CHAPTER I
Soft Assignment
Captain Alfred Weston entered the room and nodded curtly to the men at the conference table. Doctor Edwards, holding forth at the head of the table, nodded as though he had not seen the over-polite greeting. He waved the newcomer to an empty seat on the opposite side of the table, and Weston went around to sit down.
Edwards had been talking on some other subject, obviously, but now he dropped it. "Captain Weston," he said, "you are still classified as convalescent."
"Rank foolishness," grumbled Weston.
"Unfortunately," smiled Edwards, "it is the Medical Corps that makes the decision. A bit of rest does no man any harm. But, Weston, despite the convalescent classification, we have a job that seems to be right up your alley. Want it?"
"You're asking?" said Weston quizzically. "This is no order?"
"As an official convalescent, we cannot order you to duty."
Weston scowled. "I see no choice," he said. His tone was surly, his whole attitude inimical.
"Nevertheless, the choice is your own," said Edwards. As psychiatrist for the Medical Corps, Edwards was treading on thin ground. But he knew he must force this disagreement into the open and blast it out of Weston's mind.
It was a common enough block, but it needed elimination.
"Certainly the choice is mine," said Weston bitterly. "Hobson's Choice. Either I take the job and do it, or I refuse to take it and gain the disrespect of the entire Corps. I see no choice and therefore I will take your job—sight unseen!"
"We shall offer the job," said Edwards flatly. "After which you will make your decision."
"Very well," answered Weston sullenly.
Edwards ignored the tone of the answer. "Weston, you are a ranking officer. This job requires a ranking officer because it demands someone whose authority to investigate will not be questioned, scoffed at or ignored. You are now a Captain. We intend to raise your rank to Senior Captain—which is due you and has been withheld only until your convalescence is complete.
"We shall offer you a roving order and a four-mark commissioned directive which will give you authority to requisition whatever items you may need to complete your project. Experimental Spacecraft Number XXII will be assigned to you."
"You make it very attractive. Shall I now quote the ancient one about 'Beware of Greeks bearing gifts'?"
"There is no need for insolence, Weston. You are in excellent position to do us a service. If you accept it will not be necessary to create a hole in the Corps by removing some other ranking officer from his command. This job will also give you the swing of space once again. You've been out of space now for about a year—"
"Ever since the First Directive attack," said Weston bitterly.
"Right. But look, Weston. Regardless of what opinion the world may have, we in this room have reason to believe that there is something hidden behind the Jordan Green legend. We want you to get to the bottom of it. Will you do this?"
Weston grunted. He looked across the room to the door beside the blank wall beside the doorframe. On the space above the chair-rail were the scrawled words Jordan Green was here!
They were written in space-chart chalk, which Weston understood to be the case with the uncounted thousands of such scrawlings sprinkled all over the Solar System. It looked like a hurried scrawl at first glance, yet it could not have been written by a man in a tearing hurry because it was so very legible.
Weston himself had seen over a thousand of such scrawls in out of the way places and he had joined in the hours of discussion that went on through the Space Corps as to who Jordan Green might be, and if there were really such a character.
Jordan Green, it seemed, was one of those legendary people that are never seen. He had been everywhere and had apparently been there first. It was a common joke that, if the Space Corps started to erect a lonely outpost on some secret asteroid on Monday, Tuesday morning would find Jordan Green's familiar scrawl beside the door on the unfinished wall.
The trouble was that Weston himself had written one or two of these messages. And though he suspected that every officer in the Corps had been guilty of perpetuating the gag at some time or other, not one of them ever admitted it. It was a sort of unmentioned, no-prize contest in the Corps just something to talk about in the long lonely times between missions.
Every officer clamored for missions to the out of the way places because he hoped to have a Jordan Green yarn to spin and the legendary traveller was always reported. Weston smiled at one incident he had heard of.
An officer he knew had found a place where there was no scrawl and had written, I beat Jordan Green to this spot! The following day there was written beneath it, So what? Have you looked under the wallpaper? Jordan Green. The officer had torn away the wallpaper and, below it on the bare plaster, was the original scrawl.
The officer was still living down the joke.
None the less Weston thought it a waste of time to send a ranking officer on such a wild-goose chase.
He said so. And he went on to recount the facts of the case as he knew them. How, he wanted to know, was he to proceed when he was almost certain that every man in the Space Corps was guilty?
Edwards listened to Weston's objections. He agreed, partially.
"It is admitted that the officers may have amused themselves by writing it themselves. But when you consider the man-hours and the kilowatts wasted in space-chatter the Martian War could have been finished in three months less time.
"The problem is just this, Weston. Did it start as a joke—perhaps like the boy who carves his initials the highest in the Old Oak Tree—or was some agency hoping to cause enough waste to slow up our prosecution of the late war?"
"I believe that it was started by some courier," said Weston flatly. "Then it caught on and pyramided far beyond Jordan Green's expectations. Have you sought the man himself?"
"We've established that any Jordan Greens in the service were not responsible," said Edwards. "However, this possible courier of yours probably would take a pseudonym lest fooling around with official time and energy get him a reprimand. We want you to track down the origin of Jordan Green! Will you do it?"
Weston shrugged. "I have no choice."
Edwards turned to the man beside him. "Commodore Atkins, will you provide Senior Captain Weston with the necessary credentials, papers, orders and insignia?"
Atkins smiled. "Come to my office, Weston. We'll have you fixed up in a hurry."
Weston rose and followed the commodore out of the room. Then Edwards turned to the other doctor in the conference room and took a deep breath before he said: "Well, that much is accomplished!"
"You're the psychiatrist," said the other. "I'm just a simple surgeon. For the life of me, I can't see it. What happens when Weston discovers that this is just a peg-whittling job handed out to a good man who is going stale for lack of something to do?"
"Reconsider his case from the psychiatric angle," said Edwards. "Weston was an excellent officer. Because of his record he was one of twenty men selected to carry the first projectors of Directive Power against Mars. He was proud of being included in the Directive Power attack.
"His position in the task force was one that gave him the highest statistical chance for success—yet with the usual trick of fate, Weston was the first and only man whose ship was shot to pieces in the counter-measure defense. He never even warmed up the secondary feeds to the Directive Power system before he was hit.
"The rescue squadron picked him up in bad shape. He was maintained in artificial unconsciousness while you put him together again—but by that time the Martians had surrendered and the war was over. Weston feels that he missed his big chance to go down in history. It's a plain case of frustration and self-guilt."
"But how can sending him on this wild-goose chase do any good?"
"The cure for frustration is to let the subject either do that which he has been barred from doing, or to give him something as pleasing to do to divert his attention. The way to cure the type of self-guilt that Weston has—an inner feeling of failure—is to give him something in which he can succeed."
"But—"
"However, we cannot start another war. Aside from our natural reluctance, we'd have first to develop the application of Directive Power to the space drive, which will give us interstellar flight, and we'd have to go out in the galaxy with a chip on our shoulder to seek such a war.
"Then Weston might be able to obtain release. He is like the chap whose classmate turns up a Space Admiral while he himself is mustered out of service because of Venusite malaria.
"However niggling this job may be, by the time that Weston is cured through the work he'll be doing he will note that all of his former friends are envious of the very lush job he has.
"All space-hopping, no fixed base, a roving commission at four-mark level, an experimental spacecraft and, because he is chasing a will of the wisp that may be either malignant or downright foolish, no one will question his actions, castigate him if he fails or scorn his job.
"Remember this, Tomlinson, any man who goes out to unwind a wildly-tangled legend to its core has a real job on his hands. There must be reams and reams of conflicting evidence that will itself cover up our little work-therapy until he gets interested in some outlandish phase of it and settles down to work. Once he readjusts he won't mind a bit. Right now, however, Weston is mingled anger and gratification."
"Why?"
"He is happy because of the commission and the increase in rank and the freedom of action. He is angry, Tomlinson, because he knows that we have confidence in him. His self-pity is blasted because we still think he is a good bet.
"To continue in his present mental state requires that he continue to believe himself battered by fate. In other words, to enjoy his frustration-complex Weston must continue to be frustrated."
"Golly!" breathed Tomlinson. "Even when a man is slightly nuts he likes himself that way!"
"Correct," laughed Edwards. "That's one of the things that makes psychiatry difficult. It also makes Weston hate any condition which forces him to change. Now, to space with Al Weston. I'm hungry. How about you?"
Tomlinson grinned, nodded and beat Doctor Edwards to the door.