Nancy Two men faced Gordon Greene as he came into the room. The young aide was a nonentity. The general was not. The commanding general sat where he should, at his own desk. It was placed squarely in the room, and yet the infinite courtesy of the general was shown by the fact that the blinds were so drawn that the light did not fall directly into the eyes of the person interviewed. At that time the colonel general was Wenzel Wallenstein, the first man ever to venture into the very deep remoteness of space. He had not reached a star. Nobody had, at that time, but he had gone farther than any man had ever gone before. Wallenstein was an old man and yet the count of his years was not high. He was less than ninety in a period in which many men lived to one hundred and fifty. The thing that made Wallenstein look old was the suffering which came from mental strain, not the kind which came from anxiety and competition, not the kind which came from ill health. It was a subtler kind a sensitivity which created its own painful ness Yet it was real. Wallenstein was as stable as men came, and the young lieutenant was astonished to find that at his first meeting with the commander in chief his instinctive emotional reaction should be one of quick sympathy for the man who commanded the entire organization. "Your name?" The lieutenant answered, "Gordon Greene." "Born that way?" "No, sir." "What was your name originally?" "Giordano Verdi." "Why did you change? Verdi is a great name too." "People just found it hard to pronounce, sir. I followed along the best I could." "I kept my name," said the old general. "I suppose it is a matter of taste." of Man The young lieutenant lifted his hand, left hand, palm outward, in the new salute which had been devised by the psychologists. He knew that this meant military courtesy could be passed by for the moment and that the subordinate officer was requesting permission to speak as man to man. He knew the salute and yet in these surroundings he did not altogether trust it. The general's response was quick. He countersigned, left hand, palm outward. The heavy, tired, wise, strained old face showed no change of expression. The general was alert. Mechanically friendly, his eyes followed the lieutenant. The lieutenant was sure that there was nothing behind those eyes, except world upon world of inward troubles. The lieutenant spoke again, this time on confident ground. "Is this a special interview. General? Do you have something in mind for me? If it is, sir, let me warn you, I have been declared to be psychologically unstable. Personnel doesn't often make a mistake but they may have sent me in here under error." The general smiled. The smile itself was mechanical. It was a control of muscles, not a quick spring of human emotion. "You will know well enough what I have in mind when we talk together, Lieutenant. I am going to have another man sit with me and it will give you some idea of what your life is leading you toward. You know perfectly well that you have asked for deep space and that so far as I'm concerned you've gotten it. The question is now, "Do you really want it?" Do you want to take it? Is that all that you wanted to abridge courtesy for?" "Yes, sir," said the lieutenant. "You didn't have to call for the courtesy sign for that kind of a question. You could have asked me even within the limits of service. Let's not get too psychological. We don't need to, do we?" Again the general gave the lieutenant a heavy smile. Wallenstein gestured to the aide, who sprang to attention. Wallenstein said, "Send him in." The aide said, "Yes, sir." The two men waited expectantly. With a springy, lively, quick, happy step a strange lieutenant entered the room. Gordon Greene had never seen anybody quite like this lieutenant. The lieutenant was old, almost as old as the general. His face was cheerful and unlined. The muscles of his cheeks and forehead bespoke happiness, relaxation, an assured view of life. The lieutenant wore the three highest decorations of his service. There weren't any others higher and yet there he was, an old man and still a lieutenant. Lieutenant Greene couldn't understand it. He didn't know who this man was. It was easy enough for a young man to be a lieutenant but not for a man in his seventies or eighties. People that age were colonels, or retired, or out. Or they had gone back to civilian life. Space was a young man's game. The general himself arose in courtesy to his contemporary. Lieutenant Greene's eyes widened. This too was odd. The general was not known to violate courtesy at all irregularly. "Sit down, sir," said the strange old lieutenant. The general sat. "What do you want with me now? Do you want to talk about the Nancy routine one more time?" "The Nancy routine?" asked the general blindly. "Yes, sir. It's the same story I've told these youngsters before. You've heard it and I've heard it, there's no use of pretending." The strange lieutenant said, "My name's Karl Vonderleyen. Have you ever heard of me?" "No, sir," said the young lieutenant The old lieutenant said, "You will." "Don't get bitter about it, Karl," said the general. "A lot of other people have had troubles, besides you. I went and did the same things you did, and I'm a general. You might at least pay me the courtesy of envying me." "I don't envy you, General. You've had your life, and I've had mine. You know what you've missed, or you think you do, and I know what I've had, and I'm sure I do." The old lieutenant paid no more attention to the commander in chief. He turned to the young man and said, "You're going to go out into space and we are putting on a little act, a vaudeville act. The general didn't get any Nancy. He didn't ask for Nancy. He didn't turn for help. He got out into the Up-and-Out, he pulled through it. Three years of it. Three years that are closer to three million years, I suppose. He went through hell and he came back. Look at his face. He's a success. He's an utter, blasted success, sitting there worn out, tired, and, it would seem, hurt. Look at me. Look at me carefully. Lieutenant. I'm a failure. I'm a lieutenant and the Space Service keeps me that way." The commander in chief said nothing, so Vonderleyen talked on. "Oh, they will retire me as a general, I suppose, when the time comes. I'm not ready to retire. I'd just as soon stay in the Space Service as anything else. There is not much to do in this world. I've had it." "Had what, sir?" Lieutenant Greene dared to ask. "I found Nancy. He didn't," he said. "That's as simple as it is." The general cut back into the conversation. "It's not that bad and it's not that simple, Lieutenant Greene. There seems to be something a little wrong with Lieutenant Vonderleyen today. The story is one we have to tell you and it is something you have to make up your own mind on. There is no regulation way of handling it." The general looked very sharply at Lieutenant Greene. "Do you know what we have done to your brain?" "No, sir." Greene felt uneasiness rising in him. "Have you heard of the sokta virus?" "The what, sir?" "The sokta virus. Sokta is an ancient word, gets its name from Chosen-real, the language of Old Korea. That was a country west of where Japan used to be. It means 'maybe' and it is a 'maybe' that we put inside your head. It is a tiny crystal, more than microscopic. It's there. There is actually a machine on the ship, not a big one because we can't waste space; it has resonance to detonate the virus. If you detonate sokta, you will be like him. If you don't, you will be like me assuming, in either case, that you live. You may not live and you may not get back, in which case what we are talking about is academic." The young man nerved himself to ask, "What does this do to me? Why do you make this big fuss over it?" "We can't tell you too much. One reason is it is not worth talking about." "You mean you really can't, sir?" The general shook his head sadly and wisely. "No, I missed it, he got it, and yet it somehow gets out beyond the limits of talking." At this point while he was telling the story, many years later, I asked my cousin, "Well, Gordon, if they said you can't talk about it, how can you ? " "Drunk, man, drunk, " said the cousin. "How long do you think it took me to wind myself up to this point? I'll never tell it again never again. Anyhow, you 're my cousin, you don't count. And I promised Nancy I wouldn't tell anybody. " "Who's Nancy?" I asked him. "Nancy's what it's all about. That is what the story is. That's what those poor old goo ps were trying to tell me in the office. They didn't know. One of them, he had Nancy; the other one, he hadn't. " "Is Nancy a real person ? " With that he told me the rest of the story. The interview was harsh. It was clean, stark, simple, direct. The alter- natives were flat. It was perfectly plain that Wallenstein wanted Greene to come back alive. It was actual space command policy to bring the man back as a live failure instead of letting him become a dead hero. Pilots were not that common. Furthermore, morale would be worsened if men were told to go out on suicide operations. The whole thing was psychological and before Greene got out of the room he was more confused than when he went in. They kept telling them, both of them in their different ways the general happily, the old lieutena...
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