A Separate War and Other Stories

by Joe Haldeman

  “—and check the shuttle, the Washington shuttle, he wouldn’t stay around the airport very long after—”

  bigger than Khan bigger than Oswald, bigger than Booth! That damn plastic won’t do any good against a .658 Magnum shatter it get Harriman’s ass…

  “Sir, the shuttles out of Kennedy are fully automated, have been for two months. Not even a stewardess, just an automated drink tray. All we can do is watch at Dulles.”

  “Okay, set it up. Better watch Friendship, too.”

  “Right.” Fred punched off, and Braxn tried to concentrate on the thick report in front of him. Just let them take care of it, what can one man do…

  …to optimize all the ecological parameters, this committee decided to situate the experimental station first in a northern temperate rural region, then in a northern temperate urban region, then in…

  “Mr. President?”

  Braxn opened the line to his secretary. “Yes?”

  “Your appointment with the secretary of the interior is in ten minutes. Do you want—”

  “No, God, I haven’t even finished reading the report. Look, Joyce, something has come up in Chicago, something important. I’m staying in touch with Mr. Aller, trying to keep on top of it. Cancel all of today’s appointments, tell ’em I’m not in.” He stood up. “In fact, I won’t be in. I’ll be in my office downstairs.”

  “All right, sir.”

  Linda wasn’t home; she was spending a few days in Wisconsin, visiting grandchildren. That simplified matters. Braxn told the guard at the door that he wasn’t in, to anybody.

  He poured a glass of wine and sat down at his desk, with the thick report unopened in front of him. He stared at the phone for a few seconds, then punched Fred.

  “No word yet, sir.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No, sir…The New York State Police are doing a dragnet through Kennedy; all the airlines have his description. If he hasn’t left Kennedy, we’ll find him soon.”

  “We? Or the police?”

  “Sir?”

  “If they catch him, they’ll hold him for homicide. He’s sure to shoot off his mouth. Headlines for a week.”

  “God.” Fred slapped himself twice. “I’m not thinking.”

  “That’s all right, Fred. It was my idea to feed his description to them—what do you think the chances are, that he’s still there?”

  “Well, it gets more likely with every shuttle that lands without him. Another hour at the most, and we’ll be able to say he definitely didn’t—”

  “Didn’t take the shuttle to Washington or Baltimore. Could he have slipped on another automated flight, before his description went out?”

  “Oh…it’s possible, sure. The other shuttles are, let’s see, Newark, Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia…might be one to Richmond, but I doubt—”

  “Any way to check them?”

  “Newark and Boston, at least, probably have a camera like the one at Kennedy, takes pictures of all the people debarking from the shuttle, because of smuggling. I’ll check all of them.”

  “Well, that’s a start. Go ahead.”

  Harry Doyle got off the shuttle in Boston and took a limousine to Cambridge. Knowing he couldn’t buy a gun with Kramer’s identification, he waited in a bar until he saw a man about his own age, height, and build. He followed the man home to his apartment, rang the bell and when the man came to the door he slashed out with the razor blade—a technique he had practiced mentally a thousand times in Switzerland—pushed the silently dying man inside, was grateful that he was alone, took the man’s wallet and memorized his new date of birth and social security number, locked the door behind him, and went on down the street.

  He called five sporting goods stores before he found one that had the Weatherby .658 Magnum, an elephant gun that was really overkill, even for elephants. He said he would be there in half an hour, and he was.

  It took over half of Kramer’s American money to buy the Weatherby and the scope and a box of shells, and shooter’s mitts and a case. When it was all wrapped in brown paper and tied up in a bundle, it didn’t look like a gun at all. He left it in a locker in the bus station and went to the public library and looked in Section B of the Sunday Washington Post and found the president’s itinerary for the week. He would be present at the dedication of the new Peace Corps school in Columbia, just outside of Washington. So would Harry.

  …our conclusions were that this type of EE station has an optimum balancing effect in areas on the periphery of an urban heat sink, but closer to the urban mass or more…

  The phone chimed, and Braxn punched up visual.

  “Well, sir, we got results from Newark and Hartford. The camera at Boston had been taken down for repairs. Nobody who looks like Doyle—”

  “Is there any way to check Boston?”

  “Ah…not after four hours, sir. Big town with efficient rapid transit in and out. If he slipped through the Boston shuttle while the camera was down—it’s fixed now—then he could be anywhere on the East Coast.”

  “That might make it easier…in a way, not to find him, but…I guess we can assume he’s ‘crossed state lines pursuant to the commission of a—’”

  “The CBI?”

  “Yes. Might as well, we have more control over them than the—contact the CBI, tell them all you have that’s, uh, safe…tell them that he’s a murderer and is suspected of high treason, is armed and dangerous.”

  “And to not risk trying to take him alive.”

  Braxn chewed a nail, thoughtfully. “I think that would be best. Tell the director he can call me for verification. Patch him through your scrambler, though.”

  “Sir, um, maybe you ought not to make any public appearances until we nail him. He is desperate and—”

  “Yes, I had planned to curtail my…peregrinations—I’ll keep the appointments, I think, that are in the Washington area…trust the Secret Service and the CBI. I’ve got two speeches in town this week, and that one out in Columbia. The rest I’ll postpone or arrange for a substitute. (To look more like a traveler, Harry bought an old suitcase in a pawnshop and filled it with newspapers and a supply of sandwich material. Then he went to a trucking firm and traded a twenty-dollar bill for a lift to Baltimore on a big ground effect rig.)

  “Joyce, who wrote this Peace Corps speech?”

  Her image went off the screen for a second. “Philip O’Hara, that new boy from Yale.”

  “Tell him I need a rewrite—the language is fine, continue in that vein, but I want more about ‘the administration’s changing priorities’—and I want it worded so that young people will think the Peace Corps will be an alternative to the draft, but older people will see it as just a two-year deferment.”

  “Uh, sir—do you know which it’ll be?”

  “Probably something in between. Certainly, someone who takes two consecutive tours will be too old for the draft when he gets out.”

  “But you don’t want that said explicitly.”

  “God, no!” A chime rang. “Have to punch off, Joyce.” Braxn turned to the other phone. “What is it, Fred?”

  “Just a progress report. Little enough progress—but we do have the CBI’S full cooperation: the director assigned a force of 122 men to the job.”

  “Good.” Harriman had always been leery of the amount of power the CBI had accumulated—it had too much in the beginning, when they’d merged the old CIA and FBI—but now Braxn was glad to have it on his side. Most C-men came close to the public image of the remorseless, thorough, incorruptible automaton. There wasn’t a man on earth who could elude 122 of them for any length of time.

  (Harry got off at a trucker’s stop just north of the outer Beltway, and hitched a ride to Towson. Five minutes after he left, two expressionless men in charcoal coveralls came into the truck stop with a description of him. Luckily, the waitress on duty didn’t like cops.)

  The week before, Braxn had approved a measure closing some loopholes in the Capital Gains Law. This week,
he lived through a businessman fidgeting, worrying, waiting for his secretary to go to lunch, whereupon he opened a window, stepped out and jumped 1,236 feet into a busy Dallas intersection. An experienced skydiver, he aimed for a red convertible, and just missed.

  (Harry rented a car in Towson and drove out in the country. At an old stone quarry, he paced off a hundred meters and fired twelve rounds, getting the scope zeroed in. The gun was awesomely loud. He was gone fifteen minutes before the Towson police came to investigate. They figured it was just some kids raising hell.)

  “It was just an unfortunate coincidence,” Fred was saying. “The man was a dead ringer for Harry Doyle, and when the agent stopped him and identified himself, the fool tried to run.”

  “And he burned him down on a busy corner in Philadelphia,” Braxn said.

  “That’s right, sir. We’re lucky he was a good shot. An amateur with one of those pocket lasers would have killed a dozen innocent bystanders.”

  “Instead of just one.”

  (Harry drove to Columbia and located the new Peace Corps school. He noted the position of the bleachers and drove on by without stopping.

  Tommy Tommy Tommy Tommy you wasn’t doin’ nothin’ just walkin’ down the street an’ they shot you for doin’ nothin’

  God damn you Tommy, woman. I Harry Doyle why can’t I control this damn thing

  “He look just like he sleepin’.”

  (He parked the car in the lot behind an all-night drugstore and waited in the car until it got dark. Then he stepped inside briefly to puchase a small flashlight and a bottle of fingernail enamel. Outside, he painted the button lens of the flashlight with enamel, so it gave off a very faint red glow.

  (Harry sneaked across a golf course to a water tower: naturally, the highest point around. He found a breach in the chain-link fence and wiggled through with rifle and lunch bag.

  (Using his light sparingly, Harry found the steps that spiraled up the side of the tower and tiptoed up. At the top, there was a catwalk that went all the way around the tank. From one point, he could look down and see the pattern of light and shadow that was the new school and bleachers, not half a mile away.

  (On the far side of the catwalk there was a small toolshed, unlocked. Harry went in, closed the door behind him, and lay down. So he’d carried the hacksaw blade all the way up there for nothing. Who would’ve guessed he could be so lucky?)

  “I don’t believe in luck, Fred. There’s incompetence somewhere along the line.”

  “They’re doing all they can, sir. The director assigned another team of a hundred men to the hunt.”

  “Maybe he’s lying low for a while, on the West Coast or in Canada—”

  “We have men there, and there. And in Mexico and Cuba.”

  (When Harry woke up there was a bright line of sunlight shining under the door. He ate a stale sandwich and sipped water from his canteen.)

  “Almost time to go, sir.”

  “Thank you, Joyce. You watch on the video and feed me the speech after I finish my opening remarks.” Braxn heard the helicopters’ engines starting, up on the roof.

  (He heard the footsteps long before the man got to the shed. When the door opened, Harry was standing to one side, rifle held horizontal, butt first, at eye level. The Secret Service man stepped in, laser in one hand and flashlight in the other, and probably never felt the twenty-pound club strike his temple.

  (Harry considered taking the laser, but decided it wasn’t accurate enough at eight hundred meters. He heard the flutter of helicopters and crawled over the agent’s body and started around the catwalk.)

  Braxn looked out the window and saw the green field, the school, the bleachers slowly rising up to meet him. He mentally reviewed his opening comments, going over the ways they would have to be modified, according to who had or had not shown up.

  (He crawled to his firing position just about the same time as the helicopters touched down. He put a handful of ammunition in front of him—the rifle worked like a double-barreled shotgun; had to be reloaded after every second shot—and focused the scope on the door of the white helicopter.)

  Braxn let two of the Secret Service men precede him then he stepped out onto the grass, Fred following, and then:

  There’s the bastard! Breathe and hold. now… Crosshairs swing over and settle on Harriman’s chest—

  Braxn jumped to the right. No place to hide…swing to the left

  Aim for the top of his head not sure how far it’ll drop but only has to hit his big toe and he’s dead—

  “You can die here,” Father said. Jump left—

  Swing right—

  Fred caught Braxn’s arm in a tight grip. “Sir! What’s—”

  now

  Let go! “Let go!”

  The force of the bullet jerked Braxn from Fred’s grip and his right shoulder erupted in a spray of blood and muscle and bone splinters. His body turned a half somersault in the air and he landed heavily just as the sound of the shot, rolling thunder, reached him, and then the second bullet dug a furrow inches from his head.

  Lasers crackled and filled the air with ozone while the doctor did something to stop the cephalic and brachial veins and the brachial artery from oozing and spurting blood. He gave a quick injection for shock just as the third bullet whirred by his ear. The fourth hit a Secret Service man in the abdomen, killing him.

  Harry chambered two more shells and smiled. They might get him sooner or later but, as he had figured, those lasers just wouldn’t reach. He put his eye to the scope and looked for a good target.

  He didn’t see the Secret Service agent who had jumped back in the helicopter, as he poked the snout of a 30/06 Mannlicher target rifle out the door. Harry was just starting to squeeze the trigger as the relatively small bullet from the agent’s gun fortuitously struck the end of his telescopic sight. The metal eyepiece slammed back, putting out Harry’s eye very painfully.

  He stood up raging, blood streaming from his eye, and fired two wild unaimed shots before the second small bullet opened a bloody rose in the center of his chest. The bullet passed on through and penetrated the metal skin of the water tank and a jet of water pushed Harry off the catwalk.

  “Son! Wake up! This body is dying.” The illusion of a friendly octopoid figure floated in front of Braxn’s eyes, not quite as real as the bright light and anxious masked people hovering over him; green tunics smeared with blood.

  “It hurts, Father.”

  The surgeon didn’t look up, but one of his assistants turned bright eyes to the president’s face.

  “I know you are probably in pain,” the prerecorded, hypnotically implanted image said. “Remember your learnings and ignore the pain. You may be able to escape.

  “If you have learned enough about power, if you’ve learned enough from both sides, you have no further use for this body. Try to reach out and find another. Try!”

  Braxn tried, but the pain was too much of a presence, a crushing weight.

  “This pain is not mine,” he said aloud. “This pain belongs to this body.” He took that thought and pulled it, stretched it until it lay over the dying organism like a shroud. The pain didn’t fade, but it slowly became less important. He reached out and pushed.

  The surgical mask was rather tight and tasted slightly of lipstick. Scrubbed down in too much of a hurry. Good to be in a young woman’s body, after that—

  “Scalpel!” the surgeon said. “God…” With hands that were his and not-his, Braxn slapped a scalpel into the doctor’s waiting palm.

  “No heartbeat.” He made an incision, deep, in Harriman’s chest, held it open and plunged his gloved hand in to try to massage the heart back into action. Braxn knew it was useless; Harriman had died of spiritual abdication.

  Eventually he stopped trying. He stripped the gloves from his hands and pulled down his mask. With an opportunity to say something that would ring down through the ages, the doctor just shook his head, whispered an earthy syllable, and stalked out.

/>   Afterwards, washing up, Braxn was still enough of a politician to wonder whether that doddering old fool of a Speaker would have the grace to step out of the line of succession.

  (1970)

  Fantasy for Six Electrodes and One Adrenaline Drip

  (A Play in the Form of a Feelie Script)

  ESTABLISHING SHOT I: Slow DOLLY down buffet table loaded with rare and expensive foods. Linger on certain items: purple Denebian caviar in crushed ice with pattern of thin lemon circles; a whole grouper jellied in crystal aspic; pepper-roasted bison haunch, partially sliced, pink and steaming; platoons of wine bottles ranked at end of table, some on ice (use stock SMELL for simulated items, linen tablecloth FEEL down to wine bottles; switch to cool smooth moist glass FEEL at end).

  NARRATOR

  SEXY CULTURED VOICE

  There are almost ten million people on Earth with personal worth over ten million credits. Nine million, Nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand of them are just too poor to be invited to this party.

  PAUSE AT BISON HAUNCH

  Of the remaining thousand, say, roughly half are too new to the game of superrich to be considered.

  SUBLIMINALS: Feel and smell of money.

  Half of the eligible five hundred either have unfortunate politics or are simply disliked by the host.

  SOUND UNDER NARRATOR: polite early cocktail party chatter.

  The rest were all invited. Many were off-planet, some did not care for the host, some had pressing business elsewhere. Eighty-three of them have never appeared in public, and this party seemed too public.

  Ninety-four came, some with wives or husbands or concubines or friends; a total of one hundred and fifty-one fortunate people. We are interested in only a few of them.

  CUT from wine bottles to HAZLIK. HOLD glass FEEL in right hand. SOUND UP. FEEL expensive clothing on SOMATIC: Healthy though no longer young male body. TASTE of fine wine and SMELL of good dope. ADD SOMATIC: Dope 0.20.