“But they wanted me to contact you!” cries the voice from the picture tube. “I told them what it would mean, L.S., they’re going crazy. They’re spoiling for a fight.”
And after a little more talk, L.S. Maffity turns off the set.
“We’ll give it to them, eh, Major?” he says, as stern and straight as a ramrod himself.
“We will, sir!” says the major, and he salutes, spins around and leaves. Already he can feel the eagles on his shoulders—who knows, maybe even stars!
And this is how the punitive expedition came to be launched; and it was exactly what Pung’s Corners could have expected as a result of their actions—could have, and did.
Now I already told you that fighting had been out of fashion for some time, though getting ready to fight was a number-one preoccupation of a great many people. You must understand that there appeared to be no contradiction in these two contradictory facts, outside.
The big war had pretty much discouraged anybody from doing anything very violent. Fighting in the old-fashioned way—that is, with missiles and radio-dust and atomic cannon—had turned out to be expensive and for other reasons impractical. It was only the greatest of luck then that stopped things before the planet was wiped off, nice and clean, of everything more advanced than the notochord, ready for the one-celled beasts of the sea to start over again. Now things were different.
First place, all atomic explosives were under rigid interdiction. There were a couple of dozen countries in the world that owned A-bombs or better, and every one of them had men on duty, twenty-four hours a day, with their fingers held ready over buttons that would wipe out for once and all whichever one of them might first use an atomic weapon again. So that was out.
And aircraft, by the same token, lost a major part of their usefulness. The satellites with their beady little TV eyes scanned every place every second, so that you didn’t dare drop even, an ordinary he bomb as long as some nearsighted chap watching through a satellite relay might mistake it for something nuclear—and give the order to push one of those buttons.
This left, generally speaking, the infantry.
But what infantry it was! A platoon of riflemen was twenty-three men and it owned roughly the firepower of all of Napoleon’s legions. A company comprised some twelve hundred and fifty, and it could single-handed have won World War One.
Hand weapons spat out literally sheets of metal, projectiles firing so rapidly one after another that you didn’t so much try to shoot a target as to slice it in half. As far as the eye could see, a rifle bullet could fly. And where the eye was blocked by darkness, by fog, or by hills, the sniperscope, the radar-screen, and the pulse-beam interferometer sights could locate the target as though it were ten yards away at broad noon.
They were, that is to say, very modern weapons. In fact, the weapons that this infantry carried were so modern that half of each company was in process of learning to operate weapons that the other half had already discarded as obsolete. Who wanted a Magic-Eye Self-Aiming All-Weather Gunsight, Mark XII, when a Mark XIII, With Dubl-jewelled Bearings, was available?
For it was one of the triumphs of the age that at last the planned obsolescence and high turnover of, say, a TV set or a Detroit car had been extended to carbines and bazookas.
It was wonderful and frightening to see.
It was these heroes, then, who went off to war, or to whatever might come.
Major Commaigne (so he says in his book) took a full company of men, twelve hundred and fifty strong, and started out for Pung’s Corners. Air brought them to the plains of Lehigh County, burned black from radiation but no longer dangerous. From there, they journeyed by wheeled vehicles.
Major Commaigne was coldly confident. The radioactivity of the sands surrounding Pung’s Corners was no problem. Not with the massive and perfect equipment he had for his force. What old Mr Coglan could do, the United States Army could do better; Coglan drove inside sheet lead, but the expeditionary force cruised in solid iridium steel, with gamma-ray baffles fixed in place.
Each platoon had its own half-track personnel carrier. Not only did the men have their hand weapons, but each vehicle mounted a 105-mm explosive cannon, with Zip-Fire Auto-Load and Wizardtrol Safety Interlock. Fluid mountings sustained the gimbals of the cannon. Radar picked out its target. Automatic digital computers predicted and outguessed the flight of its prey.
In the lead personnel carrier, Major Commaigne barked a last word to his troops:
“This is it, men! The chips are down! You have trained for this a long time and now you’re in the middle of it. I don’t know how we’re going to make out in there—” and he swung an arm in the direction of Pung’s Corners, a gesture faithfully reproduced in living three-dimensional colour on the intercoms of each personnel carrier in his fleet—“but win or lose, and I know we’re going to win, I want every one of you to know that you belong to the best Company in the best Regiment of the best Combat Infantry Team of the best Division of—”
Crump went the 105-mm piece on the lead personnel carrier as radar range automatically sighted in and fired upon a moving object outside, thus drowning out the tributes he had intended to pay to Corps, to Army, to Group, and to Command.
The battle for Pung’s Corners had begun.
6
Now that first target, it wasn’t any body.
It was only a milch cow, and one in need of freshening at that. She shouldn’t have been on the baseball field at all, but there she was, and since that was the direction from which the invader descended on the town, she made the supreme sacrifice. Without even knowing she’d done it, of course.
Major Commaigne snapped at his adjutant: “Lefferts! Have the ordnance sections put the one-oh-fives on safety. Can’t have this sort of thing.” It had been a disagreeable sight, to see that poor old cow become hamburger, well ketchuped, so rapidly. Better chain the big guns until one saw, at any rate, whether Pung’s Corners was going to put up a fight.
So Major Commaigne stopped the personnel carriers and ordered everybody out. They were past the dangerous radioactive area anyway.
The troops fell out in a handsome line of skirmish; it was very, very fast and very, very good. From the top of the Presbyterian Church steeple in Pung’s Corners, Jack Tighe and Andy Grammis watched through field glasses, and I can tell you that Grammis was pretty near hysterics. But Jack Tighe only hummed and nodded.
Major Commaigne gave an order and every man in the line of skirmish instantly dug in. Some were in marsh and some in mud; some had to tunnel into solid rock and some—nearest where that first target had been—through a thin film of beef. It didn’t much matter, because they didn’t use the entrenching spades of World War II; they had Power-Pakt Diggers that clawed into anything in seconds, and, what’s more, lined the pits with a fine ceramic glaze. It was magnificent.
And yet, on the other hand—.
Well, look. It was this way. Twenty-six personnel carriers had brought them here. Each carrier had its driver, its relief driver, its emergency alternate driver, and its mechanic. It had its radar-and-electronics repairman, and its radar-and-electronics repairman’s assistant. It had its ordnance staff of four, and its liaison communications officer to man the intercom and keep in touch with the P.C. commander.
Well, they needed all those people, of course. Couldn’t get along without them.
But that came to two hundred and eighty-two men.
Then there was the field kitchen, with its staff of forty-seven, plus administrative detachment and dietetic staff; the headquarters detachment, with paymaster’s corps and military police platoon; the meteorological section, a proud sight as they began setting up their field teletypes and fax receivers and launching their weather balloons; the field hospitality with eighty-one medics and nurses, nine medical officers and attached medical administrative staff; the special services detachment, prompt to begin setting up a three-D motion-picture screen in the lee of the parked personnel carriers and to commen
ce organizing a hand-ball tournament among the off-duty men; the four chaplains and chaplains’ assistants, plus the Wiseham Counsellor for Ethical Culturists, agnostics and waverers; the Historical officer and his eight trained clerks already going from foxhole to foxhole bravely carrying tape recorders, to take down history as it was being made in the form of first-hand impressions of the battle that had yet to be fought; military observers from Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, the Scandinavian Confederation, and the Soviet Socialist Republic of Inner Mongolia, with their orderlies and attaches; and, of course, field correspondents from Stars & Stripes, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Scripps-Howard chain, five wire services, eight television networks, an independent documentary motion-picture producer, and one hundred and twenty-seven other newspapers and allied public information outlets.
It was a stripped-down combat command, naturally. Therefore, there was only one Public Information Officer per reporter.
Still…
Well, it left exactly forty-six riflemen in line of skirmish.
Up in the Presbyterian belfry, Andy Grammis wailed: “Look at them, Jack! I don’t know, maybe letting advertising back into Pung’s Corners wouldn’t be so bad. All right, it’s a rat race, but—”
“Wait,” said Jack Tighe quietly, and hummed.
They couldn’t see it very well, but the line of skirmish was in some confusion. The word had been passed down that all the field pieces had been put on safety and that the entire firepower of the company rested in their forty-six rifles. Well, that wasn’t so bad; but after all, they had been equipped with E-Z Fyre Revolv-a-Clip Carbines until ten days before the expeditionary force had been mounted. Some of the troops hadn’t been fully able to familiarize themselves with the new weapons.
It went like this:
“Sam,” called one private to the man in the next foxhole. “Sam, listen, I can’t figure this something rifle out. When the something green light goes on, does that mean that the something safety is off?”
“Beats the something hell out of me,” rejoined Sam, his brow furrowed as he pored over the full-coloured glossy-paper operating manual, alluringly entitled, The Five-Step Magic-Eye Way to New Combat Comfort and Security. “Did you see what it says here? It says, ‘Magic-Eye in Off position is provided with positive Fayl-Sayf action, thus assuring Evr-Kleen Cartridge of dynamic and release, when used in combination with Shoulder-Eez Anti-Recoil Pads.’ ”
“What did you say, Sam?”
“I said it beats the something hell out of me,” said Sam, and pitched the manual out into no-man’s-land before him.
But he was sorry and immediately crept out to retrieve it, for although the directions seemed intended for a world that had no relation to the rock-and-mud terra firma around Pung’s Corners, all of the step-by-step instructions in the manual were illustrated by mock-up photographs of starlets in Bikinis—for the cavern factories produced instruction manuals as well as weapons. They had to, obviously, and they were good at it; the more complicated the directions, the more photographs they used. The vehicular ones were downright shocking.
Some minutes later: “They don’t seem to be doing anything,” ventured Andy Grammis, watching from the steeple.
“No, they don’t, Andy. Well, we can’t sit up here for ever. Come along and we’ll see what’s what.”
Now Andy Grammis didn’t want to do that, but Jack Tighe was a man you didn’t resist very well, and so they climbed down the winding steel stairs and picked up the rest of the Pung’s Corners Independence Volunteers, all fourteen of them, and they started down Front Street and out across the baseball diamond.
Twenty-six personnel carriers electronically went ping, and the turrets of their one-oh-fives swivelled to zero in on the Independence Volunteers.
Forty-six riflemen, swearing, attempted to make Akur-A-C Greenline Sighting Strip cross Horizon Blue Tree-Site Band in the Up-Close radar screens of their rifles.
And Major Commaigne, howling mad, waved a sheet of paper under the nose of his adjutant. “What kind of something nonsense is this?” he demanded, for a soldier is a soldier regardless of his rank. “I can’t take those men out of line with the enemy advancing on us!”
“Army orders, sir,” said the adjutant impenetrably. He had got his doctorate in Military Jurisprudence at Harvard Law and he knew whose orders meant what to whom. “The rotation plan isn’t my idea, sir. Why not take it up with the Pentagon?”
“But, Lefferts, you idiot, I can’t get through to the Pentagon! Those something newspapermen have the channels sewed up solid! And now you want me to take every front-line rifleman out and send him to a rest camp for three weeks—”
“No, sir,” corrected the adjutant, pointing to a line in the order, “Only for twenty days, sir, including travel time. But you’d best do it right away, sir, I expect. The order’s marked, ‘priority’.”
Well, Major Commaigne was no fool. Never mind what they said later. He had studied the catastrophe of Von Paulus at Stalingrad and Lee’s heaven-sent escape from Gettysburg, and he knew what could happen to an expeditionary force in trouble in enemy territory. Even a big one. And his, you must remember, was very small.
He knew that when you’re on your own, everything becomes your enemy; frost and diarrhoea destroyed more of the Nazi Sixth Army than the Russians did; the jolting wagons of Lee’s retreat put more of his wounded and sick out of the way than Meade’s cannon. So he did what he had to do.
“Sound the retreat!” he bawled. “We’re going back to the barn.”
Retire and regroup; why not? But it wasn’t as simple as that.
The personnel carriers backed and turned like a fleet in manoeuvres. Their drivers were trained for that. But one P.C. got caught in Special Service’s movie screen and blundered into another, and a flotilla of three of them found themselves stymied by the spreading pre-fabs of the field hospital. Five of them, doing extra duty in running electric generators from the power take-offs at their rear axles, were immobilized for fifteen minutes and then boxed in.
What it came down to was that four of the twenty-six were in shape to move right then. And obviously that wasn’t enough, so it wasn’t a retreat at all; it was a disaster.
“There’s only one thing to do,” brooded Major Commaigne amid the turmoil, with manly tears streaming down his face, “but how I wish I’d never tried to make lieutenant colonel!”
So Jack Tighe received Commaigne’s surrender. Jack Tighe didn’t act surprised. I can’t say the same for the rest of the Independence Volunteers.
“No, Major, you may keep your sword,” said Jack Tighe kindly. “And all of the officers may keep their Pinpoint Levl-Site No-Jolt sidearms.”
“Thank you, sir,” wept the major, and blundered back into the officer’s club which the Headquarters Detachment had never stopped building.
Jack Tighe looked after him with a peculiar and thoughtful expression.
William LaFarge, swinging a thirty-inch hickory stick—it was all he’d been able to pick up as a weapon—babbled: “It’s a great victory! Now they’ll leave us alone, I bet!”
Jack Tighe didn’t say a single word.
“Don’t you think so, Jack? Won’t they stay away now?”
Jack Tighe looked at him blankly, seemed about to answer and then turned to Charley Frink. “Charley. Listen. Don’t you have a shotgun put away somewhere?”
“Yes, Mr Tighe. And a .22. Want me to get them?”
“Why, yes, I think I do.” Jack Tighe watched the youth run off. His eyes were hooded. And then he said; “Andy, do something for us. Ask the major to give us a p.o.w. driver who knows the way to the Pentagon.”
And a few minutes later, Charley came back with the shotgun and the .22; and the rest, of course, is history.
Kurt Vonnegut
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
The year was 2158 a.d., and Lou and Emerald Schwartz were whispering on the balcony outside of Lou’s family’s apartment on the
76th floor of Building 257 in Alden Village, a New York housing development that covered what had once been known as Southern Connecticut. When Lou and Emerald had married, Em’s parents had tearfully described the marriage as being between May and December; but now, with Lou 112 and Em 93, Em’s parents had to admit that the match had worked out surprisingly well.
But Em and Lou weren’t without their troubles, and they were out in the nippy air of the balcony because of them. What they were saying was bitter and private.
“Sometimes I get so mad, I feel like just up and diluting his anti-gerasone,” said Em.
“That’d be against Nature, Em,” said Lou, “it’d be murder. Besides, if he caught us tinkering with his anti-gerasone, not only would he disinherit us, he’d bust my neck. Just because he’s 172 doesn’t mean Gramps isn’t strong as a bull.”
“Against Nature,” said Em. “Who knows what Nature’s like any more? Ohhhhh—I don’t guess I could ever bring myself to dilute his anti-gerasone or anything like that, but, gosh, Lou, a body can’t help thinking Gramps is never going to leave if somebody doesn’t help him along a little. Golly—we’re so crowded a person can hardly turn around, and Verna’s dying for a baby, and Melissa’s gone thirty years without one.” She stamped her feet. “I get so sick of seeing his wrinkled old face, watching him take the only private room and the best chair and the best food, and getting to pick out what to watch on TV, and running everybody’s life by changing his will all the time.”
“Well, after all,” said Lou bleakly, “Gramps is head of the family. And he can’t help being wrinkled like he is. He was 70 before anti-gerasone was invented. He’s going to leave, Em. Just give him time. It’s his business. I know he’s tough to live with, but be patient. It wouldn’t do to do anything that’d rile him. After all, we’ve got it better’n anybody else, them on the day-bed.”
“How much longer do you think we’ll get to sleep on the day-bed before he picks another pet? The world’s record’s two months, isn’t it?”
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