The Stoker and the Stars Read online

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  THE STOKER AND THE STARS

  BY JOHN A. SENTRY

  _When you've had your ears pinned back in a bowknot, it's sometimes hard to remember that an intelligent people has no respect for a whipped enemy ... but does for a fairly beaten enemy._

  Illustrated by van Dongen

  Know him? Yes, I know him--_knew_ him. That was twenty years ago.

  Everybody knows him now. Everybody who passed him on the street knowshim. Everybody who went to the same schools, or even to differentschools in different towns, knows him now. Ask them. But I knew him. Ilived three feet away from him for a month and a half. I shipped withhim and called him by his first name.

  What was he like? What was he thinking, sitting on the edge of his bunkwith his jaw in his palm and his eyes on the stars? What did he think hewas after?

  Well ... Well, I think he-- You know, I think I never did know him,after all. Not well. Not as well as some of those people who're writingthe books about him seem to.

  I couldn't really describe him to you. He had a duffelbag in his handand a packed airsuit on his back. The skin of his face had been driedout by ship's air, burned by ultraviolet and broiled by infra red. Thepupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmicrays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body washard. What did he look like? He looked like a man.

  * * * * *

  It was after the war, and we were beaten. There used to be a school ofthought among us that deplored our combativeness; before we had ever metany people from off Earth, even, you could hear people saying we weretoughest, cruelest life-form in the Universe, unfit to mingle with thegentler wiser races in the stars, and a sure bet to steal their galaxyand corrupt it forever. Where these people got their information, Idon't know.

  We were beaten. We moved out beyond Centaurus, and Sirius, and then wemet the Jeks, the Nosurwey, the Lud. We tried Terrestrial know-how, wetried Production Miracles, we tried patriotism, we tried damning thetorpedoes and full speed ahead ... and we were smashed back likemayflies in the wind. We died in droves, and we retreated from theguttering fires of a dozen planets, we dug in, we fought through thelast ditch, and we were dying on Earth itself before Baker mutinied,shot Cope, and surrendered the remainder of the human race to the wiser,gentler races in the stars. That way, we lived. That way, we werepermitted to carry on our little concerns, and mind our manners. TheJeks and the Lud and the Nosurwey returned to their own affairs, and weknew they would leave us alone so long as we didn't bother them.

  We liked it that way. Understand me--we didn't accept it, we didn'tknuckle under with waiting murder in our hearts--we _liked_ it. We weregrateful just to be left alone again. We were happy we hadn't been wipedout like the upstarts the rest of the Universe thought us to be. Whenthey let us keep our own solar system and carry on a trickle of tradewith the outside, we accepted it for the fantastically generous gift itwas. Too many of our best men were dead for us to have any remainingclaim on these things in our own right. I know how it was. I was there,twenty years ago. I was a little, pudgy man with short breath and ahigh-pitched voice. I was a typical Earthman.

  * * * * *

  We were out on a God-forsaken landing field on Mars, MacReidie and I,loading cargo aboard the _Serenus_. MacReidie was First Officer. I wasSecond. The stranger came walking up to us.

  "Got a job?" he asked, looking at MacReidie.

  Mac looked him over. He saw the same things I'd seen. He shook his head."Not for you. The only thing we're short on is stokers."

  You wouldn't know. There's no such thing as a stoker any more, withautomatic ships. But the stranger knew what Mac meant.

  _Serenus_ had what they called an electronic drive. She had to run withan evacuated engine room. The leaking electricity would have broken anystray air down to ozone, which eats metal and rots lungs. So the engineroom had the air pumped out of her, and the stokers who tended the dialsand set the cathode attitudes had to wear suits, smelling themselves fortwelve hours at a time and standing a good chance of cooking where theysat when the drive arced. _Serenus_ was an ugly old tub. At that, wewere the better of the two interstellar freighters the human race hadleft.

  "You're bound over the border, aren't you?"

  MacReidie nodded. "That's right. But--"

  "I'll stoke."

  MacReidie looked over toward me and frowned. I shrugged my shouldershelplessly. I was a little afraid of the stranger, too.

  The trouble was the look of him. It was the look you saw in the barsback on Earth, where the veterans of the war sat and stared down intotheir glasses, waiting for night to fall so they could go out into thealleys and have drunken fights among themselves. But he had brought thatlook to Mars, to the landing field, and out here there was somethingdisquieting about it.

  He'd caught Mac's look and turned his head to me. "I'll stoke," herepeated.

  I didn't know what to say. MacReidie and I--almost all of the men in theMerchant Marine--hadn't served in the combat arms. We had freightedsupplies, and we had seen ships dying on the runs--we'd had our ownbrushes with commerce raiders, and we'd known enough men who joined thecombat forces. But very few of the men came back, and the war this manhad fought hadn't been the same as ours. He'd commanded a fighting ship,somewhere, and come to grips with things we simply didn't know about.The mark was on him, but not on us. I couldn't meet his eyes. "O.K. byme," I mumbled at last.

  I saw MacReidie's mouth turn down at the corners. But he couldn'tgainsay the man any more than I could. MacReidie wasn't a mumbling man,so he said angrily: "O.K., bucko, you'll stoke. Go and sign on."

  "Thanks." The stranger walked quietly away. He wrapped a hand around thecable on a cargo hook and rode into the hold on top of some freight. Macspat on the ground and went back to supervising his end of the loading.I was busy with mine, and it wasn't until we'd gotten the _Serenus_loaded and buttoned up that Mac and I even spoke to each other again.Then we talked about the trip. We didn't talk about the stranger.

  * * * * *

  Daniels, the Third, had signed him on and had moved him into the emptybunk above mine. We slept all in a bunch on the _Serenus_--officers andcrew. Even so, we had to sleep in shifts, with the ship's designersgiving ninety per cent of her space to cargo, and eight per cent topower and control. That left very little for the people, who werecrammed in any way they could be. I said empty bunk. What I meant was,empty during my sleep shift. That meant he and I'd be sharing workshifts--me up in the control blister, parked in a soft chair, and himdown in the engine room, broiling in a suit for twelve hours.

  But I ate with him, used the head with him; you can call that rubbingelbows with greatness, if you want to.

  He was a very quiet man. Quiet in the way he moved and talked. When wewere both climbing into our bunks, that first night, I introduced myselfand he introduced himself. Then he heaved himself into his bunk, rolledover on his side, fixed his straps, and fell asleep. He was alwaysfriendly toward me, but he must have been very tired that first night. Ioften wondered what kind of a life he'd lived after the war--what he'ddone that made him different from the men who simply grew older in thebars. I wonder, now, if he really did do anything different. In an oddway, I like to think that one day, in a bar, on a day that seemed likeall the rest to him when it began, he suddenly looked up with some newthought, put down his glass, and walked straight to the Earth-Marsshuttle field.

  He might have come from any town on Earth. Don't believe the historianstoo much. Don't pay too much attention to the Chamber of
Commerceplaques. When a man's name becomes public property, strange thingshappen to the facts.

  * * * * *

  It was MacReidie who first found out what he'd done during the war.

  I've got to explain about MacReidie. He takes his opinions fast andstrong. He's a good man--is, or was; I haven't seen him for a longwhile--but he liked things simple.

  MacReidie said the duffelbag broke loose and floated into the middle ofthe bunkroom during acceleration. He opened it to see whose it was. Whenhe found out, he closed it up and strapped it back in its place at thefoot of the stoker's bunk.

  MacReidie was my relief on the bridge. When he came up, he didn'trelieve me right away. He stood next to my chair and looked out throughthe ports.

  "Captain leave any special