Keith Laumer - End as a Hero

In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire. The dream went on and on; and then I was awakeand the fire was still there, fiercely burning at me.

I moved to get away from the flames, and the real pain hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and conscious.

I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to an unpadded acceleration couchthe kind the Terrestrial Space Arm installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasnt easy but, by applying a lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it. I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare, but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst.

There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with the charred arm. The crawl to the cabinet dwarfed Hillarys trek up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was fading out again

I came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a fracture. The left armwell, it was still there, wrapped to the shoulder and held out stiffly by a power truss that would keep the scar tissue from pulling up and crippling me. The steady pressure as the truss contracted wasnt anything to do a sense-tape on for replaying at leisure moments, but at least the cabinet hadnt amputated. I wasnt complaining.

As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the Goolif I survived.

I was still a long way from home, and I hadnt yet checked on the condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at work.

I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my conditionwith a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skullI shouldnt have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip from Belshazzars CCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was thereand it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.

I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before. It was almost five minutes before the acknowledge came through from the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayles face swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the haggard look.

Granthan! he burst out. Where are the others? What happened out there? I turned him down to a mutter.

Hold on, I said. Ill tell you. Recorders going? I didnt wait for an answernot with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:

Belshazzar was sabotaged. So was GilgameshI think. I got out. I lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the Med people the drinks are on me.

I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayles reply. On the screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would get his reaction to my report. I dozed offand awoke with a start. Kayle was talking.

your report. I wont mince words. Theyre wondering at your role in the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?

How the hell do I know? I yelledor croaked. But Kayles voice was droning on:

you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. Youve told me yourself that you blacked out during the attackand came to on the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there.

This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the possibility ofwhats that term you use?hypercortical invasion. You know better than most the risk Id be running if you were allowed to pass the patrol line.

Im sorry, Granthan. I cant let you land on Earth. I cant accept the risk.

What do I do now? I stormed. Go into orbit and eat pills and hope you think of something? I need a doctor!

Presently Kayle replied. Yes, he said. Youll have to enter a parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make it possible to ah restudy the situation. He didnt meet my eye. I knew what he was thinking. Hed spare me the mental anguish of knowing what was coming. I couldnt really blame him; he was doing what he thought was the right thing. And Id have to go along and pretendright up until the warheads struckthat I didnt know Id been condemned to death.

I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldnt survive my next meeting with my own kind. They couldnt take the chance that I was acting under Gool orders.

I wasnt, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan, psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayans fleet six weeks earlier. The thoughts I was having werent brilliant, but they were mine, all mine.

But how could I be sure of that?

Maybe there was something in Kayles suspicion. If the Gool were as skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of their tamperingnot at a conscious level.

But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I wasnt just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the mindand I had been prepared for just such an attack.

Now was the time to make use of that training. It had given me one resource. I could unlock the memories of my subconsciousand see again what had happened.

I lay back, cleared my mind of extraneous thoughts, and concentrated on the trigger word that would key an autohypnotic sequence.

Sense impressions faded. I was alone in the nebulous emptiness of a first-level trance. I keyed a second word, slipped below the misty surface into a dreamworld of vague phantasmagoric figures milling in their limbo of sub-conceptualization. I penetrated deeper, broke through into the vividly hallucinatory third level, where images of mirror-bright immediacy clamored for attention. And deeper

The immense orderly confusion of the basic memory level lay before me. Abstracted from it, aloof and observant, the monitoring personality-fraction scanned the pattern, searching the polydimensional continuum for evidence of an alien intrusion.

And found it.

As the eye instantaneously detects a flicker of motion amid an infinity of static detail, so my inner eye perceived the subtle traces of the probing Gool mind, like a whispered touch deftly rearranging my buried motivations.

I focused selectively, tuned to the recorded gestalt.

It is a contact, Effulgent One!

Softly, now! Nurture the spark well. It but trembles at the threshold

It is elusive, Master! It wriggles like a gorm-worm in the eating trough