Blaze of Glory

by Robert Silverberg

They list John Murchison as one of the great heroes of space—a brave man and true, who willingly sacrificed himself to save his ship. He won his immortality on the way back from Shaula II.

One thing’s wrong, though. He was brave, but he wasn’t willing. He wasn’t the self-sacrificing type. I’m inclined to think it was murder, or maybe execution. By remote control, you might say.

I guess they pick spaceship crews at random—say, by yanking a handful of cards from the big computer and throwing them up at the BuSpace roof. The ones that stick get picked. At least, that’s the only way a man like Murchison could have been sent to Shaula II in the first place.

He was a spaceman of the old school, tall, bullnecked, coarse-featured, hard-swearing. He was a spaceman of a type that had never existed except in storytapes for the very young—the only kind Murchison was likely to have viewed. He was our chief signal officer.

Somewhere, he had picked up an awesome technical competence; he could handle any sort of communication device with supernatural ease. I once saw him tinker with a complex little Caphian artifact that had been buried for half a million years, and have it detecting the 21-centimeter “hydrogen song” within minutes. How he knew the little widget was a star-mapping device I will never understand.

But coupled with Murchison’s extraordinary special skill was an irascibility, a self-centered inner moodiness flaring into seemingly unmotivated anger at unpredictable times, that made him a prime risk on a planet like Shaula II. There was something wrong with his circuit-breaker setup: you could never tell when he’d overload, start fizzing and sparking, and blow off a couple of megawatts of temper.

You must admit this is not the ideal sort of man to send to a world whose inhabitants are listed in the E-T Catalogue as “wise, somewhat world-weary, exceedingly gentle, non-aggressive to an extreme degree and thus subject to exploitation. The Shaulans must be handled with great patience and forbearance, and should be given the respect due one of the galaxy’s elder races.”

I had never been to Shaula II, but I had a sharp mental image of the Shaulans: melancholy old men pondering the whichness of the why and ready to fall apart at the first loud voice that caught them by surprise. So it caught me by surprise when the time came to affix my hancock to the roster of the Felicific, and I saw on the line above mine the scribbled words Murchison, John F., Signalman First Class.

I signed my name—Loeb, Ernest T., Second Officer—picked up my pay voucher, and walked away somewhat dizzily. I was thinking of the time I had seen Murchison, John F., giving a Denebolan frogman the beating of his life, for no particular reason at all. “All the rain here makes me sick” was all Murchison cared to say; the frogman lived and Big Jawn got an X on his psych report.

Now he was shipping out for Shaula? Well, maybe so…but my faith in the computer that makes up spaceship complements was seriously shaken.

We were the fourth or fifth expedition to Shaula II. The planet—second of seven in orbit round the brightest star in Scorpio’s tail—was small and scrubby, but of great strategic importance as a lookout spot for that sector of the galaxy. The natives hadn’t minded our intrusion, and so a military base had been established there after a little preliminary haggling.

The Felicific was a standard warp-conversion-drive ship holding thirty-six men. It had the usual crew of eight, plus a cargo of twenty-eight of Terra’s finest, being sent out as replacements for the current staff of the base.

We blasted on 3 July 2530, a warmish day, made the conversion from ion-drive to warp-drive as soon as we were clear of the local system, and popped back into normal space three weeks later and two hundred light-years away. It was a routine trip in all respects.

With the warp-conversion drive, a ship is equipped to travel both long distances and short. It handles the long hops via subspace warp, and the short ones by good old standard ion-drive seat-of-the-spacesuit navigating. It’s a good system, and the extra mass the double drive requires is more than compensated for by the saving in time and maneuverability.

The warp-drive part of the trip was pre-plotted and just about pre-traveled for us; no headaches there. But when we blurped back into the continuum about half a light-year from Shaula the human factor entered the situation. Meaning Murchison, of course.

It was his job to check and tend the network of telemetering systems that acted as the ship’s eyes, to make sure the mass-detectors were operating, to smooth the bugs out of the communications channels between navigator and captain and drive-deck. In brief, he was the man who made it possible for us to land.

Every ship carried a spare signalman, just in case. In normal circumstances the spare never got much work. When the time came for the landing, Captain Knight buzzed me and told me to start lining up the men who would take part, and I signaled Murchison first.

His voice was a slow rasping drawl. “Yeah?”

“Second Officer Loeb. Prepare for landing, double-fast. Navigator Henrichs has the chart set up for you and he’s waiting for your call.”

There was a pause. Then: “I don’t feel like it, Loeb.”

It was my turn to pause. I shut my eyes, held my breath, and counted to three by fractions. Then I said, “Would you mind repeating that, Signalman Murchison?”

“Yes, sir. No, sir, I mean. Hell, Loeb, I’m fixing something. Why do you want to land now?”

“I don’t make up the schedules,” I said.

“Then who in blazes does? Tell him I’m busy!”

I turned down my phones’ volume. “Busy doing what?”

“Busy doing nothing. Get off the line and I’ll call Henrichs.”

I sighed and broke contact. He’d just been ragging me. Once again, Murchison had been ornery for the sheer sake of being ornery. One of these days he was going to refuse to handle the landing entirely.

And that day, I told myself, is the day we’ll crate him up and shove him through the disposal lock.

Murchison was a little island. He had his skills, and he applied them—when he felt like it. But only when he believed that he, Murchison, would profit. He never did anything unwillingly, because if he couldn’t find it in himself to do it willingly he wouldn’t do it at all. It was impossible to make him do something.

Unwisely, we tolerated it. But someday he would get a captain who didn’t understand him, and he’d be slapped with a sentence of mutiny during a fit of temperament. For his sake, I hoped not. The penalty for mutiny in space is death.

With Murchison’s cooperation gratefully accepted, we targeted on Shaula II, which was then at perihelion, and orbited it. Down in his little cubicle Murchison worked like a demon, taking charge of the ship’s landing system in a tremendous way. He was a fantastic signalman when he wanted to be.

Later that day the spinning red ball that was Shaula II hung just ahead of us, close enough to let us see the three blobs of continents and the big, choppy hydrocarbon ocean that licked them smooth. The Terran base on Continent Three beamed as a landing-guide; Murchison picked it up, fed it through the computer bank to Navigator Henrichs, and we homed in for the landing.

The Terran base consisted of a couple of blockhouses, a sprawling barracks, and a good-sized radar parabola, all set in a ring out on an almost mathematically flat plain. Shaula II was a great world for plains; Columbus would have had the devil’s time convincing people this world was round!

Murchison guided us to a glassy-looking area not far from the base, and we touched down. The Felicific creaked and groaned a little as the landing jacks absorbed its weight. Green lights went on all over the ship. We were free to go outside.

A welcoming committee was on hand: eight members of the base staff, clad in shorts and topees. Regulation uniforms went by the board on oven-hot Shaula II. The eight looked awfully happy to see us.

Coming over the flat sandy plain from the base were a dozen or so others, running, and behind them I could see even more. They were understandably glad we were here. Twenty-eight of them had spent a full year on Shaula II; they were eligible for their parity-program year’s vacation.

There were some other—things—moving towards us. They moved slowly, with grace and dignity. I had expected to be impressed with the Shaulans, and I was.

They were erect bipeds about four feet tall, with long thin arms dangling to their knees; their grey skins were grainy and rough, and their dark eyes—they had three, arranged triangularly—were deepset and brooding. A fleshy sort of cowl or cobra-hood curled up from their necks to shield their round hairless skulls. The aliens were six in number, and the youngest-looking of them seemed ancient.

A brown-faced young man wearing shorts, topee, and tattooed stars stepped forward and said, “I’m General Gloster. I’m in charge here.”

The Captain acknowledged his greeting. “Knight of the Felicific. We have your relief men with us.”

“I sure as hell hope you do,” Gloster said. “Be kind of silly to come all this way without them.”

We all laughed a little over that. By now we were ringed in by at least fifty Earthmen, probably the entire base complement (we didn’t rotate the entire base staff at once, of course), and the six aliens. The twenty-eight kids we had ferried here were looking around the place curiously, apprehensive about this hot, dry, flat planet that would be their home for the next sidereal year. The crew of the Felicific had gathered in a little knot near the ship. Most of them probably felt the way I did; they were glad we’d be on our way home in a couple of days.

Murchison was squinting at the six aliens. I wondered what he was thinking about.

The bunch of us traipsed back the half mile or so to the settlement; Gloster walked with Knight and myself, prattling volubly about the progress the base was making, and the twenty-eight newcomers mingled with the twenty-eight who were being relieved. Murchison walked by himself, kicking up puffs of red dust and scowling in his usual manner. The six aliens accompanied us at some distance.

“We keep building all the time,” Gloster explained when we were within the compound. “Branching out, setting up new equipment, shoring up the old stuff: That radar parabola out there wasn’t up, last replacement-trip.”

I looked around. “The place looks fine, General.” It was strange calling a man half my age General, but the Service sometimes works that way. “When do you plan to set up your telescope?”

“Next year, maybe.” He glanced out the window at the featureless landscape. “We keep building all the time. It’s the best way to stay sane on this world.”

“How about the natives?” the Captain asked. “You have much contact with them?”

Gloster shrugged. “As much as they’ll allow. They’re a proud old race—pretty near dried up and dead now, just a handful of them left. But what a race they must have been once! What minds! What culture!”

I found Gloster’s boyish enthusiasm discomforting. “Do you think we could meet one of the aliens before we go?” I asked.

“I’ll see about it.” Gloster picked up a phone. “McHenry? There any natives in the compound now? Good. Send him up, will you?”

Moments later one of the shorts-clad men appeared, hand in hand with an alien. At close range the Shaulan looked almost frighteningly old. A maze of wrinkles gullied its noseless face, running from the triple optics down to the dots of nostrils to the sagging, heavy-lipped mouth.

“This is Azga,” Gloster said. “Azga, meet Captain Knight and Second Officer Loeb, of the Felicific.”

The creature offered a wobbly sort of curtsey and said, in a deep, resonant, almost-human croak, “I am very humble indeed in your presence, Captain Knight and Second Officer Loeb.”

Azga came out of the curtsey and the three eyes fixed on mine. I felt like squirming, but I stared back. It was like looking into a mirror that gave the wrong reflection.

Yet I enjoyed my proximity to the alien. There was something calm and wise and good about the grotesque creature; something relaxing, and terribly fragile. The rough grey skin looked like precious leather, and the hood over the skull appeared to shield it from worry and harm. A faint musty odor wandered through the room.

We looked at each other—Knight, and Gloster, and McHenry, and I—and we remained silent. Now that the Shaulan was here, what could we say? What new thing could we possibly tell the ancient creature?

I resisted an impulse to kneel. I was fumbling for words to express my emotion when the sharp buzz of the phone cut across the room.

Gloster nodded curtly to McHenry, who answered. The man listened for a moment. “Captain Knight, it’s for you.”

Puzzled, Knight took the receiver. He held it long enough to hear about three sentences and turned to me. “Loeb, get a landcar from someone in the compound and get back to the ship. Murchison’s carrying on with one of the aliens.”

I hotfooted down into the compound and spotted an enlisted man tooling up his landcar. I pulled rank and requisitioned it, and minutes later I was parking it outside the Felicific and was clambering hand-over-hand up the catwalk.

An excited-looking recruit stood at the open airlock.

“Where’s Murchison?” I asked.

“Down in the communicator cabin. He’s got an alien in there with him. There’s gonna be trouble.”

I remembered Denebola, and Murchison kicking the stuffings out of a groaning frogman. I groaned a little myself, and dashed down the companionway.

The communications cabin was Murchison’s sanctum sanctorum, a cubicle off the astro deck where he worked and kept control over the Felicific’s communications network. I yanked open the door and saw Murchison at the far end of the cabin holding a massive crescent wrench and glaring at a Shaulan facing him. The Shaulan had its back to me. It looked small and squat and helpless.

Murchison saw me as I entered. “Get out of here, Loeb. This isn’t your affair.”

“What’s going on here?” I snapped.

“This alien snooping around. I’m gonna let him have it with the wrench.”

“I meant no harm,” the alien boomed sadly. “Mere philosophical interest in your strange machines, nothing more. If I have offended a folkway of yours I humbly apologize. It is not the way of my people to give offence.”

I walked forward and took a position between them, making sure I wasn’t within easy reach of Murchison’s wrench. He was standing there with his nostrils spread, his eyes cold and hard, his breath pumping noisily. He was angry, and an angry Murchison was a frightening sight.

He took two heavy steps toward me. “I told you to get out. This is my cabin, Loeb. And neither you or any aliens got any business in it.”

“Put down that wrench, Murchison. It’s an order.”

He laughed contemptuously. “Signalman First Class don’t have to take orders from anyone but the Captain if he thinks the safety of the ship is jeopardized. And I do. There’s a dangerous alien in here.”

“Be reasonable,” I said. “This Shaulan’s not dangerous. He just wanted to look around. Just curious.”

The wrench wiggled warningly. I wished I had a blaster with me, but I hadn’t thought of bringing a weapon. The alien faced Murchison quite complacently, as if confident the signalman would never strike anything so old and delicate.

“You’d better leave,” I said to the alien.

“No!” Murchison roared. He shoved me to one side and went after the Shaulan.

The alien stood there, waiting, as Murchison came on. I tried to drag the big man away, but there was no stopping him.

At least he didn’t use the wrench. He let the big crescent slip clangingly to the floor and slapped the alien open-handed across its face. The Shaulan backed up a few feet. A trickle of bluish fluid worked its way along its mouth. Murchison raised his hand again. “Damned snooper! I’ll teach you to poke in my cabin!” He hit the alien again.

This time the Shaulan folded up accordionwise and huddled on the floor. It focused those three deep solid-black eyes on Murchison reproachfully.

Murchison looked back. They stared at each other for a long, moment, until it seemed that their eyes were linked by an invisible cord. Then Murchison looked away.

“Get out of here,” he muttered to the alien, and the Shaulan rose and departed, limping a little but still intact. Those aliens were more solid than they seemed.

“I guess you’re going to put me in the brig,” Murchison said to me. “Okay. I’ll go quietly.”

We didn’t brig him, because there was nothing to be gained by that. I had seen the explosion coming right from the start. When you drop a lighted match into a tub of hydrazine, you don’t punish the hydrazine for blowing up. And Murchison couldn’t be blamed for what he did, either.

He got the silent treatment instead. The men at the base would have nothing to do with him whatsoever, because in their year on Shaula they had developed a respect for the aliens not far from worship, and any man who would actually use physical violence—well, he just wasn’t worth wasting breath on.

The men of our crew gave him a wide berth too. He wandered among us, a tall, powerful figure with anger and loneliness stamped on his face, and he said nothing to any of us and no one said anything to him. Whenever he saw one of the aliens, he went far out of his way to avoid a meeting.

Murchison got another X on his psych report, and that second X meant he’d never be allowed to visit any world inhabited by intelligent life again. It was a BuSpace regulation, one of the many they have for the purpose of locking the barn door too late.

Three days went by this way on Shaula. On the fourth, we took aboard the twenty-eight departing men, said goodbye to Gloster and his staff and the twenty-eight we had ferried out to him, and—somewhat guiltily—goodbye to the Shaulans too.

The six of them showed up for our blastoff, including the somewhat battered one who had had the run-in with Murchison. They wished us well, gravely, without any sign of bitterness. For the hundredth time I was astonished by their patience, their wisdom, their understanding.

I held Azga’s rough hand in mine and said goodbye. I told him for the first time what I had been wanting to say since our first meeting, how much I hoped we’d eventually reach the mental equilibrium and inner calm of the Shaulans. He smiled warmly at me, and I said goodbye again and entered the ship.

We ran the usual pre-blast checkups, and got ready for departure. Everything was working well; Murchison had none of his usual grumbles and complaints, and we were off the ground in record time.

A couple of days of ion-drive, three weeks of warp, two more of ion-drive deceleration, and we would be back on Earth.

The three weeks passed slowly, of course; when Earth lies ahead of you, time drags. But after the interminable greyness of warp came the sudden wrenching twist and the bright slippery sliding feeling as our Bohling generator threw us back into ordinary space.

I pushed down the communicator stud near my arm and heard the voice of Navigator Henrichs saying, “Murchison, give me the coordinates, will you?”

“Hold on,” came Murchison’s growl. “Patience, Sam. You’ll get your coordinates as soon as I got ’em.”

There was a pause; then Captain Knight said, “Murchison, what’s holding up those coordinates? Where are we, anyway? Turn on the visiplates?”

“Please, Captain.” Murchison’s heavy voice was surprisingly polite. Then he ruined it. “Please, be good enough to shut up and let a man think.”

“Murchison—” Knight sputtered, and stopped. We all knew one solid fact about our signalman: he did as he pleased. No one but no one coerced him into anything.

So we waited, spinning end-over-end somewhere in the vicinity of Earth, completely blind behind our wall of metal. Until Murchison chose to feed us some data, we had no way of bringing the ship down.

Three more minutes went by; then the private circuit Knight uses when he wants to talk to me alone lit up, and he said, “Loeb, go down to Communications and see what’s holding Murchison up. We can’t stay here forever.”

“Yessir.”

I pocketed a blaster—I hate making mistakes more than once—and left my cabin. I walked numbly to the companionway, turned to the left, hit the drophatch and found myself outside Murchison’s door.

I knocked.

“Get away from here, Loeb!” Murchison bellowed from within.

I had forgotten that he had rigged a one-way vision circuit outside his door. I said, “Let me in, Murchison. Let me in or I’ll come in blasting.”

I heard a heavy sigh. “Come on in, then.”

Nervously I pushed the door open and poked my head and the blaster snout in, half expecting Murchison to leap on me from above. But he was sitting at an equipment-jammed desk scribbling notes, which surprised me. I stood waiting for him to look up.

And finally he did. I gasped when I saw his face: drawn, harried, pale, tense. I had never seen an expression like that on Murchison’s face before.

“What’s going on?” I asked softly. “We’re all waiting to get moving, and—”

He turned to face me squarely. “You want to know what’s going on, Loeb? Well, listen: the ship’s blind. None of the equipment is reading anything. No telemeter pickup, no visual, no nothing. You scrape up some coordinates, if you can.”

We held a little meeting half an hour later, in the ship’s Common Room. Murchison was there, and Knight, and myself, and Navigator Henrichs, and three representatives of the cargo.

“How did this happen?” Knight demanded.

Murchison shrugged. “It happened while we were in warp. We passed through something—magnetic field, maybe—and bollixed every instrument we have.”

Knight glanced at Henrichs. “You ever hear of such a thing happening before?” He seemed to suspect Murchison of funny business.

But Henrichs shook his head. “No, Chief. And there’s a good reason why, too. If this happens to a ship, the ship doesn’t get back to tell about it.”

He was right. With no contact at all with the outside, no information on location or orbits, there was no way to land the ship. And the radio, of course, was dead too; we couldn’t even call for help.

Captain Knight looked grey-faced and very old. He asked worriedly, “What could have caused this thing?”

“No one knows what subspace conditions are like,” Henrichs said. “It may have been a fluke magnetic field, as Murchison suggests. Or anything at all—an alien entity that swallowed our antennae, for all we know. The question’s not what did it, Captain—it’s how do we get back.”

“Good point. Murchison, is there any chance you can repair the instruments?”

“No.”

“Just like that—flat no? Hell, man, we’ve seen you do wonders with instruments on the blink before.”

“No,” Murchison repeated stolidly. “I tried. I can’t do a damned thing.”

“That means we’re finished, doesn’t it?” asked Ramirez, one of our returnees. His voice was a little wild. “We might just as well have stayed on Shaula! At least we’d still be alive!”

“It looks pretty lousy,” Henrichs admitted. The thin-faced navigator was frowning blackly. “We don’t dare try a blind landing. There’s nothing we can do. Nothing at all.”

“There’s one thing,” Murchison said.

All eyes turned to him. “What?” Knight asked.

“Put a man in a spacesuit and anchor him to the skin of the ship. Have him guide us in by verbal instructions. It’s a way, anyway.”

“Pretty farfetched,” Henrichs commented.

“Yes, dammit, but it’s our only hope!” Murchison snapped. “Stick a man up there and let him talk us in.”

“He’d incinerate once we hit Earth’s atmosphere,” I said. “We’d lose a man and still have to land blind.”

Murchison puckered his thick lower lip. “You’ll be able to judge the ship’s height by hull temperature once you’re that close. Besides, once the ship’s inside the ionosphere you can use ordinary radio for the rest of the way down. The trick is to get that far.”

“I think it’s worth a try,” Captain Knight said. “I guess we’ll have to draw lots. Loeb, get some straws from the galley.” His voice was grim.

“Never mind,” Murchison said.

“Huh?”

“I said, never mind. Skip it. Forget about drawing straws. I’ll go.”

“Murchison—”

“Skip it!” he barked. “It’s a failure in my department, so I’m going to go out there. I volunteer, get it? If anyone else wants to volunteer, I’ll match him for it.” He looked around at us. No one moved. “I don’t hear any takers. I’ll assume the job’s mine.” Sweat streamed down his face.

There was a startled silence, broken when Ramirez made the lousiest remark I’ve ever heard mortal man utter. “You’re trying to make it up for hitting that defenseless Shaulan, eh, Murchison? Now you want to be a hero to even things up!”

If Murchison had killed him on the spot, I think we’d all have applauded. But the big man only turned to Ramirez and said quietly, “You’re just as blind as the others. You don’t know how rotten those defenseless Shaulans are, any of you. Or what they did to me.” He spat. “You all make me sick. I’m going out there.”

He turned and walked away…out, to get into his spacesuit and climb into the ship’s skin.

Murchison’s explicit instructions, relayed from the outside of the ship, allowed Henrichs to bring us in. It was quite a feat of teamwork.

At 50,000 feet above Earth, Murchison’s voice suddenly cut out. We were able to pick up ground-to-ship radio by then and we taxied down. Later, they told us it seemed like a blazing candle was riding the ship’s back. A bright, clear flame flared for a moment as we cleaved the atmosphere.

And I remember the look on Murchison’s face as he left us to go out there. It was tense, bitter, strained—as if he were being compelled to go outside. As if he had no choice about volunteering for martyrdom.

I often wonder about that now. No one had ever made Murchison do anything he didn’t want to do—until then.

We think of the Shaulans as gentle, meek, defenseless. Murchison crossed one of them, and he died. Gentle, meek, yes—but defenseless? Murchison didn’t think so.

Maybe they whammied the ship and cursed Murchison with the urge to self-martyrdom, to punish him. Maybe. He never did trust them much.

It sort of tarnishes his glorious halo. But you know, sometimes I think Murchison was right about the Shaulans after all.

Content

Blaze of Glory
by Robert Silverberg