Future Wars . . . and Other Punchlines

by Hank Davis

  When dawn came the Russian soldiers were individuals scattered over three separate nations. And Russian soldiers, in quantity, tend to fight or loot as opportunity offers. But a Russian soldier, as an individual, craves civilian clothes above all else. Russian soldiers landed and tried to make deals for their flying equipment according to the traditions of only a few months before. They were sadly disillusioned. The best bargain most of them could make was simply a promise that they wouldn’t be sent back home—and they took that.

  It was all rather anticlimactic, and it got worse. Russia was still legally at war with everybody, even after its flying infantry sat down and made friends. And Russia was still too big to invade. On the other hand, it had to keep its air force in hand to fight off attempts at invasion. Just to maintain that defensive frame of mind, Allied bombers occasionally smashed some Russian airfields, and some railroads, and—probably at the instigation of decadent capitalists—they did blow up the Aviation Production factories, even away off in the Urals. Those Ural raids by the way, were made by the United States Air Force, flying over the North Pole to prove that it could deliver something besides condensed milk at long distances.

  But the war never really amounted to much. The Allies had all the flying infantry they wanted to use, but they didn’t want to use it. The Russians worked frantically, suborning treason and developing black marketers and so on, to get personal fliers for defense, but Russian civilians would pay more than even the Soviet government, so the Army hardly got any at all. To correct this situation the Supreme Soviet declared private possession of a personal flier a capital offense, and shot several hundred citizens to prove it. Among the victims of this purge, by the way, was the Nuclear-Fission man who had worked out the personal flier from Professor Rojestvensky’s figures. But people wanted personal fliers. When owning one became a reason for getting shot, almost half the Russian government’s minor officials piled out of the nearest window and went somewhere else, and the bigger officials kept their personal fliers where they could grab them at any instant and take off. And the smuggling kept on. Before long practically everybody had private fliers but the army—and flier-equipped soldiers tended to disappear over the horizon if left alone after nightfall.

  So the Soviet Union simply fell to pieces. The Supreme Soviet couldn’t govern when anybody who disagreed with it could go up the nearest chimney and stay gone. It lost the enthusiastic support of the population as soon as it became unable to shoot the unenthusiastic. And when it was committed to the policy of shooting every Russian citizen who possessed proof of the supreme splendor of Russian science—a personal flier—why public discipline disappeared. Party discipline went with it. All discipline followed. And when there wasn’t any discipline there simply wasn’t any Soviet Union and therefore there wasn’t any war, and everybody might as well stop fooling around and cook dinner. The world, in fact, was remade.

  Undoubtedly, the world is a good deal happier since Professor Rojestvensky thought of an interesting inference to be drawn from the Bramwell-Weems Equation while at his breakfast of red-cabbage soup and black bread. There are no longer any iron-bound national boundaries, and therefore no wars or rumors of wars. There are no longer any particular reasons for cities to be crowded, and a reasonably equitable social system has to exist or people will go fishing or down to the South Seas, or somewhere where they won’t be bothered.

  But in some ways the change has not been as great as one might have expected. About a year after the world was remade, an American engineer thought up a twist on Professor Rojestvensky’s figure. He interested the American continental government and they got ready to build a spaceship. The idea was that if a variation of that brass-sodium-nickel bar was curled around a hundred-foot-long tube, and metallic sodium vapor was introduced into one end of the tube, it would be pushed out of the other end with some speed. Calculation proved, indeed, that with all the acceleration possible, the metallic vapor would emerge with a velocity of ninety-eight point seven percent of the speed of light. Using Einstein’s formula for the relationship of mass to speed, that meant that the tube would propel a rocketship that could go to the moon or Mars or anywhere else. The American government started to build the ship, and then thought it would be a good idea to have Professor Rojestvensky in on the job as a consultant. Besides, the world owed him something. So he was sent for and Congress voted him more money than he had ever heard of before, and he looked over the figures and O.K.’d them. They were all right.

  But he was typical of the people whose happiness has not been markedly increased by the remade world. He was a rich man, and he liked America, but after a month or so he didn’t look happy. So the government put him in the most luxurious suite in the most luxurious hotel in America, and assigned people to wait on him and a translator to translate for him, and did its very best to honor the man who’d remade the world. But still he didn’t seem content.

  One day a committee of reporters asked him what he wanted. He would be in all the history books, and he had done the world a great favor and the public would like him to be pleased. But Professor Rojestvensky shook his head sadly.

  “It’s only,” he said gloomily, “that since I am rich and the world is peaceable and everybody is happy—well, I just can’t seem to find anyone who knows how to make good red-cabbage soup.”

  INTO EACH LIFE, SOME PERIWINKLES MUST FALL

  by Hank Davis

  Once again, yr. hmbl. ed. engages in auto-nepotism and inserts a story of his own, this one a case of the U.S. Army meets Charles Fort, with a nod toward David Drake, who also has been known to exhibit anti-establishment Fortean tendencies. And by the way, Dave, Happy Big Seven-Oh!

  Hank Davis is an editor emeritus at Baen Books. While a naïve youth in the early 1950s (yes, he’s old!), he was led astray by SFcomic books, and then by A. E. van Vogt’s Slan, which he read in the Summer 1952 issue of Fantastic Story Quarterly while in the second grade, sealing his fate. He has had stories published mumble-mumble years ago in Analog, If, F&SF, and Damon Knight’s Orbit anthology series. (There was also a story sold to The Last Dangerous Visions, but let’s not go there.) A native of Kentucky, he currently lives in North Carolina to avoid a long commute to the Baen office.

  Dedicated to David Drake

  “It is as if with intelligence, or with the equivalence of intelligence, something has specialized upon transporting, or distributing, immature and larval forms of life. If the gods send worms, that would be kind if we were robins.”

  —Charles Fort, Lo!

  MID-JUNE

  The colonel wasn’t sure what was going on, or what he was supposed to do about it, out there watching an open field in the middle of the day, but at least he was sure that his feet were hurting. Normally, he would count that as a distraction and tune them out, but sore feet were like old friends, and something that he could understand, so he gave them more attention than usual. He shifted his weight slightly, to even out the ache. Then he heard the sound of a car approaching, and turned toward the sound, aching feet forgotten.

  The sound got louder as the car came over the rise—not really a car, he thought, some kind of small SUV, probably with four-wheel drive. It rolled over the grass, stopped, then a woman got out, and looked around, then began walking toward the open field.

  “Dr. Greene,” the colonel called, walking toward her. His feet were still hurting, but now that he had something to do with them, he didn’t notice. “Please don’t go that way. It may not be safe.”

  She stopped and waited as he approached. She was wearing something like a civilian version of fatigues, khaki-colored, with no insignia, of course, and some sort of tan boots. He wondered if they came from L.L. Bean, though he wasn’t sure if the company even sold camping equipment any more, such as his grandfather had bought through the mail decades ago. On her head was a construction worker’s hard hat, medium-length dark red hair spilling from its sides. He wondered if her headgear might be more protection than the military he
lmet sitting on his own head.

  “Colonel Duncan?” she asked, putting out a hand. Green eyes watched him through metal-rimmed glasses.

  “Guilty as charged,” he said. They shook hands. Dr. Greene, with green eyes, he thought, and wondered if she had been teased about that.

  “Am I in time? But I must be, or you wouldn’t have warned me about safety.”

  “You’re here in plenty of time—if it happens at the same time as the previous days. The times since we’ve been watching, that is. But we don’t understand what’s happening, and we don’t know if there really is a schedule. It might surprise us.” He was hoping that she would surprise him by making sense of the . . . thing.

  “We’ve had the blades examined under microscopes, including an electron microscope. There were no unusual or dangerous organisms on them. I can show you the photos.”

  “That’s useful information, but I don’t have any training in microbiology,” she said with a puzzled tone, as if wondering why he was talking about photos of microbes. “I’m afraid photos wouldn’t convey anything to me.”

  Now, he was puzzled—but by now he was used to being puzzled. “I thought, well, when Washington phoned that you were coming here, I thought they said your field was virology.”

  She smiled, but her eyes weren’t amused. “Either the person who phoned you misunderstood, or you misheard them. My field is verticology.”

  Still puzzled, he said, “That’s a new one on me. A branch of geology?” He was thinking of layers of rock, piled vertically atop each other, thinking back to his time as a rockhound in his teens.

  “Geology?” She wasn’t smiling at all now. “No, it’s a new field, and not really respectable yet. Someone in Washington must be either very scared, or else a closet Fortean, or maybe both, to have called me in.”

  At first, he thought she said “Freudian,” but this time he tried to sound less confused, and just said, “Fortean?” hoping he was pronouncing it right.

  “Have you ever heard of Charles Fort?” she asked.

  He had a brief flash of memory from old history lessons of the long-abandoned Fort Charles, but decided to just say, “No.”

  “Charles Fort was a man early in the last century who collected reports of strange events. He collected thousands of them, and published four books full of them.”

  “Like Believe It or Not?”

  “Something like that, but usually far less believable. The sort of events he collected are now called Fortean phenomena. And people with an interest in such apparently impossible things are also called Forteans.”

  “Like astrology?” the colonel said, thinking of his wife’s intently reading the newpaper horoscope every day, but immediately regretted it. Dr. Greene was looking as if she had smelled something bad.

  “I doubt he would have taken astrology any more seriously than he took astronomy. But one category of the mysterious events he recorded was things impossibly falling from the sky: fish, frogs, worms, periwinkles.”

  He decided not to ask what a periwinkle was. Sounded like a character from a TV cartoon show, particularly since a little bit of light was dawning. “Your field is verticology? Is that from vertical?”

  At least she wasn’t frowning any more. “Got it. The study of falling things. Inexplicable falling things, that is.”

  At least, now, he knew what she was doing here.

  “Five minutes, sir,” the spec five manning one of the gizmos shouted.

  “Did Charles Fort mention this sort of falling . . . things?” Duncan asked.

  “No, though I understand that they fall slowly,” Dr. Greene said. “More slowly than they should. There are cases reported of rocks falling from the sky, slowly, as if gravity is partly suspended.”

  “That part sounds familiar, all right. Do you have any suggestions where they’re coming from?”

  “You won’t like it, Colonel—” she began, but then someone yelled, “Here they come,” and she stopped, watching a swarm of long, narrow objects that were coming down from the clear, cloudless sky. Birds scattered. The swarm fell much more slowly than the eye expected, but still drove themselves into the soil of the empty field.

  “That should be it for now, Duncan said, “but let’s wait a bit, for safety’s sake. You were saying?”

  “Fort threw out wild ideas, and it’s hard to know if he meant any of them—he had an odd sense of humor. But he did suggest that falling things might be caused by some unknown mechanism or agency that was trying to provide something that was needed somewhere—like water falling to relieve a drought—but didn’t do it in a sensible manner. Dropping fish because of a famine somewhere, but not dropping them where they were needed. Or dropping water where there was a drought, but dropping it in such huge quantities that destruction resulted.”

  “You mean somebody somewhere needs bayonets?” Duncan asked, looking at the handles sticking up out in the field. As usual the fallen weapons had driven their blades into the dirt, up to their hilts.

  “Have you followed what the President has been doing?” she asked.

  Duncan frowned, preferring not to think about the new commander in chief. In fact, he’d been thinking it might be a good time to retire, but all he said was, “Can you be more specific?”

  “She’s doing huge cutbacks in the defense budget. Cutting back on military stockpiles and cancelling new weapons that were in development. Talking about drastically reducing the size of the armed forces.”

  “So you think that because the army isn’t going to get a new tank that the Pentagon wanted, something is dropping hundreds of bayonets in a field as a counterbalance?” He didn’t wait for an answer, said, “It should be safe now, if you want to take a look,” and started walking toward the bayonet-studded field. Dr. Greene walked with him.

  “As I said, if there is a regulatory system, one that we don’t understand at all, it doesn’t seem to operate efficiently. Or even what we would think of as rationally.”

  Duncan pulled one of the bayonets out of the ground, and handed it grip first to the . . . to the verticologist. “That should be it until this time tomorrow. We have radar set up, and cameras running, but if it’s the same as usual they’ll just show bayonets appearing a few hundred feet up from nowhere—” actually, he expected it to again be 378 feet and a couple of inches, but he didn’t feel like speaking exactly about something that made no damned sense at all “—and the radar and satellite photos won’t show anything up in the air that could have dropped them. Not even a cloud. So, Doctor, do you have any suggestions?”

  “I’ll be honest, Colonel Duncan. I’m still surprised that I’m here. Frankly, verticology is not a respectable field. Like UFOs and telepathy. At the University of California—”

  California? Duncan thought. Where else?

  “—there’re a couple of classes in Fortean studies, taught by me, and the classes are listed under folklore. As I said, somebody in the government must be scared to send for me. Similar things to this have been recorded, but they’ve been ignored and forgotten. No investigations like you’ve set up here. We might be like Röntgen, about to discover X-rays. Or we might only be piling up more speculations, like the Kennedy assassination conspiracy fans do, and not proving anything.”

  Duncan was relieved of having to say anything when his cell phone rang. “Duncan here,” he said, then, “Yes, sir . . . in Ohio . . . This has happened twice? . . . None of them went off ?. . . none of the pins pulled, then? Yes, sir, I’m on it.” He put away the phone and told Dr. Greene, “We’re on a priority flight to Ohio. Things are falling there.”

  “Pins are falling?” she asked, as they headed for her SUV.

  “Pins?” he said, then, “Oh. No, hand grenades are falling from the sky. Fortunately, the pins haven’t been pulled and none of them have gone off.” So far, he thought to himself.

  “. . . Jan. 3, 1924—red objects falling with snow at Halmstead, Sweden. They were red worms, from one to four inches in length. Thousan
ds of them streaking down with the snowflakes—red ribbons in a shower of confetti—a carnival scene that boosts my discovery that meteorology is a more picturesque science than most persons—including meteorologists—have suspected . . .”

  —Charles Fort, Lo!

  LATE JUNE

  None of the hand grenades had gone off, and after a week both bayonets and hand grenades had stopped falling. The only thing that tests had shown was that the bayonets were high-grade steel but needed sharpening, and 37 percent of the hand grenades were defective: some lacked the explosive charge, some lacked the the coil of wire that would turn to shrapnel if they had a charge to shatter the wire, but all of them still had their pins in. There were no cases reported anywhere of missing bayonets or hand grenades. Not just the delivery system was a mystery, but also the manufacturer.

  Duncan had noticed that some military personnel on this case, and civilians, too, felt better when they talked about a “delivery system,” as if it explained something. If this became public, he thought, the phrase would be all over the media, up there with “escalation,” “peace process,” and “exit strategy.”

  At least he had looked up “periwinkles” and now knew that they were a kind of snail. One small mystery solved. “Has anyone checked on shortages of snails in France at the time of periwinkles falling from the sky?” he asked Dr. Greene as they sat in the helicopter.