The Man Without a Planet

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Dave Van Arnam, in memory of Toad Hall days, S.L.I.T.N. and A.T.S.I.S., Haslam’s, Spectrum, and sundry other matters.

RAUL LINTON WENT INTO THE WAR a boy, young, untried, full of patriotism, ambition and ideals, thrilled by bugles and banners and the heart-stirring sight of great ships lifting against the dark their blazing torches. He came out in ’68 a man, seasoned and tempered by twelve endless years of war, and miraculously unscarred.

Unscarred, that is, only in a sense. Somehow his strapping six foot four inches of lean-muscled body has escaped maiming in the bloodiest, most savage war ever fought between the stars. But his mind, or soul or character—call it what you will—was seared deeply and forever. Like most other men in the Naval vanguard, exposed to the assault and ravishment of planets, he came to pray for death. Any­thing to put an end to the madness and ferocity of what historians would neatly label the Third Imperial War—and to that consummation he labored valiantly and single-mindedly. But instead of being fried with his ship, caught in a barrage of planet-mounted lasers, or blasted to incandescent gas by a computer-guided mobile bomb, he went on from year to year unscathed, and earned a reputation for cool- mindedness and courage that embarrassed him.

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