General Bannister sat behind a battered mahogany desk that looked like something out of the twenties. Actually it was out of the twenties, since this wasn’t a general’s office. The guards pushed Harry into an oak and leather swivel chair.
“All right,” Bannister said. “Let’s make this quick. Tell me about that.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder but refused to turn to look.
“Why are there guards pulling me around? What have I done?” Harry asked. “And where are my clothes…”
“Cut the crap,” Bannister said. “You were found unconscious in the Pentagon courtyard in the dead of night. You and that. Now where’d you come from, and no shit about Mars. Jayzeus, man, you’ve got the whole government out of its mind. You bring that—” the general still carefully avoided looking out the window—”into Washington without being detected and set it down in the Pentagon courtyard! You’ve got some explaining to do, son.”
“Yeah.” Oh Christ, what do I say? Why did I come here? “Where do I start?”
“With who you are and where it came from.”
“My name’s Harry, and I don’t know where it came from.”
“But you can operate it.” It wasn’t a question. “How?”
“I don’t know that either. I don’t remember.” He thought about it. The machine had done what he thought at it—he tried. He sent out a picture of the ship lifting from the ground. Nothing happened.
Bannister inspected his fingernails as he fought for self control. “What do you want, Harry?” he asked reasonably. The pleasant tone obviously cost him.
Good question, Harry thought. What did he want? The hangover to go away. Peace and quiet. Money. Hey…
The door burst open. A Navy Admiral and a hard-eyed civilian stamped in, followed by so many people they couldn’t all fit in the room. There were loud voices in the corridor.
“All right, Bannister, we found you,” the admiral growled. “Tried to hide him, didn’t you? Just because you were working late last night doesn’t mean you own that ship!”
“It flies,” Bannister protested. “That makes it Air Force.”
“The Navy flies too,” the admiral said.
“You have both missed the point,” the civilian interrupted. He had a voice like a corpse, flat, atonal, and he spoke so softly that you’d think you couldn’t hear him, but he was heard. When he spoke, everyone in the room was silent. “That object is obviously of foreign make. Therefore it belongs to us. Not to the services.”
“Crap!” General Bannister exploded. “Horse puckey!” shouted the admiral. Both faced the civilian with determined looks. “What makes you think it’s foreign?” Bannister demanded.
“It employs technology well beyond that of any known science. We cannot open the doors. We cannot chip away any of the hull for analysis, or understand the monopole effect it exhibits. Thus I conclude it was not constructed on earth, and it is therefore foreign.” There was no triumph in the voice; it merely stated facts, coldly, with precision.
“Yeah, I thought of that,” Bannister growled. “That makes it outer space. And that’s Air Force.”
“Navy too,” the admiral said.
“What about NASA?” an air force captain asked.
Bannister and the admiral both swivelled toward the junior man. “Get him out of here!” the general yelled. “Fuck off!” the admiral added.
“Outer space is nevertheless foreign,” the corpse voice said. “Thus I will have to ask you gentlemen to leave the room, or to release this man to me. Come along, sir,” he told Harry.
“I’ll be damned,” Bannister growled. “Sergeant, block that door!”
“Get my marines!” the Admiral snapped.
Harry tried to shrink down into the seat. What had he got himself into? The military people were bad enough, but that civilian—CIA?—terrified him. Harry could imagine being taken into a windowless room and staying there until he had a long beard. Did the CIA operate that way? Logan didn’t know, but that man looked like he did.
“Stop it!” Harry yelled. Everyone turned to face him. Even the civilian. “I don’t belong to any of you! Neither does my ship! It’s mine, and I’ll decide who I talk to about it.” He willed the ship to come to life but nothing happened. Nothing, and he needed it…
Did he have to be in the seat? No, the doors had closed last night…
“Stick with us, Harry. We’ll take care of you,” General Bannister said soothingly. The admiral moved into place with him, a solid show of military strength. The civilian stared at them coldly.
“Sure,” said Harry. “I’m with you, General. You asked me what I want. I want some coffee. A pot of coffee and a bottle of brandy.” Harry held his aching head in both hands. “A big bottle of brandy, you understand.”
“Get the coffee.” “Brandy?” “He’s nuts.” “A wino.” “So he’s a drunk, what’s that?” They all talked at once.
“Will you get me what I asked for?” Harry looked at Bannister.
“Brandy?”
“Yes.” Harry tried to look like a drunk in need of a shot. It wasn’t hard. He was a drunk in need of a shot.
“And you’ll tell me how…”
“No brandy, no talkee.”
Bannister nodded. “Sergant, get that man what he wants. And move.”
“But sir, in the Pentagon…”
“Goddamit, the Secretary of the Navy keeps brandy,” the admiral said. “Chief, get up there and scrounge me some…”
A minute later a marine came in with a bottle of Courvoisier. The admiral muttered. “Now we have to wait for the goddam coffee.”
Harry felt great. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d felt better. He drained the last of his fourth cup and looked at the assembly of people, uniformed and civilian. The coffee had brought him full awake, and there was a warm feeling inside him. The office was still jammed, and although somebody had quieted those out in the corridor Logan knew they were still there. No way out.
“Very well, sir,” the cold-eyed civilian said. “You’ve had your drink. Now perhaps you’ll be good enough to give us some explanations?”
“Sure. Just take me to the ship.”
The civilian laughed politely. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. “Surely you’re not so drunk as that. In any event I assure you we aren’t.”
“Yeah.” Harry stood with an effort. It was harder to walk to the window than he’d thought it would be. Shouldn’t have had the last one, he thought. But I feel so damn good! Just who do these jokers think they are?
The window was closed and it wasn’t obvious how to open it. Maybe it didn’t open at all. Harry gulped hard, stood back from the window, and called his ship.
There was a crash and the saucer protruded several feet into the office. Two burly marines, rifles at ready, leaped in front of their admiral with a do or die look. An air policeman ran screaming out into the corridor. General Bannister put his hand on his pistol.
Harry had time to see that the wreckage of the wall had not come plummeting down, but fell, slowly, to the floor. The saucer waited for him.
It was faced the wrong way. He couldn’t see the air lock at all. And while the marines menaced the ship with their rifles, the civilian sighed, took out a pair of handcuffs, and shouldered his way toward Harry.
Time to go, Harry decided. But how? There was only one way. He leaped at the ship, fell onto the flat part astern, and thought it away from the Pentagon. There was a sudden rush, and Harry was a thousand feet above a toy city of Washington. He looked down, gulped hard, gulped again, but it did no good. He lost the contents of his stomach. Adrenalin flowed. To his horror, Harry was getting cold sober!
BALTIMORE SUN:
FREAK ROBBERY OF
LIQUOR STORE
MANIAC BATTERS DOWN
WALLS TO STEAL BOOZE!
VANCOUVER SUN:
RCMP IN CONFUSION
DAWSON TIMBER HEIR
DEMANDS ACTION
AMERICAN ENGINEER
ACCUSED OF SAUCER
THEFT
Dawson: Wealthy timber heir David McClellan insisted he will take his case to Ottawa if the Royal Canadian Mounted Police will not give him satisfaction. McClellan,exhausted from a trek through the northern bush country, could not be reached for comment, but it is reliably reported that he has asked the Mounties to track down and recover a stolen flying saucer.
TOPEKA STAR:
POLICE HOLD
ROBBERY SUSPECT
REPEAT OF BALTIMORE
LIQUOR STORE BURGLARY
SUSPECT HELD—PLOT
SUSPECTED
Topeka, Kansas: Police are holding George Hemdon, liquor store manager, who was found with the contents of the store’s cash register in a park near RADCLIFFE’S FLASK AND BOTTLE. Hemdon, 29, was employed as the chief clerk and manager in the store, and was found dead drunk two blocks from the wrecked building. Hemdon told police a wild story of a flying saucer which battered down the rear wall of the store, and explained that he had rescued the night’s receipts from the invading saucer—
A prize ten litre flask of Napoleon brandy was also taken and has not been recovered. Store owners say the rare brandy is almost two hundred years old.
LOS ANGELES TIMES:
BEL AIRE MILLIONAIRE
ESCAPES DEATH
ONE-IN-A-MILLION
ACCIDENT
Millionaire playboy Larry Van Cott was nearly killed today when an empty ten litre brandy bottle fell onto his patio from a great height. Van Cott was in the swimming pool only a yard from the point of impact, and was cut by glass flying from the over-sized bottle which totally shattered. FAA officials are investigating.
“Harry Logan, stop messing around with that junk and Get A Job! And no more of these mysterious trips either! You came home drunk!”
“Yes, dear.” Couldn’t she leave him alone? Ever? She had the thousand, wasn’t that enough?
He hadn’t dared tell her what really happened. He’d been barely sober enough to hide the saucer out in the arroyo. He’d been so clever, hiding his liquor in the ship where Ruth couldn’t find it …
And now the ship wouldn’t open the doors for him! “You took all my money. Give me five bucks, please, Ruth. Please.”
“No! You’d just walk down to the liquor store! I know you, Harry Logan!” She stomped off.
Harry held his aching head. The liquor store was five miles away. The ship only worked when he was drunk. And he didn’t have any money…
There was a sound of crunching gravel. A car was coming up the long drive from the highway. Harry looked out to see Air Force blue and froze. Good Lord, they’d traced him!
I give up, Harry thought. He went outside as the car drove up. General Bannister climbed out of the back seat of the sedan. There were two majors with him, silver wings gleaming on their chests. Each of them held a bottle of Christian Brothers brandy, and the general was staggering…
Editor's Introduction to:
’CASTER
by Eric Vinicoff
The Vietnam War was traumatic in ways that previous wars had never been, because it was brought home to our living rooms each evening. The United States lost few engagements, and never lost a battle. We were never defeated in the field.
Instead, we were defeated at home, by an enemy we could not fight.
The memory of defeat stays with us yet. I recently read an essay by a highly intelligent young lady. The essay concerned the works of Robert Heinlein; but in the course of her review, she said, “The last war [Vietnam] looked more like WWI’s man-killing trenches, in which an entire generation was devastated. Read the poets of the era; Robert Graves is still alive.”
This is a popular view of Vietnam, almost universally accepted without challenge or argument. The truth, though, is a bit different.
According to the Statistical Abstract, traffic deaths (for the total population) hover at about 50,000 a year, and suicides have risen from about 14,000 in 1960 to 20,000 in 1980.[1]
In 1960, there were 11.9 million males ages 15—24; 105.2 per 100,000 died by violence in that year, for a total of 12,518 dead in accidents, suicides, and homicides. By 1980 the number of males in that group had grown to 21.4 million, and the death by violence rate had risen to 138.3 per 100,000, so that a total of 29,596 young males died by violence in 1980.
Just under 50,000 died in the entire Vietnam War: about one year’s traffic fatalities. Of course the casualties happened to young men, rather than the population as a whole; on the other hand, the war was not particularly bloody (for Americans) in its early years. Battle deaths in 1961-1964 were negligible (except to those killed): a total of 267 for all four years. Compare this to the 12,000 per year who died of accidents and suicides in that same period.
By 1965, though, battle deaths had reached 1,369, and the number rose steadily until it peaked at 14,589 in 1968. At that time we had 500,000 soldiers in Southeast Asia, so that the death rate among young men in Vietnam was about 27 times that of the population as a whole; definitely frightening for those involved. On the other hand, the war did no more than double the death rate among young men as a class, even in that peak year. In 1968, young men had about equal chances of being killed by being in Southeast Asia, or while driving on the highways in the United States.
By 1969, battle deaths had fallen to 9,414. This is a large number, but by that time, the civilian violent death rate had risen to 130 per hundred thousand, so that nearly 24,000 young men died in the United States that year. After 1969 the battle deaths fell off rapidly; civilian accidental and homicide death rates continued to rise.
Thus: if the War “devastated a generation”, then we continue to devastate each generation through accidental deaths; and if the Vietnam War served no useful purpose—and perhaps, given that we eventually abandoned those we had sworn to protect, it did not—neither do the accidental deaths and suicides.
The war certainly had a terrible effect; but in part that was due to the way it was reported at the time.
Moreover, we can dispel once and for all the myth that the Vietnam War was lost because it wasn’t winnable. By 1970 it was essentially “won” in the sense that the indigenous Southern Viet Cong had ceased to exist. From that moment on, the war was waged entirely by invaders from the North.[2]
Even so, Vietnam did not fall to infiltrators and irregulars. Despite continuous infiltrations from the North, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam continued to hold the country, and in many places life became something like normal.
In 1972 (a year in which the US lost 300 troops in battle deaths, as compared to about 25,000 young males killed in accidents in the United States) the North Vietnam regulars invaded the South; they were beaten back with heavy losses by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam assisted by the US. US assistance was primarily air cavalry and anti-tank air support, plus a great deal of material. By that time we weren’t involved much in the “internal war”, but were assisting the South in enforcing at least some of the provisions of the Geneva agreements.
Vietnam fell in 1975, and it fell to four army corps of regulars, employing more armor than the Wehrmacht sent into France in 1940.[3]
When the North invaded in 1975, the Democratic Congress of the US refused any assistance to South Vietnam. After spending billions on the war, our military aid to South Vietnam was cut to $700 million. By 1974, South Vietnam soldiers were reduced to two hand grenades per man, and there was a drastic cut in ammunition supplies. Tactical communications were cut in half, and a quarter of the Vietnamese air force was grounded. More than a third of their tanks were idled, and bandages and surgical dressings were to be washed and reused.
According to Lawrence O’Brien, these cuts were made just as US analysts had concluded from an analysis of the Yom Kippur War of 1973 that supply-expenditure estimates for modern air-land battles had to be drastically increased.
South Vietnam ran short of supplies, and the nation fell. The Northern forces who swept into Saigon were no m
ore “liberators” or even guerrillas than were the Wehrmacht units which claimed to be “liberating” the Sudetendeutschen of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Ukraine. The story of the boat people, re-education camps, etc., is sufficiently well known that I needn’t tell it.[4]
This may have been, as some have put it, “a senseless foreign adventure that did us as a nation no good.” Still, we should at least be clear about what did happen over there, and phrases like “devastated a generation” applied to casualties which at their peak barely exceeded the casualties due to accidents do little to help our understanding; nor is it useful to continue the myth that our Armed Forces failed us.
The truth is that the nation lost its will. The United States withdrew, the dominoes fell, and the blood baths began. It is no good our telling ourselves anything different.[5]
The conflict between the soldiers who must fight, and the newspeople who tell the story, is ancient. Soldiers hold most correspondents in contempt, and indeed many in Vietnam seemed contemptible, satisfied to get their stories from each other in the Caravelle bar, and so eager for “balance” that they gave equal time to a common murderer and an exhausted allied officer.
Some merely lied. To this day few know that the notorious “tiger cages” of South Vietnam were above-ground structures with bars in place of a ceiling. Three feet above the bars was a corrugated metal roof. The intent of the design was humane: by having a gap be-tween ceiling and roof, ventilation is much increased. The famous photograph of the prisoner in the “tiger cage” was taken by a man who climbed to the top of the wall and hunched himself between the iron barred ceiling and the roof above.
True, some correspondents have been adopted by the military. Ernie Pyle and Maggie Higgins come to mind. Both went where the action was, and both were killed trying to find out the truth. If Marguerite Higgins had lived, the story of South East Asia might have been different.
There Will Be War Volume II Page 10