E-text prepared by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(/)
Transcriber's note:
This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction,March, 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidencethat the copyright on this publication was renewed.
THE MERCENARIES
BY H. BEAM PIPER
Illustrated by Brush
Once, wars were won by maneuvering hired fighting men; now warsare different—and the hired experts are different. But the humanproblems 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 andidentity-number, tossing this into one of the wire baskets provided forthe purpose. Then, naked except for the plastic identity disk around hisneck, he went over to the desk, turned in his locker key, and passedinto the big room beyond.
Four or five young men, probably soldiers on their way to town, werecoming through from the other side. Like MacLeod, they wore only theplastic disks they had received in exchange for the metal ones they woreinside the reservation, and they were being searched by attendants whocombed through their hair, probed into ears and nostrils, peered intomouths with tiny searchlights, and employed a variety of magnetic andelectronic detectors.
To this search MacLeod submitted wearily. He had become quite aconnoisseur of security measures in fifteen years' research anddevelopment work for a dozen different nations, but the Tonto BasinResearch Establishment of the Philadelphia Project exceeded anything hehad seen before. There were gray-haired veterans of the old ManhattanProject here, men who had worked with Fermi at Chicago, or withOppenheimer at Los Alamos, twenty years before, and they swore in amusedexasperation when they thought of how the relatively mild regulations ofthose days had irked them. And yet, the very existence of the ManhattanProject had been kept a secret from all but those engaged in it, and itspurpose from most of them. Today, in 1965, there might have been a fewwandering tribesmen in Somaliland or the Kirghiz Steppes who had neverheard of the Western Union's Philadelphia Project, or of the FourthKomintern's Red Triumph Five-Year Plan, or of the Islamic Kaliphate'sAl-Borak Undertaking, or of the Ibero-American Confederation's CavorProject, but every literate person in the world knew that the four greatpower-blocs were racing desperately to launch the first spaceship toreach the Moon and build the Lunar fortress that would insure worldsupremacy.
He turned in the nonmagnetic identity disk at the desk on the other sideof the search room, receiving the metal one he wore inside thereservation, and with it the key to his inside locker. He put on theclothes he had left behind when he had passed out, and filled hispockets with the miscellany of small articles he had not been allowed tocarry off the reservation. He knotted the garish necktie affected by thecivilian workers and in particular by members of the MacLeod ResearchTeam to advertise their nonmilitary status, lit his pipe, and walked outinto the open gallery beyond.
Karen Hilquist was waiting for him there, reclining in one of the metalchairs. She looked cool in the belted white coveralls, with the whiteturban bound around her yellow hair, and very beautiful, and