The Seventh Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Robert Silverberg
was a her.” He shrugged. “I could be wrong. He wasn’t making much sense. I thought he couldn’t remember his name for a couple of minutes. Turns out he was right and I was wrong. Daniel Daniels. Funny name.” His companion started shifting his weight uneasily. “If you don’t have any more questions, we’ve got to schlep this guy down to the basement for an autopsy. We were on our break, but we’re a little short-handed this week.”
I stepped aside to let them go into the room, and decided it was time to return to the spaceport. But just for the hell of it, I stopped by Admissions before I left and asked if anyone had inquired about Seymour.
No one had.
* * * *
When I got back to my office, I was still curious, so I had the computer hunt up with little there was on Seymour and on Daniel Daniels. Seymour was easy; born and raised in Miami, went to college here, spent nine years in the space service, honorably discharged after getting shot all to hell in a firefight on Kobernykov II, informally known as Nikita. Came back home, got a realtor’s license, and was selling beachfront property until two years ago, when he suddenly seemed determined to prove he was either a hero or bulletproof or both. Since then he’d tried to throw his life away three different times; the first two times the hospital made him keep it, this time they didn’t.
Daniels was harder. There were actually four Daniel Daniels living in Miami at the start of the year. You’d think their parents would have had a little more creativity. Two were still around. One had died of relatively natural causes at the age of 93. And then there was the one the orderly had told me about.
He was 33 years old. Dropped out of school at 16, signed a couple of minor-league soccer contracts, got cut both times, joined the space service when he was 20, served seven years, got out on a medical discharge, and had been going from one menial job to another ever since.
I checked the medical discharge. He got it after catching some serious flak on Nikita. He recovered physically, but he’d been seeing a shrink for depression for four years before the night he tried to take on a gang of teenaged hoods and got turned into an animated cinder for his trouble. It took them a year to put him back together with a brand-new epidermis—and damned if he didn’t go out and do something equally suicidal a month later. Even the police weren’t sure what happened—they found him after all the shooting was over—but he was filled with so much lead of so many different calibers that he had to have taken on at least six armed men.
And that was it: two unexceptional men who had nothing in common but the town they lived in and the planet they’d served on, each willingly faced certain death for no apparent reason—and then, when they were saved, went right out and faced it again.
I was still pondering it when Captain Symmes called me into his office to give him my report. I told him what I’d observed, which matched all the other reports, and then figured I was done.
“Just a minute,” he said as I was turning to leave.
“Sir?” I said.
“You accompanied him to the hospital. Why?”
“I was hoping he might be able to tell me why he willingly put himself at such risk,” I answered. “I thought maybe he knew something about the men we killed.”
“And did he?”
I shook my head. “We’ll never know. He only regained consciousness for perhaps a minute after surgery, and then he died.”
“I wonder what the hell made him do it?” mused Captain Symmes.
“I wondered, too,” I said. “So I ran computer checks on him and on Daniels…”
“Daniels?” he said sharply. “Who’s Daniels?”
“Another man who threw his life away the same way,” I said. “But the only things they had in common were that they lived here and they both saw action on Kobernykov II.”
“Kobernykov II,” he repeated. “Is that the one they call Nikita?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, that’s interesting,” said Captain Symmes.
“What is, sir?” I asked.
“About two years ago I was running security at MarsPort, and the same kind of thing happened. Four men were robbing one of the restaurants there, and this guy, he was just waiting for his flight to Titan, decided to take them out single-handed. They shot him before he got close to them. We nailed all four of them before they could harm anyone else, but the man had taken too many bullets and energy pulses. He died a few hours later.” Captain Symmes paused and frowned. “I had to fill out a report, and that meant I had to find out who was killed. The reason I’m mentioning it at all is because he spent some time on Nikita.”
“Medical discharge?”
“Yes,” he answered. “Curious, isn’t it?”
“Very,” I said. “Do you know if that was the first time he’d risked his life like that?”
“No, I don’t,” said Captain Symmes. “I assume you have a reason for asking?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Give me a minute and I’ll check the record. Like I said, it was two years ago.”
He activated his computer, instructed it to pull up the file in question, then told it to run a biographical search on the dead man. Eleven seconds later it had the answer.
Creighton Mortenson Jr. had willingly faced what seemed like certain death on four separate occasions. Only after he’d miraculously survived the first three did Fate finally deliver on its promise at MarsPort.
“Captain,” I said, “what would you say if I told you that Seymour and Daniels had also tried to throw their lives away prior to actually succeeding at it?”
“I’d say that something very interesting must have happened to them on Nikita,” he said, and instructed his computer to produce a readout of Kobernykov II. He studied it for a moment, then shrugged. “It’s about three-quarters the size of Earth, lighter gravity, a bit less oxygen but breathable. During the war with the Patruka Alliance we found they were using Nikita as an ammunition dump, we landed a small party, we blew the ammo dump, each side suffered serious casualties. The few survivors were scattered all the hell over, we found them over a period of maybe three weeks, and eventually they rejoined their main units. There’s some plant and animal life there, but no humans and no Patrukans.”
“I wonder what the hell went on there,” I said. “Most men who get shot up in wartime don’t ever want to experience it again—and here were three men who went out of their way to walk into enemy fire or its equivalent again.
“Have your computer hunt up the survivors and ask,” he said.
When I went back to my office I filed my report, then tried to find the survivors of Nikita, as Captain Symmes had suggested. The Patrukan War was over, so all the documents and records were declassified, but it didn’t help much. We’d sent in a covert team of 30 men and women. It was an exceptionally bloody action. 25 died on Nikita, and the other five—which included Seymour, Daniels and Mortenson—were wounded pretty badly. Evidently they’d become separated, and each managed to survive on his own until a rescue mission arrived a few weeks later.
I tried to track down the other two survivors. They’d both courted Death until it inevitably caught up with them.
There was nothing in any of their histories to indicate that they were either exceptionally brave or exceptionally foolish. Except for Daniels’ depression, none of them was being treated for any emotional or psychiatric problems. As far as I could tell, none of them kept in touch with any of the others after they were discharged from the service.
And within six years of the firefight on Nikita, every one of them was dead, having placed themselves in what could only be termed suicidal situations until even the best surgeons and hospitals could no longer