Free Unto Him That Hath by Lester del Rey

UNTO HIM THAT HATH By Lester Del Rey
     
    The lunch room was half-filled, and Captain Michael Dane stopped at the door, feeling like a fool. The almost-as-good substitute they'd given him for his right leg suddenly dragged, and the worn, faded uniform felt out of place here among the trim flying officers and men. Lambert Field had been home before he went off to the front; but he'd been whole and in fashion then.
    Now he was attracting attention by just standing there. He moved up to the counter, selecting the old seat at the end. He sank down tiredly. There had been too many planes, too many flights, too long a time in the hospital, and now too much mystery and haste in getting him back.
    "Coffee—just coffee," he ordered as a waitress came up to him. "Black and hot." He shouldn't have come into the place; it was silly to expect things to stay the same while he was gone—stupid to waste time on a whim, when he should have been reporting to the Dane Aircraft buildings down at the end of the field.
    The coffee was suddenly in front of him, and he reached for it. But a hand was in his way. "Still three lumps, Mike?"
    He looked up at that. Molly was four years older, but those years had done well by her. She'd filled out a bit, and had learned to use her brown hair as a setting for her oval face, instead of looking like a tousled tomboy. Now she lifted the end of the counter and came around to sit beside him. There were no rings on the left hand she dropped over his. "Been a long time, Mike—too long for no letters."
    He pretended not to hear the last. There was nothing he could say. He'd told her he wouldn't write and wouldn't let her be tied down to a man who might not come back. He'd kept his word. Now he shrugged,
    and turned his palm up to meet hers. "Too long, kid. I thought you'd be in school, instead of here."
    "I'm helping out while I'm back. Be here a few weeks before the position I took with Caltech is ready for me."
    "Caltech?" He shook his head in admiration. "I suppose that means you're a Ph.D. physicist now, with gravity all figured out, and fields doing dances at your whim. You promised you'd let me see your doctorate thesis."
    She grimaced. "Not when they mark it Ultra Top Secret. But you'll see it on the planes one of these days. I found something—a whole new field of physics. I told you I would, and I did. . . . How's it feel to be back?"
    "Lousy." He jerked his thumb back toward a table where a pink-faced major was declaiming on how they had to dig out their H-bombs and use them against Pan-Asia. Dane had heard little else since he'd been back, and there was no way of convincing the natural fools that it would be world suicide. Somehow, up to now both sides had managed to avoid turning it into an all-out fatal atomic war.
    Pan-Asia was afraid the American Alliance had too many such bombs for them, and the Alliance knew how little it could do with bombs against the decentralized enemy, whose one great manufacturing center had somehow remained undiscoverable. But the Alliance was losing, now.
    In five grinding years of technological warfare, the despised Pan-Asians had proved themselves technologically modern, and with heavier manpower. The Alliance had been retreating across the Dnieper when Mike was wounded, and were now fighting a slow retreat through central Europe. And the fools here were braying for their favorite horror weapon, to kill off everyone!
    Then Mike shrugged and tightened his grip on Molly's hand. "And good," he added. "How's Dad?"
    She shook her head uneasily. "I've barely seen him, Mike. He looks happy in a feverish way—and worried. And he wants you back, pretty badly. Something funny is going on, and everything's wrapped tight in a blanket of hush-hush. You'd better report in—but come back, Mike!"
    Mike nodded and got up to leave, glad to get away from the smug stupidity of the major who thought he could end war by using something so ugly neither side had dared to touch it. He'd