There Will Be War Volume II

by Jerry Pournelle

  “It’s 2516,” I said finally. “You boys have had a nice three-hundred-year nap.”

  I got the effect I was aiming for. They gasped, almost in unison. Then they started to buzz, guessing among themselves what was up, until I told them to knock it off. Around us other squads were forming up, and platoons, and companies, and battalions, and finally, if you could see it all as one unit, the entire Regimental Combat Team. Dust rose into the midmorning air and orders were barked and men scratched and belched and shuffled into lines. The lieutenant came over.

  “Any news, sir?” I said.

  “Nothing, Sergeant,” he said. “Your squad all right?”

  “All present and accounted for, sir. Nobody skipped into town last night I guess.”

  We both chuckled at the hairy old joke about the soldier slipping out after stasis check and coming back a doddering old man the next morning. He would have been a hell of an old man this time, after 300 years.

  The lieutenant inspected my squad, then sent us off to the mess hall for breakfast. I double-timed the boys over, getting the kinks out, and we filed in and went through the line.

  The cooks were civilians. A soldier’s job, after all, is to fight. Not to cook or clean up or any of the other menial jobs they used to have soldiers do, but to stick to his trade. Civilians do those things.

  Civilians—We don’t dislike them and we don’t love them. They’re another kind of people. Peace lovers, family men, businessmen. Day-to-day people/who live life in any dull, boring way that it comes. They aren’t interested in excitement, in proving themselves under fire and learning the final truth that you can only learn in combat. They just want to live. In a way they’re sane and we’re crazy. But we are what we are.

  So we fight their wars. After the war is over we have a big party and celebrate. And that time the civilians start being glad that we’re going back into stasis soon. We’re not particularly delicate about our pleasures. We take women where we find them, and of course, they’re often somebody else’s woman. We get drunk and we raise hell and then the civilians hate our guts and they’re glad when we go back into deep-freeze. But a few minor indignities are worth the service we perform of fighting their wars for them.

  By the next time they’ve forgotten how much they hated us, or else they are a whole new bunch of civilians. They’re glad we’re coming back out to fight their wars. They feed us a real good breakfast that first muster-day morning out of deep-freeze.

  This is as good a time as any to mention that of course it’s not really deep-freeze. It’s a combination of temperature and electricity and intravenous drugs and radiation, all wrapped into one package. Which doesn’t matter in the least. You stand in the cubicle, and it feels like going to sleep very fast; and when you wake up, no matter how much later, it’s like tomorrow. But in another way it’s not like tomorrow. You’re vaguely aware, in stasis, of the time going by. Not bored, not restless, just vaguely aware. The years roll by and the world changes around you. They keep you dusted, and they keep all of the buildings in vacuum, and the world changes around you. Then someone flips Colonel Moss’s switch, and we come out to fight their wars. To fight because it’s our job and because that’s the one thing that we all love, we slightly crazy soldiers who could never adjust to humdrum peacetime lives.

  During that fine civilian-cooked breakfast, eggs and ham and flapjacks and preserves and juice and toasted muffins and coffee, I talked to the two new men.

  From Bill Chesnut, the sniper, I could learn little. He’d come into the outfit only a couple of years after we went back into stasis in 2198. He had a pretty typical story. He was a wild kid, always getting into trouble and when he was nineteen he killed a man in a street fight. It wasn’t particularly Chesnut’s fault, or the other man’s either, for that matter, but he was tried and sentenced to 30 years in the penitentiary. Then they offered to let him join the army instead. He jumped at the chance.

  A lot of men come in that way, and in the army it’s never held against them. The army, nowadays, is about the only remaining place for a man with a combative nature.

  Anyway, Chesnut enlisted and went through basic training, a year of being taught the tricks of the trade by veterans too old to be worth cold storage. Chesnut even liked training, which is no snap, better than he liked civilian life. That’s the best sign of the making of a soldier and I knew that I had a man who would pull his weight.

  Charles LaBonte, the new corpsman, was a different matter. His trouble was restlessness rather than wanting to fight, but it made him unfit for civilian life no less. Born in 2291, he’d found the world a dull place. Adventure was dead; the world was calm and uneventful. From the time that he got out of school until he was thirty, he wandered around, trying to find a place where he fitted in. In 2322 he enlisted in the army, figuring it as the only place where there might be some excitement.

  “It was a stainless steel world out there,” he said. “Everything was worked out and nothing ever happened. No wars, no revolutions, no big changes. Ever since the Afro-Asian war, the people kept anything interesting from happening.”

  “Sounds pretty bad,” I said.

  “It was. One year after another, everything the same. People just moved along on the same level; never sad, never happy, never excited.”

  “Well, they must not be getting along so well now,” I said. “If they were they wouldn’t have called us out.”

  “That’s right. Besides, it’s been nearly two hundred years since I came in. Lord, think of that! Two hundred years. Everybody I knew is dead. My family is long gone. I feel alone in the world.”

  “We’re your family now,” I said. I could remember when I felt the same way, after the first time in stasis, just a kid of twenty and suddenly twenty-three years younger than my old friends. Even so, my friends had at least still been alive. LeBonte’s were dust by now.

  The bugle blew assembly and we came out of the mess hall and walked back to the parade ground and formed up with the rest of Able Company. The regiment drew up in a long line, like on parade, facing a platform that had been set up near the center of the field. On the platform were Colonel Moss, the C.O., a couple of generals probably down from division or corps, two or three light colonels and four civilians dressed in limp gray and brown and pastel-colored clothes that I took to be the current civilian style.

  Colonel Moss introduced one of the civilians to us, a Mr. Karonopolis, the Mayor of the nearby city of Linkhorn. From Colonel Moss’s first words I detected a tension of some sort. He made the introduction in almost insultingly few words, biting off each syllable as if it were bitter. Then he stepped back, very stiff and soldierly, and stood in a ramrod sort of parade rest. Mr. Karonopolis took over the microphone. “Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen,” he said. Nobody moved of course.

  “On behalf of the local and federal government, the civil population, and of myself I wish to make you welcome to the year 2516,” he said. “We of the twenty-sixth century feel that we know you men, even though you do not yet know us. In school we have studied your brave exploits of the past.”

  So he continued. It was all very kind and pleasant, but we had heard the same things, or variations of them, every time we had come out of stasis. He didn’t say anything we didn’t know until he began to describe the events since we went into cold storage.

  He told of a world of social, scientific and philosophic progress, of cultural and intellectual advances and internation accord. The world he described ran smoothly. Nations were at peace with nations, individuals with other individuals. It was a world that had no need for an army—even a stasis one. He was leading up all through the speech to what he said next, and yet the idea was so difficult to grasp that when he finally said it in plain words it was as though he had dropped a bomb on us.

  He told us that we were to be decommissioned and returned to civilian status.

  I think he expected us to cheer. He was a civilian, and had no understanding of soldiers’ minds.<
br />
  A murmuring grew in the ranks, and I was a part of the murmuring, arguing to myself the impossibility of returning to a civilian world, a strange and incomprehensible civilian world 300 years more advanced than the last one I had seen, returning from war and excitement and the only trade I knew or wanted to know to a humdrum civilian world made of foam rubber and stainless steel.

  The colonel stood on the platform in the blazing sun, his face a mask. The music tried to soothe us, soft and calm. And the murmuring grew louder.

  A soldier stood out of the ranks in the next company, a tommygunner like myself, waving his weapon in the air. “Like hell!” he shouted. “Like hell I’ll become a civilian. What do you think I am? You’re crazy!”

  His sergeant ordered the tommygunner back into ranks but the order lacked the conviction that any order needs. So the man stood and shouted at the civilian and the murmur grew, like angry bees.

  “Who do you think you’re talking to?” a voice shouted.

  “Damn fool civilian,” another roared.

  “You can’t do away with war,” my lieutenant said, half to himself. “There’ll always be wars. It’s human nature.”

  On the platform the civilians registered first surprise and then dismay. In their lifetimes none of them had ever met a soldier. How could they be expected to understand them? And probably they had never heard any of the soldierly language that was pouring at them now.

  They put their heads together in a conference, and then Mr. Karonopolis stepped over to the colonel and spoke to him. The Old Man stood at his rigid parade rest and only shook his head negatively. The Mayor spoke again, more strongly it seemed to me. This time the colonel ignored him entirely.

  They tried whatever they had tried on Colonel Moss on the two generals from higher headquarters but got no better response. Then another of the civilians stepped to the microphone.

  “Gentlemen, please,” he said. “There is no value in this. What is the good of an army without wars? Surely you don’t want to remain in stasis forever, waiting for a war that will never come?”

  The murmur grew to a roar.

  “We don’t intend to thrust you naked into a hostile world,” he said. “You will be retained into any field you want. Or you can simply live, not work at all. You can have homes and wives and cars. You can enjoy life now—you’ve earned enjoyment.”

  Then his voice was blotted out by the angry buzzing of the men. Even the men of my own squad were shouting. “We’re soldiers—we don’t want to be anything else,” Ryan yelled.

  “You can’t abolish wars,”Filippe screamed.

  “Go to hell!”

  “Shut up you bastard!”

  And standing there at attention I tried to picture myself as a civilian, living out the rest of my life, forty or fifty years probably, for I was only twenty-eight, living a humdrum day-to-day existence with no excitement or danger but only the routine of a civilian’s sort life.

  And yet the civilians were right. What use was there for an army if there were to be no more wars? Could they really have abolished wars?

  The civilians on the platform huddled together in conference again and then the Mayor approached the colonel and this time the colonel nodded his head to whatever the Mayor said.

  I will say this for the civilians—they were facing soldiers for the first time in their lives, and they were obviously surprised by the reaction they’d gotten but through all of the shouting and swearing they had shown no sign of fear. Perhaps it was the bravery of men facing something that they don’t know is dangerous. In any case, after the colonel had agreed to whatever they had asked they left the platform and climbed into a ground car—a smooth-skinned bug without any wheels or visible motor and drove away.

  The colonel approached the microphone, and the roar dropped to complete silence in a second and we could hear the soothing music again.

  “Fall the troops into the barracks,” the colonel said. “Set up for garrison duty.”

  So we marched across the parade grounds to the barracks, 5,000 strong. Somewhere up the line, someone started cadence count and the entire regiment joined in; 5,000 bass voices drowning out the music of the P.A. system. And somehow it did not sound like the last time we would march.

  The barracks were just as we had left them, not even dusty after 300 years in a vacuum. I had the men break out their barracks bags and set up their gear. By the time that was done, the word came down to choose three men for overnight pass. I let Filippe and Ryan and Orozco go, while the rest of us settled down to spend the afternoon at poker and talk.

  After a while, Johnson and Chesnut and I went over to the P.X., which the civilians had opened, and joined the beer drinkers in the slop chute. The main topic of conversation, naturally, centered around what the civilians had said and what was going to happen.

  “They’re nuts if they think they’ve done away with wars,” Sergeant Mangini from Charlie Company said. “Wars are human nature. You can’t change that.”

  “They say there haven’t been any in three hundred years,” I reminded him.

  “So what? There’ve been other times when there weren’t any wars for a long time. But they always ended. They’ll need us again.”

  “Maybe we’ll have to start our own war,” Sergeant Olivier from H.Q. Company said. “If these civilians have gotten so soft, maybe we’ll have to wake them up a little. For the good of the species, you know?”

  “You’re darn right,” Chesnut said. “We’ll just have to start our own war.”

  “You’re getting pretty salty for a guy just out of Basic,” I said.

  “Look, Sarge, if they send us back to civilian life, you know where I’ll be? In prison. They’ll make me serve out my sentence.”

  “We’ll all be in prison soon enough,” Mangini said. “We’re not suited for civilian life—not one of us. We’ll be too wild and violent for them, and they’ll end by putting us all behind bars.”

  “They said they’d reeducate us,” I defended.

  “They can’t reeducate us any more than they can teach civilians how to be soldiers,” Mangini said. “A man’s born a soldier, he dies a soldier. He just can’t be taught to live like a civilian.”

  After a while, I drifted back to the barracks. I found orders from the captain saying that Tuesday (I have no idea what day it actually was—we always call muster day Monday) we were to start regular training schedule.

  After supper I came back to the barracks and lay on my bunk trying to think the thing through. All over the barracks the men were talking about the demobilization, and soon they had something new to talk about. Long before any self-respecting soldier would have come in off an overnight pass, the men who had been in town started drifting in. Everyone started talking about what they’d seen that had driven them back so early.

  At ten, Filippi and Orozco came into the barracks.

  “C’mere, Filippi,” I said.

  He ambled over and sat on the side of my bunk.

  “It’s a hell of a world out there. Sergeant,” he said.

  “Let’s hear about it,” Tsaid.

  “It’s not that it looks so very different. Their cars and choppers and airplanes are about the same—a little smoother and quieter, but you can still tell which is which. Mostly the whole thing is just quieter. And the city seems smaller. More parks, more trees, everything moving slow and easy like in a small town.”

  “What about the people?”

  “They’ve changed. They’re relaxed and easygoing. They don’t seem to ever hurry, and they don’t have a care in the world. Everyone just walks around talking and taking it easy. And you can’t get them mad or start a fight to save yourself.”

  “You tried to start a fight?”

  “Sure. All of us tried. But no one could get the civilians riled up. Say something to them, and they’d smile and pat you on the back and talk about it like it was a specimen under a microscope. And if a soldier just walked up and took a swing, a couple of civilians
would hold him and talk to him until he didn’t want to fight anymore.”

  “Maybe they’re just a bunch of cowards. That doesn’t prove anything.”

  “Well, the women are different too, Sarge. That ought to prove something. You try to pick one up, and she doesn’t get mad or scared. She just smiles and says she’d rather not. Or, if she’s willing, it’s nothing like you expect. If she feels like making love, she does it and then says thank you and just goes away. No trauma, no love, no crying and wailing about virtue.”

  Filippi went off to tell the rest of the men about what he’d seen in Linkhorn, and I lay on my sack and thought about what he’d said. I’d been brought up to believe that people don’t change, but if what Filippi had said was true it looked like maybe I was taught wrong. I made up my mind to take a pass into town Tuesday night and see for myself.

  The next morning we woke to the same soothing music, but we breakfasted and started training, trying to drown out the music with our shouts. We marched and practiced squad tactics and ran the infiltration and obstacle courses and fired our weapons. About three in the afternoon, we knocked off and another three men from each squad were allowed to go on pass. I put on my Class A summer uniform, still well pressed and dapper from 300 years earlier, and took the bus into Linkhorn.

  As Filippi had said, the city seemed to have shrunk. Not in area exactly, and perhaps not even in population, but the buildings were lower and there were more trees and grass and parks. The machines were less noticeable. Not that there weren’t any, but you just didn’t notice them. The cars were sleek and mild colored, moving smoothly along without wheels or motor sounds, the copters rose on silent rotors, everything seemed muted. The moving sidewalks—the pride of Linkhorn the last time I’d been there—were gone, and the citizens seemed to actually enjoy walking, strolling arm-in-arm, talking and laughing together. The town was so peaceful that it made me nervous.

  Of course I had to try to start a fight. I walked into a civilian going full tilt and knocked him to the pavement.