War and Peace

by Stanley Schmidt (ed)

  Hamner nodded. “I know what to do.” He leaned against the column, gathered new strength from the thought. “I’ve known all along what had to be done. Now we can do it. We won’t thank you for it, but—you’ve saved a whole world, John.” Falkenberg looked at him grimly, then pointed to the bodies below. “Damn you, don’t say that!” he shouted. “I haven’t saved anything. All a soldier can do is buy time . . . I haven’t saved Hadley. You have to do that. God help you if you don’t.”

  Human beings tend to see things as black or white, overlooking the many shades of gray between. Some look at the destructive power of unprecedented weapons and see an awesome choice with a yawning chasm between them: now, it seems, we must surely either utterly destroy ourselves or learn to live happily ever after. But that argument overlooks a very important subtlety. …

  THIS SHIP purred as it bored a tunnel through space; purred like a pampered and petted kitten.

  It is, I was thinking, a hell of a noise for a spaceship to make.

  A spaceship should roar like all the enraged lions that have ever walked the earth roaring fortissimo and in unison. It should spew flame burning more brightly than any tiger in any jungle—even Blake’s bright burner.

  This spaceship, however, spumed the more flamboyant traits of feline heritage and purred like an enormous kitten.

  If it weren’t for the purring, I thought, I wouldn’t know that we were moving—the purring and the violet shift.

  My shirt had been white when I left Earth. It now appeared to be a delicate violet hue. The field which allowed the ship to cheat Einstein and cover light-years in a matter of days shifted all light within the ship slightly toward the violet end of the spectrum. During the first few days of flight the shift had been irritating, giving me an irrational feeling that something was wrong with my eyes. I had compulsively rubbed my eyes until they were red and throbbing.

  Now I scarcely noticed the shift. But I couldn’t get used to the purring.

  Maybe I associated it with cats. But that shouldn’t have bothered me. Cats tome were like spinach. Some people love the stuff and some people hate it. I’m apathetic.

  I’m edgy because of what Arthon said yesterday, I decided. I’m just reading something sinister into what he said. It’s silly to get cold feet just as mankind’s salvation comes out of the skies at the eleventh hour, I told myself. There’s no reason to be afraid. There should be an end to fear now that there will be no atomic doom.

  There had been the usual bumper crop of brushfire wars, some smoldering, some flaming brightly; all to the background music of rattling sabers. Dangerous, merrily blazing little brushfire wars in a world of deadly thermonuclear inflammables. There had been the arms race, more crowded than before by the entry of Cuba with its A-bomb.

  But there had also been visitors from interstellar space. Before the moon bases had been developed beyond the level of extraterrestrial summer camps, before man had gone to Mars in person, the stars had come to see him. And brought hope.

  The old argument: we have scarcely begun to crawl in space, but look how far we have come in killability. Before we can send our own carcasses—and not some electronic gimmick, some glorified and hopped-up Brownie camera—in person to Mars, we are able to sterilize the globe. If we can keep from blowing our collective brains out for just a little longer, we might even reach Pluto, chilly outpost of the sun’s domain.

  But to go beyond Pluto and reach the stars would require time; much time. To survive long enough to graduate from the solar system surely would require that we find the magic formula for peace; the therapy to prevent Terracide.

  And, similarly, wouldn’t visitors from extrasolar systems have found the key to pacem in terris; or, rather, extraterris?

  Scant surprise, then, that everybody was ecstatic over the arrival of live and kicking unbombed and unirradiated neighbors from Out There. Those who had advocated a hard line in foreign policy, consequently being villified as warmongers, were happiest of all, for it is a hard and lonely thing to advocate a necessary evil.

  Immediately, all parties concerned got down to work on each other’s languages. They learned ours before we learned theirs, naturally. They had more teachers than we did. When said language exchange had been reasonably well accomplished, and all the “hello there” rituals had been suffered through, the first question from our side was, in essence: “How can three point nine billion—and more on the way—highly belligerent people coexist on the same eight thousand-mile-diameter life raft without one or more groups of passengers capsizing the shaky thing and drowning one and all?”

  The answer, again in essence, was: “We would have to study your history and culture in depth to determine what factors are responsible for any differences between our civilization and yours with respect to war or anything else, and the time required would be prohibitive; would put us so far behind schedule that our home planets would be concerned. Why not let us ferry experts of your planet to our planets and let them study our civilizations at their leisure? When they have determined the causes of differences in our civilizations, we will return them to Earth.”

  It made sense. If a group of people, all of the same IQ, were placed on an island as children and allowed to grow up, would they ever develop the concept of intelligence? Could a man who grew up on a plain conceive of either mountains, or valleys, without seeing them? If the aliens had never slaughtered each other en masse, would it ever occur to them that there was anything unusual about the peaceful state of affairs, any more than we think it unusual that man can’t fly by wiggling his ears? If the man who had grown up on a plain ever wanted to learn all the various techniques involved in mountain climbing, he would have to go to where the mountains are.

  Which was why I, Howard M. Nelson, Esq., Ph.D. in political science, and wearer of a white shirt, that happened to look violet at the moment, happened to be on a purring spaceship hurtling through space at several hundred times the speed of light.

  My mother didn’t raise her boy to be a spaceman, I thought. I didn’t look the part. An astronaut is as near to physical perfection as flesh born of mere man and woman can be, has the reflexes of a cougar with hypertension, has stamina enough to get out and carry the ship back home, should the rockets fail. This was common knowledge—so common that it had passed into the exalted category of things that “everyone knows.” Yet here I was, receding hairline, advancing waistline and all, flying farther and faster than any of the smiling young spacefarers of Projects Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, et al.

  Aside from some mild panic at takeoff, which had been overwhelmed by the greater fear that I would show the panic and make a fool of myself, all had gone well until yesterday. I had been talking to Arthon, the pilot and entire crew of the ship, and he had hit me between the eyes with an umpteen hundred megaton firecracker—one of the ones that my little thirty-seven light-year jaunt would cover, hopefully, with cobwebs.

  “There is so much that we can learn from you,” I had said, “it’s a shame that there is no way we can repay you.”

  “The reverse is that which is true,” he had replied. “That which we can learn from you is greater than that which you can learn from us.”

  Feeling as if a gallon of ice water had been poured into my BVDS, I had said, “Oh, gee. Yeah, sure. Uh.” We he-men always have a little trouble speaking our minds; especially when hit with brain-scrambling firecrackers like the aforementioned.

  “Pardon? Perhaps I have not the mastery of your language which I thought was mine,” Arthon had said, his features clouded with very human concern.

  By now, I had re-erected the facade behind which we humans, masters of Earth, spend our lives hiding. “But you are so much more advanced than we, what can we possibly teach you?”

  “You underestimate your people and in a way that is unjust, Howard,” he replied, smiling a very human smile. “As for what that is known by you that can benefit us”—sorrow flowed across his face and spilled over into his voice—“I think t
hat that will be left as a surprise for the time which will be that of arrival.”

  Judging from his new mood, the surprise would be as cheery as an unexpected visit by Jack the Ripper.

  Now, some twenty-four hours later and about thirty minutes from arrival, I was in a very calm state of hysteria. Damnit, why had Arthon looked like Gloom & Doom, Inc. when he told me that there was much that we Earthside primitives could teach his side—which consisted of some fifty odd inhabited planets in a loose federation.

  Arthon had been very chummy during the trip. He looked very human except for his light blue fur and prehensile tail. He was more human on the inside than the administrators back at my university. I had thought that we were becoming fast friends, as the Rover Boys would say . . . Maybe he was going to have to throw me to the lions when we arrived and he was regretting it.

  But what could they learn from us?

  Maybe we had followed up pathways of discovery that they had neglected. The American Indians were around for a long time without inventing the wheel.

  Suppose they developed their space drive without ever developing atomic power.

  Arthon had said that the drive had no moving parts. I didn’t have the mathematical background to understand how it worked, he said, but he could easily show me how to make one. If it was that simple, could the extrasolarites, as I called them, have hit upon the drive by accident and still be, with the exception of the drive, in a more primitive state of technological development than man? Then they wouldn’t have the wherewithal to bump each other off and wouldn’t need any magic formula for peace. Arthon’s planet was out to get the know-how for nuclear power and lick the other planets in the federation. That was what his people could learn from me!

  Nope—because Earth had been discovered by a fleet of extrasolarites; one ship from each planet in the Federation. And each ship had taken back one (1) Earthling to its home planet; so no planet would have an advantage over any other. Moreover, each Earthling taken was just like me—an ultra-departmentalized specialist in the social sciences whose total knowledge of atomic power consisted of: “Well, there’re some bombs that have uranium in them and some that have hydrogen and the ones with hydrogen make bigger bangs and the bombs cause fallout; yup, yup, yup.”

  My son was a bug about science and electronics. They could have found out more about atomic power by snatching him than by carting me off.

  What if, instead of the planets of the Federation fighting among themselves, they have ganged up and go around looking for other planets to clobber?

  Nope—in that case, why did they contact us instead of just going back home with the news of fresh prey? And, if they wanted to size us up as to what kind of a fight we would give them, why were they taking social scientists back with them instead of military experts?

  My train of thought was derailed by Arthon’s entrance. “Howard, the time which will be that of the breaking out of pseudospace will be ten minutes from this time,” he informed me. “Would that which you want be to see it?”

  “Lead on, MacDuff,” I said. The misquote fit my mood.

  I went with him down the corridor, which was throbbing with the engine’s pussy-noise galore, and followed him into the control room. We sat down in deep-cushioned seats, both with slots for a prehensile tail, and looked through the viewscreen at the rippling violet shell that surrounded the ship.

  “You promised me a surprise,” I reminded him.

  “At this time the surprise would be that which I could only tell you. In five minutes, it will be that which can be seen with those eyes which are your own.” He paused. “It is afraid that I am, Howard, that honest is not what we have been with you.” Little crawling bits of fear were in my spinal column, as numerous as ants in an anthill. “How is that?”

  “You are hoping that the secret of peace is something which can be obtained from us, are you not?”

  “Yes. We were expecting a rain of death from the skies any day. Then you came and we, well … had hope again.”

  “For how long had this rain of death from your skies been something that you had expected?”

  “What?”

  “Let me ask again the question in another shape. How long has atomic power been with you humans?”

  My heart sank. “Well, uh, since 1945. Almost forty years, that is.”

  “And how many times has a war seen the use of atomic weapons?”

  “Well, twice. Both times in the same year—1945.”

  “So, you have not used the weapons of which you have great fear for almost as long as you have had them—for forty of your years.”

  “Well … yes.” I frowned.

  “Atomic power was our discovery over three hundred of your years ago.”

  “And you haven’t wiped yourselves out? Now I know that you must have the key to peace, Arthon!” (But, still, something was calling the short hairs on the back of my neck to military attention.)

  “The terribleness of nuclear weapons has not the final greatness that you think it does, Howard. There are perfect defenses against them. There are fields which are such that a fission bomb will not explode within them. There are other fields for fusion bombs and antimatter bombs.”

  “Then you’ve survived because you have defenses against atomic weapons. You can give them to us and there will be no atomic war.”

  “Understanding is that which you do not yet have, Howard. There are weapons which have a deadliness far greater than the weapons that are those I have named. There are biological weapons. There are X-ray lasers. The knowledge is ours which can convert a sunspot into a laser and incinerate the sunlit half of a planet. And defenses are ours which nullify these weapons. And others that are more terrible.”

  “To have survived such dangers proves that you have the key to peace that I seek.”

  “As I have said, Howard, honest is not what we have been with you. We have misled your people. Happiness was ours when we saw that to study us was your wish and so we gladly took you and your fellows to the planets which were ours, because there is that which we must learn from you.”

  He paused. My tongue was looking for a hole to crawl into and hide.

  “As you once told me, and exactly as you told me, ‘A common characteristic equally shared by a group is not evident to the group as a characteristic until they encounter another group which has the characteristic to a different degree.’ As you said, ‘A colony of people, all having the same IQ, would have no awareness of intelligence as a variable.’ True would be what this statement would be even if the colony were one of geniuses, would it not, Howard?”

  He had amazed me by quoting me verbatim. He must have a photographic memory. “Yes, Arthon,” I answered.

  “Earth is a colony of geniuses, Howard. In the forty years which have been those of your development of atomic weapons you have used only two bombs, both small ones. In my planet’s first forty years that were the same, we used hundreds, many of them more powerful than any that are yours now. Your population is expanding so fast as to be that which is a problem to you. Our population is now one tenth of that which it was when we discovered atomic energy. The time of our discovery was more than three of your centuries back. The number of planets which are those in our Federation, as you call it, is shrinking. Eighty-seven planets which once were among those which are members are lifeless balls rolling through space now.”

  The violet curtain parted and we began the approach to Arthon’s planet on slow drive. My white shirt was no longer violet, but I ignored it. I was looking at the ugly craters on the planet’s surface, which were plainly visible, even at this distance, like planetary smallpox scars. I could easily see the black areas where nothing green grew.

  A tear, running ahead to act as scout for the main body, crept out of Arthon’s left eye.

  “The job of keeping the peace is that which you humans think you have done poorly,” he said in a voice soft as a crumbling dream. “Teach us how to do a job that is as poor. Please!”<
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  So it’s up to us. We cannot rely on someone else to solve our problems of survival and tranquillity—and please note that survival is a prerequisite for tranquillity. Some enemies may allow even the most dedicated seeker of peace no choice but to die or to fight back by means that seem, in the short run, irrational.

  WEIGHTLESS, FLEET Admiral Encrai launched himself off the wall of the C-Cubed room, arched, snapped against the far wall on his front paws, twisted, and sprang back across the room. Ordinarily the lithe power of his body would have pleased him; but now he paced in fury, trying to regain his feline poise.

  Damn! Damn! How could he have expected the stupid primates to be insane? Why hadn’t the psychologists warned him? Granted, they’d told him the species hadn’t completed its evolution to a communal hunting animal. Granted, they’d warned him to expect strange behavior. But this! How could he predict that, after crushing the puny defenses around Uranus, the primates’ orbital city would accept his ships, then blow itself up? Unbelievable! Not rational! What kind of creatures were these?

  Again Encrai questioned the wisdom of taking this solar system now; certainly it’d be more sensible to let this species ripen a bit, let them gain a measure of non-primitiveness (he hated to call it sophistication—certainly no primate could achieve that) so they’d be useful slaves.

  His pacing slowed; at last he shrugged. The High Command’s decision was made, their orders given. Encrai’s full F class fleet would knock off the primates quickly, before the retrenchment wars began.

  “Admiral—an enemy fleet just broke toward us from a planetoid fragment. “ Captain Taress spoke crisply from across the room.

  Touching the controls on his magnetic harness, Encrai curved through the air to his command station. Floating between his webcradle and his console, he looked up at the holoscreen, which covered the whole front wall of the room. Part of that wall teemed with statistics and gauges, changing endlessly as the Flagship staff and the Command/Control/Communication staff requested new data.