Galactic Medal of Honor

Don wondered if he felt like answering that. It was none of the big man's business. However, he said, "My girl left me to take a job on Callisto. And my commodore's down on me because I've had a series of troubles with my One Man Scout and have come in several times from patrol prematurely."

Thor Bjornsen finished his beer and stood again. "You look like hell," he said. "The bathroom's over there. I'll order some bedding from the ultra-market and well fix up that couch for you. You'll be better in the morning. Hell, by the looks of you you couldn't be worse."

In the morning, Don Mathers did feel worse, but in a different way. By the time he awoke, his host had already dressed.

He stood next to the couch, with a small bottle in his hand and shook a pill from it. "Anti-Ale," he said. "Here, take it down."

"It's against regulations for an officer of the damned Space Service to take the stuff," Don told him.

"Why?"

"I don't know. I think they want you to suffer. If you suffer enough from drinking, maybe you'll do less drinking, and they don't like pilots, in particular, to have their reflexes slowed up with guzzle."

Thor reached out the pill again, and a glass of water. "Tell them to get poked."

Don downed it, choking slightly, flushed it on through with the water.

He began to feel better almost immediately, as he knew he would. He had taken the sober-up before, and many a time, in spite of what he had said about regulations.

The big man eyed him carefully and said, "You don't like the Space Service, do you?"

Don Mathers considered that for a minute before saying, "Well, no. But what can you do?"

"Get out. I did."

Don was surprised. "Were you in space?"

"I used to work on the radio interferometers on Luna. They're radio telescopes in which two or more antennas are connected to a single receiver. Our job was scanning space for signs of Kradens."

"I know what they are," Don growled. "How did you get out? That's a hell of a job, being stuck there in those underground towns on the moon."

"Medical discharge."

"There's nothing wrong with me, damn it."

Thor looked at him. "Would you think that there's anything wrong with me? I have a doctor friend. He can make something wrong with you, or seem to be. And he's available."

Don brushed it all off. He said, "I don't have any large lump sum of pseudo-dollars to pay out. All I have is my sub-lieutenant's pay."

"No charge."

Don contemplated him for a long, long moment. He was on delicate ground now, in view of his own thoughts about desertion. And he didn't really know this man. He said carefully, "You don't sound very patriotic, Thor. You forget the Kradens."

Thor Bjornsen shook his head. "No I don't. You can't forget something that doesn't exist."

Don fixed his eyes on him as though the other was demented. He said and his voice was angry, "That doesn't make any sense at all."

The other said, "I think it does. Keep quiet for a minute while we have some background." He thought about it for a minute before saying, "I'm not contending that the Kradens didn't once appear. Obviously, they did.

Almost fifty years ago. Out of a clear sky—or, rather, out of clear space—they came. About twenty of their various sized and shaped spaceships. In spite of our radio telescopes trying to pick up intelligent broadcasts from space, and in spite of our own tight beam laser broadcasts sending out our own messages, the human race couldn't have been more surprised if we had one and all suddenly sprouted rhinoceros horns. We were floored—momentarily.

"At the time there were four spacepowers, if we can call them powers.

They were pretty much in their infancy, so far as the military in space is concerned. They were the United States of the Americas, the Soviet Complex, Common Europe and China, in that order. The Asian Alliance and India also had embryonic space warcraft but they hardly counted at the time.

"In actuality, from the first man's explosion into space was basically a military and national prestige thing. We did a great deal of oratory about pure science and cooperation between the nations but even from the beginning spy satellites were sent up for military espionage purposes.

Before long, first the United States and the Soviet Complex, and later the others, began to send up primitive military spacecraft armed with such weapons as could be designed for space combat at that time, largely missiles with nuclear warheads. Before very long, the early two or three man ships evolved into small cruisers with eight or so men aboard.

Weapons became more sophisticated and we saw laser beam weapons, popularly called death rays, developed.

"We were at that stage, when the Kradens materialized. What they wanted well possibly never find out."

"We know what they wanted," Don protested.

Thor Bjornsen ignored him. "It was immediately assumed, the human mentality being the human mentality that they had come to conquer Earth. Why they would want to the Almighty Ultimate only knows.