The Forever War

  “Stump ought to be at the top of your neck,” Charlie said. “I don’t see why you have any qualms. You should have killed the bastard outright.”

  “I know that, goddammit!” Both Charlie and Diana jumped at my outburst. “Sorry, shit. Look, just let me do the worrying.”

  “Why don’t you both talk about something else for a while.” Diana got up and checked the contents of her medical bag. “I’ve got another patient to check. Try to keep from exciting each other.”

  “Graubard?” Charlie asked.

  “That’s right. To make sure he can mount the scaffold without assistance.”

  “What if Hilleboe—”

  “She’ll be out for another half hour. I’ll send Jarvil down, just in case.” She hurried out the door.

  “The scaffold…” I hadn’t given that any thought. “How the hell are we going to execute him? We can’t do it indoors: morale. Firing squad would be pretty grisly.”

  “Chuck him out the airlock. You don’t owe him any ceremony.”

  “You’re probably right. I wasn’t thinking about him.” I wondered whether Charlie had ever seen the body of a person who’d died that way. “Maybe we ought to just stuff him into the recycler. He’d wind up there eventually.”

  Charlie laughed. “That’s the spirit.”

  “We’d have to trim him up a little bit. Door’s not very wide.” Charlie had a few suggestions as to how to get around that. Jarvil came in and more-or-less ignored us.

  Suddenly the infirmary door banged open. A patient on a cart; Diana rushing alongside pressing on the man’s chest, while a private pushed. Two other privates were following, but hung back at the door. “Over by the wall,” she ordered.

  It was Graubard. “Tried to kill himself,” Diana said, but that was pretty obvious. “Heart stopped.” He’d made a noose out of his belt; it was still hanging limply around his neck.

  There were two big electrodes with rubber handles hanging on the wall. Diana snatched them with one hand while she ripped his tunic open with the other. “Get your hands off the cart!” She held the electrodes apart, kicked a switch, and pressed them down onto his chest. They made a low hum while his body trembled and flopped. Smell of burning flesh.

  Diana was shaking her head. “Get ready to crack him,” she said to Jarvil. “Get Doris down here.” The body was gurgling, but it was a mechanical sound, like plumbing.

  She kicked off the power and let the electrodes drop, pulled a ring off her finger and crossed to stick her arms in the sterilizer. Jarvil started to rub an evil-smelling fluid over the man’s chest.

  There was a small red mark between the two electrode burns. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. Jarvil wiped it away. I stepped closer and checked Graubard’s neck.

  “Get out of the way, William, you aren’t sterile.” Diana felt his collarbone, measured down a little ways and made an incision straight down to the bottom of his breastbone. Blood welled out and Jarvil handed her an instrument that looked like big chrome-plated bolt-cutters. I looked away but couldn’t help hearing the thing crunch through his ribs. She asked for retractors and sponges and so on while I wandered back to where I’d been sitting. With the corner of my eye I saw her working away inside his thorax, massaging his heart directly.

  Charlie looked the way I felt. He called out weakly, “Hey, don’t knock yourself out, Diana.” She didn’t answer. Jarvil had wheeled up the artificial heart and was holding out two tubes. Diana picked up a scalpel and I looked away again.

  ~~~

  He was still dead a half hour later. They turned off the machine and threw a sheet over him. Diana washed the blood off her arms and said, “Got to change. Back in a minute.”

  I got up and walked to her billet, next door. Had to know. I raised my hand to knock but it was suddenly hurting like there was a line of fire drawn across it. I rapped with my left and she opened the door immediately.

  “What—oh, you want something for your hand.” She was half-dressed, unselfconscious. “Ask Jarvil.”

  “No, that’s not it. What happened, Diana?”

  “Oh. Well,” she pulled a tunic over her head and her voice was muffled. “It was my fault, I guess. I left him alone for a minute.”

  “And he tried to hang himself.”

  “That’s right.” She sat on the bed and offered me the chair. “I went off to the head and he was dead by the time I got back. I’d already sent Jarvil away because I didn’t want Hilleboe to be unsupervised for too long.”

  “But, Diana…there’s no mark on his neck. No bruise, nothing.”

  She shrugged. “The hanging didn’t kill him. He had a heart attack.”

  “Somebody gave him a shot. Right over his heart.”

  She looked at me curiously. “I did that, William. Adrenaline. Standard procedure.”

  You get that red dot of expressed blood if you jerk away from the projector while you’re getting a shot. Otherwise the medicine goes right through the pores, doesn’t leave a mark. “He was dead when you gave him the shot?”

  “That would be my professional opinion.” Deadpan. “No heartbeat, pulse, respiration. Very few other disorders show these symptoms.”

  “Yeah. I see.”

  “Is something…what’s the matter, William?”

  Either I’d been improbably lucky or Diana was a very good actress. “Nothing. Yeah, I better get something for this hand.” I opened the door. “Saved me a lot of trouble.”

  She looked straight into my eyes. “That’s true.”

  ~~~

  Actually, I’d traded one kind of trouble for another. Despite the fact that there were several disinterested witnesses to Graubard’s demise, there was a persistent rumor that I’d had Doc Alsever simply exterminate him—since I’d botched the job myself and didn’t want to go through a troublesome courtmartial.

  The fact was that, under the Universal Code of Military “Justice,” Graubard hadn’t deserved any kind of trial at all. All I had to do was say “You, you and you. Take this man out and kill him, please.” And woe betide the private who refused to carry out the order.

  My relationship with the troops did improve, in a sense. At least outwardly, they showed more deference to me. But I suspected it was at least partly the cheap kind of respect you might offer any ruffian who had proved himself to be dangerous and volatile.

  So Killer was my new name. Just when I’d gotten used to Old Queer.

  The base quickly settled back into its routine of training and waiting. I was almost impatient for the Taurans to show up, just to get it over with one way or the other.

  The troops had adjusted to the situation much better than I had, for obvious reasons. They had specific duties to perform and ample free time for the usual soldierly anodynes to boredom. My duties were more varied but offered little satisfaction, since the problems that percolated up to me were of the “the buck stops here” type; those with pleasing, unambiguous solutions were taken care of in the lower echelons.

  I’d never cared much for sports or games, but found myself turning to them more and more as a kind of safety valve. For the first time in my life, in these tense, claustrophobic surroundings, I couldn’t escape into reading or study. So I fenced, quarterstaff and saber, with the other officers, worked myself to exhaustion on the exercise machines and even kept a jump-rope in my office. Most of the other officers played chess, but they could usually beat me—whenever I won it gave me the feeling I was being humored. Word games were difficult because my language was an archaic dialect that they had trouble manipulating. And I lacked the time and talent to master “modern” English.

  For a while I let Diana feed me mood-altering drugs, but the cumulative effect of them was frightening—I was getting addicted in a way that was at first too subtle to bother me—so I stopped short. Then I tried some systematic psychoanalysis with Lieutenant Wilber. It was impossible. Although he knew all about my problem in an academic kind of way, we didn’t speak the same cultural languag
e; his counseling me about love and sex was like me telling a fourteenth-century serf how best to get along with his priest and landlord.

  And that, after all, was the root of my problem. I was sure I could have handled the pressures and frustrations of command; of being cooped up in a cave with these people who at times seemed scarcely less alien than the enemy; even the near-certainty that it could lead only to painful death in a worthless cause—if only I could have had Marygay with me. And the feeling got more intense as the months crept by.

  He got very stern with me at this point and accused me of romanticizing my position. He knew what love was, he said; he had been in love himself. And the sexual polarity of the couple made no difference—all right, I could accept that; that idea had been a cliché in my parents’ generation (though it had run into some predictable resistance in my own). But love, he said, love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months. Bullshit, I said, and accused him of wearing cultural blinders; thirty centuries of prewar society taught that love was one thing that could last to the grave and even beyond and if he had been born instead of hatched he would know that without being told! Whereupon he would assume a wry, tolerant expression and reiterate that I was merely a victim of self-imposed sexual frustration and romantic delusion.

  In retrospect, I guess we had a good time arguing with each other. Cure me, he didn’t.

  I did have a new friend who sat in my lap all the time. It was the cat, who had the usual talent for hiding from people who like cats and cleaving unto those who have sinus trouble or just don’t like sneaky little animals. We did have something in common, though, since to my knowledge he was the only other heterosexual male mammal within any reasonable distance. He’d been castrated, of course, but that didn’t make much difference under the circumstances.

  Thirty-three

  It was exactly 400 days since the day we had begun construction. I was sitting at my desk not checking out Hilleboe’s new duty roster. The cat was on my lap, purring loudly even though I refused to pet it. Charlie was stretched out in a chair reading something on the viewer. The phone buzzed and it was the Commodore.

  “They’re here.”

  “What?”

  “I said they’re here. A Tauran ship just exited the collapsar field. Velocity .80c. Deceleration thirty gees. Give or take.”

  Charlie was leaning over my desk. “What?” I dumped the cat.

  “How long? Before you can pursue?” I asked.

  “Soon as you get off the phone.” I switched off and went over to the logistic computer, which was a twin to the one on Masaryk II and had a direct data link to it. While I tried to get numbers out of the thing, Charlie fiddled with the visual display.

  The display was a hologram about a meter square by half a meter thick and was programmed to show the positions of Sade-138, our planet, and a few other chunks of rock in the system. There were green and red dots to show the positions of our vessels and the Taurans’.

  The computer said that the minimum time it could take the Taurans to decelerate and get back to this planet would be a little over eleven days. Of course, that would be straight maximum acceleration and deceleration all the way; we could pick them off like flies on a wall. So, like us, they’d mix up their direction of flight and degree of acceleration in a random way. Based on several hundred past records of enemy behavior, the computer was able to give us a probability table:

  Unless, of course, Antopol and her gang of merry pirates managed to make a kill. The chances of that, I had learned in the can, were slightly less than fifty-fifty.

  But whether it took 28.9554 days or two weeks, those of us on the ground had to just sit on our hands and watch. If Antopol was successful, then we wouldn’t have to fight until the regular garrison troops replaced us here and we moved on to the next collapsar.

  “Haven’t left yet.” Charlie had the display cranked down to minimum scale; the planet was a white ball the size of a large melon and Masaryk II was a green dot off to the right some eight melons away; you couldn’t get both on the screen at the same time.

  While we were watching a small green dot popped out of the ship’s dot and drifted away from it. A ghostly number 2 drifted beside it, and a key projected on the display’s lower lefthand corner identified it as 2—Pursuit Drone. Other numbers in the key identified the Masaryk II, a planetary defense fighter and fourteen planetary defense drones. Those sixteen ships were not yet far enough away from one another to have separate dots.

  The cat was rubbing against my ankle; I picked it up and stroked it. “Tell Hilleboe to call a general assembly. Might as well break it to everyone at once.”

  ~~~

  The men and women didn’t take it very well, and I couldn’t blame them. We had all expected the Taurans to attack much sooner—and when they persisted in not coming, the feeling grew that Strike Force Command had made a mistake and that they’d never show up at all.

  I wanted the company to start weapons training in earnest; they hadn’t used any high-powered weapons in almost two years. So I activated their laser-fingers and passed out the grenade and rocket launchers. We couldn’t practice inside the base for fear of damaging the external sensors and defensive laser ring. So we turned off half the circle of gigawatt lasers and went out about a klick beyond the perimeter, one platoon at a time, accompanied by either me or Charlie. Rusk kept a close watch on the early-warning screens. If anything approached, she would send up a flare, and the platoon would have to get back inside the ring before the unknown came over the horizon, at which time the defensive lasers would come on automatically. Besides knocking out the unknown, they would fry the platoon in less than .02 seconds.

  We couldn’t spare anything from the base to use as a target, but that turned out to be no problem. The first tachyon rocket we fired scooped out a hole twenty meters long by ten wide by five deep; the rubble gave us a multitude of targets from twice-man-sized on down.

  The soldiers were good, a lot better than they had been with the primitive weapons in the stasis field. The best laser practice turned out to be rather like skeet-shooting: pair up the people and have one stand behind the other, throwing rocks at random intervals. The one who was shooting had to gauge the rock’s trajectory and zap it before it hit the ground. Their eye-hand coordination was impressive (maybe the Eugenics Council had done something right). Shooting at rocks down to pebble-size, most of them could do better than nine out of ten. Old non-bioengineered me could hit maybe seven out of ten, and I’d had a good deal more practice than they had.

  They were equally facile at estimating trajectories with the grenade launcher, which was a more versatile weapon than it had been in the past. Instead of shooting one-microton bombs with a standard propulsive charge, it had four different charges and a choice of one-, two-, three- or four-microton bombs. And for really close infighting, where it was dangerous to use the lasers, the barrel of the launcher would unsnap, and you could load it with a magazine of “shotgun” rounds. Each shot would send out an expanding cloud of a thousand tiny flechettes that were instant death out to five meters and turned to harmless vapor at six.

  The tachyon rocket launcher required no skill whatsoever. All you had to do was to be careful no one was standing behind you when you fired it; the backwash from the rocket was dangerous for several meters behind the launching tube. Otherwise, you just lined your target up in the crosshairs and pushed the button. You didn’t have to worry about trajectory; the rocket traveled in a straight line for all practical purposes. It reached escape velocity in less than a second.

  It improved the troops’ morale to get out and chew up the landscape with their new toys. But the landscape wasn’t fighting back. No matter how physically impressive the weapons were, their effectiveness would depend on what the Taurans could throw back. A Greek phalanx must have looked pretty impressive, but it wouldn’t do too well against a single man with a flamethrower.

&nb
sp; And as with any engagement, because of time dilation, there was no way to tell what sort of weaponry they would have. They might have never heard of the stasis field. Or they might be able to say a magic word and make us disappear.

  I was out with the fourth platoon, burning rocks, when Charlie called and asked me to come back in, urgent. I left Heimoff in charge.

  “Another one?” The scale of the holograph display was such that our planet was pea-sized, about five centimeters from the X that marked the position of Sade-138. There were forty-one red and green dots scattered around the field; the key identified number 41 as Tauran Cruiser (2).

  “You called Antopol?”

  “Yeah.” He anticipated the next question. “It’ll take almost a day for the signal to get there and back.”

  “It’s never happened before,” but of course Charlie knew that.

  “Maybe this collapsar is especially important to them.”

  “Likely.” So it was almost certain we’d be fighting on the ground. Even if Antopol managed to get the first cruiser, she wouldn’t have a fifty-fifty chance on the second one. Low on drones and fighters. “I wouldn’t like to be Antopol now.”

  “She’ll just get it earlier.”

  “I don’t know. We’re in pretty good shape.”

  “Save it for the troops, William.” He turned down the display’s scale to where it showed only two objects: Sade-138 and the new red dot, slowly moving.

  ~~~

  We spent the next two weeks watching dots blink out. And if you knew when and where to look, you could go outside and see the real thing happening, a hard bright speck of white light that faded in about a second.

  In that second, a nova bomb had put out over a million times the power of a gigawatt laser. It made a miniature star half a klick in diameter and as hot as the interior of the sun. Anything it touched it would consume. The radiation from a near miss could botch up a ship’s electronics beyond repair—two fighters, one of ours and one of theirs, had evidently suffered that fate, silently drifting out of the system at a constant velocity, without power.