* * * *
He began to fear he might not die. His wounds had lost their numbness and had begun to throb. He heard the sounds of guns and then of boots. Why wouldn’t they leave him alone? Surely the war was over. He had nothing to do with them. One side or another had won—so why couldn’t they leave him alone? The boots were coming closer, and he sensed that they would not leave him alone this time. A sudden rage mingled with his pain, and he knew he could lie there no longer. For the next few seconds he was completely and utterly insane. He pulled the pin on the grenade which had been pressing against his side and threw it blindly in the direction of the sound of the boots. With an instinct gained in two years of intense training, he rolled to his belly and began to fire at the blurred forms below him. He did not stop firing even when the blurred shapes ceased to move. He did not stop firing until his rifle clicked on an empty chamber. Only then did he learn that the blurred shapes were Russian soldiers.
* * * *
They healed his wounds. His shoulder would always be a little stiff, but his leg healed nicely, leaving him without a trace of a limp. There was a jagged scar on his jaw, but they did wonders with plastic surgery these days and unless you knew it was there, you would hardly notice it. They put him through a two-month reconditioning school, but it didn’t take, of course. They gave him ticker tape parades, medals, and the keys to all the major cities. They warned him about the psychological dangers of being a survivor. They gave him case histories of other survivors—grim little anecdotes involving suicide, insanity, and various mental aberrations.
And then they turned him loose.
For a while he enjoyed the fruits of victory. Whatever he wanted he could have for the asking. Girls flocked around him, men respected him, governments honored him, and a group of flunkies and hangers-on were willing enough to serve his every whim. He grew bored and returned to his home town.
It was not the same. He was not the same. When he walked down the streets, mothers would draw close to their daughters and hurry on past. If he shot pool, his old friends seemed aloof and played as if they were afraid to win. Only the shopkeepers were glad to see him come in, for whatever he took, the government paid for. If he were to shoot the mayor’s son, the government would pay for that too. At home his own mother would look at him with that guarded look in her eyes, and his dad was careful not to look him in the eyes at all.
He spent a lot of time in his room. He was not lonely. He had learned to live alone. He was sitting in his room one evening when he saw Cassandra, the Martin’s fifteen-year-old daughter, coming home with some neighborhood kid from the early movie. He watched idly as the boy tried to kiss her goodnight. There was an awkwardness between them that was vaguely exciting. At last the boy succeeded in kissing her on the cheek, and then, apparently satisfied, went on home.
He sat there for a long time lighting one cigarette from the last one. There was a conflict inside his mind that once would have been resolved differently and probably with no conscious thought. Making up his mind, he stubbed his cigarette and went downstairs. His mother and father were watching TV. They did not look up as he walked out the front door. They never did any more.
The Martins were still up. Mr. Martin was tying brightly colored flies for his new fly rod and Mrs. Martin was reading. They both stiffened when he entered without knocking —alarm playing over their faces like a flickering fire light. He didn’t pause, but walked on up stairs without looking at them.
Mrs. Martin got to her feet and stood looking up the stairway without moving. In her eyes there was the look of a jungle tiger who watches its mate pinned to a stake at the bottom of the pit. Mr. Martin sat staring at the brightly colored flies on his lap. For a moment there was silence. Then a girl’s shrill screams announced to the Martins that war’s reality was also for the very young.
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* * * *
The surprise best seller of 1965 was Eric Berne’s Games People Play. Of course, “game-playing” as a psychological model is anything but new. “Role-playing” has been a basic psychiatric concept for many years, and Stephen Potter has played “Gamesmanship” into an enviable income for what seems almost as long.
What is comparatively new is the application of the mathematical Theory of Games to interpersonal behavior, in an effort to achieve a greater rigor and clarity in analysis and description. Last year’s Annual quoted some applications of the idea from an article by Timothy Leary in the book, LSD (Putnam, 1964), which were rather more sophisticated and far-reaching than anything offered by Dr. Berne. What Berne does provide Is a series of plot outlines of some of the most common and destructive behavior games, with catchy, colloquial titles (Kick Me, Let’s You and Him Fight, Rapo, etc.) to make them easier to think about and identify—and enable readers to enjoy the always popular mirror game. Who Am I?
I said “plot outlines” because, of course, game playing has been an underlying assumption of the writer, from bardic times. In s-f, the game—or, I should say. The Game—has had additional significance: Indeed, the puzzle-story is one of the most basic forms of the genre, and almost any “hard-core” science-fiction story is essentially a variant of a chess problem, in which specific pieces (characters) with clearly defined powers are located within an arbitrarily determined—but thereafter unchangeable—board (environment), with White (John Doe) to mate in so many moves (pages).
(John Brunner may well have brought this form to its ultimate formulation with his multilevel chess-plus novel last year—The Squares of the City, from Ballantine.)
In the last two stories, both Mrs. Saxton and Mr. Moudy made use of a variant of the popular “arena game” s-f story. I am intrigued not so much by the departures from the standard form they both effected, but by the marked similarity of structure in two stories on such dissimilar themes, from entirely dissimilar authors.
And yet the same—almost identical—arena was ideally suited to both stories. Now Fritz Leiber—a familiar name at last—makes use of a rather more complex arena, or labyrinth, to tell a more complex story of love-and-war.
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The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - [Anthology] Page 47