Future Wars . . . and Other Punchlines

by Hank Davis

  He had a feeling that they were smiling at him, mocking him, but one could never tell. Those jolly expressions were always the same. No matter what the situation.

  “Most happy,” said the Fiver spokesman. “These refresh—”

  “Drink,” the general said and made a motion to supplement the word.

  “Drink is good,” the Fiver answered. “Drink is friend?”

  “That is right,” the general said.

  He started for the tent, walking slowly so the Fivers could keep up.

  He noted with some satisfaction that the captain had carried on most rapidly, indeed. Corporal Conrad was marching his squad back across the area, with the captive Fiver shambling in the center. The tarps were coming off the guns and the last of the crew was clambering up the ladder of the ship.

  The captain caught up with them just short of the tent.

  “Everything all set, sir,” Corporal Conrad reported in a whisper.

  “Fine,” the general said.

  They reached the tent and went inside. The general opened a refrigerating unit and took out a gallon jug.

  “This,” he explained, “is a drink we made for your compatriot. He found it very tasty.”

  He set out glasses and sipping straws and uncorked the jug, wishing he could somehow hold his nose, for the drink smelled like something that had been dead too long. He didn’t even like to guess what might have gone into it. The chemists back on Earth had whomped it up for the captive Fiver, who had consumed gallon after gallon of it with disconcerting gusto.

  The general filled the glasses and the Fivers picked them up in their tentacles and stuck the straws into their drawstring mouths. They drank and rolled their eyes in appreciation.

  The general took the glass of liquor the captain handed him and gulped half of it in haste. The tent was getting just a little thick. What things a man goes through, he thought, to serve his planets and his peoples.

  He watched the Fivers drinking and wondered what they might have up their sleeves.

  Talk, the spokesman had told him, and that might mean almost anything. It might mean a reopening of negotiations or it might be nothing but a stall.

  And if it was a negotiation, Earth was across the barrel. For there was nothing he could do but negotiate. Earth’s fleet was crippled and the Fivers had the weapon and a renewal of the war was unthinkable. Earth needed five years at the minimum and ten years would be still better.

  And if it was an attack, if this planet was a trap, there was only one thing he could do—stand and fight as best he could, a thoroughly suicidal course.

  Either way, Earth lost, the general realized.

  The Fivers put down their glasses and he filled them up again.

  “You do well,” one of the Fivers said. “You got the paper and the marker?”

  “Marker?” the general asked.

  “He means a pencil,” said the captain.

  “Oh, yes. Right here.” The general reached for a pad of paper and a pencil and laid them on the desk.

  One of the Fivers set down his glass and, picking up the pencil, started to make a laborious drawing. He looked for all the world like a five-year-old printing his first alphabet. They waited while the Fiver drew. Finally he was finished. He laid the pencil down and pointed to the wiggly lines.

  “Us,” he said.

  He pointed to the saw-toothed lines.

  “You,” he told the general.

  The general bent above the paper, trying to make out what the Fiver had put down.

  “Sir,” the captain said, “it looks like a battle diagram.”

  “Is,” said the Fiver proudly. He picked the pencil up. “Look,” he said.

  He drew directional lines and made a funny kind of symbol for the points of contact and made crosses for the sections where the battle lines were broken. When he was done, the Earth fleet had been shattered and sliced into three segments and was in headlong flight.

  “That,” the general said, with the husk of anger rising in his throat, “was the engagement in Sector 17. Half of our Fifth Squadron was wiped out that day.”

  “Small error,” said the Fiver and made a deprecatory gesture. He ripped the sheet of paper off the pad and tossed it on the floor. He laboriously drew the diagram again.

  “Attend,” he said.

  The Fiver drew the directional lines again, but this time he changed them slightly. Now the Earth line pivoted and broke and became two parallel lines that flanked the Fiver drive and turned and blunted it and scattered it in space. The Fiver laid the pencil down.

  “Small matter,” he informed the general and the captain. “You good. You make one thin mistake.”

  Holding himself sternly in hand, the general filled the glasses once again.

  What are they getting at, he thought. Why don’t they come flat out and say it?

  “So best,” one of the Fivers said, lifting his glass to let them know that he meant the drink.

  “More?” asked the Fiver tactician, picking up the pencil.

  “Please,” said the general, seething.

  He walked to the tent flap and looked outside. The men were at the guns. Thin wisps of vapor curled from the ship’s launching tubes; in just a little while, it would be set to go, should the need arise. The camp was quiet and tense.

  He went back to the desk and watched as the Fiver went on gaily with his lesson on how to win a battle. He filled page after page with diagrams and occasionally he was generous—he sometimes showed how the Fivers lost when they might have won with slightly different tactics.

  “Interesting!” he piped enthusiastically.

  “I find it so,” the general said. “There is just one question.”

  “Ask,” the Fiver invited.

  “If we should go to war again, how can you be sure we won’t use all of this against you?”

  “But fine,” the Fiver enthused warmly. “Exactly as we want.”

  “You fight fine,” another Fiver said. “But just too slightly hard. Next time, you able to do much better.”

  “Hard!” the general raged.

  “Too roughly, sir. No need to make the ship go poof.”

  Outside the tent, a gun cut loose and then another one and above the hammering of the guns came the full-throated, ground-shaking roar of many ship motors.

  The general leaped for the entrance, went through it at a run, not bothering with the flap. His cap fell off and he staggered out, thrown slightly off his balance. He jerked up his head and saw them coming in, squadron after squadron, painting the darkness with the flare of tubes.

  “Stop firing!” he shouted. “You crazy fools, stop firing!”

  But there was no need of shouting, for the guns had fallen silent.

  The ships came down toward the camp in perfect flight formation. They swept across it and the thunder of their motors seemed to lift it for a moment and give it a mighty shake. Then they were climbing, rank on serried rank, still with drill precision—climbing and jockeying into position for regulation landing.

  The general stood like a frozen man, with the wind ruffling his iron-gray hair, with a lump, half pride, half thankfulness, rising in his throat. Something touched his elbow.

  “Prisoners,” said the Fiver. “I told you bye and bye.”

  The general tried to speak, but the lump was there to stop him. He swallowed it and tried once again.

  “We didn’t understand,” he said.

  “You did not have a taker,” said the Fiver. “That why you fight so rough.”

  “We couldn’t help it,” the general told him. “We didn’t know. We never fought this way before.”

  “We give you takers,” said the Fiver. “Next time, we play it right. You do much better with the takers. It easier on us.”

  No wonder, the general thought, they didn’t know about an armistice. No wonder they were confused about the negotiations and the prisoner exchange. Negotiations are not customarily needed to hand back the pieces one has won
in a game. And no wonder those other races had viewed with scorn and loathing Earth’s proposal to gang up on the Fivers.

  “An unsporting thing to do,” the general said aloud. “They could have told us. Or maybe they were so used to it.”

  And now he understood why the Fivers had picked this planet. There had to be a place where all the ships could land.

  He stood and watched the landing ships mushing down upon the rock in clouds of pinkish flame. He tried to count them, but he became confused, although he knew every ship Earth had lost would be accounted for.

  “We give you takers,” said the Fiver. “We teach you how to use. They easy operate. They never hurt people or ships.”

  And there was more to it, the general told himself, than just a silly game though maybe not so silly, once one understood the history and the cultural background and the philosophic concepts that were tied into it. And this much one could say for it: it was better than fighting actual wars.

  But with the takers, there would be an end of war. What little war was left would be ended once for all. No longer would an enemy need to be defeated; he could be simply taken. No longer would there be years of guerrilla fighting on newly settled planets; the aborigines could be picked up and deposited in cultural reservations and the dangerous fauna shunted into zoos.

  “We fight again?” the Fiver asked with some anxiety. “Certainly,” said the general. “Any time you say. Are we really as good as you claim?”

  “You not so hot,” the Fiver admitted with disarming candor. “But you the best we ever find. Play plenty, you get better.”

  The general grinned. Just like the sergeant and the captain and their eternal chess, he thought.

  He turned and tapped the Fiver on the shoulder.

  “Let’s get back,” he said. “There’s still some drinking in that jug. We mustn’t let it go to waste.”

  SENTRY

  by Fredric Brown

  Sentry duty is dirty, lonely, and usually boring—except when the enemy shows up.

  Fredric Brown (1906-1972) was a writer with towering reputations in both the science fiction and mystery fields. After writing many short stories for the mystery pulps of the 1950s, he won the Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America for his first mystery novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint in 1947. He also wrote many stories for the SF magazines of the 1940s, and was a fixture of Astounding Science-Fiction’s “Golden Age.” He was a master craftsman in both fields, with a wide range of characterization, a lean hard-boiled style, and a sneaky touch of humor. In particular, he was the unchallenged master of the short-short story, a story so short it would take up only one or two pages, yet would have a tightly-controlled plot, and usually a surprise ending—often not a happy one. His sardonic sense of humor was displayed in such SF novels as What Mad Universe and Martians, Go Home, but he also wrote deadly serious novels such as The Lights in the Sky Are Stars and The Mind Thing. His short story, “Arena,” was adapted into one of Star Trek’s first season episodes (though there was an episode of The Outer Limits a couple of years earlier which had a suspicious resemblance to the same story). He inserted into a story of more usual length a story which has become known as the shortest horror story ever told: “The last man on Earth sat in a room. There was a knock on the door.” While the story which follows is not that brief (though it’s certainly more pithy than this introduction), it has its own sharp punch to the gut.

  He was wet and muddy and hungry and cold and he was fifty thousand light-years from home.

  A strange blue sun gave light and the gravity, twice what he was used to, made every movement difficult.

  But in tens of thousands of years this part of war hadn’t changed. The flyboys were fine with their sleek spaceships and their fancy weapons. When the chips are down, though, it was still the foot soldier, the infantry, that had to take the ground and hold it, foot by bloody foot. Like this damned planet of a star he’d never heard of until they’d landed him there. And now it was sacred ground because the aliens were there too. The aliens, the only other intelligent race in the Galaxy . . . cruel, hideous and repulsive monsters.

  Contact had been made with them near the center of the Galaxy, after the slow difficult colonization of a dozen thousand planets, and it had been war at sight; they’d shot without even trying to negotiate, or to make peace.

  Now, planet by bitter planet, it was being fought out.

  He was wet and muddy and hungry and cold, and the day was raw with a high wind that hurt his eyes. But the aliens were trying to infiltrate and every sentry post was vital.

  He stayed alert, gun ready. Fifty thousand light-years from home, fighting on a strange world and wondering if he’d ever live to see home again.

  And then he saw one of them crawling toward him. He drew a bead and fired. The alien made that strange horrible sound they all make, then lay still.

  He shuddered at the sound and sight of the alien lying there. One ought to be able to get used to them after a while, but he’d never been able to. Such repulsive creatures they were, with only two arms and two legs, ghastly white skins and no scales.

  And Then There Was Peace

  by Gordon R. Dickson

  After the war is over, there’s always the problem of what to do with all the no longer needed equipment. Here’s one solution.

  Gordon R. Dickson (1923-2001) was born in Canada. After the death of his father, he and his mother moved to Minneapolis in 1937. After the U.S. Army and college, his first publication was a 1950 collaboration with Poul Anderson, followed a year later by four solo short stories. His major work was the massive Childe cycle, centered on the Dorsai future mercenaries, a series which unfortunately was left unfinished at his death. His fantasy series of novels which began with The Dragon and The George was also very popular. With Poul Anderson, he also wrote the hilarious series about the Hoka, aliens resembling large Teddy bears, who have no concept of fiction, and think, for example, the Sherlock Holmes stories or tales of the wild west are factual accounts, which they proceed to enact, driving all humans in their vicinity to the edge of sanity. In addition, he wrote over thirty stand-alone novels and more than a hundred short stories. He won three Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, an August Derleth Award, the Skylark Award, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2000. His stories often displayed protagonists who faced seemingly hopeless odds, but nonetheless prevailed against them; but he also turned out tales with a sharp sting at the end, as in this one.

  At nine hundred hours there were explosions off to the right at about seven hundred yards. At eleven hundred hours the slagger came by to pick up the casualties among the gadgets. Charlie saw the melting head at the end of its heavy beam going up and down like the front end of a hard-working chicken only about fifty yards west of his foxhole. Then it worked its way across the battlefield for about half an hour and, loaded down with melted forms of damaged robots, of all shapes and varieties, disappeared behind the low hill to the west, and left, of Charlie. It was a hot August day somewhere in or near Ohio, with a thunderstorm coming on. There was that yellow color in the air.

  At twelve hundred hours the chow gadget came ticking over the redoubt behind the foxhole. It crawled into the foxhole, jumped up on the large table and opened itself out to reveal lunch. The menu this day was liver and onions, whole corn, whipped potato and raspberries.

  “And no whipped cream,” said Charlie.

  “You haven’t been doing your exercises,” said the chow gadget in a fine soprano voice.

  “I’m a frontline soldier,” said Charlie. “I’m an infantryman in a foxhole overlooking ground zero. I’ll be damned if I take exercises.”

  “In any case, there is no excuse for not shaving.”

  “I’ll be damned if I shave.”

  “But why not shave? Wouldn’t it be better than having that itchy, scratchy beard—”

  “No,” said Charlie. He went around back of the chow gadget and began to take its rear plate off.
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  “What are you doing to me?” said the chow gadget.

  “You’ve got something stuck to you here,” said Charlie. “Hold still.” He surreptitiously took a second out to scratch at his four-day beard. “There’s a war on, you know.”

  “I know that,” said the chow gadget. “Of course.”

  “Infantrymen like me are dying daily.”

  “Alas,” said the chow gadget, in pure, simple tones.

  “To say nothing,” said Charlie, setting the rear plate to one side, “of the expenditure of your technical devices. Not that there’s any comparison between human lives and the wastage of machines.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So how can any of you, no matter how elaborate your computational systems, understand—” Charlie broke off to poke among the innards of the chow machine.

  “Do not damage me,” it said.

  “Not if I can help it,” said Charlie. “—understand what it feels like to a man sitting here day after day, pushing an occasional button, never knowing the results of his button pushing, and living in a sort of glass-case comfort except for the possibility that he may just suddenly be dead—suddenly, like that, before he knows it.” He broke off to probe again. “It’s no life for a man.”

  “Terrible, terrible,” said the chow gadget. “But there is still hope for improvement.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” said Charlie. “There’s—ah!” He interrupted himself, pulling a small piece of paper out of the chow gadget.

  “Is there something the matter?” said the chow gadget.

  “No,” said Charlie. He stepped over to the observation window and glanced out. The slagger was making its return. It was already within about fifty yards of the foxhole. “Not a thing,” said Charlie. “As a matter of fact, the war’s over.”

  “How interesting,” said the chow gadget.

  “That’s right,” said Charlie. “Just let me read you this little bîllet-doux I got from Foxhole thirty-four. Meet you back at the bar, Charlie. It’s all over. Your hunch that we could get a message across was the clear quill. Answer came today the same way, through the international weather reports. They want to quit as well as we do. Peace is agreed on, and the gadgets—” Charlie broke off to look at the chow gadget. “That’s you, along with the rest of them.”