Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition Read Online Free PDF Page A

wrong with her, something which came to light—perhaps fatally—during our “shakedown cruise”, it would be too late to make significant changes. The design—along with the four other ships—would have to be scrapped. Something else newer, undoubtedly more expensive, would have to be undertaken, all over again.
     
    The freshly-conquered provinces, the ordinary citizens who had conquered them, would groan a little more under the increased weight of taxation. Perhaps another division or so of peacekeepers would have to be sent to quiet the groaning.
     
    Or perhaps a flotilla of Navy aerocraft might be dispatched on another “good will tour” to drive the point home unmistakably.
     
    We would not care. We would be far away.
     
    Or dead.
     
    -2-
     
     
     
    “I just do not know, Corporal O’Thraight, three years is a long time...”
     
    I watched Eleva Dethri through the smeared transparency, hating the quarantine procedures at the base, wishing I were on the other side of the plastic where her voice would not come to me through an electronic filter, yet, deep inside, a little grateful for the regulations which saved me from potential humiliation.
     
    I never touched her; I never knew if she would want me to.
     
    Behind her on the corrugated metal wall of the shed, garish posters proclaimed the glory of our coming leap to the stars, informed visitors of the many rules governing their brief, highly-supervised stays, exhorted them to tell their friends, their co-workers, their families, how their voluntary tax contributions were building a magnificent future for unborn generations of Vespuccians.
     
    “Yes, I know, Eleva, darling, if you could only...besides, when I come back, I will be an officer.”
     
    Dim red sunlight trickled through the windows on her side of the barrier. The shed stretched forty or fifty meters. At the door, a heavily-armed Army guardsman stood at parade-rest, watching each conversing couple closely. There were a dozen stations like this one where we Starmen could have a short, unsatisfactory glimpse of those we loved, of the lives we were leaving behind.
     
    She was right, of course. Women generally are about these things. Three years is a long time, a lifetime, almost the same amount of time I had loved her, since an Officer’s Club dance where she arrived come on the arm of some slavering lieutenant. Since I had last played the mandolar in public. Even then it came as a temporary assignment, an unlooked-for break in my regular duties.
     
    Changing my life.
     
    “An officer?” Her pale blue eyes brightened a little, she licked her lips uncertainly. “Why, Corporal, how wonderful! An astronaut, one of the first eighteen...but three years?”
     
    Eleva the beautiful: fair, lightly-freckled skin, tightly-curled copper- colored hair, taller than I by a centimeter or so, unless I stood up very straight. I stood up very straight. Combat boots helped, except when she wore high heels. I suppose, as the only offspring of a warrant officer—worse yet, descended from an upper-class family whose demotion, after a lost battle, had been the scandal of the previous century—she never fitted, either among the enlisted class of my beginnings, or the officer class she desperately aspired to rejoin.
     
    I shifted uncomfortably on the tractor-seat bolted in place before the counter they had divided down the middle with a plastic partition. We eighteen would spend two weeks here, with our alternates, until we proved to carry no diseases which might compromise the mission. Air pressure measured slightly higher inside the buildings to insure our isolation. We communicated with the outside world by wire.
     
    Eleva looked unhappy. “Corporal...” She glanced around to see whether anyone listened, a futile gesture, as, in addition to the guardsmen, our conversation would be line-monitored by the psychiatric staff. “...Whitey, I—I do not know what to say. I, well, I had my plans, my life sort