The Forever War

  “That’s right.” Rhonda came in with the beer. “I’ve got relatives in Pennsylvania, out in the country. I can stay with them any time.”

  “Thanks.” I took the beer. “Actually, I won’t be here long. I’m kind of en route to South Dakota. I could find another place to flop.”

  “Oh, no,” Rhonda said. “I can take the couch.” I was too old-fashioned male-chauv to allow that; we discussed it for a minute and I wound up with the couch.

  I filled Rhonda in on who Marygay was and told them about our disturbing experiences in England, how we came back to get our bearings. I had expected my mother to be horrified that I had killed a man, but she accepted it without comment. Rhonda clucked a little bit about our being out in a city after midnight, especially without a bodyguard.

  We talked on these and other topics until late at night, when Mother called her bodyguard and went off to work.

  Something had been nagging at me all night, the way Mother and Rhonda acted toward each other. I decided to bring it out into the open, once Mother was gone.

  “Rhonda—” I settled down in the chair across from her.

  I didn’t know exactly how to put it. “What, uh, what exactly is your relationship with my mother?”

  She took a long drink. “Good friends.” She stared at me with a mixture of defiance and resignation. “Very good friends. Sometimes lovers.”

  I felt very hollow and lost. My mother?

  “Listen,” she continued. “You had better stop trying to live in the nineties. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but you’re stuck with it.”

  She crossed and took my hand, almost kneeling in front of me.

  Her voice was softer. “William…look, I’m only two years older than you are—that is, I was born two years before—what I mean is, I can understand how you feel. B—your mother understands too. It, our…relationship, wouldn’t be a secret to anybody else. It’s perfectly normal. A lot has changed, these twenty years. You’ve got to change too.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She stood up and said firmly, “You think, because your mother is sixty, she’s outgrown her need for love? She needs it more than you do. Even now. Especially now.”

  Accusation in her eyes. “Especially now with you coming back from the dead past. Reminding her of how old she is. How—old I am, twenty years younger.” Her voice quavered and cracked, and she ran to her room.

  I wrote Mother a note saying that Marygay had called; an emergency had come up and I had to go immediately to South Dakota. I called a bodyguard and left.

  ~~~

  A whining, ozone-leaking, battered old bus let me out at the intersection of a bad road and a worse one. It had taken me an hour to go the 2000 kilometers to Sioux Falls, two hours to get a chopper to Geddes, 150 kilometers away, and three hours waiting and jouncing on the dilapidated bus to go the last 12 kilometers to Freehold, an organization of communes where the Potters had their acreage. I wondered if the progression was going to continue and I would be four hours walking down this dirt road to the farm.

  It was a half hour before I even came to a building. My bag was getting intolerably heavy and the bulky pistol was chafing my hip. I walked up a stone path to the door of a simple plastic dome and pulled a string that caused a bell to tinkle inside. A peephole darkened.

  “Who is it?” Voice muffled by thick wood.

  “Stranger asking directions.”

  “Ask.” I couldn’t tell whether it was a woman or a child.

  “I’m looking for the Potters’ farm.”

  “Just a second.” Footsteps went away and came back. “Down the road one point nine klicks. Lots of potatoes and green beans on your right. You’ll probably smell the chickens.”

  “Thanks.”

  “If you want a drink we got a pump out back. Can’t let you in without my husband’s at home.”

  “I understand. Thank you.” The water was metallic-tasting but wonderfully cool.

  I wouldn’t know a potato or green bean plant if it stood up and took a bite out of my ankle, but I knew how to walk a half-meter step. So I resolved to count to 3800 and take a deep breath. I supposed I could tell the difference between the smell of chicken manure and the absence thereof.

  At 3650 there was a rutted path leading to a complex of plastic domes and rectangular buildings apparently made of sod. There was a pen enclosing a small population explosion of chickens. They had a smell but it wasn’t strong.

  Halfway down the path, a door opened and Marygay came running out, wearing one tiny wisp of cloth. After a slippery but gratifying greeting, she asked what I was doing here so early.

  “Oh, my mother had friends staying with her. I didn’t want to put them out. Suppose I should have called.”

  “Indeed you should have…save you a long dusty walk—but we’ve got plenty of room, don’t worry about that.”

  She took me inside to meet her parents, who greeted me warmly and made me feel definitely overdressed. Their faces showed their age but their bodies had no sag and few wrinkles.

  Since dinner was an occasion, they let the chickens live and instead opened a can of beef, steaming it along with a cabbage and some potatoes. To my plain tastes it was equal to most of the gourmet fare we’d had on the dirigible and in London.

  Over coffee and goat cheese (they apologized for not having wine; the commune would have a new vintage out in a couple of weeks), I asked what kind of work I could do.

  “Will,” Mr. Potter said, “I don’t mind telling you that your coming here is a godsend. We’ve got five acres that are just sitting out there, fallow, because we don’t have enough hands to work them. You can take the plow tomorrow and start breaking up an acre at a time.”

  “More potatoes, Daddy?” Marygay asked.

  “No, no…not this season. Soybeans—cash crop and good for the soil. And Will, at night we all take turns standing guard. With four of us, we ought to be able to do a lot more sleeping.” He took a big slurp of coffee. “Now, what else…”

  “Richard,” Mrs. Potter said, “tell him about the greenhouse.”

  “That’s right, yes, the greenhouse. The commune has a two-acre greenhouse down about a klick from here, by the recreation center. Mostly grapes and tomatoes. Everybody spends one morning or one afternoon a week there.

  “Why don’t you children go down there tonight…show Will the nightlife in fabulous Freehold? Sometimes you can get a real exciting game of checkers going.”

  “Oh, Daddy. It’s not that bad.”

  “Actually, it isn’t. They’ve got a fair library and a coin-op terminal to the Library of Congress. Marygay tells me you’re a reader. That’s good.”

  “Sounds fascinating.” It did. “But what about guard?”

  “No problem. Mrs. Potter—April—and I’ll take the first four hours—oh,” he said, standing, “let me show you the setup.”

  We went out back to “the tower,” a sandbag hut on stilts. Climbed up a rope ladder through a hole in the middle of the hut.

  “A little crowded in here, with two,” Richard said. “Have a seat.” There was an old piano stool beside the hole in the floor. I sat on it. “It’s handy to be able to see all the field without getting a crick in your neck. Just don’t keep turning in the same direction all the time.”

  He opened a wooden crate and uncovered a sleek rifle, wrapped in oily rags. “Recognize this?”

  “Sure.” I’d had to sleep with one in basic training. “Army standardissue T-sixteen. Semiautomatic, twelve-caliber tumblers—where the hell did you get it?”

  “Commune went to a government auction. It’s an antique now, son.” He handed it to me and I snapped it apart. Clean, too clean.

  “Has it ever been used?”

  “Not in almost a year. Ammo costs too much for target practice. Take a couple of practice shots, though, convince yourself that it works.”

  I turned on the scope and just got a washed-out bright green. Set for nighttime. Cli
cked it back to log zero, set the magnification at ten, reassembled it.

  “Marygay didn’t want to try it out. Said she’d had her fill of that. I didn’t press her, but a person’s got to have confidence in ther tools.”

  I clicked off the safety and found a clod of dirt that the range-finder said was between 100 and 120 meters away. Set it at 110, rested the barrel of the rifle on the sandbags, centered the clod in the crosshairs, and squeezed. The round hissed out and kicked up dirt about five centimeters low.

  “Fine.” I reset it for night use and safetied it and handed it back. “What happened a year ago?”

  He wrapped it up carefully, keeping the rags away from the eye-piece. “Had some jumpers come in. Fired a few rounds and scared ’em away.”

  “All right, what’s a jumper?”

  “Yeah, you wouldn’t know.” He shook out a tobacco cigarette and passed me the box. “I don’t know why they don’t just call ’em thieves, that’s what they are. Murderers, too, sometimes.

  “They know that a lot of the commune members are pretty well off. If you raise cash crops you get to keep half the cash; besides, a lot of our members were prosperous when they joined.

  “Anyhow, the jumpers take advantage of our relative isolation. They come out from the city and try to sneak in, usually hit one place, and run. Most of the time, they don’t get this far in, but the farms closer to the road…we hear gunfire every couple of weeks. Usually just scaring off kids. If it keeps up, a siren goes off and the commune goes on alert.”

  “Doesn’t sound fair to the people living close to the road.”

  “There’re compensations. They only have to donate half as much of their crop as the rest of us do. And they’re issued heavier weapons.”

  ~~~

  Marygay and I took the family’s two bicycles and pedaled down to the recreation center. I only fell off twice, negotiating the bumpy road in the dark.

  It was a little livelier than Richard had described it. A young nude girl was dancing sensuously to an assortment of homemade drums near the far side of the dome. Turned out she was still in school; it was a project for a “cultural relativity” class.

  Most of the people there, in fact, were young and therefore still in school. They considered it a joke, though. After you had learned to read and write and could pass the Class I literacy test, you only had to take one course per year, and some of those you could pass just by signing up. So much for the “eighteen years’ compulsory education” they had startled us with at Stargate.

  Other people were playing board games, reading, watching the girl gyrate, or just talking. There was a bar that served soya, coffee, or thin homemade beer. Not a ration ticket to be seen; all made by the commune or purchased outside with commune tickets.

  We got into a discussion about the war, with a bunch of people who knew Marygay and I were veterans. It’s hard to describe their attitude, which was pretty uniform. They were angry in an abstract way that it took so much tax money to support; they were convinced that the Taurans would never be any danger to Earth; but they all knew that nearly half the jobs in the world were associated with the war, and if it stopped, everything would fall apart.

  I thought everything was in shambles already, but then I hadn’t grown up in this world. And they had never known “peacetime.”

  We went home about midnight and Marygay and I each stood two hours’ guard. By the middle of the next morning, I was wishing I had gotten a little more sleep.

  The plow was a big blade on wheels with two handles for steering, atomic powered. Not very much power, though; enough to move it forward at a slow crawl if the blade was in soft earth. Needless to say, there was little soft earth in the unused five acres. The plow would go a few centimeters, get stuck, freewheel until I put some back into it, then move a few more centimeters. I finished a tenth of an acre the first day and eventually got it up to a fifth of an acre a day.

  It was hard, hardening work, but pleasant. I had an earclip that piped music to me, old tapes from Richard’s collection, and the sun browned me all over. I was beginning to think I could live that way forever, when suddenly it was finished.

  Marygay and I were reading up at the recreation center one evening when we heard faint gunfire down by the road. We decided it’d be smart to get back to the house. We were less than halfway there when firing broke out all along our left, on a line that seemed to extend from the road to far past the recreation center: a coordinated attack. We had to abandon the bikes and crawl on hands and knees in the drainage ditch by the side of the road, bullets hissing over our heads. A heavy vehicle rumbled by, shooting left and right. It took a good twenty minutes to crawl home. We passed two farmhouses that were burning brightly. I was glad ours didn’t have any wood.

  I noticed there was no return fire coming from our tower, but didn’t say anything. There were two dead strangers in front of the house as we rushed inside.

  April was lying on the floor, still alive but bleeding from a hundred tiny fragment wounds. The living room was rubble and dust; someone must have thrown a bomb through a door or window. I left Marygay with her mother and ran out back to the tower. The ladder was pulled up, so I had to shinny up one of the stilts.

  Richard was sitting slumped over the rifle. In the pale green glow from the scope I could see a perfectly round hole above his left eye. A little blood had trickled down the bridge of his nose and dried.

  I laid his body on the floor and covered his head with my shirt. I filled my pockets with clips and took the rifle back to the house.

  Marygay had tried to make her mother comfortable. They were talking quietly. She was holding my shotgun-pistol and had another gun on the floor beside her. When I came in she looked up and nodded soberly, not crying.

  April whispered something and Marygay asked, “Mother wants to know whether…Daddy had a hard time of it. She knows he’s dead.”

  “No. I’m sure he didn’t feel anything.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s something.” I should keep my mouth shut. “It is good, yes.”

  I checked the doors and windows for an effective vantage point. I couldn’t find anyplace that wouldn’t allow a whole platoon to sneak up behind me.

  “I’m going to go outside and get on top of the house.” Couldn’t go back to the tower. “Don’t you shoot unless somebody gets inside…maybe they’ll think the place is deserted.”

  By the time I had clambered up to the sod roof, the heavy truck was coming back down the road. Through the scope I could see that there were five men on it, four in the cab and one who was on the open bed, cradling a machine gun, surrounded by loot. He was crouched between two refrigerators, but I had a clear shot at him. Held my fire, not wanting to draw attention. The truck stopped in front of the house, sat for a minute, and turned in. The window was probably bulletproof, but I sighted on the driver’s face and squeezed off a round. He jumped as it ricocheted, whining, leaving an opaque star on the plastic, and the man in back opened up. A steady stream of bullets hummed over my head; I could hear them thumping into the sandbags of the tower. He didn’t see me.

  The truck wasn’t ten meters away when the shooting stopped. He was evidently reloading, hidden behind the refrigerator. I took careful aim and when he popped up to fire I shot him in the throat. The bullet being a tumbler, it exited through the top of his skull.

  The driver pulled the truck around in a long arc so that, when it stopped, the door to the cab was flush with the door of the house. This protected them from the tower and also from me, though I doubted they yet knew where I was; a T-16 makes no flash and very little noise. I kicked off my shoes and stepped cautiously onto the top of the cab, hoping the driver would get out on his side. Once the door opened I could fill the cab with ricocheting bullets.

  No good. The far door, hidden from me by the roof’s overhang, opened first. I waited for the driver and hoped that Marygay was well hidden. I shouldn’t have worried.

  There was a
deafening roar, then another and another. The heavy truck rocked with the impact of thousands of tiny flechettes. One short scream that the second shot ended.

  I jumped from the truck and ran around to the back door. Marygay had her mother’s head on her lap, and someone was crying softly. I went to them and Marygay’s cheeks were dry under my palms.

  “Good work, dear.”

  She didn’t say anything. There was a steady heavy dripping sound from the door and the air was acrid with smoke and the smell of fresh meat. We huddled together until dawn.

  I had thought April was sleeping, but in the dim light her eyes were wide open and filmed. Her breath came in shallow rasps. Her skin was gray parchment and dried blood. She didn’t answer when we talked to her.

  A vehicle was coming up the road, so I took the rifle and went outside. It was a dump truck with a white sheet draped over one side and a man standing in the back with a megaphone repeating, “Wounded…wounded.” I waved and the truck came in. They took April out on a makeshift litter and told us which hospital they were going to. We wanted to go along but there was simply no room; the bed of the truck was covered with people in various stages of disrepair.

  Marygay didn’t want to go back inside because it was getting light enough to see the men she had killed so completely. I went back in to get some cigarettes and forced myself to look. It was messy enough, but just didn’t disturb me that much. That bothered me, to be confronted with a pile of human hamburger and mainly notice the flies and ants and smell. Death is so much neater in space.

  We buried her father behind the house, and when the truck came back with April’s small body wrapped in a shroud, we buried her beside him. The commune’s sanitation truck came by a little later, and gas-masked men took care of the jumpers’ bodies.

  We sat in the baking sun, and finally Marygay wept, for a long time, silently.

  Twenty-six

  We got off the plane at Dulles and found a monorail to Columbia.