“I can hardly believe it,” Merriweather murmured. The hatch came loose and they swung it quickly aside. “It doesn’t seem possible. Good old Earth.”
“Hey, listen,” Leon gasped, as he clambered down to the ground. “Somebody get the camera.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Barton said, laughing.
“Get it!” Stone yelled.
“Yes, get it,” Merriweather said. “Like we planned, if we ever got back. A historic record, for the schoolbooks.”
Vecchi rummaged around among the debris. “It’s sort of banged up,” he said. He held up the dented camera.
“Maybe it’ll work anyhow,” Parkhurst said, panting with exertion as he followed Leon outside. “How’re we going to take all six of us? Somebody has to snap the shutter.”
“I’ll set it for time,” Stone said, taking the camera and adjusting the knobs. “Everybody line up.” He pushed a button, and joined the others.
The six bearded, tattered men stood by their smashed ship, as the camera ticked. They gazed across the green countryside, awed and suddenly silent. They glanced at each other, eyes bright.
“We’re back!” Stone shouted. “We’re back!”
War Game
In his office at the Terran Import Bureau of Standards, the tall man gathered up the morning’s memos from their wire basket, and, seating himself at his desk, arranged them for reading. He put on his iris lenses, lit a cigarette.
“Good morning,” the first memo said in its tinny, chattery voice, as Wiseman ran his thumb along the line of pasted tape. Staring off through the open window at the parking lot, he listened to it idly. “Say, look, what’s wrong with you people down there? We sent that lot of”—a pause as the speaker, the sales manager of a chain of New York department stores, found his records—“those Ganymedean toys. You realize we have to get them approved in time for the autumn buying plan, so we can get them stocked for Christmas.” Grumbling, the sales manager concluded, “War games are going to be an important item again this year. We intend to buy big.”
Wiseman ran his thumb down to the speaker’s name and title.
“Joe Hauck,” the memo-voice chattered. “Appeley’s Children’s.”
To himself, Wiseman said, “Ah.” He put down the memo, got a blank and prepared to replay. And then he said, half-aloud, “Yes, what about that lot of Ganymedean toys?”
It seemed like a long time that the testing labs had been on them. At least two weeks.
Of course, any Ganymedean products got special attention these days; the Moons had, during the last year, gotten beyond their usual state of economic greed and had begun—according to intelligence circles—mulling overt military action against competitive interest, of which the Inner Three planets could be called the foremost element. But so far nothing had shown up. Exports remained of adequate quality, with no special jokers, no toxic paint to be licked off, no capsules of bacteria.
And yet....
Any group of people as inventive as the Ganymedeans could be expected to show creativity in whatever field they entered. Subversion would be tackled like any other venture—with imagination and a flair for wit.
Wiseman got to his feet and left his office, in the direction of the separate building in which the testing labs operated.
Surrounded by half-disassembled consumers’ products, Pinario looked up to see his boss, Leon Wiseman, shutting the final door of the lab.
“I’m glad you came down,” Pinario said, although actually he was stalling; he knew that he was at least five days behind in his work, and this session was going to mean trouble. “Better put on a prophylaxis suit—don’t want to take risks.” He spoke pleasantly, but Wiseman’s expression remained dour.
“I’m here about those inner-citadel-storming shock troops at six dollars a set,” Wiseman said, strolling among the stacks of many-sized unopened products waiting to be tested and released.
“Oh, that set of Ganymedean toy soldiers,” Pinario said with relief. His conscience was clear on that item; every tester in the labs knew the special instructions handed down by the Cheyenne Government on the Dangers of Contamination from Culture Particles Hostile to Innocent Urban Populations, a typically muddy ukase from officialdom. He could always—legitimately—fall back and cite the number of that directive. “I’ve got them off by themselves,” he said, walking over to accompany Wiseman, “due to the special danger involved.”
“Let’s have a look,” Wiseman said. “Do you believe there’s anything in this caution, or is it more paranoia about ‘alien milieux’?”
Pinario said, “It’s justified, especially where children’s artifacts are concerned.”
A few hand-signals, and a slab of wall exposed a side room.
Propped up in the center was a sight that caused Wiseman to halt. A plastic life-size dummy of a child, perhaps five years in appearance, wearing ordinary clothes, sat surrounded by toys. At this moment, the dummy was saying, “I’m tired of that. Do something else.” It paused a short time, and then repeated, “I’m tired of that. Do something else.”
The toys on the floor, triggered to respond to oral instructions, gave up their various occupations, and started afresh.
“It saves on labor costs,” Pinario explained. “This is a crop of junk that’s got an entire repertoire to go through, before the buyer has his money’s worth. If we stuck around to keep them active, we’d be in here all the time.”
Directly before the dummy was the group of Ganymedean soldiers, plus the citadel which they had been built to storm. They had been sneaking up on it in an elaborate pattern, but, at the dummy’s utterance, they had halted. Now they were regrouping.
“You’re getting this all on tape?” Wiseman asked.
“Oh, yes,” Pinario said.
The model soldiers stood approximately six inches high, made from the almost indestructible thermoplastic compounds that the Ganymedean manufacturers were famous for. Their uniforms were synthetic, a hodgepodge of various military costumes from the Moons and nearby planets. The citadel itself, a block of ominous dark metal-like stuff, resembled a legendary fort; peepholes dotted its upper surfaces, a drawbridge had been drawn up out of sight, and from the top turret a gaudy flag waved.
With a whistling pop, the citadel fired a projectile at its attackers. The projectile exploded in a cloud of harmless smoke and noise, among a cluster of soldiers.
“It fights back,” Wiseman observed.
“But ultimately it loses,” Pinario said. “It has to. Psychologically speaking, it symbolizes the external reality. The dozen soldiers, of course, represent to the child his own efforts to cope. By participating in the storming of the citadel, the child undergoes a sense of adequacy in dealing with the harsh world. Eventually he prevails, but only after a painstaking period of effort and patience.” He added, “Anyhow, that’s what the instruction booklet says.” He handed Wiseman the booklet.
Glancing over the booklet, Wiseman asked, “And their pattern of assault varies each time?”
“We’ve had it running for eight days now. The same pattern hasn’t cropped up twice. Well, you’ve got quite a few units involved.”
The soldiers were sneaking around, gradually nearing the citadel. On the walls, a number of monitoring devices appeared and began tracking the soldiers. Utilizing other toys being tested, the soldiers concealed themselves.
“They can incorporate accidental configurations of terrain,” Pinario explained. “They’re object-tropic; when they see, for example, a dollhouse here for testing, they climb into it like mice. They’ll be all through it.” To prove his point, he picked up a large toy spaceship manufactured by a Uranian company; shaking it, he spilled two soldiers from it.
“How many times do they take the citadel,” Wiseman asked, “on a percentage basis?”
“So far, they’ve been successful one out of nine tries. There’s an adjustment in the back of the citadel. You can set it for a higher yield of successful tries.”
; He threaded a path through the advancing soldiers; Wiseman accompanied him, and they bent down to inspect the citadel.
“This is actually the power supply,” Pinario said. “Cunning. Also, the instructions to the soldiers emanate from it. High-frequency transmission, from a shot-box.”
Opening the back of the citadel, he showed his boss the container of shot.
Each shot was an instruction iota. For an assault pattern, the shot were tossed up, vibrated, allowed to settle in a new sequence. Randomness was thereby achieved. But since there was a finite number of shot, there had to be a finite number of patterns.
“We’re trying them all,” Pinario said.
“And there’s no way to speed it up?”
“It’ll just have to take time. It may run through a thousand patterns and then—”
“The next one,” Wiseman finished, “may have them make a ninety-degree turn and start firing at the nearest human being.”
Pinario said somberly, “Or worse. There’re a good deal of ergs in that power pack. It’s made to put out for five years. But if it all went into something simultaneously—”
“Keep testing,” Wiseman said.
They looked at each other and then at the citadel. The soldiers had by now almost reached it. Suddenly one wall of the citadel flapped down, a gun-muzzle appeared, and the soldiers had been flattened.
“I never saw that before,” Pinario murmured.
For a moment nothing stirred. And then the lab’s child-dummy, seated among its toys, said, “I’m tired of that. Do something else.”
With a tremor of uneasiness, the two men watched the soldiers pick themselves up and regroup.
Two days later, Wiseman’s superior, a heavy-set, short, angry man with popping eyes, appeared in his office. “Listen,” Fowler said, “you get those damn toys out of testing. I’ll give you until tomorrow.” He started back out, but Wiseman stopped him.
“This is too serious,” he said. “Come down to the lab and I’ll show you.”
Arguing all the way, Fowler accompanied him to the lab. “You have no concept of the capital some of these firms have invested in this stuff!” he was saying as they entered. “For every product you’ve got represented here, there’s a ship or a warehouse full on Luna, waiting for official clearance so it can come in!”
Pinario was nowhere in sight. So Wiseman used his key, by-passing the hand-signals that opened up the testing room.
There, surrounded by toys, sat the dummy that the lab men had built. Around it the numerous toys went through their cycles. The racket made Fowler wince.
“This is the item in particular,” Wiseman said, bending down by the citadel. A soldier was in the process of squirming on his belly toward it. “As you can see, there are a dozen soldiers. Given that many, and the energy available to them, plus the complex instruction data—”
Fowler interrupted, “I see only eleven.”
“One’s probably hiding,” Wiseman said.
From behind them, a voice said, “No, he’s right.” Pinario, a rigid expression on his face, appeared. “I’ve been having a search made. One is gone.”
The three men were silent.
“Maybe the citadel destroyed him,” Wiseman finally suggested.
Pinario said, “There’s a law of matter dealing with that. If it ‘destroyed’ him—what did it do with the remains?”
“Possibly converted him into energy,” Fowler said, examining the citadel and the remaining soldiers.
“We did something ingenious,” Pinario said, “when we realized that a soldier was gone. We weighed the remaining eleven plus the citadel. Their combined weight is exactly equal to that of the original set—the original dozen soldiers and the citadel. So he’s in there somewhere.” He pointed at the citadel, which at the moment was pinpointing the soldiers advancing toward it.
Studying the citadel, Wiseman had a deep intuitive feeling. It had changed. It was, in some manner, different.
“Run your tapes,” Wiseman said.
“What?” asked Pinario, and then he flushed. “Of course.” Going to the child-dummy, he shut it off, opened it, and removed the drum of video recording tape. Shakily, he carried it to the projector.
They sat watching the recording sequences flash by: one assault after another, until the three of them were bleary-eyed. The soldiers advanced, retreated, were fired on, picked themselves up, advanced again…
“Stop the transport,” Wiseman said suddenly.
The last sequence was re-run.
A soldier moved steadily toward the base of the citadel. A missile, fired at him, exploded and for a time obscured him. Meanwhile, the other eleven soldiers scurried in a wild attempt to mount the walls. The soldier emerged from the cloud of dust and continued. He reached the wall. A section slid back.
The soldier, blending with the dingy wall of the citadel, used the end of his rifle as a screwdriver to remove his head, then one arm, then both legs. The disassembled pieces were passed into the aperture of the citadel. When only the arm and rifle remained, that, too, crawled into the citadel, worming blindly, and vanished. The aperture slid out of existence.
After a long time, Fowler said in a hoarse voice, “The presumption by the parent would be that the child had lost or destroyed one of the soldiers. Gradually the set would dwindle—with the child getting the blame.”
Pinario said, “What do you recommend?”
“Keep it in action,” Fowler said, with a nod from Wiseman. “Let it work out its cycle. But don’t leave it alone.”
“I’ll have somebody in the room with it from now on,” Pinario agreed.
“Better yet, stay with it yourself,” Fowler said.
To himself, Wiseman thought: Maybe we all better stay with it. At least two of us, Pinario and myself.
I wonder what it did with the pieces, he thought.
What did it make?
By the end of the week, the citadel had absorbed four more of the soldiers.
Watching it through a monitor, Wiseman could see in it no visible change. Naturally. The growth would be strictly internal, down out of sight.
On and on the eternal assaults, the soldiers wriggling up, the citadel firing in defense. Meanwhile, he had before him a new series of Ganymedean products. More recent children’s toys to be inspected.
“Now what?” he asked himself.
The first was an apparently simple item: a cowboy costume from the ancient American West. At least, so it was described. But he paid only cursory attention to the brochure: the hell with what the Ganymedeans had to say about it.
Opening the box, he laid out the costume. The fabric had a gray, amorphous quality. What a miserably bad job, he thought. It only vaguely resembled a cowboy suit; the lines seemed unformed, hesitant. And the material stretched out of shape as he handled it. He found that he had pulled an entire section of it into a pocket that hung down.
“I don’t get it,” he said to Pinario. “This won’t sell.”
“Put it on,” Pinario said. “You’ll see.”
With effort, Wiseman managed to squeeze himself into the suit. “Is it safe?” he asked.
“Yes,” Pinario said. “I had it on earlier. This is a more benign idea. But it could be effective. To start it into action, you fantasize.”
“Along what lines?”
“Any lines.”
The suit made Wiseman think of cowboys, and so he imagined to himself that he was back at the ranch, trudging along the gravel road by the field in which black-faced sheep munched hay with that odd, rapid grinding motion of their lower jaws. He had stopped at the fence—barbed wire and occasional upright posts—and watched the sheep. Then, without warning, the sheep lined up and headed off, in the direction of a shaded hillside beyond his range of vision.
He saw trees, cypress growing against the skyline. A chicken hawk, far up, flapped its wings in a pumping action … as if, he thought, it’s filling itself with more air, to rise higher. The hawk glided energetically
off, then sailed at a leisurely pace. Wiseman looked for a sign of its prey. Nothing but the dry mid-summer fields munched flat by the sheep. Frequent grasshoppers. And, on the road itself, a toad. The toad had burrowed into the loose dirt; only its top part was visible.
As he bent down, trying to get up enough courage to touch the warty top of the toad’s head, a man’s voice said nearby him, “How do you like it?”
“Fine,” Wiseman said. He took a deep breath of the dry grass smell; he filled his lungs. “Hey, how do you tell a female toad from a male toad? By the spots, or what?”
“Why?” asked the man, standing behind him slightly out of sight.
“I’ve got a toad here.”
“Just for the record,” the man said, “can I ask you a couple of questions?”
“Sure,” Wiseman said.
“How old are you?”
That was easy. “Ten years and four months,” he said, with pride.
“Where exactly are you, at this moment?”
“Out in the country, Mr. Gaylord’s ranch, where my dad takes me and my mother every weekend when we can.”
“Turn around and look at me,” the man said. “And tell me if you know me.”
With reluctance, he turned from the half-buried toad to look. He saw an adult with a thin face and a long, somewhat irregular nose. “You’re the man who delivers the butane gas,” he said. “For the butane company.” He glanced around, and sure enough, there was the truck, parked by the butane gate. “My dad says butane is expensive, but there’s no other—”
The man broke in, “Just for the sake of curiosity, what’s the name of the butane company?”
“It’s right on the truck,” Wiseman said, reading the large painted letters. “Pinario Butane Distributors, Petaluma, California. You’re Mr. Pinario.”
“Would you be willing to swear that you’re ten years old, standing in a field near Petaluma, California?” Mr. Pinario asked.
“Sure.” He could see, beyond the field, a range of wooded hills. Now he wanted to investigate them; he was tired of standing around gabbing. “I’ll see you,” he said, starting off. “I have to go get some hiking done.”
The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories Page 23