they had bought their girls dinner. Diaz punched the cantina’s name. The autopilot searched its directory and swung the cab onto the Embarcadero-Balboa skyrail.

  Sharon sighed and snuggled into the curve of his arm. “How beautiful,” she said. “How nice of you to show me this.” He felt she meant a little more than polite banality. The view through the bubble really was great tonight. The city winked and blazed, a god’s hoard of jewels, from horizon to horizon. Only in one direction was there anything but light: westward, where the ocean lay aglow. A nearly full moon stood high in the sky. He pointed out a tiny glitter on its dark edge.

  “Vladimir Base.”

  “Ugh,” said Sharon. “Unasians.” She stiffened a trifle.

  “Oh, they’re decent fellows,” Bailey said from the rear seat.

  “How do you know?” asked his own date, Naomi, a serious-looking girl and quick on the uptake.

  “I’ve visited them a time or two,” he shrugged.

  “What?” Sharon exclaimed. “When we’re at war?”

  “Why not?” Diaz said. “The ambassador of United Asia gave a party for our President just yesterday. I watched on the newscreen. Big social event.”

  “But that’s different,” Sharon protested. “The war goes on in space, not on Earth, and—”

  “We don’t blow up each other’s Lunar bases, either,” Bailey said. “Too close to home. So once in a while we have occasion to, uh, parley is the official word. Actually, the last time I went over—couple years ago now—it was to return a crater-bug we’d borrowed and bring some alga-blight antibiotic they needed. They poured me full of excellent vodka.”

  “I’m surprised you admit this so openly,” said Naomi.

  “No secret, my dear,” purred Diaz in his best grandee manner, twirling an imaginary mustache. “The newscreens simply don’t mention it. Wouldn’t be popular, I suppose.”

  “Oh, people wouldn’t care, seeing it was the Corps,” Sharon said.

  “That’s right,” Naomi smiled. “The Corps can do no wrong.”

  “Why, thankee kindly.” Diaz grinned at Sharon, chucked her under the chin, and kissed her. She held back an instant, having met him only this afternoon. But of course she knew what a date with a Corpsman usually meant, and he knew she knew, and she knew he knew she knew, so before long she relaxed and enjoyed it.

  The giro stopped those proceedings by descending to the street and rolling three blocks to the cantina. They entered a low, noisy room hung with bullfight posters and dense with smoke. Diaz threw a glance around and wrinkled his nose. “Satiama-biche!” he muttered. “The tourists have discovered it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Bailey answered in the same disappointed sotto voce. “Loud tunics, lard faces, 3V, and a juke wall. But let’s have a couple drinks, at least, seeing we’re here.”

  “That’s the trouble with being in space two or three years at a time,” Diaz said. “You lose track. Well…” They found a booth.

 
The waiter recognized him, even after so long a lapse, and called the proprietor. The old man bowed nearly to the floor and begged they accept tequila from his private stock. “No, no, Señor Capitán, conserve el dinero, por favor.” The girls were delighted—picturesqueness seemed harder to come by each time Diaz made Earth-fall—and the evening was off to a good start in spite of everything.

  But then someone paid the juke. The wall came awake with a scrawny blonde fourteen-year-old, the latest fashion in sex queens, wearing a grass skirt and three times life size.

  Bingle-jingle-jungle-bang-POW!

  Bingle-jingle-jangle-bang- U GH!

  Uh’m uh redhot Congo gal an Uh’m lookin’ fuh a pal

  Tuh share muh bingle-jingle-bangle-jangle-ugh-YOW!

  “What did you say?” Sharon called through the saxophones.

  “Never mind,” Diaz grunted. “They wouldn’t’ve included it in your school Spanish anyway.”

  “Those things make me almost wish World War Four would start,” Naomi said bitterly.

  Bailey’s mouth tightened. “Don’t talk like that,” he said. “Wasn’t Number Three a close enough call for the race? Without even accomplishing its aims, for either side. I’ve seen—Any war is too big.”

  Lest they become serious, Diaz said thoughtfully above the racket: “You know, it should be possible to do something about those Kallikak walls. Like, maybe, an oscillator. They’ve got oscillators these days which’ll even goof a solid-state apparatus at close range.”

  “The FCC wouldn’t allow that,” Bailey said.

  “Especially since it’d interfere with local 3V reception.”

  “That’s bad? Besides, you could miniaturize the oscillator so it’d be hard to find. Make it small enough to carry in your pocket. Or in your body, if you could locate a doctor who’d, uh, perform an illegal operation. I’ve seen uplousing units no bigger than-”