by Gene Wolfe
“No, sir.”
“Listen, Daws,” the captain stood up, and walking around his desk put a hand on Lonnie’s shoulder. “You have a gun mounted on that truck of yours, don’t you?”
“An eighteen millimeter launcher, sir. The autodriver controls it once I turn it on. I would have used it if I’d seen anything, sir.”
“I hope you would. Let me tell you something, Daws. If we win this fight it’s going to be because we Techs won it, and if we lose it’s going to be us who lost it.”
He seemed to be waiting for an answer, so Lonnie said, “Yes, sir.”
“Some of us think that because we’re technical specialists, and our special skills make us too valuable to be risked in combat, we’re too good to activate weapons when the need arises. I hope you know better.”
“Sir—”
“Yes?”
“It isn’t really that.”
Koppel frowned. “Isn’t really what?”
“All that about special skills. I mean, driving a truck—a truck that will mostly drive itself. It’s because the tests showed they couldn’t trust us in a fight but the public would be angry if we were deferred for that. It’s not more of us they need, it’s more of them.”
“Daws, I think you ought to have a talk with the chaplain.”
“You know it’s true, sir. They only say all that so we won’t resent the Marksmen so much, and even with all the propaganda, sometimes Supply won’t give out things they have to Marksmen when they think they can get away with it. And last month when that mechanic in the motor pool got his foot mashed when the jack slipped, the medics let a Marksman bleed to death while they treated him.”
“I am going to ask you again to talk to the chaplain, Daws. In fact, I’m going to order it. Sometime during the next three days. He’ll tell me when you’ve come.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The injustices you spoke of are lamentable—if they actually occurred, which I doubt. But the motivation for them was the quite natural superiority felt by men who have difficulty in taking human life. The psychs know what they’re doing, Daws.”
“It isn’t that either, sir.” Something in Lonnie’s throat was warning him to stop, but it was crushed by the memory of unconscious men sprawled on white gravel. “We can kill. We could kick a helpless man to death. What we can’t do—”
“That will be enough! You’re trying for a psycho discharge, aren’t you, Daws? Well, you won’t get it from me. You’re dismissed!”
Lonnie saluted, waited a moment more with the vague feeling that Koppel might have something further to say, then made an about-face and left the tent.
It was raining hard now. A dark figure carrying more than the usual quantity of clattering mess gear was waiting under the eaves of the Aid tent. Brewer, of course. As Lonnie stepped into the rain he came forward, the wind whipping his poncho. “Ready for chow?”
Lonnie accepted his own mess gear.
“You got a chewing out in there, huh?”
“Could you hear it?”
“It shows on your face, Lon. Don’t feel bad, this weather has everybody on edge—no air.”
Lonnie stared at him, feeling stupid.
“No chopper strikes because they’re afraid they might hit us instead. It’s got all the crumby Markies so jumpy they’re shooting at each other.”
When they were inside the mess tent Lonnie asked, “You think anything will happen? Maybe this is what they’ve been waiting for.”
Brewer shook his head, accepting a turkey leg from a KP server. Marksmen ate first, but the cooks, Techs themselves, held back the best pieces and biggest portions.
“There’s a lot more of them out there than there are of us,” Lonnie said.
Brewer snorted. “We could get reinforcements from Corps in six hours. Maybe less—four hours.”
To himself Lonnie wondered.
It began at two minutes after midnight. Lonnie knew, because when he hit the dirt beside his cot, he struck his watch against one of the legs and the humming little fork inside went silent forever, leaving the hands upraised like a stout man and a thin one clutching each other for reassurance.
It began with rockets and big mortars, each detonation shaking the wet ground and lighting the camp with its flash, even through the rain. Shouting platoons of Marksmen splashed down the Headquarters Company street outside his tent on their way to their positions, and somewhere someone was screaming.
Then their own radar-eyed, computer-directed artillery had ranged the incoming rounds and begun to fire back. At almost the same moment, Lonnie heard the perimeter multilaunchers go into action, and flares burst overhead sending stark blue light through every crevice in the tent. He rolled under one hanging side curtain and sprinted for a sandbagged dugout nearby. It was dark and half full of water and entirely full of men, but he wedged in somehow.
No one spoke. As each rocket came whistling down he closed his eyes and, knowing how absurd it was, tensed. The blackness, the shrieking missiles and the explosions, the hip-high water and the ragged breathing of the men pressed against him seemed to endure for hours.
Abruptly, the darkness changed to dancing yellow light in which he could see the drawn faces around him. Someone with a flashlight stood in the doorway, and a voice from the back of the dugout yelled, “Turn that thing off.”
Instead of obeying, the man with the light snapped, “Everybody outside. We need you at the tank park.”
No one moved.
A second man appeared, and the first flicked his light on him long enough to show that he was holding an automatic rifle. “Come out,” the first man said. “In a minute we’re going to spray the place.”
As they filed out a rocket struck somewhere to their left, and men threw themselves down in the mud in front of the dugout. Lonnie and several others did not, standing numbly erect in the firework glare of the flares while the soft earth trembled and shrapnel tore at the tents. The wind had died and the rain fell straight down, dripping from the rims of their helmets, washing the tops of their boots whenever they stood still.
When everyone was out—everyone, at least, who would obey the order to come out—the automatic rifleman fired a long burst through the doorway. Then, led by the man with the flashlight, with the automatic rifleman bringing up the rear, they started off.
The tank park had been a victim of its own design. Sheltered from surprise rockets or mortar strikes in a branch of the central valley, its one exit had been further narrowed by spider wire intended to defend it from infiltrating raiders. Now this exit was blocked by a combat car belly-deep in mud. Half a dozen men were already working to free it when they came up; the man with the flashlight, now seen to be a green-uniformed lieutenant not much older than Lonnie himself, waved his light toward a jumbled pile of tools. “Get it out. We have to bring the tanks into action or we don’t have a chance. When you get it going and we can get them out, you can go back to your hole.”
They worked frantically. A minim-dozer, floating on whining fans with only its thrust screws engaging the mud, leveled ruts and swept away the worst of the liquescent ooze while they drove in the suction probes of enthalpy pumps to freeze the stuff enough to give it traction. They shoved exploded aluminum mats under the combat car’s churning triangular wheel assemblies and labored to lighten it by unbolting its foam-backed ceramic armor.
With a cassette of ammunition someone had flung him from the turret hatch, Lonnie stumbled through the mud—then, suddenly, lay facedown in it half deaf, a roaring in his ears and the cassette gone. He shook his head to clear it, opening and closing his mouth; the side of his face stung as though burned.
When he stood up he found his clothing had been ripped and scorched. Around him other survivors were rising as well; at their feet those who had not lived lay—some dismembered, some apparently untouched. A crater a meter deep and three meters wide gaped between the mired combat car and his own position, showing where the rocket had struck.
&nbs
p; “Armor piercing,” someone near him said. He looked around and recognized the lieutenant who had driven them from the dugout. “Armor piercing,” the officer repeated half to himself. “Or it would have gone off higher up and gotten us all.”
“Yes,” Lonnie said.
The lieutenant looked around, noticing him. For a moment he seemed about to answer, but he shouted an order instead, to Lonnie and all the others.
Several obeyed, redoubling their efforts to free the combat car. Several merely stood staring. Two tried to help the wounded, and some others moved away from the car, the crater, and the shouting officer—moved away as inconspicuously as they could, a few walking backward, all looking for shadowed spots even darker than the rain-drenched darkness about the car.
The automatic rifleman saw one group and ran yelling toward them. They halted. Still running, the rifleman circled them until he barred their way, then—too quickly for Lonnie to see what had happened—he was down and the men he had tried to stop were jumping and stumbling across him, one carrying his rifle. The officer with the flashlight drew a pistol and fired, the shots coming so close together they sounded almost like a burst from an automatic weapon.
Lonnie was running and telling himself as he ran that it was dangerous to run, that the lieutenant with the flashlight would shoot him in the back. But by then it was too late; the tank park was somewhere behind him, and the ground beneath his pounding feet was no longer merely mud but a nightmare landscape of ditches and holes from which timbers and steel posts protruded.
Something pulled sharply and insistently at his wreck of a shirt. He stopped, turned around. There was no one there.
Something very swift passed close to his head. Stupidly, awkwardly, he got down. First to hands and knees, then prone, thinking as he did of a picnic at which he remembered lying belly-down in young grass. The thing, the bullet, had made an unvocalizable noise that was not a Voisriit BANG at all, but a sound suggesting a whip cracked very close to his ear. He thought of this as he lay in the oozing mud, and it came to him that the brief sound had in fact been hours of exposition packed into a millisecond; that it had been this compression that had made its strange rustle. It had told of Death, and he knew that he had heard and that he, who had been frightened merely by the thought of pain before—because he did not know Death—had understood. It had spoken, and the word spoken had been never. Never again, anything. Never again, even the luxury of being afraid. Never. Nothing.
He had seen his body, his own body, as it lay bloated and stinking; and much more …
His stomach was cold. He recalled being told of a fellow student at the university who had killed himself by swallowing dry ice, and thought it must have felt like that; but no, that would be flatulent as well, and he did not feel flatulent. Something splattered two meters in front, throwing up mud. The taste of brass was in his mouth.
A ditch—a trench he now realized—yawned not far to his right; he foundered toward it and rolled in.
He could stand now if he stooped. His hands touched the trench wall and felt the bulging burlap of sandbags, dripping wet. He wondered if the man who had shot at him (he was not certain whether it had been an insurgent or a Marksman) would throw a grenade. He would not see it in the darkness, he knew. He took a step forward and put his foot upon a man’s hand. It jerked away and someone groaned, the motion and sound giving the impression—gone in an instant—that he had stepped on a rabbit or a rat. He crouched and heard the bubbling of a chest wound as the man tried to breathe. His fingers groped for the wound but found instead the thick straps of a sort of harness.
“Here,” the wounded man whispered. “Here.”
“In a minute,” Lonnie said. “Let me get this off you.” Then, mostly because he found talking somehow relieved his fear, “What is it anyway?”
“Fl … flame …” A whisper.
“Never mind.” The straps were held by a central buckle. With it loosed, he could slide them away from the man’s chest. His aid kit contained a self-adhesive dressing, and when he had located the wound he spread it in place. The bubbling stopped and he could hear the wounded man draw deep, choking breaths. “I’ll get you to the aid station if I can,” Lonnie said.
Weakly the man asked, “You’re not one of our lads?”
“I guess not. U.N.” He picked the man up, then crouched again as a flight of flechettes whizzed overhead.
“We have you, you know,” the man said.
“What?” The flechettes, steel arrows like the darts men played with in bars here, had filled his mind.
“We have you. There’s thousands more of ours coming, and my own lot almost did for you by ourselves a bit ago. Too many of yours won’t fight.”
Lonnie said, “The ratio’s about the same on both sides—we know who ours are, that’s all.” He was answering with only a part of his thought, the rest concentrated on a new sound, a sound from the direction from which the flechettes had come. It was a scuffing and a breathing, the clinking of a hundred buckles and buttons against the fiberglass stocks of weapons, the husky voices of automatic rifle bolts as nervous men checked their loading by touch, then checked again. The squish of a thousand boots in mud.
“You think they can do that? Tell one lad has it and another doesn’t?” The wounded man sounded genuinely curious, but there was a touch of scorn in his voice.
“Well, they examine the person and go by probabilities. They’re very thorough.”
“They did it to you?”
Lonnie nodded, but he was not thinking of the examination, the cold, long-wired sensors gummed to his skin. He said, “I was worrying about my mice. All the time I was answering the questions and looking at the holograph projections and everything, it was kind of in the back of my mind—you know, whether my mother would take care of them right while I was gone.”
“Mice?” the wounded man asked, and then, “Here now, what’re you doin’?”
“Fancy mice, with little rosettes of fur on them, and waltzing mice. I bred them.” He had put the wounded man down and was running his fingers over the mechanism of the flamer the man had carried. “I remembered them just now, and I haven’t thought about them for months. Now I think maybe I’d like to take them up again, if I get back. You know a lot of progress in medicine has come from studying the genetics of mice.” The flamer seemed simple: two valves already opened, tubes leading to a sort of gun like the nozzle of a gasoline pump.
“Dirty job, I should think, cleaning up after them.”
Lonnie said, “If you don’t clean their cages, they die.” Propping the flamer against the dripping wall of the trench, he backed into the harness and pulled the straps over his shoulders.
The blade of the wounded man’s knife had been blackened, but the ground edge flashed in the faint light, and Lonnie threw up his arm in time to block the blow and wrench the knife from the man’s weak fingers. “If you do something like that again,” he said softly, “I’m going to pull off that patch I put on your chest.”
After that he stood, his eyes just higher than the top of the trench, ignoring the man. He did not have to wait long.
The insurgents came raggedly but by the hundreds, firing as they advanced. He raised himself to his full height, glancing for some reason at his watch as he straightened up. The hands still stood at two minutes past midnight, unmoving, and that he felt must be correct. It was a new day.
His gouts of orange flame, hot as molten steel, held the straggling lines back until the three tanks came; and when they did he vaulted out of the trench and jogged forward with them, keeping twenty meters ahead until the canisters on his back were as empty and light as cardboard.
MEMORIAL DAY
How I Lost the Second World Way and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion
1 April, 1938
Dear Editor:
As a subscriber of some years standing—ever since taking up residence in Britain, in point of fact—I have often noted with pleasure that in addition to dealin
g with the details of the various All New and Logical, Original Games designed by your readers, you have sometimes welcomed to your columns vignettes of city and rural life, and especially those having to do with games. Thus I hope that an account of a gamesing adventure which lately befell me, and which enabled me to rub elbows (as it were) not only with Mr. W. L. S. Churchill—the man who, as you will doubtless know, was dismissed from the position of First Lord of the Admiralty during the Great War for his sponsorship of the ill-fated Dardanelles Expedition, and is thus a person of particular interest to all those of us who (like myself) are concerned with Military Boardgames—but also with no less a celebrity than the present Reichschancellor of Germany, Herr Adolf Hitler.
All this, as you will already have guessed, took place in connection with the great Bath Exposition; but before I begin my account of the extraordinary events there (events observed—or so I flatter myself—by few from as advantageous a position as was mine), I must explain, at least in generalities (for the details are exceedingly complex) the game of World War, as conceived by my friend Lansbury and myself. Like many others we employ a large world map as our board; we have found it convenient to mount this with wallpaper paste upon a sheet of deal four feet by six, and to shellac the surface; laid flat upon a commodious table in my study this serves us admirably. The nations siding with each combatant are determined by the casting of lots; and naval, land, and air units of all sorts are represented symbolically by tacks with heads of various colors; but in determining the nature of these units we have introduced a new principle—one not found, or so we believe, in any other game. It is that either contestant may at any time propose a new form of ship, firearm, or other weapon; if he shall urge its probability (not necessarily its utility, please note—if it prove not useful the loss is his only) with sufficient force to convince his opponent, he is allowed to convert such of his units as he desires to the new mode, and to have the exclusive use of it for three moves, after which his opponent may convert as well if he so chooses. Thus a player of World War, as we conceive it, must excel not only in the strategic faculty, but in inventive and argumentative facility as well.