"And no one's tried to knock him off?"
"Not us," protested Wilma. "If we did, we'd have a holy war on our hands. Our policy is to let him be. His ministers are the ones we deal with. And they've calmed down ever since the Israeli Vengeance War."
"Israel?" Buck knew his voice sounded hollow. "I can't imagine they're much more than a splinter in the woodpile."
"Even a small splinter, in the right place, can be a terrible thing," said Bergstrasser. "And the Israelis made some pretty big splinters. The Arab and Indo-European oil fields had all been pretty well ripped up. Wherever there was oil, those areas became prime targets for occupation. The Arabs, who had developed submarine fleets of their own, lobbed hydrogen bombs on the Venezuelan oil fields. We blew up the Alaskan fields to keep them from falling into enemy hands when the Mongols came pouring over the top of the world.
"But the Arabs have a habit of ignoring reality. To them, the global war represented a sign from heaven. Allah was calling for his people to destroy their oldest enemies. And there were the Jews, all packed neatly inside a small area, just ripe to be squashed. While the rest of the world was beating each other up, the Arabs judged the time ripe for the jihad, the final holy war against the descendants of the ancient Israelites. Whatever armies they had left attacked Israel. They threw everything at them—poison gases, biological agents, and millions of soldiers whipped to killing frenzy. Israel never stood a chance, but they were ready for such a moment, and they had always vowed that if they went down, they would exact a terrible price. They told their enemies that if they attacked, not one Arab or Indo-European city would be left standing."
"I'm familiar with the Sabra," Buck said slowly. "The fighters of Israel. . ."
"The Israelis had underground airstrips ready for such a moment. They also had vertical takeoff fighters and bombers in those bases and on ships. Over two hundred attack planes were in the air almost at once, each carrying two thermonuclear bombs of twenty megatons. Behind them, waiting for launch,
A Life in the Future
were the big Negev Mark Four missiles, each with a single warhead, one gigaton per missile."
"A billion tons . . . my God," Buck whispered.
"They launched one hundred and seventy missiles. Almost all hit their targets," Wilma said. "They incinerated most of the Arab and Moslem world—where it counted, anyway. What they didn't destroy outright was wiped out by massive radioactive fallout.
"Most of the world decided the United States must be behind this kind of nuclear savagery. It didn't matter that Israel itself had been slaughtered. People don't reason clearly when everything about them is being torn to pieces."
"So whoever had missiles and bombers left," added Bergstrasser, his expression suddenly grim, "took dead aim at us. That should have been the end of this country. But our scientists had developed enormous power transformers capable of firing a tremendous jet of heat at incoming warheads and bombers. The result was that we were able to stop most of the attacks."
"But we were already badly hurt," Wilma said sadly. "Pockets of this country had been devastated, turned into slag. For the most part, the big cities were jungles of wreckage. You can picture the rest of it. Yet," she said, forcing a smile to her face, "there was a benefit to all this."
Buck shook his head. "How could that be? There must have been something like a nuclear winter with all that ash and smoke thrown into the atmosphere. Biological weapons must have taken hundreds of millions of lives. Farming couldn't have been much of an industry anymore. And distribution must have been nearly nil. What could be positive in such a scenario?"
"The future," Wilma said with sudden forcefulness. "You see, everybody was just about out of long-range missiles. There were no more factories and industry to replenish them. All this was history. Gone. The cupboard was empty. One of the few things that was left were the aircraft, most of which were small machines, fighters and tactical planes. They couldn't be gathered into really large units. No one was making advanced jet engines. Most electronics systems were worn out, and the ones that worked were guarded jealously and kept for special purposes."
Buck leaned back in his chair, looking from Wilma to Bergstrasser. "It sounds as if most of the world simply sank back into history. All you had left to fight with was junk your people
Buck Rogers
could piece together."
"Yes and no. A really determined effort could build ground armor for fighting. But everyone felt worn out, and a new mood seemed to affect most people. If an attack was made by air, the defenders reverted to the old kamikaze ethic. They'd ram the enemy. Some of them bailed out in time, but most didn't. That kind of determined fighting became a detriment to further mass attacks. Air duels between a few opponents became the norm. Kind of like the old medieval days of chivalry and knights in armor."
"It beats mass suicide," Buck observed.
"But it led to a static world. There was more than enough hatred to go around. People wanted to get even. The big armies began to break up into isolated fighting units, and those, in turn, became new towns and cities."
Buck laughed. "Castles and feudal barons."
"There was still one trump card to play," noted Wilma.
"Not that difficult to figure," Buck broke in. "Shipping. Plenty of ships still left—big, small, it wouldn't matter much. Odds are that most people returned to the barter system of trade."
"For the most part, yes," confirmed Bergstrasser.
"But this place"—Buck gestured to take in the gleaming metropolis that was Niagara—"doesn't seem to fit the scenario you've been describing. This all looks pretty high-tech—electronics, computers, underground vacuum railways, and all that."
"There are perhaps eight such cities in the entire country," Wilma explained. "The only way to start major power centers like this one was to bring in the best people remaining from all over the country—from anj^where in the world, for that matter. What we have in Niagara, Chicago, and a few other places are like castles in a ruined land."
"I bet that gets a lot of people upset," Buck said quickly. "The haves and the have-nots. Which means those who don't have are ticked off and would like to redistribute the goodies you're stashing here."
Bergstrasser nodded. "A bit crude, but true."
"Globally, we have world disorder. South America began to boom. So much material had been poured into Chile that when the mass fighting was over, they found themselves a real power-
A Life in the Future
house among the countries that remained. And what they have is protected in mountain redoubts and great undersea caverns."
"What happened here, in the good old U. S. of A?" Buck persisted.
"Your 'good old U. S. of A.' was history," Bergstrasser snapped. "We were just as responsible as anyone else for what happened. Much of the world died because of our weapons."
"Don't drag me into your philosophy of how and why. All I care about are the results," Buck said.
"It's a mixture of world disorder and uneasy truce," Wilma said. "Entire countries were hanging on to survival by their fingernails. Russia was a vast wasteland. The Mideast still glows at night from residual radioactivity. The lower Pacific regions— Indonesia, Malaya, Borneo, Java, New Guinea, all those places— cut themselves off from the rest of the world. No planes can land there; no ships can dock. They live in total isolation. Maybe they're right. They're making it. We've already explained what happened to New Zealand. The general attitude of the countries who came off better than most is, we've got ours and the rest of you can go to hell."
"Stay with what happened here," Buck persisted. "Like how come the name America is in the trashcan and we're now Amerigo?"
"Because someone in the council," Bergstrasser said with sudden heat, "finally got some smarts. "We allied ourselves with Central and South America. No more trade barriers. No more American ownership of the countries. No more looking down on the Latinos as second-class citizens. No more destroying native jungles. We became a single
nation from the Canadian border right on down to the tip of South America. And changing the name to honor the past, Italians and Spanish and the locals, was a stroke of genius. Overnight we were no longer the damn Yankees intruding on their lives. We rebuilt the highways. The Panama Canal was redredged. Shipping was a coastal matter, and critical goods began to flow back and forth between north and south. Frankly, I believe that move saved our hides."
"I can't believe that what you're telling me was enough to drag ourselves up from the bottom of the pit," Buck told him bluntly.
"How true," Wilma said sadly. "You're right. It wasn't, and it
Buck Rogers
still isn't. We still haven't put our own house in order."
"Would I be right in assuming Amerigo is largely a land of splintered power groups?" Buck asked.
"You've hit the nail on the head," Bergstrasser said quickly. "Amerigo, and the world as well, is a dichotomy of stark contrasts. We live our daily lives—as a nation, an5rway—in conflict, disorder, and distrust—anything but working together as a nation. Most of the country is still back in the past somewhere, yet scientific advances have also been made. We've been to the planets. There are actually space fleets out there. If we could work together, we could speed up the rebuilding of this country and much of the world tremendously."
Buck didn't hide his distaste for what he'd just heard. What they were sa3ring reminded him of how millions of people felt in the 1960s. The United States and the Soviet Union spent hundreds of billions of dollars sending men into space in unbelievably expensive rockets. They went into orbit and they walked on the moon, and when it was all over, if you asked the man on the street, "How did the Apollo program make your life better?" he'd laugh in your face.
"Save the science for later," Buck said, pushing aside the issue. "We're just starting to get back to square one. Let's get back to the Half-Breeds. Seems to me that's what this powwow was supposed to be about."
Wilma glanced at Bergstrasser, then looked directly at Buck. "How do you feel about risking your life in a duel?"
Chapter 11
You're an idiot, Rogers, you know that? Buck chastised himself. How in the name of blue blazes could you have let yourself in for this? Here you are in the twenty-fifth century, and you're on your way to fight some local hot dog who wants nothing more than to fill you full of hot lead. You don't know this cat—what's his name? Oh, yeah—Rocky Hoffman. Sounds like a pug from some rundown boxing gym. But names don't mean an3d:hing, and you know it. The whole country is going to be watching on the television circuits to see who goes down in flames. . . .
Wilma really slipped it to you. She and that slick Marcus Bergstrasser. They pump you full of historical folderol until you don't know which way is up, and then she slips you the Mickey.
Why should I risk my life in a death duel? for crying out loud. Tomorrow morning, over the North Carolina hill country. A duel at dawn, like some whacko fight of honor from the First World War. And here I am in this resurrected museum piece of a fighter—a bloody Messerschmitt, for crying out loud—while this Hoffman character has a hot late-model Mustang to take me on.
Buck shook off the foul mood that had hung with him through the night. He'd had little sleep. He found it impossible to doze while he ran through aerial maneuvers through his head, trying to remember all the little things that could make all the
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difference when you're in a death dance. Wilma Deering and that smug air marshal were gambhng that Buck was as good at the controls of an airplane as his history indicated—ace aerobatic jock, veteran combat fighter pilot, airliner captain, and all the rest of it.
Unlike Buck, Rocky Hoffman hadn't had the chance to fly hundreds of vintage planes. He lacked that kind of experience, so he might not have knowledge of the moves only those fighter pilots who lived through dozens of combats knew about. But Wilma hadn't left anything out. Hoffman came from the crazy bunch called the Half-Breeds, whose stronghold was a powerful military area in Missouri. He'd been flying since he was a kid. The Half-Breeds had only a few jet fighters, but they had a cache of planes dragged out of museums and stored in underground hangars, and they fussed over them day and night to keep them in top-notch condition. The Niagara Orgzone had done the same. They had samples of the old weapons so that they could be duplicated if it should ever prove necessary. But a German Messer-schmitt! Buck would dearly have loved a Bearcat or a Mustang, or even one of those souped-up Sea Fury fighters they flew in wild races in the old—
The old days? Those times were hundreds of years ago, but Buck had flown in such races, had fought it out on the deck around the pylons in Reno and Scottsdale with the best of the fighter gang. Mustangs, Bearcats, the Tsunami modification, even the big Lightnings with boosted Griffon engines. As hot as those races were, they weren't the stuff of which great fighter pilots are made.
The Half-Breeds, one of the most powerful guerrilla bands in the country, affected most of the other tightly-knit armed groups spread throughout Amerigo. So long as they remained free of control from any national organization, there would never be any hope that Niagara could pull the country together.
So that's how the big contest was set up. Buck cruised at 33,000 feet, the powerful Daimler-Benz engine throttled back to economy cruise, purring with the smooth power the Me-109G had been famous for. The cockpit was cramped, a porcupine pit with knobs and controls in all the wrong places. Even the cockpit canopy was something disdained by the Mustang and Thunderbolt pilots who viewed the world through a beautiful
A Life in the Future
domed plexiglass canopy with superb visibility. You looked out of the Messerschmitt through flat-paneled armored glass. The visibility was lousy, and the airplane one of the most uncomfortable he'd ever flown.
He couldn't help the smile that came unbidden to his face. A long time ago—forever, it seemed—he had spent time with Adolf Galland, who had commanded the entire fighter force of the Third Reich. Galland worked with the Americans to rebuild the German air force after the war, and he spent much time in Arizona and Nevada at the fighter training schools. There Buck had not only met the German ace who had more than a hundred kills to his credit but also had the great advantage of listening to how Galland had survived eight years of war, starting in 1937 in Spain.
"There is only one creed for the successful fighter pilot," Galland said over a drink late one night. "You fly to fight, and you fight to kill. You catch the enemy by surprise if you can, and then you ram the throttle forward and you dive at top speed, eyes bulging and your blood lusting to kill, and you do whatever it takes to defeat your opponent. That way," Galland said with a smile, "you will return to your home field to fly and fight another day"
They had talked about the merits of the fighter planes. Buck had always wanted to know why the top German aces, including Hartmann, who racked up an incredible 352 kills, refused the more modern Focke-Wulf FW-190 fighters, choosing to stay in the older, cramped, uncomfortable Messerschmitt. "Ah, the Focke-Wulf is a beautiful airplane. Its lines are superb, and it flies like a dream. The Messerschmitt? It is designed to do one thing—kill the enemy. And I do not care what anyone says. It is better fighter plane—assuming the pilots are of equal caliber—than anj^hing else in the world, including the Mustang and the Spitfire. The secret is to know what your airplane can do for you. You must become one, the man and the machine, and that is the winning combination. . . ."
Buck had never forgotten those words. When Wilma asked Buck about dueling, so abrupt and startling, Bergstrasser looking on, poker-faced and not saying a word, Buck realized there was so much more to that query than a one-on-one contest with some crazy pilot from the powerful Half-Breeds.
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"Risk my life?" he repeated her words. "It depends. Look, lady, nobody is ever more than one heartbeat away from ending his life. I imagine you'll spell out the why of all this, but I've got to say something first. I'm here, talking and breathing and in great shape
, only because you people gave me back my life. This is also my country even if you've named it after this Vespucci cat. So I owe you, and I always pay my debts. The answer is yes. So now tell me what this is all about."
Before either Wilma or Bergstrasser could reply, the door to the hologram cubicle opened. Buck turned to look at Commodore-General Killer Kane. He wore a combat flight suit with space fleet insignia. Entering the room, he was followed by President Grenvil Logan. Kane stepped to one side as Logan slowly seated himself.
"I've heard the question, and I'm gratified for your reply," Logan said quietly to Buck. "There is great risk in what we're asking you to do. Why we're asking you to accept that risk, and what it means to this country, is something I wanted you to hear from me directly."
He turned to Wilma. "Major Deering, bring up the free armed forces on the holoprojector, please."
Wilma keyed in the computer, and a glowing map of Amerigo appeared. One by one areas glowed in different colors. Buck recognized what he'd seen before—the area occupied by what the others had identified as the Half-Breeds.
President Logan pointed to the projection. "The Outlaws," he said. Another area glowed brightly. "Wyoming, please." Another spasm of color flashed across the screen.
"Altoonas." Light appeared in an area to the west of the territory of the Wyoming Gang.
"Nagras."
That one surprised Buck. Killer Kane saw his questioning look. "They're only a hundred and twenty miles from here. Wildest bunch you ever saw. They call themselves the Nagra Gang. They come from all over—blacks, whites, latinos, islanders, desert people, mixed into every kind of mongrel human you can imagine, and they're proud of it. Got a bunch of Indians as well. We keep them supplied with food, medicine and other necessities. We do not mix with them. They won't have it. They act as scouts for this city, prowling the countryside, and we keep them going. It's a great deal for both of us."
Buck Rogers- A Life in the Future Page 11