There Will Be War Volume III Read online

  “I understand, sir,” Oberholzer said levelly. “Cassirir, let’s go. We’ll backtrack to where we nabbed the worm and then follow his trail to wherever he came from. Fall in.”

  The men shouldered their Sussmanns. 12-Upjohn and Robin One watched them go. At the last dune before the two would go out of sight altogether, Oberholzer turned and waved, but neither waved back. Shrugging, Oberholzer resumed plodding. “Sarge?” “Yeah?”

  “How do you figure to spring this joker with only four guns?”

  “Five guns if we spring him—I’ve got a side arm,” Oberholzer reminded him. “We’ll play it by ear, that’s all. I want to see just how serious these worms are about leaving us alone and letting us shoot them if we feel like it. I’ve got a hunch that they aren’t very bright, one at a time, and don’t react fast to strictly local situations. If this whole planet is like one huge body, and the worms are its brain cells, then we’re germs—and maybe it’d take more than four germs to make the body do anything against us that counted, at least fast enough to do any good.”

  Cassirir was frowning absurdly; he did not seem to be taking the theory in without pain. Well, Cassirir had never been much of a man for tactics.

  “Here’s where we found the guy,” one of the men said, pointing at the sand.

  “That’s not much of a trail,” Cassirir said. “If there’s any wind, it’ll be wiped out like a shot.”

  “Take a sight on it, that’s all we need. You saw him run off—straight as a ruled line, no twists or turns around the dunes or anything. Like an army ant. If the trail sands over, we’ll follow the sight. It’s a cinch it leads someplace.”

  “All right,” Cassirir said, getting out his compass. After a while the four of them resumed trudging.

  There were only a few drops of hot, flat-tasting water left in the canteens, and their eyes were gritty and red from dryness and sand, when they topped the ridge that overlooked the nest. The word sprang instantly into Oberholzer’s mind, though perhaps he had been expecting some such thing ever since Robin One had compared the Calleans to ants.

  It was a collection of rough white spires, each perhaps fifty feet high, rising from a common doughlike mass which almost filled a small valley. There was no greenery around it and no visible source of water, but there were three roads, two of them leading into oval black entrances which Oberholzer could see from here. Occasionally—not often—a Callean would scuttle out and vanish, or come speeding over the horizon and dart into the darkness. Some of the spires bore masts carrying what seemed to be antennae or more recondite electronic devices, but there were no windows to be seen; and the only sound in the valley, except for the dry, dusty wind, was a subdued composite hum.

  “Man!” Cassirir said, whispering without being aware of it.

  “It must be as black as the ace of spades in there. Anybody got a torch?”

  Nobody had. “We won’t need one anyhow,” Oberholzer said confidently. “They’ve got eyes, and they can see in desert sunlight. That means they can’t move around in total darkness. Let’s go—I’m thirsty.”

  They stumbled down into the valley and approached the nearest black hole cautiously. Sure enough, it was not as black as it had appeared from the hill; there was a glow inside which had been hidden from them against the contrast of the glaringly lit sands. Nevertheless, Oberholzer found himself hanging back.

  While he hesitated, a Callean came rocketing out of the entrance and pulled to a smooth, sudden stop.

  “You are not to get in the way,” he said in exactly the same piping singsong voice the other had used.

  “Tell me where to go and I’ll stay out of your way,” Oberholzer said. “Where is the man from the warship that you didn’t dissect?”

  “In Gnitonis, halfway around the world from here.” Oberholzer felt his shoulders sag, but the Callean was not through. “You should have told me that you wanted him,” he said. “I will have him brought to you. Is there anything else that you need?”

  “Water,” Oberholzer said hopefully.

  “That will be brought. There is no water you can use here. Stay out of the cities; you will be in the way.”

  “How else can we eat?”

  “Food will be brought. You should make your needs known; you are of low intelligence and helpless. I forbid nothing, I know you are harmless, and your life is short in any case; but I do not want you to get in the way.”

  The repetition was beginning to tell on Oberholzer, and the frustration created by his having tried to use a battering ram against a freely swinging door was compounded by his mental picture of what the two Momma’s boys would say when the squad got back.

  “Thank you,” he said, and bringing the Sussmann into line, he trained it on the Callean’s squidlike head and squeezed the trigger.

  It was at once established that the Calleans were as mortal to Sussmann flamers as is all other flesh and blood; this one made a very satisfactory corpse. Unsatisfied, the flamer bolt went on to burn a long slash in the wall of the nest, not far above the entrance. Oberholzer grounded the rifle and waited to see what would happen next; his men hefted their weapons tensely.

  For a few minutes there was no motion but the random twitching of the headless Callean’s legs. Evidently he was still not entirely dead, though he was a good four feet shorter than he had been before and plainly was feeling the lack. Then there was a stir inside the dark entrance.

  A ten-legged animal about the size of a large rabbit emerged tentatively into the sunlight, followed by two more and then by a whole series of them, perhaps as many as twenty. Though Oberholzer had been unabashed by the Calleans themselves, there was something about these things that made him feel sick. They were coal black and shiny, and they did not seem to have any eyes; their heavily armored heads bore nothing but a set of rudimentary palps and a pair of enormous pincers, like those of a June beetle.

  Sightless or no, they were excellent surgeons. They cut the remains of the Callean swiftly into sections, precisely one metamere to a section, and bore the carrion back inside the nest. Filled with loathing, Oberholzer stepped forward quickly and kicked one of the last in the procession. It toppled over like an unstable kitchen stool but regained its footing as though nothing had happened. The kick had not hurt it visibly, though Oberholzer’s toes felt as though he had kicked a Victorian iron dog. The creature, still holding its steak delicately in its living tongs, mushed implacably after the others back into the dubiety of the nest. Then all that was left in the broiling sunlight was a few pools of blackening blood seeping swiftly into the sand.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Cassirir said raggedly.

  “Stand fast,” Oberholzer growled. “If they’re mad at us, I want to know about it right now.”

  But the next Callean to pass them, some twenty eternal minutes later, hardly even slowed down. “Keep out of the way,” he said and streaked away over the dunes. Snarling, Oberholzer caromed a bolt after him, but missed him clean.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go back. No hitting the canteens till we’re five kilometers past the mid-point cairn. March!”

  The men were all on the verge of prostration by the time that point was passed, but Oberholzer never once had to enforce the order. Nobody, it appeared, was eager to come to an end on Calle as a series of butcher’s cuts in the tongs of a squad of huge black beetles.

  V

  “I know what they think,” the man from the Assam Dragon said. “I’ve heard them say it often enough.”

  He was a personable youngster, perhaps thirty, with blond wavy hair which had been turned almost white by the strong Callean sunlight: His captors had walked him for three hours every day on the desert. He had once been the Assam Dragon’s radioman, a post which in interstellar flight is a branch of astronomy, not of communications; nevertheless Oberholzer and the Marines called him Sparks in deference to a tradition which, 12-Upjohn suspected, the Marines did not even know existed.

  “Then why wouldn’t there
be a chance of our establishing better relations with the ‘person’ on the fourth planet?” 12-Upjohn said. “After all, there’s never been an Earth landing there.”

  “Because the ‘person’ on Xixobrax is a colony of Calle and knows everything that goes on here. It took the two planets in cooperation to destroy the fleet. There’s almost full telepathic communion between the two—in fact, all through the Central Empire. The only rapport that seems to weaken over short distances—interplanetary distances—is the sense of identity. That’s why each planet has an I of its own, its own ego. But it’s not the kind of ego we know anything about. Xixobrax wouldn’t give us any better deal than Calle has, any more than I’d give Calle a better deal than you would, Your Excellency. They have common purposes and allegiances. All the Central Empire seems to be like that.”

  12-Upjohn thought about it; but he did not like what he thought. It was a knotty problem, even in theory.

  Telepathy among men had never amounted to anything. After the pioneer exploration of the microcosm with the Arpe Effect—the second of two unsuccessful attempts at an interstellar drive, long before the discovery of the Standing Wave—it had become easy to see why this would be so. Psi forces in general were characteristic only of the subspace in which the primary particles of the atom had their being; their occasional manifestations in the macrocosm were statistical accidents, as weak and indirigible as spontaneous radioactive decay.

  Up to now this had suited 12-Upjohn. It had always seemed to him’ that the whole notion of telepathy was a dodge—an attempt to bypass the plain duty of each man to learn to know his brother and, if possible, to learn to love him; the telepathy fanatics were out to short-circuit the task, to make easy the most difficult assignment a human being might undertake. He was well aware, too, of the bias against telepathy which was inherent in his profession of diplomat; yet he had always been certain of his case, hazy though it was around the edges. One of his proofs was that telepathy’s main defenders invariably were incorrigibly lazy writers, from Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser all the way down to…

  All the same, it seemed inarguable that the whole center of the Galaxy, an enormously diverse collection of peoples and cultures, was being held together in a common and strife-free union by telepathy alone, or perhaps by telepathy and its even more dubious adjuncts: a whole galaxy held together by a force so unreliable that two human beings sitting across from each other at a card table had never been able to put it to an even vaguely practicable use.

  Somewhere there was a huge hole in the argument.

  While he had sat helplessly thinking in these circles, even Robin One was busy, toting power packs to the welding crew which was working outside to braze together on the desert the implausible, misshapen lump of metal which the Marine sergeant was fanatically determined would become a ship again. Now the job was done, though no shipwright would admire it, and the question of where to go with it was being debated in full council. Sparks, for his part, was prepared to bet that the Calleans would not hinder their departure.

  “Why would they have given us all this oxygen and stuff if they were going to prevent us from using it?” he said reasonably. “They know what it’s for—even if they have no brains, collectively they’re plenty smart enough.”

  “No brains?” 12-Upjohnsaid. “Or are you just exaggerating?”

  “No brains,” the man from the Assam Dragon insisted. “Just lots of ganglia. I gather that’s the way all of the races of the Central Empire are organized, regardless of other physical differences. That’s what they mean when they say we’re all sick—hadn’t you realized that?”

  “No,” 12-Upjohn said in slowly dawning horror. “You had better spell it out.”

  “Why, they say that’s why we get cancer. They say that the brain is the ultimate source of all tumors and is itself a tumor. They call it ‘hostile symbiosis.”

  “Malignant?”

  “In the long run. Races that develop them kill themselves off. Something to do with solar radiation; animals on planets of Population II stars develop them, Population I planets don’t.”

  Robin One hummed an archaic twelve-tone series under his breath. There were no words to go with it, but the Consort of State recognized it; it was part of a chorale from a twentieth-century American opera, and the words went: Weep, weep beyond time for this Earth of hours.

  “It fits,” he said heavily. “So to receive and use a weak field like telepathy, you need a weak brain. Human beings will never make it.”

  “Earthworms of the galaxy, unite,” Robin One said.

  “They already have,” Sergeant Oberholzer pointed out. “So where does all this leave us?”

  “It means,” 12-Upjohn said slowly, “that this Central Empire, where the stars are almost all Population I, is spreading out toward the spiral arms where the Earth lies. Any cluster civilizations they meet are natural allies—clusters are purely Population I—and probably have already been mentally assimilated. Any possible natural allies we meet, going around Population II stars, we may well pick a fight with instead.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Sergeant Oberholzer said.

  “I know what you meant; but this changes things. As I understand it, we have a chance of making a straight hop to the nearest Earth base if we go on starvation rations–”

  “–and if I don’t make more than a point zero five percent error in plotting the course,” Sparks put in.

  “Yes. On the other hand, we can make sure of getting there by going in short leaps via planets known to be inhabited, but never colonized and possibly hostile. The only other possibility is Xixobrax, which I think we’ve ruled out. Correct?”

  “Right as rain,” Sergeant Oberholzer said. “Now I see what you’re driving at, Your Excellency. The only thing is—you didn’t mention that the stepping-stone method will take us the rest of our lives.”

  “So I didn’t,” 12-Upjohn said bleakly. “But I hadn’t forgotten it. The other side of that coin is that it will be even longer than that before the Matriarchy and the Central Empire collide.”

  “After which,” Sergeant Oberholzer said with a certain relish, “I doubt that it’ll be a Matriarchy, whichever wins. Are you calling for a vote, sir?”

  “Well–yes, I seem to be.”

  “Then let’s grasshopper,” Sergeant Oberholzer said unhesitatingly. “The boys and I can’t fight a point zero five percent error in navigation—but for hostile planets, we’ve got the flamers.”

  Robin One shuddered. “I don’t mind the fighting part,” he said unexpectedly. “But I do simply loathe the thought of being an old, old man when I get home. All the same, we do have to get the word back.”

  “You’re agreeing with the sergeant?”

  “Yes, that’s what I said.”

  “I agree,” Sparks said. “Either way we may not make it, but the odds are in favor of doing it the hard way.”

  “Very good,” 12-Upjohn said. He was uncertain of his exact emotion at this moment; perhaps gloomy satisfaction was as close a description as any. “I make it unanimous. Let’s get ready.”

  The sergeant saluted and prepared to leave the cabin; but suddenly he turned back.

  “I didn’t think very much of either of you, a while back,” he said brutally. “But I’ll tell you this: There must be something about brains that involves guts too. I’ll back ’em any time against any critter that lets itself be shot like a fish in a barrel—whatever the odds.”

  The Consort of State was still mulling that speech over as the madman’s caricature of an intersteller ship groaned and lifted its lumps and angles from Calle. Who knows, he kept telling himself, who knows, it might even be true.

  But he noticed that Robin One was still humming the chorale from Psyche and Eros; and ahead the galactic night was as black as death.

  Editor's Introduction to:

  007: “IT IS ENOUGH, IVAN. GO HOME!”

  by Reginald Bretnor

  Reginald Bretnor and my fat
her have at least this in common: They were both in the Horse Cavalry. I have heard identical tales from each about how they nearly castrated themselves attempting to sheathe the Patton sabre during mounted parade.

  Reg Bretnor lives in Oregon now, but he used to live in the Bay Area of California. I first met him at Poul Anderson’s house; I believe that was also the day I really got to know Randall Garrett. Reg is a fascinating character: inveterate (and expert!) poker player; sword collector; gun expert; historian; military theorist and excellent raconteur.

  He and Randall Garrett had much in common: attitudes, and a fascination with puns, although Randall was much quicker to make them in ordinary conversation. Still in all, Bretnor for years published “Through Space and Time with Ferdinand Feghoot,” certainly the most famous series of science fiction puns in our history. (Randall parodied them with “The Adventures of Benedict Breadfruit.” I suppose that was inevitable.)

  When not being a punster, Reginald Bretnor is a very serious writer. His Decisive Warfare is generally considered a real contribution to military theory, while the present essay indicates that he understands all too well the menace facing Western civilization.

  It has become fashionable of late to act as if there were a symmetry between Western civilization and the Soviet bloc; to speak of “side A and side B” as if their national motives were the same. This is always done in speeches at the United Nations.

  We all know better, of course. The Soviets slaughtered more of their own citizens than the Nazis ever managed, and their invasion of Afghanistan has little in common with the futile U.S. efforts to keep at least a part of Vietnam, if not free, then at least unenslaved. Intellectuals may be proud of their achievements in inducing the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam; but they do not often say so when speaking to groups of Southeast Asian refugees.

  Yet we continue to sell grain and butter to the Soviet Union, and the Europeans continue to build their pipelines. Worse, this is not done for cash, but for credit, so that Poland, West Germany, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union itself pile up ever-mounting debts to the West—and Western bankers agitate for further extensions of credit lest a Communist loan default upset the international monetary market.