The Measure of a Man

  THE MEASURE OF A MAN

  by

  RANDALL GARRETT

  Illustrated by Martinez

  _What is desirable is not always necessary, while that which is necessary may be most undesirable. Perhaps the measure of a man is the ability to tell one from the other ... and act on it._

  Alfred Pendray pushed himself along the corridor of the battleship_Shane_, holding the flashlight in one hand and using the other hand andhis good leg to guide and propel himself by. The beam of the torchreflected queerly from the pastel green walls of the corridor, givinghim the uneasy sensation that he was swimming underwater instead ofmoving through the blasted hulk of a battleship, a thousand light-yearsfrom home.

  He came to the turn in the corridor, and tried to move to the right, buthis momentum was greater than he had thought, and he had to grab thecorner of the wall to keep from going on by. That swung him around, andhis sprained ankle slammed agonizingly against the other side of thepassageway.

  Pendray clenched his teeth and kept going. But as he moved down the sidepassage, he went more slowly, so that the friction of his palm againstthe wall could be used as a brake.

  He wasn't used to maneuvering without gravity; he'd been taught it inCadets, of course, but that was years ago and parsecs away. When thepseudograv generators had gone out, he'd retched all over the place, butnow his stomach was empty, and the nausea had gone.

  He had automatically oriented himself in the corridors so that the doorsof the various compartments were to his left and right, with the ceiling"above" and the deck "below." Otherwise, he might have lost his sense ofdirection completely in the complex maze of the interstellarbattleship.

  _Or_, he corrected himself, _what's left of a battleship_.

  And what _was_ left? Just Al Pendray and less than half of theonce-mighty _Shane_.

  The door to the lifeboat hold loomed ahead in the beam of theflashlight, and Pendray braked himself to a stop. He just looked at thedogged port for a few seconds.

  _Let there be a boat in there_, he thought. _Just a boat, that's all Iask. And air_, he added as an afterthought. Then his hand went out tothe dog handle and turned.

  The door cracked easily. There was air on the other side. Pendraybreathed a sigh of relief, braced his good foot against the wall, andpulled the door open.

  The little lifeboat was there, nestled tightly in her cradle. For thefirst time since the _Shane_ had been hit, Pendray's face broke into abroad smile. The fear that had been within him faded a little, and thedarkness of the crippled ship seemed to be lessened.

  Then the beam of his torch caught the little red tag on the air lock ofthe lifeboat. _Repair Work Under Way--Do Not Remove This Tag WithoutProper Authority._

  That explained why the lifeboat hadn't been used by the other crewmen.

  Pendray's mind was numb as he opened the air lock of the small craft. Hedidn't even attempt to think. All he wanted was to see exactly how thevessel had been disabled by the repair crew. He went inside.

  The lights were working in the lifeboat. That showed that its power wasstill functioning. He glanced over the instrument-and-control panels. Nored tags on them, at least. Just to make sure, he opened them up, one byone, and looked inside. Nothing wrong, apparently.

  Maybe it had just been some minor repair--a broken lighting switch orsomething. But he didn't dare hope yet.

  He went through the door in the tiny cabin that led to the enginecompartment, and he saw what the trouble was.

  The shielding had been removed from the atomic motors.

  He just hung there in the air, not moving. His lean, dark face remainedexpressionless, but tears welled up in his eyes and spilled over,spreading their dampness over his lids.

  The motors would run, all right. The ship could take him to Earth. Butthe radiation leakage from those motors would kill him long before hemade it home. It would take ten days to make it back to base, andtwenty-four hours of exposure to the deadly radiation from those engineswould be enough to insure his death from radiation sickness.

  His eyes were blurring from the film of tears that covered them; withoutgravity to move the liquid, it just pooled there, distorting his vision.He blinked the tears away, then wiped his face with his free hand.

  Now what?

  He was the only man left alive on the _Shane_, and none of the lifeboatshad escaped. The Rat cruisers had seen to that.

  * * * * *

  They weren't really rats, those people. Not literally. They lookedhumanoid enough to enable plastic surgeons to disguise a human being asone of them, although it meant sacrificing the little fingers and littletoes to imitate the four-digited Rats. The Rats were at a disadvantagethere; they couldn't add any fingers. But the Rats had otheradvantages--they bred and fought like, well, like rats.

  Not that human beings couldn't equal them or even surpass them inferocity, if necessary. But the Rats had nearly a thousand years ofprogress over Earth. Their Industrial Revolution had occurred while theAngles and the Saxons and the Jutes were pushing the Britons into Wales.They had put their first artificial satellites into orbit while KingAlfred the Great was fighting off the Danes.

  They hadn't developed as rapidly as Man had. It took them roughly twiceas long to go from one step to the next, so that their actualsuperiority was only a matter of five hundred years, and Man wascatching up rapidly. Unfortunately, Man hadn't caught up yet.

  The first meeting of the two races had taken place in interstellarspace, and had seemed friendly enough. Two ships had come withindetector distance of each other, and had circled warily. It was almost aperfect example of the Leinster Hypothesis; neither knew where theother's home world was located, and neither could go back home for fearthat the other would be able to follow. But the Leinster Hypothesiscouldn't be followed to the end. Leinster's solution had been to havethe parties trade ships and go home, but that only works when the twocivilizations are fairly close in technological development. The Ratscertainly weren't going to trade their ship for the inferior craft ofthe Earthmen.

  The Rats, conscious of their superiority, had a simpler solution. Theywere certain, after a while, that Earth posed no threat to them, so theyinvited the Earth ship to follow them home.

  The Earthmen had been taken on a carefully conducted tour of the Rats'home planet, and the captain of the Earth ship--who had gone down inhistory as "Sucker" Johnston--was convinced that the Rats meant no harm,and agreed to lead a Rat ship back to Earth. If the Rats had struckthen, there would never have been a Rat-Human War. It would have beenover before it started.

  But the Rats were too proud of their superiority. Earth was too far awayto bother them for the moment; it wasn't in their line of conquest justyet. In another fifty years, the planet would be ready for picking off.

  Earth had no idea that the Rats were so widespread. They had taken andcolonized over thirty planets, completely destroying the indigenousintelligent races that had existed on five of them.

  It wasn't just pride that had made the Rats decide to wait beforehitting Earth; there was a certain amount of prudence, too. None of theother races they had met had developed space travel; the Earthmen mightbe a little tougher to beat. Not that there was any doubt of theoutcome, as far as they were concerned--but why take chances?

  But, while the Rats had fooled "Sucker" Johnston and some of hisofficers, the majority of the crew knew better. Rat crewmen were littleshort of slaves, and the Rats made the mistake of assuming that theEarth crewmen were the same. They hadn't tried to impress the crewmen asthey had the officers. When the interrogation officers on Earthquestioned the crew of the Earth ship, they, too, became suspicious.Johnston's optimistic attitude just didn't jibe with the facts.

 
So, while the Rat officers were having the red carpet rolled out forthem, Earth Intelligence went to work. Several presumably awe-strickenmen were allowed to take a conducted tour of the Rat ship. After all,why not? The Twentieth Century Russians probably wouldn't have mindedshowing their rocket plants to an American of Captain John Smith's time,either.

  But there's a difference. Earth's government knew Earth was beingthreatened, and they knew they had to get as many facts as they could.They were also aware of the fact that if you know a thing _can_ be done,then you will eventually find a way to do it.

  During the next fifty years, Earth learned more than it had during theprevious hundred. The race expanded, secretly, moving out to otherplanets in that sector of the galaxy. And they worked to catch up withthe Rats.

  They didn't make it, of course. When, after fifty years of presumablypeaceful--but highly limited--contact, the Rats hit Earth, they foundout one thing. That the mass and energy of a planet armed with theproper