“I’ve got vacation time stored up,” I said.
He checked his computer. “Your vacation’s not for five months.”
“Then I’ll take a leave of absence.”
“Think it through,” he said. “Nothing on that planet harmed anyone. Do you really want to go there, bore yourself to tears for a week or two, come home, and then one day decide to prove that you’re invulnerable to bullets and lasers?”
“No,” I admitted. “No, I suppose I don’t.”
I thought it was the truth when I said it, but with each day I became more obsessed with what could have turned otherwise normal men into weapon-charging suicides. And in the back of my mind I kept coming back to Captain Symmes’ question: if they really wanted to die, why not just put a gun to their heads, or take an overdose? And then I remembered Myron Seymour lying on his bed in the recovery room. He didn’t want to die; he wanted to see this woman he was sure would somehow know he was in the hospital. Okay, he may have been fantasizing about the woman, but he wasn’t fantasizing about wanting to live.
I’d never thought of myself as obsessive, but as the next three weeks sped by I found myself obsessing over the mystery of what happened on Nikita, and finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I told Captain Symmes that I was putting in for a one-month leave of absence, and that if I didn’t get it I was fully prepared to quit my job.
“Don’t be foolish,” he said. “That’s an awfully big step to take, just to chase a fantasy. Besides, I already reported your findings to the navy and the space service. I’m sure they’ll look into it.”
“I’m sure they will, too,” I said. “Just not necessarily in our lifetimes.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’ve got ten or twelve minor wars going on right now,” I said. “They’ve got more important things to do than examine a planet that nobody’s set foot on in six years.”
“I gave them all the details,” said Captain Symmes. “If they think it’s important, they’ll get out there pretty damned fast.”
“And if they find whatever it is that caused this behavior, they’ll make it Top Secret and won’t declassify it for a century,” I shot back. “I want to know what happened.”
“I’m not going to talk you out of this, am I?” he said after a long pause.
“No, sir, you’re not.”
“All right. You’ve got a month, starting tomorrow.” He handed me a small cube. “There are no direct flights. This’ll get you free passage on any ship owned by Earth or its allies.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“The codes will vanish in exactly thirty days, so don’t stay any longer than that unless you’re prepared to pay your passage back.”
“I appreciate this, sir.”
“You’re a good security man,” he said uncomfortably. (Praising people always made him uncomfortable.) “I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t,” I promised him. “I’ll be back less than a month with the answers to what happened.”
“Good health,” he said.
“Not good luck?”
“I think you might be luckier if you never find what you’re looking for,” said Captain Symmes seriously.
* * * *
The non-traveler tends to think that between FTL speeds and wormholes you can get anywhere in the galaxy in a day’s time, but of course it isn’t so. Wormholes go where they want to go, not where we want them to, and even when you’re traveling at multiples of light speed it’s still a big galaxy. It took me a day to get to Antares III, where I changed ships and proceeded to Buckingham IV. I laid over for a day until I could transfer to a ship that took me to Mickeleen, and from there I had to charter a private ship for the last leg of the journey.
“I want you to burn this location into your mind,” said the pilot when the small ship touched down on Nikita. “I’ll be here in exactly ten days. If you’re not at this spot, I have neither the time nor the inclination to embark on a one-man planetary search, which means you’ll be stranded here, probably for the rest of what remains of your life. You got that?”
“Got it,” I said.
“You sure you have enough supplies?” he asked, looking at my pack.
“Food and water for twelve days, just to be on the safe side.”
“If you’re not here ten days from now, there won’t be anything safe about it,” he said. “It could be decades before another ship touches down here.”
“I’ll be here,” I assured him.
“You’d better be,” he said.
Then the hatch closed and he was gone, and I was alone, the first human to set foot on Nikita in six years.
I felt good. Hell, at 82% of Earth’s gravity, everybody feels good. This was exactly the kind of world they used for recuperating heart patients. The oxygen content was a little light, but the gravity more than made up for it.
The world itself seemed pleasant enough. There was a brownish, grasslike ground cover in most places, a few clusters of oddly-shaped trees here and there, and a type G sun that provided plenty of daylight without making Nikita uncomfortably hot. I saw a few small, rodent-like animals peeking at me from behind shrubs and trees, but when I turned to get a better look they ducked into their burrows.
I knew there was water on the planet. There were a pair of freshwater oceans, and a quartet of snow-topped mountain ranges that produced rivers with their runoff. My research told me that it smelled bad and tasted worse, but that it was drinkable. I had no idea if there were any fish, but I suspected there were. One thing we’ve learned since first reaching the stars is that life not only takes the strangest forms, but sprouts up in the oddest places.
According to my charts, I was about four miles from the site of the conflict, which is to say, the ammunition dump. I was retracing the steps of our team. They’d actually started on the far side of the planet, maybe three thousand miles away, and taken a high-speed aircar here under cover of night, but they’d gone the last few miles on foot.
I looked for signs of a camp, but then realized that a covert attack team wouldn’t make a camp, but would just continue to their target before they were spotted.
The ground was level, not overgrown at all, and I just kept walking until I came to it. It wasn’t hard to spot. There was a raw crater close to 500 yards in circumference and maybe 40 feet deep, the remains of the ammo dump. Evidently the rescue ships on both sides couldn’t handle both the living and the dead; there were skeletons of both men and Patrukans littering the place, picked clean by small animals and even smaller insects. The Patrukans’ bones had a blue-green tint to them; I never did find out why.
I walked the area. It must have been one hell of a battle. There was absolutely
