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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Soldier Boy
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Soldier Boy

Author: Michael Shaara

Illustrator: Ed Emshwiller

Release date: January 5, 2016 [eBook #50848]

Most recently updated: October 22, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOLDIER BOY

***
 SOLDIER BOY

By MICHAEL SHAARA

Illustrated by EMSH

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Galaxy Science Fiction July 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
 It's one thing to laugh at a man because his
job is useless
and outdated—another to depend on him
when it suddenly isn't.

In the northland, deep, and in a great cave, by an everburning

fire the Warrior sleeps. For this is the resting time, the time of
peace, and so shall it be for a thousand years. And yet we shall
summon him again, my children, when we are sore in need, and
out of the north he will come, and again and again, each time
we call, out of the dark and the cold, with the fire in his hands,
he will come.

—Scandinavian legend

Throughout the night, thick clouds had been piling in the north; in
the morning, it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy,
snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops
were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed
hot coffee and remained inside. The wind blew steadily, icily from
the north. It was well below freezing when, some time after nine, an
army ship landed in a field near the settlement.
There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which
the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They
therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here.
The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a
mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them.
After a while a rather tall, frail-looking man came out of the ship and
stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained
there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly
thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or
just plain orneriness.
"Well, I never," a nice lady said.
"What's he just standing there for?" another lady said.
And all of them thought: well, God knows what's in the mind of a
soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be
drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the
children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had
been taught, oh so carefully, to hate war they had also been taught,
quite incidentally, to despise soldiers.
The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind.

Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and
pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go
out in that miserable cold to meet him.
The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not
too clean and the salute was sloppy. Although he was bigger than
Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were
tears gathering in the ends of his eyes.
"Captain Dylan, sir." His voice was low and did not carry. "I have a
message from Fleet Headquarters. Are you in charge here?"
Rossel, a small sober man, grunted. "Nobody's in charge here. If you
want a spokesman I guess I'll do. What's up?"
The captain regarded him briefly out of pale blue, expressionless
eyes. Then he pulled an envelope from an inside pocket, handed it
to Rossel. It was a thick, official-looking thing and Rossel hefted it
idly. He was about to ask again what was it all about when the
airlock of the hovering ship swung open creakily. A beefy, black-
haired young man appeared unsteadily in the doorway, called to
Dylan.
"C'n I go now, Jim?"
Dylan turned and nodded.
"Be back for you tonight," the young man called, and then, grinning,
he yelled "Catch" and tossed down a bottle. The captain caught it
and put it unconcernedly into his pocket while Rossel stared in
disgust. A moment later the airlock closed and the ship prepared to
lift.
"Was he drunk?" Rossel began angrily. "Was that a bottle of liquor?"
The soldier was looking at him calmly, coldly. He indicated the
envelope in Rossel's hand. "You'd better read that and get moving.
We haven't much time."
He turned and walked toward the buildings and Rossel had to follow.
As Rossel drew near the walls the watchers could see his lips moving
but could not hear him. Just then the ship lifted and they turned to
watch that, and followed it upward, red spark-tailed, into the gray
spongy clouds and the cold.
After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it
again.

The first contact Man had ever had with an intelligent alien race
occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from
home. Late in the year 2360—the exact date remains unknown—an
alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The
wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off
screaming for the army.
When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered
colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women
and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns,
machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been
burned, so were the bodies. Apparently the aliens had a heat ray.
What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking
around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something.
For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main
buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to
be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to
blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile alien
learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There
was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it
had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut.
In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of
earth, the wire had been dug up and cut.
The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five
hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was
small, weak and without respect. Therefore, the army did nothing
but spread the news, and Man began to fall back.
In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won
stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most
of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest,
died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in
those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the
dregs of a society which had grown beyond them, were for a long
while the only defense Earth had.
This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from
Earth with a bottle on his hip.

An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well

shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table
and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the
colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with
great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably
a wait, between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear
and the rage.
Dylan waited. These people were taking it well, much better than
those in the cities had taken it. But then, these were pioneers. Dylan
grinned. Pioneers. Before you settle a planet you boil it and bake it
and purge it of all possible disease. Then you step down gingerly
and inflate your plastic houses, which harden and become warm and
impregnable; and send your machines out to plant and harvest; and
set up automatic factories to transmute dirt into coffee; and, without
ever having lifted a finger, you have braved the wilderness, hewed a
home out of the living rock and become a pioneer. Dylan grinned
again. But at least this was better than the wailing of the cities.
This Dylan thought, although he was himself no fighter, no man at
all by any standards. This he thought because he was a soldier and
an outcast; to every drunken man the fall of the sober is a happy
thing. He stirred restlessly.
By this time the colonists had begun to realize that there wasn't
much to say, and a tall, handsome woman was murmuring
distractedly: "Lupus, Lupus—doesn't that mean wolves or
something?"
Dylan began to wish they would get moving, these pioneers. It was
very possible that the aliens would be here soon, and there was no
need for discussion. There was only one thing to do and that was to
clear the hell out, quickly and without argument. They began to see
it.
But, when the fear had died down, the resentment came. A number
of women began to cluster around Dylan and complain, working up
their anger. Dylan said nothing. Then the man Rossel pushed
forward and confronted him, speaking with a vast annoyance.
"See here, soldier, this is our planet. I mean to say, this is our home.
We demand some protection from the fleet. By God, we've been
paying the freight for you boys all these years and it's high time you
earned your keep. We demand...."
It went on and on while Dylan looked at the clock and waited. He
hoped that he could end this quickly. A big gloomy man was in front
of him now and giving him that name of ancient contempt, "soldier
boy." The gloomy man wanted to know where the fleet was.
"There is no fleet. There are a few hundred half-shot old tubs that
were obsolete before you were born. There are four or five new jobs
for the brass and the government. That's all the fleet there is."

Dylan wanted to go on about that, to remind them that nobody had

wanted the army, that the fleet had grown smaller and smaller ...
but this was not the time. It was ten-thirty already and the damned
aliens might be coming in right now for all he knew, and all they did
was talk. He had realized a long time ago that no peace-loving
nation in the history of Earth had ever kept itself strong, and
although peace was a noble dream, it was ended now and it was
time to move.
"We'd better get going," he finally said, and there was quiet.
"Lieutenant Bossio has gone on to your sister colony at Planet Three
of this system. He'll return to pick me up by nightfall and I'm
instructed to have you gone by then."
For a long moment they waited, and then one man abruptly walked
off and the rest followed quickly; in a moment they were all gone.
One or two stopped long enough to complain about the fleet, and
the big gloomy man said he wanted guns, that's all, and there
wouldn't nobody get him off his planet. When he left, Dylan
breathed with relief and went out to check the bomb, grateful for
the action.
Most of it had to be done in the open. He found a metal bar in the
radio shack and began chopping at the frozen ground, following the
wire. It was the first thing he had done with his hands in weeks, and
it felt fine.
Dylan had been called up out of a bar—he and Bossio—and told
what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four
colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning
to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like
the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug
the breach, just like that. It would take time.
He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip.
Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain.
Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty
years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped
his way along the outer edges of Mankind, had waited and dozed
and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to
happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited
for something to happen, and he had done them all.
Once he had even studied military tactics.
He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been
green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died—of a
hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because
he'd worked too long on a heavy planet—and in those days the anti-
war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a
lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other
kids and a broken-down doctor. And ... now he was a captain.
He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you
wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those
damn days was upon him now and there was nothing he could do
but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in
some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-
murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime
soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly
matter. That was the point: it made no particular difference if he
never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and
trying to think of something pleasant from the old days, when the
wire came loose in his hands.
Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment
it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The
wire had just been cut.

Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his
hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip and
then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real,
there was no time for that.
When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. Rossel was so excited
he did not notice the wire.
"Listen, soldier, how many people can your ship take?"
Dylan looked at him vaguely. "She sleeps two and won't take off with
more'n ten. Why?"
His eyes bright and worried, Rossel leaned heavily against the shack.
"We're overloaded. There are sixty of us and our ship will only take
forty. We came out in groups, we never thought...."
Dylan dropped his eyes, swearing silently. "You're sure? No baggage,
no iron rations; you couldn't get ten more on?"
"Not a chance. She's only a little ship with one deck—she's all we
could afford."
Dylan whistled. He had begun to feel light-headed. "It 'pears that
somebody's gonna find out first hand what them aliens look like."
It was the wrong thing to say and he knew it. "All right," he said
quickly, still staring at the clear-sliced wire, "we'll do what we can.
Maybe the colony on Three has room. I'll call Bossio and ask."
The colonist had begun to look quite pitifully at the buildings around
him and the scurrying people.
"Aren't there any fleet ships within radio distance?"
Dylan shook his head. "The fleet's spread out kind of thin
nowadays." Because the other was leaning on him he felt a great
irritation, but he said, as kindly as he could, "We'll get 'em all out.
One way or another, we won't leave anybody."
It was then that Rossel saw the wire. Thickly, he asked what had
happened.
Dylan showed him the two clean ends. "Somebody dug it up, cut it,
then buried it again and packed it down real nice."
"The damn fool!" Rossel exploded.
"Who?"
"Why, one of ... of us, of course. I know nobody ever liked sitting on
a live bomb like this, but I never...."
"You think one of your people did it?"
Rossel stared at him. "Isn't that obvious?"
"Why?"
"Well, they probably thought it was too dangerous, and silly too, like
most government rules. Or maybe one of the kids...."

It was then that Dylan told him about the wire on Lupus V. Rossel
was silent. Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky, then he said shakily,
"Maybe an animal?"
Dylan shook his head. "No animal did that. Wouldn't have buried it,
or found it in the first place. Heck of a coincidence, don't you think?
The wire at Lupus was cut just before an alien attack, and now this
one is cut too—newly cut."
The colonist put one hand to his mouth, his eyes wide and white.
"So something," said Dylan, "knew enough about this camp to know
that a bomb was buried here and also to know why it was here. And
that something didn't want the camp destroyed and so came right
into the center of the camp, traced the wire, dug it up and cut it.
And then walked right out again."
"Listen," said Rossel, "I'd better go ask."
He started away but Dylan caught his arm.
"Tell them to arm," he said, "and try not to scare hell out of them.
I'll be with you as soon as I've spliced this wire."
Rossel nodded and went off, running. Dylan knelt with the metal in
his hands.
He began to feel that, by God, he was getting cold. He realized that
he'd better go inside soon, but the wire had to be spliced. That was
perhaps the most important thing he could do now, splice the wire.
All right, he asked himself for the thousandth time, who cut it? How?
Telepathy? Could they somehow control one of us?
No. If they controlled one, then they could control all, and then
there would be no need for an attack. But you don't know, you don't
really know.
Were they small? Little animals?
Unlikely. Biology said that really intelligent life required a sizable
brain and you would have to expect an alien to be at least as large
as a dog. And every form of life on this planet had been screened
long before a colony had been allowed in. If any new animals had
suddenly shown up, Rossel would certainly know about it.
He would ask Rossel. He would damn sure have to ask Rossel.
He finished splicing the wire and tucked it into the ground. Then he
straightened up and, before he went into the radio shack, he pulled
out his pistol. He checked it, primed it, and tried to remember the
last time he had fired it. He never had—he never had fired a gun.
The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody
could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white
rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the
whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings
and a few warm lights and the snow.
By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to
try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still
didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window
through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees
which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio
was still drunk—maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on
Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a
special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things
could be waiting....
A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the
shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like
to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it
but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and
irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him.
He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow
it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went
down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out
stripping down their ship and that would take a while. He wondered
why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about
room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that
Rossel knew that there was no room, and he wanted to put off the
answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him.
Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man—who turned out
to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was
methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly
full of hope.
"Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We
might get the rest of the folks out on that."
Dylan shrugged. "Don't count on it."
"But they have a contract!"
The soldier grinned.
The big man, Rush, was paying no attention. Quite suddenly he
said: "Who cut that wire, Cap?"

Dylan swung slowly to look at him. "As far as I can figure, an alien
cut it."
Rush shook his head. "No. Ain't been no aliens near this camp, and
no peculiar animals either. We got a planet-wide radar, and ain't no
unidentified ships come near, not since we first landed more'n a year
ago." He lifted the rifle and peered through the bore. "Uh-uh. One of
us did it."
The man had been thinking. And he knew the planet.
"Telepathy?" asked Dylan.
"Might be."
"Can't see it. You people live too close, you'd notice right away if one
of you wasn't ... himself. And, if they've got one, why not all?"
Rush calmly—at least outwardly calmly—lit his pipe. There was a
strength in this man that Dylan had missed before.
"Don't know," he said gruffly. "But these are aliens, mister. And until
I know different I'm keepin' an eye on my neighbor."
He gave Rossel a sour look and Rossel stared back,
uncomprehending.
Then Rossel jumped. "My God!"
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