Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “Of course, of course,” Vargas said. John Odoacer Gatt was getting him a little nervous. He didn’t know what this was leading up to. “But how could this be possible?”

  “Let’s talk more about it after the vote tomorrow,” Gatt said.

  The delegates’ voting room was a large and circular chamber equipped with comfortable chairs and a cluster of overhead lighting. In the center was a circular stage that revolved slowly so that those in the center would by turns be facing all the delegates. On the platform was the steering committee for the first provisional and temporary world military government.

  The generals, Vargas included, voted in a brisk and unanimous manner to disenfranchise all civilians outside of those few approved ones already assembled at the delegate hall. The civilians were stripped of the vote, habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and all other liberal encumbrances until such time as they could be relied upon to vote in a prescribed manner. This was a very important measure because the military had found out long ago that civilians were inherently untrustworthy and even traitorous.

  Next the generals faced the serious question of disarmament, or, as they called it, unemployment. Disarmament meant there would be hard times ahead because war on Earth was finished as a business since everybody was now under a unified command and there was no one to fight. None of the generals liked the idea of giving up war entirely, however, and General Gatt said there might be a way around that and promised there would be an announcement about that later.

  The conference ended with a good cheer and boisterous camaraderie among the various military satraps. Vargas very much enjoyed the reception afterwards, where Lupe made a big hit in her blue, yellow and red ball gown.

  After the reception, General Gatt took Vargas aside and asked to meet him tomorrow morning at eight hundred hours sharp at the Ground Zero Motor Pool.

  “I have a proposition to put to you,” Gatt said. “I think you will find it of interest.”

  Vargas, accompanied by Lupe, was at the Ground Zero Motor Pool at the appointed hour. That morning he was wearing his sash of Commander in the Legion of Death, and also his campaign medals from the sacking of New York. He’d come a long way from when he was a mere bandit’s apprentice.

  Soon they were speeding out of the city into the flat desert countryside. It was a time of blooming, and there were many little wild flowers carpeting the desert floor with delicate colors.

  “This is really nice,” Vargas said.

  “It used to belong to some Indian tribe,” the driver said. “I can never remember which one. They’re all gone now to Indianola.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Indianola is the new industrial suburb in Mississippi where we’re relocating all the Indians in America.”

  “They used to be all scattered around the country, didn’t they?” Vargas said.

  “They sure did,” the driver said. “But it was sloppy that way.”

  “Seems a pity, though,” Vargas said. “Indians have been in the country a long time, haven’t they?”

  “They were always griping anyhow,” the driver said. “Don’t worry, they’ll get used to our way of doing things.”

  The secret installation was in a tangle of hills some thirty miles west of Ground Zero. General Gatt came out of his temporary headquarters to greet Vargas. There was a pretty young woman with him. Gatt had thoughtfully brought along his mistress, a young lady named Lola Montez—not the original one, a relative, these names tend to run in the family—who immediately put her arm in Lupe’s and took her away for cigarettes, dope, coffee, bourbon, and gossip. Generals’ mistresses are good entertainers and it’s traditional for the military to be hospitable.

  Once the two generals were alone, they could settle down to business. First some small talk about how the armed forces security groups were successfully doing away with anyone who felt that things should be handled in a different way. Most of these malcontents were quiet now. It was amazing what the Central Committee had been able to do in the way of cleaning things up.

  “It’s a beginning,” General Gatt said. “These ideas of social perfectability have been around as long as there has been a military. But this is the first time we’ve had all the soldiers on our side.”

  General Vargas asked, “What are you going to do about local groups who want to do their own thing or worship their own gods—that sort of stuff?”

  “If they really want freedom, they can join the military,” Gatt said. “Our fighting men enjoy perfect freedom of religion.”

  “And if they don’t want to join the military?”

  “We tell them to shut up and go away,” Gatt said. “And if they don’t, we shoot them. It saves a lot of arguing, and helps us avoid all the cost of keeping prisons and guards.”

  General Gatt explained that one of the great advantages of universal peace was that world government could finally afford to put some money into worthwhile projects.

  “Oh,” Vargas said, “you mean like feeding the poor and stuff like that?”

  “I don’t mean that at all,” Gatt said. “That’s been tried and it hasn’t worked.”

  “You’re right,” Vargas said. “They just keep on coming back for more. But what sort of worthwhile project do you mean?”

  “Come with me and I’ll show you,” Gatt said.

  They left General Gatt’s office and went to the command car. The driver was a short, thickset, Mongolian-looking fellow with long bandit mustaches, wearing a heavy woollen vest in spite of the oppressive heat. The driver saluted smartly and opened the door for the generals. They got into the command car and drove for twenty minutes, stopping at a huge hangerlike building all by itself on the desert. Guards let them through a concertina of barbed wire to a small side door that led inside.

  The building was really huge. From the inside it looked even larger. Gazing up toward the ceiling, Vargas noticed several birds fluttering overhead. But amusing as this spectacle was, what he saw next took his breath away, leaving him gasping in amazement.

  He said to Gatt, “Is this real, John, or some optical illusion you’re projecting?”

  General Gatt smiled in his mysterious way that seemed easy but was not. “It’s real enough, Getulio, old boy. Look again.”

  Vargas looked. What he saw, towering many stories above him, was a spaceship. Lupe had shown him enough drawings and diagrams in newspapers like The Brazilian Enquirer and others of that ilk for him to know what it was. It was unmistakably a spaceship, colored a whale gray and with tiny portholes and a dorsal fin.

  “It’s amazing, sir,” Vargas said, “just amazing.”

  “Bet you never knew we had this,” Gatt said.

  “I had no idea,” Vargas assured him.

  “Of course not,” Gatt said. “This has been kept a secret from everybody except the ruling council. But you’re a part of that ruling council now, Getulio old boy, because I’m appointing you a freely elected member of it as of today.”

  “I don’t get it,” Vargas said. “Why me?”

  “Come inside the ship,” Gatt said. “Let me show you a little more.”

  There was a motorized ramp that led up into the interior of the ship. Gatt took Vargas’ arm and led him up.

  Vargas felt at home almost immediately. The interior of the ship looked exactly like what he had seen on old Star Trek reruns. There were large rooms filled with panels of instruments. There were indirect lighting panels of rectangular shape. There were technicians who wore pastel jumpsuits with high collars. There were avocado green wall-to-wall carpets. It was just what Vargas would have expected if he’d thought about it. He expected to see Spock come out of a passageway at any moment.

  “No, we don’t have Spock here,” Gatt said in answer to Vargas’ unspoken question. “But we’ve got a lot more important stuff than some pointy-eared alien. Let me give you a little quiz, Vargas, just for fun. What is the first thing a warrior thinks about when he looks over his new battleship
?”

  Vargas had to give that some serious thought. He wished Lupe were here with him. Although she was stupid and only a woman, she was very good at supplying, through some mysterious feminine intuition, answers which Vargas had on the tip of his tongue but couldn’t quite come up with.

  Fortunately for him, this time the answer came unbidden. “Guns!” he said.

  “You got it!” Gatt said. “Come with me and let me show you the guns on this sucker.”

  Gatt led him to a small car of the sort used to drive the long distances between points in a ship. Vargas tried to remember if they’d had a car like that on Star Trek. He thought not. He thought this ship was larger than the Enterprise. He liked that. He was not afraid of big things.

  The little car hummed down the long, evenly lit passageway deep in the interior of the ship. General Gatt was reeling off statistics as they went, explaining how many battalions of men in Darth Vader helmets could be fitted into the attack bays, how many tons of rations in the forms of beef jerky and bourbon could be stored in a thousand hundredweights of standard mess kits, and other important details. Soon they reached the area of the ship’s primary armament. Vargas looked admiringly at the large projector tubes, the paralysis wavelength radio, the vibratory beamer, which could shake apart a fair-sized asteroid. His fingers itched to get on the controls of the tractor and pressor beams. But General Gatt told him he would have to be patient for a little while longer. There was nothing around to shoot at. And besides, the main armament wasn’t quite all hooked up yet.

  Vargas was loud in his praise of the work done by the scientists of the military. But Gatt had to set him straight on that.

  “We have a lot of good boys, to be sure,” Gatt said. “Some of them quite clever. Especially the ones we drafted. This spaceship, however, was not of their doing.”

  “Whose is it then, sir, if I may enquire?” said Vargas.

  “It was the work of a special group of civilian scientists, what they call a consortium. Which simply means a whole bunch of them. It was a joint European-American-Asian effort. And a damned selfish one.”

  “Why do you say that, sir?”

  “Because they were building this ship to get away from us.”

  “I can hardly believe that, sir,” Vargas said.

  “It’s almost unthinkable, isn’t it? They were scared for their puny lives, of course, afraid that they’d all be killed. As it turned out, quite a few of them did get killed. I don’t know what made them think any respectable military establishment would let them escape from the planet with a valuable spaceship.”

  “What happened to the scientists, sir?”

  “Oh, we drafted them. Put them to work. Their ship was very good but it lacked a few things. Guns, for one. These people had actually thought they could go into outer space without high-powered weaponry. And another problem was that the ships weren’t fast enough. We have learned that space is quite a bit larger than some of our previous estimates at the Military College; therefore, we need really fast ships if we’re ever to get anywhere.”

  “Fast ships and strong guns,” Vargas mused. “That’s just what I would have asked for myself. Did you have any trouble getting those things, general?”

  “A little at first,” Gatt said. “The scientists kept on saying it was impossible and other downbeat and subversive talk like that. But I handled it. Gave them a deadline, started having executions when our goals weren’t met. You’d be amazed how quickly they picked up the pace.”

  Vargas nodded, having used similar methods himself in his day.

  “It’s a beautiful ship,” Vargas said. “Is it the only one?”

  “What you’re looking at here,” Gatt said, “is the flagship of the fleet.”

  “You mean there are more ships?” Vargas asked.

  “Indeed there are. Or will be soon. We’ve got the entire worldwide shipbuilding and automobile industries working on them. We need lots of ships, Getulio.”

  “Yessir,” Vargas said. The trouble was, he couldn’t think of anything to use ships for, now that everything was conquered. But he didn’t want to come out and say that. He could see there was a little smile on General Gatt’s face, so he guessed that he was about to be told something he hadn’t known before, but which he would find of considerable interest He waited for a while, and then decided that Gatt wanted him to ask, so he said, “Now, about all these ships, sir . . .”

  “Yesss?” said Gatt.

  “We need these,” Vargas hazarded, “for security—”

  Gatt nodded.

  “—and to take care of our enemies.”

  “Perfectly correct,” Gatt said.

  “The only thing that perplexes me,” Vargas said, “is, who exactly are our enemies? I mean, sir that I was under the impression that we don’t really have any of them left on Earth. Or are there some enemies I haven’t heard about?”

  “Oh, we don’t have any enemies left on Earth,” Gatt said. “They have gone the way of the buffalo, the cow, the Airedale, and other extinct species. What we have now, General Vargas, is the God-given opportunity to go forth into space, our Earth troops unified for the first time in history, ready and willing to take on anything that comes along.”

  “Anything! In space!” Vargas said, amazed at the size of the idea.

  “Yes! Today Earth, tomorrow the Milky Way, or at least one hell of a good-sized hunk of it.”

  “But can we just do that? Take what we want?”

  “Why not? If there’s anything out there, it’s just aliens.”

  “It’s a wonderful dream, sir. I hope I may be permitted to do my bit for the cause.”

  Gatt grinned and punched Vargas on the arm.

  “I’ve got a pretty good bit for you, Getulio. How would you like to be my first Marshal of Space, with command of this ship and orders to go forth and check out some new planets for Earth?”

  “Me? Sir, you do me too much honor.”

  “Nonsense, Getulio. You’re the best fighting general I’ve got. And you’re the only one I trust. Need I say more?”

  Gatt made the announcement to the other generals. First he showed them the spaceship. Then he told them he was going into space on a fact-finding mission, with good old Vargas along to actually run the ship. He and Vargas would take a lot of fighting men along, just in case they ran into anything interesting. Gatt was sure there were new worlds to explore out there, and these new worlds, in the manner of new worlds since the beginning of recorded history, were going to bring in millions.

  The generals were enthusiastic about the expansion of Earth military power and the promise of a good return on the military business.

  Working night and day, the ship was soon provisioned. Not long after that, the armament was all bolted into place. When they tried it out it worked perfectly, all except for one missile which unaccountably got out of control and took out Kansas City. A letter of regret to the survivors and a posthumous medal for all concerned soon put that to rights, however. Shortly afterwards, ten thousand heavily armed shock troops with full equipment marched aboard. It was time for Earth to make its debut in space.

  The ship went through its trial runs in the solar system without a problem. Once past Neptune, Vargas told the engineers to open her up. Space was big; there was no time to dawdle. The ship ran up to speed without a tremor.

  Lastly, the hyperspace jump control worked perfectly. They popped out of the wormhole into an area rich with star systems, many of which had nice-looking planets.

  Time passed. Not too much of it, but enough so you know you’ve really gone somewhere.

  Soon after this passage of time, the communications officer reported a tremble of movement on the indicator of the Intelligence Detector. This recent invention was a long-range beam which worked on something the scientists called Neuronal Semi-Phase Amplification, or NSPA. The Military-Scientific Junta in charge of technology felt that a detector like this would be useful for finding a race that might be worth talking t
o.

  “Where’s the signal coming from?”

  “One of them planets out there, sir,” the communications officer said, gesturing vaguely at the vast display of stars visible through the ship’s transparent shield.

  “Well, let’s go there,” Vargas said.

  “Have to find what star it belongs to first,” the communications officer said. “I’ll get right on it.”

  Vargas notified Gatt, who, from the luxury of his suite which was supplied with everything a fighting man could want—women, guns, food, booze, dope—told him to carry on.

  Vargas gave the orders to carry on at best speed.

  The big spaceship drilled onward through the vacuum of space.

  DeepDoze technology let the soldiers pass their time in unconsciousness while the ship ate up the parsecs. The special barbarian shock troops were stacked in hammocks eight or ten high. The sound of ten thousand men snoring was enormous but not unexpected. One man from each squad was detailed to stay awake to brush flies off the sleepers.

  More time passed, and quite a few light years sped by, when a flash of green light from the instrumentation readout telltale told the duty officer that they were nearing the source of the signal.

  He got up and went to the captain’s quarters in the quickest way, by express elevator and pneumo tube.

  Vargas was in deep sleep when a hand tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

  “Hmmmf?”

  “Planet ahead, sir.”

  “Call me for the next one.”

  “I think you’d better check this out, sir.”

  Vargas got out of bed grumpily and followed the man down to the Communications Area.

  “Something is coming through,” the operator of the Intelligence Scanner said.

  General Vargas looked over his shoulder. “What’ve you got there, son?”

  “I think it’s an intelligent bleep,” the operator said.