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The Mercenaries By: H. Beam Piper (1904-1964) |
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by H. BEAM PIPER Illustrated by Brush Once, wars were won by maneuvering hired fighting men; now wars
are different and the hired experts are different. But the human
problems remain!
Duncan MacLeod hung up the suit he had taken off, and sealed his shirt,
socks and underwear in a laundry envelope bearing his name and
identity number, tossing this into one of the wire baskets provided for
the purpose. Then, naked except for the plastic identity disk around his
neck, he went over to the desk, turned in his locker key, and passed
into the big room beyond. Four or five young men, probably soldiers on their way to town, were
coming through from the other side. Like MacLeod, they wore only the
plastic disks they had received in exchange for the metal ones they wore
inside the reservation, and they were being searched by attendants who
combed through their hair, probed into ears and nostrils, peered into
mouths with tiny searchlights, and employed a variety of magnetic and
electronic detectors. To this search MacLeod submitted wearily. He had become quite a
connoisseur of security measures in fifteen years' research and
development work for a dozen different nations, but the Tonto Basin
Research Establishment of the Philadelphia Project exceeded anything he
had seen before. There were gray haired veterans of the old Manhattan
Project here, men who had worked with Fermi at Chicago, or with
Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, twenty years before, and they swore in amused
exasperation when they thought of how the relatively mild regulations of
those days had irked them. And yet, the very existence of the Manhattan
Project had been kept a secret from all but those engaged in it, and its
purpose from most of them. Today, in 1965, there might have been a few
wandering tribesmen in Somaliland or the Kirghiz Steppes who had never
heard of the Western Union's Philadelphia Project, or of the Fourth
Komintern's Red Triumph Five Year Plan, or of the Islamic Kaliphate's
Al Borak Undertaking, or of the Ibero American Confederation's Cavor
Project, but every literate person in the world knew that the four great
power blocs were racing desperately to launch the first spaceship to
reach the Moon and build the Lunar fortress that would insure world
supremacy. He turned in the nonmagnetic identity disk at the desk on the other side
of the search room, receiving the metal one he wore inside the
reservation, and with it the key to his inside locker. He put on the
clothes he had left behind when he had passed out, and filled his
pockets with the miscellany of small articles he had not been allowed to
carry off the reservation. He knotted the garish necktie affected by the
civilian workers and in particular by members of the MacLeod Research
Team to advertise their nonmilitary status, lit his pipe, and walked out
into the open gallery beyond. Karen Hilquist was waiting for him there, reclining in one of the metal
chairs. She looked cool in the belted white coveralls, with the white
turban bound around her yellow hair, and very beautiful, and when he saw
her, his heart gave a little bump, like a geiger responding to an
ionizing particle. It always did that, although they had been together
for twelve years, and married for ten. Then she saw him and smiled, and
he came over, fanning himself with his sun helmet, and dropped into a
chair beside her. "Did you call our center for a jeep?" he asked. When she nodded, he
continued: "I thought you would, so I didn't bother." For a while, they sat silent, looking with bored distaste at the swarm
of steel helmeted Army riflemen and tommy gunners guarding the transfer
platforms and the vehicles gate. A string of trucks had been passed
under heavy guard into the clearance compound: they were now unloading
supplies onto a platform, at the other side of which other trucks were
backed waiting to receive the shipment. A hundred feet of bare concrete
and fifty armed soldiers separated these from the men and trucks from
the outside, preventing contact... Continue reading book >>
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Science |
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