There Will Be War Volume II

by Jerry Pournelle

“That’s up to Colonel Moss. The Regiment moves when the colonel tells it to. Until he decides, they’ll just stew.”

  “And if the colonel decides not to move?”

  “They’ll do only what he tells them. They’re soldiers.”

  They lost interest in me after that and began to talk among themselves.

  “May I say something?” I said.

  “Certainly, Sergeant Oskowski,” the Mayor said.

  “Don’t you want me to tell you about troop disposition and firepower and that sort of thing?”

  “No, I don’t think that would help us much,” the Mayor said.

  “I’m glad you don’t, of course. I wouldn’t like to have to tell you. I’d feel even more like a traitor. But it seems to me that you aren’t taking the right line of defense. All you’re interested in is how the soldiers feel. And I can tell you that they feel like starting a war.

  “You’ve got to figure out a defense. I brought in a few weapons. You should be able to improvise more. But you’ll be facing five thousand trained soldiers with every kind of modern weapon. You’ll never beat them in the open.

  “The way I see it, the best thing is to attack them before they attack you. Send out a few carloads of booze and let them get themselves drunk, then go out there in the middle of the night with knives and clubs, picking up their weapons as you kill them.

  “I don’t know if it will work, but it’s the only way to save your society. I can teach you how to use their weapons and tell you how the camp is laid out. I feel like a traitor, but I’ll do it anyway. Because if you don’t attack first, your society is finished.”

  I stood there, after my speech—waiting for applause, I suppose. The council members smiled at me, softly and sadly, and finally Major Karonopolis said, “Thank you very much for your expression of loyalty, Sergeant Oskowski. But I am afraid that we can’t do any of the things you suggest. You say that we have to defend our society or they will destroy it. But you see, if we do what you suggest, we will have destroyed it ourselves.”

  I sat down, feeling at the same time like a complete fool and the only sane man in the room. The discussion moved back and forth, mostly concerning itself with whether and how soon the Regiment would attack. Occasionally one of the councilmen would ask me a question but mostly they spoke to each other, like scientists rather than politicans, illustrating their points with case histories from other societies dating back before the Greeks.

  Finally it was decided to send another delegation, to see the colonel alone this time and feel out his attitude.

  Mr. French, the man who had brought me to the council, told me that I was free to do as I wished, but that he would be happy to show me around the city if I wanted. I accepted his offer and he got a car out of the pool.

  He showed me manufacturing plants and colleges and private homes and museums, and yet somehow the tour was less interesting than I had expected. Most of the changes since last I’d seen the city had been inside of the people. The machines were there, of course, doing all of the arduous work, and the new buildings and new products. But the people considered them only necessary, not important. The buildings—in fact, the entire style of architecture—was designed to emphasize people, rather than the buildings themselves.

  Passing an athletic field, Mr. French and I started talking about track records, and I got a shock. I’d looked upon the civilians as relatively soft and weak, misjudging their pacifism as weakness. But I discovered that the current record for the mile was 2 miles, 3.8 seconds, and the hundred-yard dash was run in 6 seconds flat. Schoolboys polevaulted over 16 feet. They had given up distance javelin throwing when the throws had become so long that the wind was more of a factor than the thrower. Now they threw flat, at targets 250 feet away, almost as far as the record distance when I was young. And nearly everyone participated in one sport or another. Mr. French said that they attributed the fantastic records to control of the mind, for the people weren’t any larger or heavier muscled than before. But excellent physical condition was the rule rather than the exception, and the people in general were actually in better shape than my fellow soldiers.

  As for the colleges, they no longer issued degrees. People studied for knowledge and took courses on and off during their lives. Classes had become lecture series, and the newspapers printed lists of which lecture series were starting and who was speaking.

  Late in the afternoon, Mr. French got word by his pocket radio that the delegation to Fort Morris had returned, so we went back to the city hall to hear hear the news.

  Mr. Kolar, the man who had headed the delegation, analyzed the colonel as feeling himself caught in a dilemma.

  “He is trained to accept civilian control,” Mr. Kolar said. “To do what the civilian authorities tell him. But we have told him to become a civilian himself, and that is a command that falls outside of his frame of reference.”

  “How do you think he will decide?” Mayor Karonopolis said.

  “Right now he’s wavering between waiting to see what will happen and launching an immediate attack. He instinctively feels that we are wrong, that our society is deluding itself in thinking that there will be no more wars.”

  “Pardon me, Mr. Kolar,” I said, “but perhaps if I returned to the Fort, I could convince the troops about your society.”

  “No,” he said. “They know what you’ve done, and they think of you as a traitor. You would only start bloodshed, perhaps even tip them into action.”

  “It seems,” the Mayor said, “that we shall have to solve the colonel’s dilemma for him. Mr. Fitzgerald, the proposed plan was yours. Do you feel prepared to try to implement it?”

  “But do we have the right to manipulate them?” a Councilwoman asked.

  “Perhaps we don’t,” the Mayor said, “but in the long run it seems the only way to protect themselves. And after all, the soldiers have the avowed purpose of protecting society. Mr. Fitzgerald, what do you say?”

  A tall, bony-faced man with horn rimmed glasses stood up at the end of the table. “Yes, Mr. Mayor,” he said, “I’ll be happy to try.”

  The tall man chose two others to accompany him and they left the room.

  “You might as well stay here,” the Mayor said. “Mr. Fitzgerald has a portable radio transmitter in his coat and we’ll be able to listen.”

  We made ourselves comfortable and waited for the technicians monitoring Fitzgerald’s transmission to cut him in to the wall loudspeaker.

  “You’ll have to make a decision yourself if our plan succeeds,” the Mayor said. “You must decide whether your loyalty is to the Fort or to us.”

  “I don’t see that there’s much choice. I can’t go back.”

  “Still, this will mean for the rest of your life. Perhaps we could arrange it so that you could return to the Fort with honor.”

  “No, sir, I’m afraid that I’ve already made my choice. I think I’ll just have to learn to live here and like it.”

  “It won’t be easy. It’s a pleasant society for us, but we all grew up in it. You will miss the excitement and conflict. I doubt if you can ever entirely adjust to our mild way of life.”

  “I’ll just have to try, sir. But you seem pretty sure that you can solve the problem of the army. Can you be that sure? What’s your plan?”

  “It’s a psychological one, and you’ll hear it soon enough. Of course there’s always an area of doubt. We must wait and see, and hope.”

  We sat and sipped coffee and waited, the minutes dragging slowly by, until the loudspeaker on the wall crackled into life. It broke into the middle of a conversation between Colonel Moss and Councilman Fitzgerald.

  “Colonel, we can’t thank you enough for saving us from the plot,” Mr. Fitzgerald was saying.

  “Long experience has shown that war is human nature,” the colonel said.

  “Yet the traitors had us convinced.”

  “They would have disbanded the army, waited a few years, and then struck when you least expected it.”r />
  “We see that now, sir.”

  “The army stands ready to march, Mr. Fitzgerald.”

  “The time isn’t right yet sir. Our enemies are not prepared to attack. It will be three years at the minimum, and we don’t believe in attacking first.”

  “Yes, that is the weakness of democracy. But a noble weakness.”

  “I suppose that it’s best for you to spend those years in training?”

  “No, no,” the colonel said. “Three years of garrison duty would soften the men.”

  “Then what do you propose?”

  “We shall return to stasis. You must keep a careful watch and alert us just just before hostilities commence. We can be ready to march in an hour, if necessary, but a few days or a week’s notice is best.”

  Councilman Fitzgerald and the colonel talked for a few minutes more, completing plans for the imaginary future war against the traitors, and then the Councilman took his leave, and the radio crackled into silence.

  “I suppose that it’s unfair to us,” the Mayor said next to me.

  “You knew that they would choose to return to cold storage, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, Sergeant. Fitzgerald’s plan was predicated on their dislike of garrison duty and their faith in war as a part of human nature. It wasn’t too difficult to predict with our knowledge of psychology. Actually, Colonel Moss symbolically repeated the original decision of the army to go into stasis. Do you think that we’ve done wrong by your comrades?”

  “No, sir. I think you’ve done the best you could.”

  “We can try waking them one at a time in the future,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. But they still won’t choose civilian life.”

  And so the next day I rode a helicopter out and watched the Regiment muster on the parade grounds and march back to their cubicles. It was too far to see who was marching my squad. Corporal Ryan, I suppose. They marched back and disbanded, not into civilian life but into perpetual stasis.

  Of myself, during the years since then, there isn’t much to tell. I wandered around the country. I studied a little at a couple of colleges and tried to find a place and an interest for myself. But there wasn’t any, for I was still a soldier. I was restless and lonely and not very adjustable—an old soldier at thirty without a war to fight.

  That’s why I came back here to Fort Morris and took over maintaining the Fort. Not that a man is needed, for the machines do the work, but it seems more personal for me to care for my old comrades in arms. I check the vacuums of the barracks and ordnance buildings and other buildings and I see to it that the cubicles of my former comrades are dusted and clean, as though they might want to look out of their plastic and steel cubicles. To keep a watch for the enemy, for the war they silently await.

  I have watched myself—and listened—for news of the foe, but I have not seen him approach. Years in this time and place have convinced me that, indeed, war and violence have been winnowed out of the human heart and mind. Yet who can say that all the universe is as peaceable as Earth is now? That somewhere, sometime, there will not be beings of this world or some other, bent on doing battle, and only my silent, waiting warrior brothers to oppose them?

  As for myself, I live, and therefore daily die. And sometimes stop to look into the cubicle marked Staff Sergeant Kenneth Oskowski, Squad Leader, 2nd Platoon, Able Company, 3rd Battalion, 45th Regimental Combat Team.

  The vacant cubicle.

  Editor's Introduction to:

  POEMS

  by Edward C. Garrett, Robert Frazier, and Steve Rasnic Tern

  There is so little market for science fiction poetry that I have become known as a major publisher simply because I try to include some in each of my anthologies.

  I think that’s a shame.

  Garrett’s “Parable of the Phantom Limb” arrived not long after “Final Muster”. Events like that make me take seriously my friend Barbara Hubbard’s concerns with “synchronicity.”

  Robert Frazier and Steve Rasnic Tern are long-time contributors to my anthologies, and I always look forward to their submissions.

  PARABLE OF THE PHANTOM LIMB

  by Edward C. Garrett

  The world of course is an awful place.

  What you need is a little protection.

  Take this stick, for instance.

  It’s like another arm.

  You can reach up into trees

  or dig holes in the ground.

  You can even beat a snake senseless

  before it can give you the tongue.

  That’s right, a stick’s a useful thing.

  Why, no self-respecting entrepreneur,

  be it of shadows or pie in the sky,

  would be caught without one in his hands.

  But a stick has other uses.

  You can sharpen it on a rock

  and spear lizards in the sand.

  You can even practice hurling,

  stampede frightening sounds.

  You can poke out the lights in the eyes

  that glow in the dark. Yes sir,

  there is nothing like a stick.

  And sticks are beautiful

  don’t you think? Not right now, perhaps.

  But after awhile, after it’s chiseled,

  varnished, and carved… Gives you

  something to do that’ll make you proud,

  something to talk about when it’s raining

  outside and the fire is warm.

  Everything that’s ever happened

  can be put on a stick. You can even

  measure the sky by it’s length

  or circle the dust with squiggles

  and words. Want to know how tall you are?

  That’s right. Use a stick.

  There is no security like a stick.

  And dangerous as it is out there,

  you’d be a fool to bend over

  for a drink of well water. So tell you

  what, this being your birthday and all,

  and because you have far to go. Here—

  open your hand—is the best stick

  in the land. No charge. Just go

  and learn to use the magic wand.

  If it’s from point A to point B

  you wish to go, just put it under arm

  and rest your weight full. That’s right!

  Good! You’re getting it! Stick’s like

  a third leg or at least you’ll never know

  when you’ll need another one.

  How do you feel? Hard to hop and skip?

  Well, you’ll get used to it.

  FORBIDDEN LINES

  by Robert Frazier

  Cast by some unnamed initiates of gaming

  in a forgotten Armageddon,

  the dying thought still echoes

  through the whispering galleries

  of sentient minds,

  still castles the weak telepathic links

  in sentient kinds.

  In the bluelight spectra

  of the coming image board of years,

  it will stain us all with limb-darkening

  and forbidden lines of doubt;

  as trapped in the isolation

  tank of ourselves,

  we become both a pawn

  of red entropy, pure random, and the infinite,

  and a king frozen in check

  against the lightless enemy of intellect

  within and beyond.

  The dying thought must wait…

  stalemate.

  TWO POEMS

  by Steve Rasnic Tern

  THE NEW WEATHER

  On the New Rhine campaign—22 April 2023:

  palpable stench of fear amongst the fleshies that day

  (if only us metal guys could smell),

  anxious talk on the line, us metal guys nodding,

  sympathetic to the last, sentimental

  about those old fleshies, our brothers—

  their eyes blazed-out like soldiers’

  sinc
e war one, strained and blank,

  or so my history tapes tell me,

  jittery about “this last gift from Geneva,”

  when their government had assured them

  “the inhuman aspects not clearly established.”

  But then the wind, clearly, shifted:

  Tabun, Sarin, and Soman, metal carbonyls

  (a poetic chant, that, even from a voice box)

  just for a starter—stumbling and coughing,

  drooling, cramps, pissing in their pants,

  twisting and jerking the danse macabre

  (tapes provide cultural reference for full empathy),

  blood gases, choking gases, nerve gases,

  then a final wave of BZ for old fleshies

  they’d missed, made them crazy, shooting themselves.

  By the time they commenced tearing

  the ozone layer with their reagents,

  nothing left but us metal guys.

  * * *

  Now life’s not so bad without the fleshies

  (god bless ‘em), just racing o’er the dunes

  all day, sunning ourselves ‘neath the toxic haze.

  But this recent, manic, electrical behavior,

  this confusion in the ranks, the rumors

  (just spook tales, mind you) of a new

  ultimate weapon—I just can’t believe it!

  An acid rain?

  DIRECTIONS FOR KILLING THE AUTOMATED HOUSE

  So first we sought lobotomy on the dishwasher,

  no easy task, what with toxic steam cycle,

  laser dry, and ready-made projectiles.

  Poor Charlie bought it from a flying collander.

  The freezer was easier, not knowing his own mind.

  We laid him on his back, until he’d coughed

  quite out of ice cubes. Cruelly,

  we stuffed the toasters and mixers

  into Mother Oven, turned her high

  and insane; she self-immolated

  in the face of what she’d done.

  The electric dog we kept;

  it gets lonely in the field.

  But it was the neurotic bed, finally,

  who gave us fits. Crazed and lonely