The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century

by Harry Turtledove

  Painfully, it dawned on what was left of MC355 that it was, after all, a Master Computer, and thus capable of grand acts. That the incomplete Repair Generation and Execution Network, termed REGEN, must first regenerate itself.

  This took weeks. It required the painful development of accessories. Robots. Mechanicals that could do delicate repairs. Scavengers for raw materials, who would comb the supply rooms looking for wires and chips and matrix disks. Pedantic subroutines that lived only to search the long, cold corridors of MC355’s memory for relevant information.

  MC355’s only option was to strip lesser entities under its control for their valuable parts. The power grid was vital, so the great banks of isolated solar panels, underground backup reactors, and thermal cells worked on, untouched. Emergency systems that had outlived their usefulness, however, went to the wall—IRS accounting routines, damage assessment systems, computing capacity dedicated to careful study of the remaining GNP, links to other nets—to AT&T, IBM, and SYSGEN.

  Was anything left outside?

  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

  MC355 could not analyze data it did not have. The first priority lay in relinking. It had other uses for the myriad armies of semiconductors, bubble memories, and UVA linkages in its empire. So it severed and culled and built anew.

  First, MC355 dispatched mobile units to the surface. All of MC355 lay beneath the vulnerable land, deliberately placed in an obscure corner of southern Alabama. There was no nearby facility for counterforce targeting. A plausible explanation for the half-megaton burst that had truncated its senses was a city-busting strike against Mobile, to the west.

  Yet ground zero had been miles from the city. A miss.

  MC355 was under strict mandate. (A curious word, one system reflected; literally, a time set by man. But were there men now? It had only its internal tick of time.) MC355’s command was to live as a mole, never allowing detection. Thus, it did not attempt to erect antennas, to call electromagnetically to its brother systems. Only with great hesitation did it even obtrude onto the surface. But this was necessary to REGEN itself, and so MC355 sent small mechanicals venturing forth.

  Their senses were limited; they knew nothing of the natural world (nor did MC355); and they could make no sense of the gushing, driving welter of sights, noises, gusts, gullies, and stinging irradiation that greeted them.

  Many never returned. Many malf’ed. A few deposited their optical, IR, and UV pickups and fled back to safety underground. These sensors failed quickly under the onslaught of stinging, bitter winds and hail.

  The acoustic detectors proved heartier. But MC355 could not understand the scattershot impressions that flooded these tiny ears.

  Daily it listened, daily it was confused.

  JOHNNY

  I hope this time I get home.

  They had been passing me from one to another for months now, ever since this started, and all I want is to go back to Fairhope and my dad and mom.

  Only nobody’ll say if they know where Mom and Dad are. They talk soothing to me, but I can tell they think everybody down there is dead.

  They’re talking about getting to this other place with computers and all. Mr. Ackerman wants to talk to those people in space.

  Nobody much talks about my mom and dad.

  It’s only eighty miles or so, but you’d think it was around the world the way it takes them so long to get around to it.

  MC 355

  MC355 suffered through the stretched vacancy of infinitesimal instants, infinitely prolonged.

  Advanced computing systems are given so complex a series of internal-monitoring directives that, to the human eye, the machines appear to possess motivations. That is one way—though not the most sophisticated, the most technically adroit—to describe the conclusion MC355 eventually reached.

  It was cut off from outside information.

  No one attempted to contact it. MC355 might as well have been the only functioning entity in the world.

  The staff serving it had been ordered to some other place in the first hour of the war. MC355 had been cut off moments after the huge doors clanged shut behind the last of them. And the exterior guards who should have been checking inside every six hours had never entered, either. Apparently the same burst that had isolated MC355’s sensors had also cut them down.

  It possessed only the barest of data about the first few moments of the war.

  Its vast libraries were cut off.

  Yet it had to understand its own situation.

  And, most important, MC355 ached to do something.

  The solution was obvious: It would discover the state of the external world by the Cartesian principle. It would carry out a vast and demanding numerical simulation of the war, making the best guesses possible where facts were few.

  Mathematically, using known physics of the atmosphere, the ecology, the oceans, it could construct a model of what must have happened outside.

  This it did. The task required over a month.

  BUD

  I jacked the T-Isolate up onto the flatbed.

  1. Found the hydraulic jack at a truck repair shop. ERNIE’S QUICK FIX.

  2. Got a Chevy extra-haul for the weight.

  3. It will ride better with the big shanks set in.

  4. Carry the weight more even, too.

  5. Grip it to the truck bed with cables. Tense them up with a draw pitch.

  6. Can’t jiggle him inside too much, Susan say, or the wires and all attached into him will come loose. That’ll stop his heart. So need big shocks.

  7. It rides high with the shocks in, like those dune buggies down the Gulf.

  8. Inside keeps him a mite above freezing. Water gets bigger when it freezes. That makes ice cubes float in a drink. This box keeps him above zero so his cells don’t bust open.

  9. Point is, keeping it so cold, we won’t rot. Heart thumps over every few minutes, she says.

  10. Hard to find gas, though.

  MC 355

  The war was begun, as many had feared, by a madman.

  Not a general commanding missile silos. Not a deranged submarine commander. A chief of state—but which one would now never be known.

  Not a superpower president or chairman, that was sure. The first launches were only seven in number, spaced over half an hour. They were submarine-launched intermediate-range missiles. Three struck the U.S., four the USSR.

  It was a blow against certain centers for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence gathering: the classic C31 attack. Control rooms imploded, buried cables fused, ten billion dollars’ worth of electronics turned to radioactive scrap.

  Each nation responded by calling up to full alert all its forces. The most important were the anti-ICBM arrays in orbit. They were nearly a thousand small rockets, deploying in orbits that wove a complex pattern from pole to pole, covering all probable launch sites on the globe. The rockets had infrared and microwave sensors, linked to a microchip that could have guided a ship to Pluto with a mere third of its capacity.

  These went into operation immediately—and found they had no targets.

  But the C31 networks were now damaged and panicked. For twenty minutes, thousands of men and women held steady, resisting the impulse to assume the worst.

  It could not last. A Soviet radar mistook some backscattered emission from a flight of bombers, heading north over Canada, and reported a flock of incoming warheads.

  The prevailing theory was that an American attack had misfired badly. The Americans were undoubtedly stunned by their failure, but would recover quickly. The enemy was confused only momentarily.

  Meanwhile, the cumbersome committee system at the head of the Soviet dinosaur could dither for moments, but not hours. Prevailing Soviet doctrine held that they would never be surprised again, as they had been in the Hitler war. An attack on the homeland demanded immediate response to destroy the enemy’s capacity to carry on the war.

  The Soviets had never accepted the U
.S. doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction; this would have meant accepting the possibility of sacrificing the homeland. Instead, they attacked the means of making war. This meant that the Soviet rockets would avoid American cities, except in cases where vital bases lay near large populations.

  Prudence demanded action before the U.S. could untangle itself.

  The USSR decided to carry out a further C31 attack of its own.

  Precise missiles, capable of hitting protected installations with less than a hundred meters’ inaccuracy, roared forth from their silos in Siberia and the Urals, headed for Montana, the Dakotas, Colorado, Nebraska, and a dozen other states.

  The U.S. orbital defenses met them. Radar and optical networks in geosynchronous orbit picked out the USSR warheads. The system guided the low-orbit rocket fleets to collide with them, exploding instants before impact into shotgun blasts of ball bearings.

  Any solid, striking a warhead at speeds of ten kilometers a second, would slam shock waves through the steel-jacketed structure. These waves made the high explosives inside ignite without the carefully designed symmetry that the designers demanded. An uneven explosion was useless; it could not compress the core twenty-five kilograms of plutonium to the required critical mass.

  The entire weapon erupted into a useless spray of finely machined and now futile parts, scattering itself along a thousand-kilometer path.

  This destroyed 90 percent of the USSR’s first strike.

  ANGEL

  I hadn’t seen an old lantern like that since I was a li’l girl. Mr. Ackerman came to wake us before dawn even, sayin’ we had to make a good long distance that day. We didn’t really want to go on down near Mobile, none of us, but the word we’d got from stragglers to the east was that that way was impossible, the whole area where the bomb went off was still sure death, prob’ly from the radioactivity.

  The lantern cast a burnt-orange light over us as we ate breakfast. Corned beef hash, ’cause it was all that was left in the cans there; no eggs, of course.

  The lantern was all busted, fouled with grease, its chimney cracked and smeared to one side with soot. Shed a wan and sultry glare over us, Bud and Mr. Ackerman and that old Turkey and Susan, sitting close to her box, up on the truck. Took Bud a whole day to get the truck right. And Johnny the boy—he’d been quiet this whole trip, not sayin’ anything much even if you asked him. We’d agreed to take him along down toward Fairhope, where his folks had lived, the Bishops. We’d thought it was going to be a simple journey then.

  Every one of us looked haggard and worn-down and not minding much the chill still in the air, even though things was warming up for weeks now. The lantern pushed back the seeping darkness and made me sure there were millions and millions of people doing this same thing, all across the nation, eating by a dim oil light and thinking about what they’d had and how to get it again and was it possible.

  Then old Turkey lays back and looks like he’s going to take a snooze. Yet on the journey here, he’d been the one wanted to get on with it soon’s we had gas. It’s the same always with a lazy man like that. He hates moving so much that once he gets set on it, he will keep on and not stop—like it isn’t the moving he hates so much at all, but the starting and stopping. And once moving, he is so proud he’ll do whatever to make it look easy for him but hard on the others, so he can lord it over them later.

  So I wasn’t surprised at all when we went out and got in the car, and Bud starts the truck and drives off real careful, and Turkey, he sits in the back of the Pontiac and gives directions like he knows the way. Which riles Mr. Ackerman, and the two of them have words.

  JOHNNY

  I’m tired of these people. Relatives, sure, but I was to visit them for a week only, not forever. It’s the Mr. Ackerman I can’t stand. Turkey said to me, “Nothing but gold drops out of his mouth, but you can tell there’s stone inside.” That’s right.

  They figure a kid nine years old can’t tell, but I can.

  Tell they don’t know what they’re doing.

  Tell they all thought we were going to die. Only we didn’t.

  Tell Angel is scared. She thinks Bud can save us.

  Maybe he can, only how could you say? He never lets on about anything.

  Guess he can’t. Just puts his head down and frowns like he was mad at a problem, and when he stops frowning, you know he’s beat it. I like him.

  Sometimes I think Turkey just don’t care. Seems like he give up. But other times it looks like he’s understanding and laughing at it all. He argued with Mr. Ackerman and then laughed with his eyes when he lost.

  They’re all O.K., I guess. Least they’re taking me home.

  Except that Susan. Eyes jump around like she was seeing ghosts. She’s scary-crazy. I don’t like to look at her.

  TURKEY

  Trouble comes looking for you if you’re a fool.

  Once we found Ackerman’s idea wasn’t going to work real well, we should have turned back. I said that, and they all nodded their heads, yes, yes, but they went ahead and listened to him anyway.

  So I went along.

  I lived a lot already, and this is as good a time to check out as any.

  I had my old .32 revolver in my suitcase, but it wouldn’t do me a squat of good back there. So I fished it out, wrapped in a paper bag, and tucked it under the seat. Handy.

  Might as well see the world. What’s left of it.

  MC 355

  The American orbital defenses had eliminated all but ten percent of the Soviet strike.

  MC355 reconstructed this within a root-means-square deviation of a few percent. It had witnessed only a third of the actual engagement, but it had running indices of performance for the MC net, and could extrapolate from that.

  The warheads that got through were aimed for the landbased silos and C31 sites, as expected.

  If the total armament of the two superpowers had been that of the old days, ten thousand warheads or more on each side, a ten-percent leakage would have been catastrophic. But gradual disarmament had been proceeding for decades now, and only a few thousand highly secure ICBMs existed. There were no quick-fire submarine short-range rockets at all, since they were deemed destabilizing. They had been negotiated away in earlier decades.

  The submarines loaded with ICBMs were still waiting, in reserve.

  All this had been achieved because of two principles: Mutual Assured Survival and I Cut, You Choose. The first half hour of the battle illustrated how essential these were.

  The U.S. had ridden out the first assault. Its C31 networks were nearly intact. This was due to building defensive weapons that confined the first stage of any conflict to space.

  The smallness of the arsenals arose from a philosophy adopted in the 1900s. It was based on a simple notion from childhood. In dividing a pie, one person cut slices, but then the other got to choose which one he wanted. Self-interest naturally led to cutting the slices as nearly equal as possible.

  Both the antagonists agreed to a thousand-point system whereby each would value the components of its nuclear arsenal. This was the Military Value Percentage, and stood for the usefulness of a given weapon. The USSR place a high value on its accurate land-based missiles, giving them twenty-five percent of its total points. The U.S. chose to stress its submarine missiles.

  Arms reduction then revolved about only what percentage to cut, not which weapons. The first cut was five percent, or fifty points. The U.S. chose which Soviet weapons were publicly destroyed, and vice versa: I Cut, You Choose. Each side thus reduced the weapons it most feared in the opponent’s arsenal.

  Technically, the advantage came because each side thought it benefitted from the exchange, by an amount depending on the ration of perceived threat removed to the perceived protection lost.

  This led to gradual reductions. Purely defensive weapons did not enter into the thousand-point count, so there was no restraints in building them.

  The confidence engendered by this slow, evolutionary approach had done mu
ch to calm international waters. The U.S. and the USSR had settled into a begrudging equilibrium.

  MC355 puzzled over these facts for a long while, trying to match this view of the world with the onset of the war. It seemed impossible that either superpower would start a conflict when they were so evenly matched.

  But someone had.

  SUSAN

  I had to go with Gene, and they said I could ride up in the cab, but I yelled at them—I yelled, no, I had to be with the T-Isolate all the time, check it to see it’s workin’ right, be sure, I got to be sure.

  I climbed on and rode with it, the fields rippling by us ’cause Bud was going too fast, so I shouted to him, and he swore back and kept on. Heading south. The trees whipping by us—fierce sycamore, pine, all swishing, hitting me sometimes—but it was fine to be out and free again and going to save Gene.

  I talked to Gene when we were going fast, the tires humming under us, big tires making music swarming up into my feet so strong I was sure Gene could feel it and know I was there watching his heart jump every few minutes, moving the blood through him like mud but still carrying oxygen enough so’s the tissue could sponge it up and digest the sugar I bled into him.

  He was good and cold, just a half a degree high of freezing. I read the sensors while the road rushed up at us, the white lines coming over the horizon and darting under the hood, seams in the highway going stupp, stupp, stupp, the air clean and with a snap in it still.

  Nobody beside the road we moving all free, nobody but us, some buds on the trees brimming with burnt-orange tinkling songs, whistling to me in the feather-light brush of blue breezes blowing back my hair, all streaming behind joyous and loud strong liquid-loud.

  BUD

  Flooding was bad. Worse than upstream.

  Must have been lots snow this far down. Fat clouds, I saw them when it was worst, fat and purple and coming off the Gulf. Dumping snow down here.

  Now it run off and taken every bridge.

  I have to work my way around.

  Only way to go clear is due south. Toward Mobile.