A Century of Science Fiction

by Damon Knight

  “I see. Then you don’t have any idea what killed him?” The Lieutenant got to his feet, pacing across the room. “I’ve stopped having ideas,” he said. “Maybe we killed him. Society—maybe that did it. There seems to be a new sickness now—no goals, no ideals, nothing to live for. Maybe one of these days we’ll all just stop living.”

  “Well, Lieutenant,” Stanley remarked, “I don’t see why you don’t just throw in the sponge. Enjoy yourself while you can.”

  The Lieutenant gave him an irritated glance. “Don’t talk crazy. I’m getting paid to do a job.”

  “You say there was no identification on the body?”

  The Lieutenant shook his head wearily. “No wallet, no keys, no letters—nothing but this.” He picked up a slip of paper from the desk. “This was in his breast pocket. It appears to be some kind of code, but the boys in the cipher room haven’t been able to break it yet.” He tossed it across the desk.

  Stanley picked it up and started to read. “ ‘Deep fr.— board ken.—P.T.A.—phone phone co.—gar. Dr.—pay ins—’ ” His eyes traveled to the bottom of the paper; there seemed to be about forty entries. Somewhere in the back of his mind was an elusive wisp of meaning.

  “Does it mean anything?” the Lieutenant asked quickly. “The pieces are all here,” he said slowly, “or most of the pieces. If I can put them together—”

  “Sorry, gentlemen, I’m afraid it’s all over.”

  The two men looked up, startled, to see a shadowy figure in the doorway. It was the Host.

  “All over?” The Lieutenant stared. “What do you mean?”

  “The show,” replied the Host. “At the last minute the sponsor changed his mind.”

  “The sponsor?” Stanley said.

  “Actually the sponsor’s wife, I believe, but that is neither here nor there. At any rate, you are now free to return to your normal everyday lives.”

  Stanley turned slowly toward the Lieutenant. “Our normal, everyday lives.”

  “Quite right,” said the Host briskly. “And now if you will turn in any props you may have—”

  Stanley reached in his pocket and drew out the pistol.

  “Is it loaded?” the Host inquired. “You’d better empty it.” “Yes,” Stanley said, “perhaps that would be best.” When the gun was empty he dropped it on the desk.

  The Lieutenant looked thoughtfully at the figure on the floor. “Sometimes we have to do things we don’t like,” he observed. “It’s all part of the job.”

  “I know.” Stanley picked up the slip of paper from the desk. He folded it carefully, then leaned over the body and tucked the paper in the breast pocket.

  “There is such a thing as the American Dream,” the Lieutenant continued softly, “and when someone threatens to destroy it—”

  “We do what has to be done,” Stanley said. He put the gun back in his pocket. “I guess that wraps it up.”

  The Lieutenant frowned. “There’s still one detail. I hate to ask you, but we have to get telephotos of a certain office. The only place they can be taken from is the top floor of the U.N. Hilton. It will mean being confined there for a week or more—”

  Stanley shrugged. “As you said, Lieutenant, it’s all part of the job.” He turned then, and walked slowly into the night.

  The weapon to end war is an old and bitter joke; poison gas and nuclear bombs, although “too frightful to use in war” have been used. But suppose someone should invent an antiweapon—a device that would keep all other modern instruments of destruction from being used. What then?

  Here is a queerly impressive picture of the creative mind at work, a vivid and plausible glimpse of the next war, and a question whose answer is not as obvious as it seems.

  CEASE FIRE

  BY FRANK HERBERT

  Snow slanted across the frozen marshland, driven in fitful gusts. It drifted in a low mound against the wooden observation post. The antennae of the Life Detector atop the O.P. swept back and forth in a rhythmic half circle like so many frozen sticks brittle with rime ice.

  The snow hid all distance, distorted substance into gray shadows without definition. A suggestion of brightness to the north indicated the sun that hung low on the horizon even at midnight in this season.

  Out of possible choices of a place for a world-shattering invention to be bom, this did not appear in the running.

  A rifle bullet spanged against an abandoned tank northeast of the O.P., moaned away into the distance. The bullet only emphasized the loneliness, the isolation of the O.P. set far out ahead of the front lines on the Arctic battlefields of 1972. Behind the post to the south stretched the long reaches of the Canadian Barren Grounds. An arm of the Arctic Ocean below Banks Island lay hidden in the early snowstorm to the north.

  One operator—drugged to shivering wakefulness—stood watch in the O.P. The space around him was barely six feet in diameter, crammed with equipment, gridded screens glowing a pale green with spots that indicated living flesh: a covey of ptarmigan, a possible Arctic fox. Every grid point on the screens held an aiming code for mortar fire.

  This site was designated O.P. 114 by the Allied command. It was no place for the sensitive man who had found himself pushed, shunted and shamed into this position of terror. The fact that he did occupy O.P. 114 only testified to the terrible urgencies that governed this war.

  Again a rifle bullet probed the abandoned tank. Corporal Larry Hulser, crouched over the O.P.’s screens, tried to get a track on the bullet. It had seemed to come from the life-glow spot he had identified as probably an Arctic fox.

  Much too small for a human, he thought. Or is it?

  The green glow of the screens underlighted Hulser’s dark face, swept shadows upward where they merged with his black hair. He chewed his lip, his eyes darting nervously with the fear he could never hide, the fear that made him the butt of every joke back at the barracks.

  Hulser did not look like a man who could completely transform his society. He looked merely like an indefinite lump of humanity encased in a Life Detector shield, crouching in weird green shadows.

  In the distant days of his youth, one of Hulser’s chemistry professors had labeled him during a faculty tea “a mystic— sure to fail in the modern world.”

  The glow spot Hulser had identified as a fox shifted its position.

  Should I call out the artillery? Hulser wondered. No. This could be the one they’d choose to investigate with a flying detector. And if the pilot identified the glow as a fox . . . Hulser cringed with the memory of the hazing he had taken on the wolf he’d reported two months earlier.

  “Wolfie Hulser!”

  I’m too old for this game, he thought. Thirty-eight is too old. If there were only some way to end—

  Another rifle bullet spanged against the shattered tank. Hulser tried to crouch lower in the tiny wooden O.P. The bullets were like questing fingers reaching out for unrecognized metal—to identify an O.P. When the bullets found their mark, a single 200-mm. mortar shell followed, pinpointed by echo phones. Or it could be as it had been with Breck Wingate, another observer.

  Hulser shivered at the memory.

  They had found Wingate slumped forward across his instruments, a neat hole through his chest from side to side just below the armpits. Wind had whistled through the wall of the O.P. from a single bullet hole beside Wingate. The enemy had found him and never known.

  Hulser glanced up nervously at the plywood walls, all that shielded him from the searching bullets—a wood shell designed to absorb the metal seekers and send back the sound of a bullet hitting a snowdrift. A rolled wad of plot paper filled a hole made on some other watch near the top of the dome.

  Again Hulser shivered.

  And again a bullet spanged against the broken tank. Then the ground rumbled and shook as a mortar shell zeroed the tank.

  Discouraging us from using it as an O.P., thought Hulser.

  He punched the backtrack relay to give the mortar’s position to his own artillery, but wit
hout much hope. The enemy was beginning to use the new “shift” shells that confused backtrack.

  The phone beside his L.D. screens glowed red. Hulser leaned into the cone of silence, answered, “O.P. one fourteen. Hulser.”

  The voice was Sergeant Chamberlain’s. “What was that mortar shooting at, Wolfie?”

  Hulser gritted his teeth, explained about the tank.

  Chamberlain’s voice barked through the phone, “We shouldn’t have to call for an explanation of these things! Are you sure you’re awake and alert?”

  “Yeah, Sarge.”

  “O.K. Keep your eyes open, Wolfie!”

  The red glow of the phone died.

  Hulser trembled with rage. Wolfie!

  He thought of Sergeant Mike Chamberlain: tall, overbearing, the irritating nasal twang in his voice. And he thought of what he’d like to do to Chamberlain’s narrow, small-eyed face and its big nose. He considered calling back and asking for “Schnozzle” Chamberlain.

  Hulser grinned tightly. That’d get him! And he’d have to wait another four hours before he could do anything about it

  But the thought of the certain consequences of arousing Chamberlain’s anger wiped the grin from Hulser’s face.

  Something moved on his central screen. The fox. Or was it a fox? It moved across the frozen terrain toward the shattered tank, stopped halfway.

  A fox investigating the strange odors of cordite and burned gas? he wondered. Or is it the enemy?

  With this thought came near panic. If any living flesh above a certain minimum size—roughly fifty kilos—moved too close to an O.P. without the proper I.F.F., the hut and all in it exploded in a blinding flash of thermite—everything incinerated to prevent the enemy from capturing the observer’s Life Detector shield.

  Hulser studied the grid of his central screen. It reminded him of a game he’d played as a boy: two children across a room from each other, ruled graph paper hidden behind books in their laps; each player’s paper contained secretly marked squares; four in a row—a battleship; three in a row —a destroyer; two in a . . .

  Again the glow on his screen moved toward the tank crater.

  He stared at the grid intersection above the glowing spot, and far away in his mind a thought giggled at him: Call and tell ’em you have a battleship on your screen at 0-6-C. That’d get you a Section Eight right out of this man’s Army!

  Out of the Army!

  His thoughts swerved abruptly to New Oakland, to Carol Jean. To think of her having our baby back there and—

  Again the (fox?) moved toward the tank crater.

  But his mind was hopelessly caught now in New Oakland. He thought of all the lonely years before Carol: working five days a week at Planetary Chemicals ... the library and endless pages of books (and another channel of his mind commented. You scattered your interests too widely!) . . . the tiny cubbyhole rooms of his apartment . . . the tasteless—

  Now, the (fox?) darted up to the tank crater, skirted it.

  Hulser’s mind noted the movement, went right on with its reverie: Then Carol! Why couldn’t we have found each other sooner? Just one month together and—

  Another small glowing object came on the screen near the point where he’d seen the first one. It too darted toward the tank crater.

  Hulser was back in the chill present, a deadly suspicion gnawing at him: The enemy has a new type of shield, not as good as ours. It merely reduces image size!

  Or is it a pair of foxes?

  Indecision tore at him.

  They could have a new shield, he thought. We don’t have a corner on the scientific brains.

  And a piece of his mind wandered off in a new direction— the war within the war: the struggle for equipment superiority. A new weapon, a new shield; a better weapon, a better shield. It was like a terrible ladder dripping with maimed flesh.

  They could have a new shield, his mind repeated.

  And another corner of his mind began to think about the shields—the complex flicker-lattice that made human flesh transparent to—

  Abruptly he froze. In all clarity, every diagram in place, every equation, every formula complete—all spread out in his mind was the instrument he knew could end this war. Uncontrolled shivering took over his body. He swallowed in a dry throat.

  His gaze stayed on the screen before him. The two glow spots joined, moved into the tank crater. Hulser bent into the cone of silence at his phone. “This is O.P. one fourteen. I have two greenies at co-ordinates oh-six-C-sub T-R. I think they’re setting up an O.P.!”

  “Are you sure?” It was Chamberlain’s nasal twang.

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  “We’ll see.”

  The phone went dead.

  Hulser straightened, wet his lips with his tongue. Will they send a plane for a sky look? They don’t really trust me.

  A rending explosion at the tank crater answered him.

  Immediately, a rattle of small-arms fire sprang up from the enemy lines. Bullets quested through the gray snow.

  It was an enemy O.P.! Now they know we have an observer out here!

  Another bullet found the dome of the O.P.

  Hulser stared at the hole in terror. What if they kill me? My idea will die with me! The war will go on and on and— He jerked toward the phone, screamed into it, “Get me out of here! Get me out of here! Get me out of here!”

  When they found him, Hulser was still mumbling the five words.

  Chamberlain’s lanky form crouched before the O.P.’s crawl hole. The three muffled figures behind him ignored the O.P., their heads turning, eyes staring off into the snow, rifles at the ready. The enemy’s small-arms fire had stopped.

  Another one’s broke, thought Chamberlain. I thought shame might make him last a little while longer!

  He dragged Hulser out into the snow, hissed, “What is it, you? Why’d you drag us out into this?”

  Hulser swallowed, said, “Sarge, please believe me. I know how to detonate enemy explosives from a distance without even knowing where the explosives are. I can—”

  “Detonate explosives from a distance?” Chamberlain’s eyes squinted until they looked like twin pieces of flint. Another one for the head shrinkers unless we can shock him out of it, he thought. He said, “You’ve gone off your rocker, you have. Now, you git down at them instruments and—”

  Hulser paled. “No, Sarge! I have to get back where—” “I could shoot your head off right where you—”

  Fear, frustration, anger—all of the complex pressure-borne emotions in Hulser—forced the words out of him: “You big-nosed, ignorant lump. I can end this war! You hear?” His voice climbed. ‘Take me back to the lieutenant! I’m gonna send your kind back under the rocks you—” Chamberlain’s fist caught Hulser on the side of the head, sent him tumbling into the snow. Even as he fell, Hulser’s mind said, But you told him, man! You finally told him!

  The sergeant glanced back at his companions, thought, If the enemy heard him, we’ve had it! He motioned one of the other men in close. “Mitch, take the watch on this O.P. We’ll have to get Hulser back.”

  The other nodded, ducked through the crawl hole. Chamberlain bent over Hulser. “You stinkin’ coward!” he hissed. “I’ve half a mind to kill you where you sit! But I’m gonna take you in so’s I can have the personal pleasure of watchin’ you crawl when they turn the heat on you! Now you git on your feet! An’ you git to walkin’!”

  Major Tony Lipari—“Tony the Lip” to his men—leaned against the canvas-padded wail of his dugout, hands clasped behind his head. He was a thin, oily-looking man with black hair parted in the middle and slicked to his head like two beetle wings. In civilian life he had sold athletic supplies from a wholesale house. He had once worn a turban to an office party, and it had been like opening a door on his appearance. Somewhere in his ancestry there had been a Moor.

  The major was tired (Casualty reports! Endless casualty reports!) and irritable, faintly nervous.

  We don’t have en
ough men to man the O.P.s now! he thought. Do we have to lose another one to the psych boys?

  He said, “The lieuten—” His voice came out in a nervous squeak, and he stopped, cleared his throat. “The lieutenant has told me the entire story, Corporal. Frankly, it strikes me as utterly fantastic.”

  Corporal Hulser stood at attention before the major. “Do I have the Major’s permission to speak?”

  Lipari nodded. “Please do.”

  “Sir, I was a chemist—I mean as a civilian. I got into this branch because I’d dabbled in electronics and they happened to need L.D. observers more than they needed chemists. Now, with our shields from—” He broke off, suddenly overwhelmed by the problem of convincing Major Lipari.

  He’s telling me we need L.D. observers! thought Lipari. He said, “Well, go on, Hulser.”

  “Sir, do you know anything about chemistry?”

  “A little.”

  “What I mean is, do you understand Redox equations and substitution reactions of—”

  “Yes, yes. Go on!”

  Hulser swallowed, thought, He doesn’t understand. Why won’t he send me back to someone who does? He said, “Sir, you’re aware that the insulation layer of our L.D. shields is a typical kind of protection for—”

  “Certainly! Insulates the wearer from the electric charge of the suit!”

  Hulser goggled at the major. “Insulates . . . Oh, no, sir. Begging the Major’s pardon, but—”

  “Is this necessary, Corporal?” asked Lipari. And he thought, If he’d only stop this act and get back to work! It’s so obvious he’s faking! If—

  “Sir, didn’t you get the—”

  “I had a full quota of L.D.-shield orientation when they called me back into the service,” said Lipari. “Infantry’s my specialty, of course. Korea, you know. But I understand how to operate a shield. Go on, Corporal.” He kicked his chair away from the wall.

  “Sir, what that insulation layer protects the wearer from is a kind of pseudo-substitution reaction in the skin. The suit’s field can confuse the body into producing nitrogen bubbles at—"