The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Oscar did not have to wait long for action; he got it before his political, social, and cultural indoctrination courses were completed. And as the bombs dropped, he reasoned, with simian logic, that it would have been better had he and his comrades been taught how to fight, instead of being briefed on why they would be fighting, and what for. The first contact with the enemy paratroopers gave every soldier an urgent reason for fighting, but the occasion was instructive only to the survivors.

  When the newly-developed force-projector was finally issued to the ragged remains of Oscar’s company, he proved himself handy enough. It was a neat weapon, and came in two models. One was for precision-sniping, with a compact, built-in base line and radar, for night work. The other was for fire-volume, rather than accuracy. The bullets of either weapon functioned by causing a limited molecular fission at the point of impact. Personnel within a radius of a yard or so were blasted by the explosion and fried by the heat radiation. The neat thing about it was that there were no dangerous by-products to harm the troops as they closed in on their target.

  All that Oscar knew about the big stuff, the self-steering bombs, was that they reduced a city to a deep crater, rimmed with twisted junk, and lined with a hard glaze: the fusion of earth and of certain building materials. Most of the cities north of latitude forty existed only as map coordinates. This destruction did not end the war; it was merely the signal for the real business: men afoot, smoking out the invading paratroopers. The war did not start until, according to long established theory, it had been wholly lost.

  The first weeks had been tough, going in and getting them with old fashioned carbines, flame-throwers, and grenades. The new force-projector had not been issued until the advancing invaders had gone as far south as latitude 35 N. 40, on a line reaching from coast to coast.

  Until Oscar’s company got the new weapon, he had been quite too busy retreating to be lonesome. But after the first successful counterattack, in which they took an objective littered with smoking morsels—prisoners were no problem at all—Oscar counted noses. Of a company that had numbered two hundred originally, only fifty-two had gone into action that morning. Now, with its first victory chalked up, there were still fifty: and after what had been virtually a massacre of the enemy.

  The sergeant, the only sergeant—there had been no officers for weeks—was nearly as broad as he was tall. His leathery face was as elegantly-shaped as his body. A bull bitch or a female gorilla would have fainted had any of her offspring resembled Sergeant Quaddy. He did not even have a pleasing voice; the only good thing about it was that it carried, and that his enunciation was clear, as his thinking. Though his I.Q. was not high, his mind was singularly logical, and untainted by ideals.

  Once the mopping-up was over, and the fragrance of self-heating rations masked the savor of scorched enemies, Oscar said, “Sergeant, we could have murdered those slobs to the last man, weeks back, if we’d had these guns then. Most of my buddies would be here and ready for another whack at it, tomorrow.” He blinked, wiped his eyes with the back of his grimy hand. He coughed, and avoided Quaddy’s grim gaze. “Look at the model-date on this projector; it’d been invented and perfected long before the invasion. Why didn’t we get them in time?”

  “Don’t talk like a damned ape!” Quaddy growled. “With strikes, and a five-hour week, how could they be turned out fast enough? Quit beefing; you’re here, and we are winning. The enemy has no place to go; he’s got no home left. He was let down worse than we were. Now shut up—I’m recommending you for a decoration.

  “Everyone that did work overtime was printing indoctrination booklets. You big clown, you know why you’re fighting, don’t you?”

  Automatically, Oscar recited that which no amount of battle could dislodge. “We are fighting to protect the Bureaucratic way of living. We are Crusaders to spread the Light of Bureaucracy among—”

  Quaddy thrust a pack of cigarettes at him. “Stuff one of these in your face and quit beefing. I said you’d get a decoration!”

  There was a strong humanitarian movement down in the undevastated areas. The proposal was to drop propaganda leaflets to induce the invaders to surrender. Good food, good quarters, good indoctrination in Bureaucracy: social security, and an abundant life. This was squelched only when it was conclusively shown that to feed the invaders, rehabilitate them and their blasted homeland, would impose upon the entire nation an eight-hour week—and for generations to come. Actually, the few realists—civilian and military—knew that extermination was the only way to prevent another war; the enemy could not be rehabilitated except through musketry—but they dared not express themselves in any such repugnant terms. So, they terrorized the public into the necessity of exterminating the fanatic invaders.

  Despite efficient weapons, and the enemy’s insufficiency of supplies—they had enormous caches dropped during their days of victory, and many more that had been awaiting their arrival, having been planted by sympathizers—mopping up was slow work. It became all the slower, and somewhat more costly, because idealists smuggled some of the new weapons to the harassed enemy. Several idealists, nabbed by Federal police, made pre-mortem statements which boiled down to this: “It would make us a nation of barbarians, shooting them down like animals. They deserve a fighting chance.” And, “It really is not their fault. Their philosophy is splendid. It was merely perverted by their leaders. We could, if we tried, come to an understanding with them.”

  Eventually, Oscar got an acre of decorations, and a number of superficial wounds. His outfit was finally taken out of the “hunt and kill” area, and sent to the rear to recuperate, and receive replacements. Including Sergeant Quaddy, there were thirty-nine survivors of the original two hundred.

  “We’re all going to get a leave, as soon as we have another parade, face the public-relations officers and the cameramen, and get some more decorations.”

  Oscar said something obscene about decorations; in specific terms, he suggested a use for which decorations had never been intended. “And they can do the same with the cameras!”

  “Got a girl on the brain, huh?” Quaddy demanded. “Well, keep your shirt on. Our papers’ll come through, any day. And back pay.”

  Back pay did pour down, finally. However, the orders for leave were snarled up. “Take it easy, take it easy, men,” Quaddy told his outfit. “It’ll be just a few more days. Then we’ll be screened for loyalty; that won’t take long.”

  Oscar was too skeptical to wait; he went over the hill. After months in the face of the enemy, MPs were no problem. Nothing was a problem. Nothing was important but seeing Diane, to tell her that his life was his own, as far as Logan was concerned. Then, he was worried.

  Logan must, by now, be a high-ranking general, and Diane was only human. That Oscar had not heard once from Diane—not even an acknowledgement of the receipt of her suitcase—was not as ominous as it might have been. Hardly anyone ever received mail, except someone else’s; censorship and snarl-ups did it. Oscar had received announcements of the birth of eleven sons, and nine daughters, and summonses in five divorce suits; he wondered who had been getting the letters Diane had written him.

  While the MPs were no problem, the civilian population was; Oscar griped when he had to pay $3 for a pack of cigarettes.

  “Mister, don’t you know there’s a war?” the man had asked.

  Instead of indicating his conspicuous three pounds of medals, Oscar knocked the man cold with a bone-cracking punch, and moved on. The second time someone wondered if he had heard about the war, Oscar bought himself civilian clothes, stuffed his uniform into a garbage can, and continued his way south.

  He found Diane at the installation. All jobs had been frozen; no one had paid any attention when she pointed out that her work had no defense value, whereas she was qualified for service as a nurse. “Meanwhile,” she said to Oscar, pointing to a heap of papers, “there were full-page ads, crying for voluntee
rs. It seems that my being tagged as ‘laboratory worker’ jinxed everything, by making this job essential-seeming.”

  “Where’s Doctor Cromer?” he demanded, when the first impact of reunion had tapered off, and it was once more natural to realize that Diane was a woman, and not merely an idea.

  She sighed. “He was arrested.”

  “Those damned loyalty tests!”

  “Oh, no, darling! Someone exposed the infant adoption ring. That settled Doctor Cromer; not even his purpose to evolve adult chimpanzees, on a production-line basis to fight the war, did any good. He’d actually stepped up the evolution machine so that change could be made in a few hours.

  “The synthetic infants were really more highly developed than their foster parents, but that didn’t help a bit. It created a frightful problem. What to do with them.”

  “Do?”

  She shuddered. “They weren’t considered human in fact; a sort of abomination. There was a proposal to have them all gassed. Just suppose, they said, they’d grow up, looking and acting exactly like humans.”

  “That would have been bad,” Oscar said, with a double meaning that seemed to have eluded Diane entirely. “Were they gassed?”

  “No, the S.P.C.A. intervened. They got an injunction; now the other side is pleading that the injunction is illegal.”

  “Speaking of evolution,” Oscar resumed, “what happened to Eric? I was worried about him, and his chance of beating the draft—being here with you, playing up the rescue somehow or other.”

  Diane laughed happily. “Oh, darling, I’d forgotten! Of course you don’t know; you didn’t get my letters. Well, he went to enlist, the very day I told him and Doctor Cromer what you had done.”

  “The devil he did!”

  “He said that you had been diabolically cunning in volunteering. That you had put him into the position of staying here with me, to play up his heroism. It was the cleverest thing, even though you didn’t realize it at the time. Oh, you’re marvelous!”

  “Bet he became high brass overnight.”

  She shook her head and with genuine pity. “You know, I liked Eric, in spite of his being such a conceited ass.”

  “Spill it, honey, spill it! What did his I.Q. get him?”

  “Got him locked in a psychopathic ward. He told them how to win the war. Proved that he and a thousand more like him could do the job. Or, given command of a division, he could do it himself.”

  “I think he could have. Nothing I’ve been through ever scared me the way the sight of that tiger did; no human ever came within a mile of Erie’s headwork and coordination. Locking him up is just about proof that he must have been right.”

  * * * *

  They walked about the grounds. Oscar looked at each animal and reptile. Because of meat-rationing, the carnivora had been gassed—this despite the availability of sea food, which the civilian population refused to eat as a staple. They were going to have a bite to eat in the kitchen when Oscar said, “Let’s go to the Palmetto, and dance, and watch the moonlight on the water. Lord, Lord, that’s been a long time ago.”

  “Oh, that’d be fun!” Then her glow faded, and a shadow darkened her eyes. “I wonder if we really should. Oh, let’s stay home.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, Oscar; maybe I’m just dopey from letdown from all the excitement.”

  “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

  So they went.

  CHAPTER 6

  They danced at the Palmetto. They lolled on the beach. They spoke fondly of Cromer: and with kisses to sweeten every thought, it was easy for them to think well of Eric Logan. “Funny,” Oscar mused, “now that I’ve bought my life back, I’d even like to take a couple of beers with Eric; we owe him a lot. You know, when they let him out of the booby hatch, he ought to take the reverse evolving process, and get back to normal.”

  Diane sighed. “I’m afraid he couldn’t stand it.”

  “The hoarders and chisellers I met along the way home,” Oscar resumed, “made me think how the chimpanzees were a lot more human. Even a parrot that’s learned to say, Don’t You Know There’s A War is likely to think of a new one, or an old one, once in awhile.”

  It was all amusing now; the papers furnished comic relief. The press correspondents, it seemed, met only the primadonnas of the front, and never a Sergeant Quaddy.

  Oscar was thinking, the following morning, that since he was AWOL, he might as well make a job of it. “We’ll get married,” he said to Diane, “and we’ll be honeymooning until the show is over, and they’ve pardoned all the draft-dodgers. I had a lot of back pay. And on my way home, I got into a few games and won more.”

  “That’ll be wonderful, darling. All the more so, after last night; we’ll turn the animals loose, and move on.”

  But Oscar and Diane had not yet done the breakfast dishes when there were visitors: a pair of MPs.

  “Oh, good Lord,” she said, in a voice small and tight and with dismay. “Why didn’t we leave last night!”

  Oscar shrugged as he watched the pair make for the door. “I shouldn’t have taken you to the Palmetto. Either I talked too loud, or someone recognized me—the owner, it couldn’t have been anyone else—and saw a chance to collect the reward for turning a deserter. Don’t worry too much honey, they look like good Joes.”

  He knew very well they were not; there was no chance of bluffing the MPs, or talking them out of it. They had him nailed, AWOL, and not in uniform. It was likely that they counted on getting a kickback from the reward, which only a civilian could collect.

  Oscar brought this point up, casually and pleasantly. He added, “You can collect a whole hell of a lot more from me, if you are smart, and play it right. You can always tell the fellow at the Palmetto that he loused it up—and slug the spots out of him if he beefs. Or, give him a cut from what you get from me. Don’t be a jerk and spoil a good thing. What are you dopes getting out of your job except pay, and a bit of graft that’s strictly chicken?”

  This was civilian talk—the kind they really understood from rear area service. The corporal and the private exchanged glances. One, eager; one, wary. “How about the provost marshal?” the former asked his buddy.

  That exchange of questions was what Oscar had played for. He used the commando training, belatedly given, for missions in which modern arms could not be employed, because of danger to fellow users. He knocked the two heads together, and then, without pity and without anger, reduced the two to a state of coma from which they would not recover for several hours.

  “I wish,” he said, wistfully, as he eyed his prisoners, “that I had the owner of the Palmetto here. He’d look nice, this way. And he was such a friendly chap, remember? That first time. The sort of man who seems to love the whole world and all humanity. War seems to do something to people.”

  He tied and gagged his unconscious opponents. “Honey, you be packing up,” he said, “while I turn the animals loose.”

  Those that had not come within the orders for destruction of all carnivora were freaks, yet not a menace to anyone who might find them, and fancy that they would make unique pets. The loss of even a finger would enlighten the curious. Meanwhile, these creatures would find all the isolation they needed, and a congenial climate, in the Florida swamp lands. There would never be a bomb to disturb them; the country was not worth bombing. Remembering what he had seen up north, Oscar’s appraisal meant that this was truly the Lord’s country…except for civilians…

  When he had done, he went to find Diane.

  “You are sure you really want to go through with it? It won’t be easy, honey; we’ll be on the dodge. Somehow, being a deserter is considered far worse than being an idealist who favors the enemy, or a conscientious objector, or a fellow who blocks the production line. You’ll be in for something.”

  His mood sobered her. However, the gravity of h
er face enhanced the glow in her eyes as she said, “To the finish, my dear. I’ve had my fill, too. We’ll pull through—though I’d go anyway, regardless. We’d be foolish, waiting for the fine new world someone else is going to make for us, when we can make our own, now.”

  Her voice thrilled him to a new peak. “You wait a second,” he said. “We’re going to drink to that; right now. I remember a bottle Doctor Cromer kept in the lab. He liked his little nip.”

  Oscar took quite awhile. He was solemn when he returned with the bottle and glasses, and a small bottle labeled, “Bitters.”

  “Still mean it?” he asked, and at her nod, he turned slightly, saying, “Get a twist of lemon, will you? This’ll be like the old man used to toss off.”

  He put “bitters” only in one of the glasses.

  “To the finish, darling,” Diane proposed. “I died too many times, all those months, with never a letter, never a report, never anything, after my suitcase came back.”

  “So did I,” Oscar said. “But somehow, I believed. In you. Oh, I worried, too, but still, I believed. And now we won’t come back. I’ve got it all figured. It’ll be tough, but we’ll always be together.”

  “Together, darling,” she said, and they drank.

  He caught her as her eyes went out of focus, and her head wobbled. She would be out for hours; he bundled her in his arms, and carried her to the laboratory.

  The thought which now had charge of Oscar was one which, unrecognized, had lurked for a long time under the surface.

  Without fully understanding the theory of the evolutionary control, he nonetheless knew more than enough about the mechanics of it and the practice. He set the switches, and turned on the power. He got the bottles of synthetic hormones. The enormously accelerated process which Cromer had perfected would now serve the needs of the occasion.

  It was not difficult to get the unconscious girl to swallow a sufficient quantity of the compound. He set the automatic timer.

  “We know better than Eric,” he said to himself and his companion, as he carried her into the radiation cabinet in which he had evolved to collegiate standards, and to something higher: combat infantryman, first class—the insignium of which he valued far more than any of the decorations.