Galactic Medal of Honor

Galactic Medal of Honor

By

Mack Reynolds

Table of Contents

I - After his craft had been mechanically wheeled away2

II - By evening he was drenched, as the expression11

III - Don Mathers didn't leave the big man's apartment25

IV - Don Mathers laughed sarcastically

37

V - When Don Mathers reported for duty

51

VI - Don Mathers wasn't acquainted with the Lindbergh story

63

VII - The President, still beaming, had shaken hands and said

73

VIII - Getting out of the Intercontinental undetected was simplicity itself.83

IX - Colonel Donal Mathers returned to North America on a Space

92

X - He couldn't have shocked Don Mathers more if he had suddenly

109

XI - Don stared at him and took a hasty slug of his port. "Doing what?" 120

XII - When they awoke the next morning, she turned to him and said

131

XIII- Inwardly laughing, Don Mathers made his way out of the building 114

XIV - Harry came up hesitantly, a camera in his heavy freckled hands 151

XV - They gave him two full weeks of instructions and rehearsals before162

XVI - Mathers spent the next weeks,

170

XVII - After Rostoff had left, slamming the door behind him

183

XVIII - It took him four days, even with the aid of Anti-Ale and some

190

AFTERMATH - From the Geneva Spaceport he took an auto -mated hover200

I

After his craft had been mechanically wheeled away, Donal Mathers took one of the little hovercarts over to the squadron non-resident officers'

quarters and showered, used a depilatory on his beard, then opened his locker and brought forth a dress uniform. He had thrown his coveralls into a disposal chute. He dressed carefully, checked himself out at the full length tri-di mirror, put his cap on his head, took a deep breath in unhappy anticipation, and headed for his fate.

The hovercart took him the kilometer or so to the administration buildings of the spaceport. He headed for the king size doors and the identity screen picked him up, checked him out in less than a second, and the doors opened before him.

Inside was bustle, the amount of bustle to be expected of a military establishment responsible for some two hundred spacecraft. Don Mathers was used to it. He made his way briskly to his destination.

A uniformed girl looked up from her work at the reception desk.

Don said, "Sub-lieutenant Donal Mathers, reporting to Commodore Bernklau."

She nodded and did the things receptionists do, and shortly looked up and said, "Go right in, Lieutenant."

He was about thirty years of age, slim of build and with a sort of aristocratic handsomeness in the British tradition. His hair was not quite blond, his eyes dark blue, his nose high and very slightly hooked. He affected a small moustache. He cut quite a nice figure in his light blue space pilot's uniform.

Now he snapped a crisp salute to his superior and said, "Sub-lieutenant Donal Mathers reporting from patrol, sir."

The commodore looked up at him, returned the salute in an off-hand manner and looked down into a screen set into the desk. He murmured,

"Mathers. One Man Scout V-102. Sector A22-K223."

Commodore Walt Bernklau was a small man in the Space Service fashion. Overgrown men were no longer in vogue. Smaller men take up less room in a spaceship, breathe less air and require less food. It was not that a six-footer who weighed over 180 pounds was taboo in space but there was, perhaps, an unstated prejudice against him. Down through the centuries it had been the big man who received the attention, the small man who was a bit scorned. But those had been the days when war was waged with sword and battle-ax, and work performed by the muscular.

Things had been reversed. Even women, perhaps instinctively, had come to prefer smaller men.