There Will Be War Volume III Read online

  “You can relax now, lad. Everything is under control.”

  Kurt gave a sigh of relief and, pulling himself to his feet, stretched luxuriantly. As the other officers saw the firing stud deserted, they tensed and looked to Commander Krogson questioningly. He frowned for a second and then slowly shook his head.

  “Well?” he said to Colonel Harris.

  “It’s obvious,” said the other, “you’ve a fleet, a darn good fleet, but it’s falling apart for lack of decent maintenance. I’ve got a base down there with five thousand lads who can think with their fingers. This knucklehead of mine is a good example.” He walked over to Kurt and slapped him affectionately on the shoulder. “There’s nothing on this ship that he couldn’t tear down and put back together blindfolded if he was given a little time to think about it. I think he’ll enjoy having some real work to do for a change.”

  “I may seem dense,” said Krogson with a bewildered expression on his face, “but wasn’t that the idea that I was trying to sell you?”

  “The idea is the same,” said Harris, “but the context isn’t. You’re in a position now where you have to cooperate. That makes a difference. A big difference!”

  “It sounds good,” said Krogson, “but now you’re overlooking something. Carr will be looking for me. We can’t stand off the whole galaxy!”

  “You’re overlooking something too, sir,” Schninkle interrupted. “He hasn’t the slightest idea where we are. It will be months before he has things well enough under control to start an organized search for us. When he does, his chances of ever spotting the fleet are mighty slim if we take reasonable precautions. Remember that it was only by a fluke that we ever happened to spot this place to begin with.”

  As he talked, a calculating look came into his eyes. “A year of training and refitting here and there wouldn’t be a fleet in the galaxy that could stand against us.” He casually edged over until he occupied a position between Kurt and the fire-control board. “If things went right, there’s no reason why you couldn’t become Lord Protector, Commander.”

  A flash of the old fire stirred within Krogson and then quickly flickered out. “No, Schninkle,” he said heavily. “That’s all past now. I’ve had enough. It’s time to try something new.”

  “In that case,” said Colonel Harris, “let’s begin! Out there a whole galaxy is breaking up. Soon the time will come when a strong hand is going to be needed to piece it back together and put it in running order again. You know,” he continued reflectively, “the name of the old empire still has a certain magic to it. It might not be a bad idea to use it until we are ready to move on to something better.”

  He walked silently to the vision port and looked down on the lush greenness spreading far below. “But whatever we call ourselves,” he continued slowly, half talking to himself, “we have something to work for now.” A quizzical smile played over his lips and his wise old eyes seemed to be scanning the years ahead. “You know, Kurt, there’s nothing like a visit from the Inspector General once in a while to keep things in line. The galaxy is a big place, but when the time comes, we’ll make our rounds!”

  XVI

  On the parade ground behind the low buildings of the garrison, the 427th Light Maintenance Battalion of the Imperial Space Marines stood in rigid formation, the feathers in their war bonnets moving slightly in the breeze that blew in from the west and their war paint glowing redly in the slanting rays of the setting sun.

  A quiver ran through the hard-surface soil of the plateau as the great mass of the fleet flagship settled down ponderously to rest. There was a moment of expectant silence as a great port clanged open and a gangplank extended to the ground. From somewhere within the ship a fanfare of trumpets sounded. Slowly and with solemn dignity, surrounded by his staff, Conrade Krogson, Inspector General of the Imperial Space Marines, advanced to review the troops.

  Editor's Introduction to:

  THIS EARTH OF HOURS

  by James Blish

  James Blish was a highly influential science fiction writer until his death in 1974. As “W. Atheling,” he became one of the field’s best-known critics.

  His work tended to be philosophical in nature. Even his “straight” adventure stories, beginning with “Surface Tension” (which became the novel The Seedling Stars), had a deeper theme: What is human? His A Case of Conscience, including as it does an ethical problem as old as the Roman Catholic Church, is rightly regarded as a science fiction classic. His best-known novels are the stories of The Okies, or Cities in Flight.

  Blish’s military career was brief and undistinguished. According to Damon Knight, Blish, a medical technician at Fort Dix, New Jersey, was “always in trouble over unshined shoes, or pajamas showing under his trousers at reveille.” In 1945 he refused a direct order to do KP. According to Knight, “Since it was wartime, he could have been court-martialed, but his father pulled strings in Washington and got him discharged.”

  Blish’s later work shows a far different view of the military: It does not always win his approval, but he pays the military all due respect.

  Kipling called the non-commissioned officers the backbone of the army. In this story Marine Master Sergeant Oberholzer shows why.

  Enrico Fermi once asked of alien civilizations, “Where are they?” He reasoned that there had to be a large number of intelligent life forms in the universe, and some had to be a great deal older and more advanced than we; why, then, have they never visited us? James Blish offers one possible answer.

  THIS EARTH OF HOURS

  by James Blish

  The advance squadron was coming into line as Master Sergeant Oberholzer came onto the bridge of the Novoe Washingtongrad, saluted, and stood stiffly to the left of Lieutenant Campion, the exec, to wait for orders. The bridge was crowded and crackling with tension, but after twenty years in the Marines, it was all old stuff to Oberholzer. The Hobo (as most of the enlisted men called her, out of earshot of the brass) was at the point of the formation, as befitted a virtually indestructible battleship already surfeited with these petty conquests. The rest of the cone was sweeping on ahead in the swift enveloping maneuver which had reduced so many previous planets before they had been able to understand what was happening to them.

  This time the planet at the focus of all those shifting conic sections of raw naval power was a place called Calle. It was showing now on a screen that Oberholzer could see, turning as placidly as any planet turned when you were too far away from it to see what guns it might be pointing at you. Lieutenant Campion was watching it too, though he had to look out of the very corners of his eyes to see it at all.

  If the exec were caught watching the screen instead of the meter board assigned to him, Captain Hammer would probably reduce him to an ensign. Nevertheless, Campion never took his eyes off the image of Calle. This one was going to be rough.

  Captain Hammer was watching, too. After a moment he said, “Sound!” in a voice like sandpaper.

  “By the pulse six, sir,” Lieutenant Spring’s voice murmured from the direction of the ’scope. His junior, a very raw youngster named Rover, passed him a chit from the plotting table. “For that read: By the briefs five eight nine, sir,” the invisible navigator corrected.

  Oberholzer listened without moving while Captain Hammer muttered under his breath to Flo-Mar 12-Upjohn, the only civilian allowed on the bridge—and small wonder, since he was the Consort of State of the Matriarchy itself. Hammer had long ago become accustomed enough to his own bridge to be able to control who overheard him, but 12-Upjohn’s answering whisper must have been audible to every man there.

  “The briefing said nothing about a second inhabited planet,” the Consort said a little peevishly. “But then there’s very little we do know about this system—that’s part of our trouble. What makes you think it’s a colony?”

  “A colony from Calle, not one of ours,” Hammer said in more or less normal tones; evidently he had decided against trying to keep only half of the discussion p
rivate. “The electromagnetic ‘noise’ from both planets has the same spectrum—the energy level, the output, is higher on Calle, that’s all. That means similar machines being used in similar ways. And let me point out, Your Excellency, that the outer planet is in opposition to Calle now, which will put it precisely in our rear if we complete this maneuver.”

  “When we complete this maneuver,” 12-Upjohn said firmly. “Is there any evidence of communication between the two planets?”

  Hammer frowned. “No,” he admitted.

  “Then we’ll regard the colonization hypothesis as unproved—and stand ready to strike back hard if events prove us wrong. I think we have sufficient force here to reduce three planets like Calle if we’re driven to that pitch.”

  Hammer grunted and resigned the argument. Of course it was quite possible that 12-Upjohn was right; he did not lack for experience—in fact, he wore the Silver Earring as the most-traveled Consort of State ever to ride the Standing Wave. Nevertheless Oberholzer repressed a sniff with difficulty. Like all military, he was a colonial; he had never seen the Earth, and never expected to; and both as a colonial and as a Marine who had been fighting the Matriarchy’s battles all his adult life, he was more than a little contemptuous of Earthmen, with their tandem names and all that they implied. Of course it was not the Consort of State’s fault that he had been born on Earth and so had been named only Marvin 12 out of the misfortune of being a male; nor that he had married into Florence Upjohn’s cabinet, that being the only way one could become a cabinet member and Marvin 12 having been taught from birth to believe such a post the highest honor a man might covet. All the same, neither 12-Upjohn nor his entourage of drones filled Oberholzer with confidence.

  Nobody, however, had asked M. Sgt. Richard Oberholzer what he thought, and nobody was likely to. As the chief of all the non-Navy enlisted personnel on board the Hobo, he was expected to be on the bridge when matters were ripening toward criticality; but his duty there was to listen, not to proffer advice. He could not in fact remember any occasion when an officer had asked his opinion, though he had received—and executed—his fair share of near-suicidal orders from bridges long demolished.

  “By the pulse five point five,” Lieutenant Spring’s voice sang.

  “Sergeant Oberholzer,” Hammer said.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “We are proceeding as per orders. You may now brief your men and put them into full battle gear.”

  Oberholzer saluted and went below. There was little enough he could tell the squad—as 12-Upjohn had said, Calle’s system was nearly unknown—but even that little would improve the total ignorance in which they had been kept till now. Luckily, they were not much given to asking questions of a strategic sort; like impressed spacehands everywhere, the huge mass of the Matriarchy’s interstellar holdings meant nothing to them but endlessly riding the Standing Wave, with battle and death lurking at the end of every jump. Luckily also, they were inclined to trust Oberholzer, if only for the low cunning he had shown in keeping most of them alive, especially in the face of unusually Crimean orders from the bridge.

  This time Oberholzer would need every ounce of trust and erg of obedience they would give him. Though he never expected anything but the worst, he had a queer cold feeling that this time he was going to get it. There were hardly any data to go on yet, but there had been something about Calle that looked persuasively like the end of the line.

  Very few of the forty men in the wardroom even looked up as Oberholzer entered. They were checking their gear in the dismal light of the fluorescents with the single-mindedness of men to whom a properly wound gun-tube coil, a properly set face-shield gasket, a properly fueled and focused vaulting jet, have come to mean more than parents, children, retirement pensions, the rule of law, or the logic of empire. The only man to show any flicker of interest was Sergeant Cassirir—as was normal, since he was Oberholzer’s understudy—and he did no more than look up from over the straps of his antigas suit and say, “Well?”

  “Well,” Oberholzer said, “now hear this.”

  There was a sort of composite jingle and clank as the men lowered their gear to the deck or put it aside on their bunks.

  “We’re investing a planet Called Calle in the Canes Venatici cluster,” Oberholzer said, sitting down on an olive-drab canvas pack stuffed with lysurgic acid grenades. “A cruiser Called the Assam Dragon—you were with her on her shakedown, weren’t you, Himber?—touched down here ten years ago with a flock of tenders and got swallowed up. They got two or three quick yells for help out and that was that—nothing anybody could make much sense of, no weapons named or description of the enemy. So here we are, loaded for the kill.”

  “Wasn’t any Calley in command of the Assam Dragon when I was aboard,” Himber said doubtfully.

  “Nah. Place was named for the astronomer who spotted her, from the rim of the cluster, a hundred years ago,” Oberholzer said. “Nobody names planets for ship captains. Anybody got any sensible questions?”

  “Just what kind of trouble are we looking for?” Cassirir said.

  “That’s just it—we don’t know. This is closer to the center of the Galaxy than we’ve ever gotten before. It may be a population center too; could be that Calle is just one piece of a federation, at least inside its own cluster. That’s why we’ve got the boys from Momma on board; this one could be damn important.”

  Somebody sniffed. “If this cluster is full of people, how come we never picked up signals from it?”

  “How do you know we never did?” Oberholzer retorted. “For all I know, maybe that’s why the Assam Dragon came here in the first place. Anyhow that’s not our problem. All we’re–”

  The lights went out. Simultaneously the whole mass of the Novoe Washingtongrad shuddered savagely, as though a boulder almost as big as she was had been dropped on her.

  Seconds later the gravity went out too.

  II

  Flo-Mar 12-Upjohn knew no more of the real nature of the disaster than did the wardroom squad, nor did anybody on the bridge, for that matter. The blow had been indetectable until it struck, and then most of the fleet was simply annihilated; only the Hobo was big enough to survive the blow, and she survived only partially—in fact, in five pieces. Nor did the Consort of State ever know by what miracle the section he was in hit Calle still partially under power; he was not privy to the self-salvaging engineering principles of battleships. All he knew—once he struggled back to consciousness—was that he was still alive, and that there was a broad shaft of sunlight coming through a top-to-bottom split in one wall of what had been his office aboard ship.

  He held his ringing head for a while, then got up in search of water. Nothing came out of the dispenser, so he unstrapped his dispatch case from the underside of his desk and produced a pint palladium flask of vodka. He had screwed up his face to sample this—at the moment he would have preferred water— when a groan reminded him that there might be more than one room in his suddenly shrunken universe, as well as other survivors.

  He was right on both counts. Though the ship section he was in consisted mostly of engines of whose function he had no notion, there were also three other staterooms. Two of these were deserted, but the third turned out to contain a battered member of his own staff, by name Robin One.

  The young man was not yet conscious and 12-Upjohn regarded him with a faint touch of despair. Robin One was perhaps the last man in space that the Consort of State would have chosen to be shipwrecked with.

  That he was utterly expendable almost went without saying; he was, after all, a drone. When the perfection of sperm electrophoresis had enabled parents for the first time to predetermine the sex of their children, the predictable result had been an enormous glut of males—which was directly accountable for the present regime on Earth. By the time the people and the law-makers, thoroughly frightened by the crazy years of fashion upheavals, “beefcake,” polyandry, male prostitution, and all the rest, had come to their senses, the Matriarchy
was in to stay; a weak electric current had overturned civilized society as drastically as the steel knife had demoralized the Eskimos.

  Though the tide of excess males had since receded somewhat, it had left behind a wrack, of which Robin One was a bubble. He was a drone, and hence superfluous by definition—fit only to be sent colonizing, on diplomatic missions or otherwise thrown away.

  Superfluity alone, of course, could hardly account for his presence on 12-Upjohn’s staff. Officially, Robin One was an interpreter; actually—since nobody could know the language the Consort of State might be Called upon to understand on this mission—he was a poet, a class of unattached males with special privileges in the Matriarchy, particularly if what they wrote was of the middling-difficult or Hillyer Society sort. Robin One was an eminently typical member of this class, distractible, sulky, jealous, easily wounded, homosexual, lazy except when writing, and probably (to give him the benefit of the doubt, for 12-Upjohn had no ear whatever for poetry) the second-worst poet of his generation.

  It had to be admitted that assigning 12-Upjohn a poet as an interpreter on this mission had not been a wholly bad idea, and that if Hildegard Muller of the Interstellar Understanding Commission had not thought of it, no mere male would have been likely to—least of all Bar-Rob 4-Agberg, Director of Assimilation. The nightmare of finding the whole of the center of the Galaxy organized into one vast federation, much older than Earth’s, had been troubling the State Department for a long time, at first from purely theoretical considerations—all those heart-stars were much older than those in the spiral arms, and besides, where star density in space is so much higher, interstellar travel does not look like quite so insuperable an obstacle as it long had to Earthmen—and later from certain practical signs, of which the obliteration of the Assam Dragon and her defenders had been only the most provocative. Getting along with these people on the first contact would be vital, and yet the language barrier might well provoke a tragedy wanted by neither side, as the obliteration of Nagasaki in World War II had been provoked by the mistranslation of a single word. Under such circumstances, a man with a feeling for strange words in odd relationships might well prove to be useful, or even vital.