The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  “So you see . . .” he said. “Just sensible precautions. There’s no trick to it. You’re a military man—and what’s that mean? Superior strength. Superior tactics. That’s all. So I outpower your strength, outnumber you, make your tactics useless—and what are you? Nothing.” He put his glass carefully aside on the table with the decanter. “But I’m not Brian. I’m not afraid of you. I could do without these things if I wanted to.”

  Ian sat watching him. On the floor above, Tyburn had stiffened.

  “Could you?” asked Ian.

  Kenebuck stared at him. The white face of the millionaire contorted. Blood surged up into it darkening it. His eyes flashed whitely.

  “What’re you trying to do—test me?” he shouted suddenly. He jumped to his feet and stood over Ian, waving his arms furiously. It was, recognized Tyburn overhead, the calculated, self-induced hysterical rage of the hoodlum world. But how would Ian Graeme below know that? Suddenly, Kenebuck was screaming. “You want to try me out? You think I won’t face you? You think I’ll back down like that brother of mine, that . . .” He broke into a flood of obscenity in which the name of Brian was freely mixed. Abruptly, he whirled about to the walls of the room yelling at them. “Get out of there. All right, out! Do you hear me? All of you! Out—”

  Panels slid back, bookcases swung aside and four men stepped into the room. Three were those who had been in the foyer earlier when Ian had entered for the first time. The other was of the same type.

  “Out!” screamed Kenebuck at them. “Everybody out. Outside, and lock the door behind you. I’ll show this Dorsai, this . . .” Almost foaming at the mouth, he lapsed into obscenity again.

  Overhead, above the ceiling, Tyburn found himself gripping the edge of the table below the observation screen so hard his fingers ached.

  “It’s a trick!” he muttered between his teeth to the un-hearing Ian. “He planned it this way! Can’t you see that?”

  “Graeme armed?” inquired the police sensor technician at Tyburn’s right. Tyburn jerked his head around momentarily to stare at the technician.

  “No,” said Tyburn. “Why?”

  “Kenebuck is.” The technician reached over and tapped the screen, just below the left shoulder of Kenebuck’s jacket image. “Slugthrower.”

  Tyburn made a fist of his aching right fingers and softly pounded the table before the screen in frustration.

  “All right!” Kenebuck was shouting below, turning back to the still-seated form of Ian, and spreading his arms wide. “Now’s your chance. Jump me! The door’s locked. You think there’s anyone else near to help me? Look!” He turned and took five steps to the wide, knee-high-to-ceiling window behind him, punched the control button and watched as it swung wide. A few of the whirling sleet-ghosts outside drove from out of ninety stories of vacancy, into the opening —and fell dead in little drops of moisture on the window-sill as the automatic weather shield behind the glass blocked them out.

  He stalked back to Ian, who had neither moved nor changed expression through all this. Slowly, Kenebuck sank back down into his chair, his back to the night, the blocked-out cold and the sleet.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, slowly, acidly. “You don’t do anything? Maybe you don’t have the nerve, Graeme?”

  “We were talking about Brian,” said Ian.

  “Yes, Brian . . .” Kenebuck said, quite slowly. “He had a big head. He wanted to be like me, but no matter how he tried—how I tried to help him—he couldn’t make it.” He stared at Ian. “That’s just the way, he never could make it—the way he decided to go into enemy lines when there wasn’t a chance in the world. That’s the way he was—a loser.”

  “With help,” said Ian.

  “What? What’s that you’re saying?” Kenebuck jerked upright in his chair.

  “You helped him lose,” Ian’s voice was matter-of-fact. “From the time he was a young boy, you built him up to want to be like you—to take long chances and win. Only your chances were always safe bets, and his were as unsafe as you could make them.”

  Kenebuck drew in an audible, hissing breath.

  “You’ve got a big mouth, Graeme!” he said, in a low, slow voice.

  “You wanted,” said Ian, almost conversationally, “to have him kill himself off. But he never quite did. And each time he came back for more, because he had it stuck into his mind, carved into his mind, that he wanted to impress you—even though by the time he was grown, he saw what you were up to. He knew, but he still wanted to make you admit that he wasn’t a loser. You’d twisted him that way while he was growing up, and that was the way he grew.”

  “Go on,” hissed Kenebuck. “Go on, big mouth.”

  “So, he went off-Earth and became a professional soldier,” went on Ian, steadily and calmly. “Not because he was drafted like someone from Newton or a born professional from the Dorsai, or hungry like one of the ex-miners from Coby. But to show you you were wrong about him. He found one place where you couldn’t compete with him, and he must have started writing back to you to tell you about it—half rubbing it in, half asking for the pat on the back you never gave him.”

  Kenebuck sat in the chair and breathed. His eyes were all one glitter.

  “But you didn’t answer his letters,” said Ian. “I suppose you thought that’d make him desperate enough to finally do something fatal. But he didn’t. Instead he succeeded. He went up through the ranks. Finally, he got his commission and made Force leader, and you began to be worried. It wouldn’t be long, if he kept on going up, before he’d be above the field officer grades, and out of most of the actual fighting.”

  Kenebuck sat perfectly still, a little leaning forward. He looked almost as if he were praying, or putting all the force of his mind to willing that Ian finish what he had started to say.

  “And so,” said Ian, “on his twenty-third birthday—which was the day before the night on which he led his men against orders into the enemy area—you saw that he got this birthday card . . .” He reached into a side pocket of his civilian jacket and took out a white, folded card that showed signs of having been savagely crumpled but was now smoothed out again. Ian opened it and laid it beside the decanter on the table between their chairs, the sketch and legend facing Kenebuck. Kenebuck’s eyes dropped to look at it.

  The sketch was a crude outline of a rabbit, with a combat rifle and battle helmet discarded at its feet, engaged in painting a broad yellow stripe down the center of its own back. Underneath this picture was printed in block letters, the question—”why fight it?”

  Kenebuck’s face slowly rose from the sketch to face Ian, and the millionaire’s mouth stretched at the corners, and went on stretching into a ghastly version of a smile.

  “Was that all ... ?” whispered Kenebuck.

  “Not all,” said Ian. “Along with it, glued to the paper by the rabbit, there was this—”

  He reached almost casually into his pocket.

  “No, you don’t!” screamed Kenebuck triumphantly. Suddenly he was on his feet, jumping behind his chair, backing away toward the darkness of the window behind him. He reached into his jacket and his hand came out holding the slugthrower, which cracked loudly in the room. Ian had not moved, and his body jerked to the heavy impact of the slug.

  Suddenly, Ian had come to life. Incredibly, after being hammered by a slug, the shock of which should have immobilized an ordinary man, Ian was out of the chair on his feet and moving forward. Kenebuck screamed again— this time with pure terror—and began to back away, firing as he went.

  “Die, you—! Die!” he screamed. But the towering Dorsai figure came on. Twice it was hit and spun clear around by the heavy slugs, but like a football fullback shaking off the assaults of tacklers, it plunged on, with great strides narrowing the distance between it and the retreating Kenebuck.

  Screaming finally, Kenebuck came up with the back of his knees against the low sill of the open window. For a second his face distorted itself out of all human shape in a grimace of
its terror. He looked, to right and to left, but there was no place left to run. He had been pulling the trigger of his slugthrower all this time, but now the firing pin clicked at last upon an empty chamber. Gibbering, he threw the weapon at Ian, and it flew wide of the driving figure of the Dorsai, now almost upon him, great hands outstretched.

  Kenebuck jerked his head away from what was rushing toward him. Then, with a howl like a beaten dog, he turned and flung himself through the window before those hands could touch him, into ninety-odd stories of unsupported space. And his howl carried away down into silence.

  Ian halted. For a second he stood before the window, his right hand still clenched about whatever it was he had pulled from his pocket. Then, like a toppling tree, he fell.

  —As Tyburn and the technician with him finished burning through the ceiling above and came dropping through the charred opening into the room. They almost landed on the small object that had come rolling from Ian’s now lax hand. An object that was really two objects glued together. A small paintbrush and a transparent tube of glaringly yellow paint.

  * * * *

  “I hope you realize, though,” said Tyburn, two weeks later on an icy, bright December day as he and the recovered Ian stood just inside the Terminal waiting for the boarding signal from the spaceliner about to take off for the Sirian worlds, “what a chance you took with Kenebuck. It was just luck it worked out for you the way it did.”

  “No,” said Ian. He was as apparently emotionless as ever; a little more gaunt from his stay in the Manhattan hospital, but he had mended with the swiftness of his Dorsai constitution. “There was no luck. It all happened the way I planned it.”

  Tyburn gazed in astonishment.

  “Why . . .” he said, “if Kenebuck hadn’t had to send his hoods out of the room to make it seem necessary for him to shoot you himself when you put your hand into your pocket that second time—or if you hadn’t had the card in the first place—” He broke off, suddenly thoughtful. “You mean . . . ?” he stared at Ian. “Having the card, you planned to have Kenebuck get you alone ... ?”

  “It was a form of personal combat,” said Ian. “And personal combat is my business. You assumed that Kenebuck was strongly entrenched, facing my attack. But it was the other way around.”

  “But you had to come to him—”

  “I had to appear to come to him,” said Ian, almost coldly. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have believed that he had to kill me—before I killed him. By his decision to kill me, he put himself in the attacking position.”

  “But he had all the advantages!” said Tyburn, his head whirling. “You had to fight on his ground, here where he was strong . . .”

  “No,” said Ian. “You’re confusing the attack position with the defensive one. By coming here, I put Kenebuck in the position of finding out whether I actually had the birthday card, and the knowledge of why Brian had gone against orders into enemy territory that night. Kenebuck planned to have his men in the foyer shake me down for the card— but they lost their nerve.”

  “I remember,” murmured Tyburn.

  “Then, when I handed him the package, he was sure the card was in it. But it wasn’t,” went on Ian. “He saw his only choice was to give me a situation where I might feel it was safe to admit having the card and the knowledge. He had to know about that, because Brian had called his bluff by going out and risking his neck after getting the card. The fact Brian was tried and executed later made no difference to Kenebuck. That was a matter of law—something apart from hoodlum guts, or lack of guts. If no one knew that Brian was braver than his older brother, that was all right; but if I knew, he could only save face under his own standards by killing me.”

  “He almost did,” said Tyburn. “Any one of those slugs—”

  “There was the medical mech,” said Ian, calmly. “A man like Kenebuck would be bound to have something like that around to play safe—just as he would be bound to set an amateur’s trap.” The boarding horn of the spaceliner sounded. Ian picked up his luggage bag. “Good-by,” he said, offering his hand to Tyburn.

  “Good-by ...” he muttered. “So you were just going along with Kenebuck’s trap, all of it. I can’t believe it . . .” He released Ian’s hand and watched as the big man swung around and took the first two strides away toward the bulk of the ship shining in the winter sunlight. Then, suddenly, the numbness broke clear from Tyburn’s mind. He ran after Ian and caught at his arm. Ian stopped and swung half-around, frowning slightly.

  “I can’t believe it!” cried Tyburn. “You mean you went up there, knowing Kenebuck was going to pump you full of slugs and maybe kill you—all just to square things for thirty-two enlisted soldiers under the command of a man you didn’t even like? I don’t believe it—you can’t be that cold-blooded! I don’t care how much of a man of the military you are!”

  Ian looked down at him. And it seemed to Tyburn that the Dorsai face had gone away from him, somehow become as remote and stony as a face carved high up on some icy mountain’s top.

  “But I’m not just a man of the military,” Ian said. “That was the mistake Kenebuck made, too. That was why he thought that stripped of military elements, I’d be easy to kill.”

  Tyburn, looking at him, felt a chill run down his spine as icy as wind off a glacier.

  “Then, in heaven’s name,” cried Tyburn. “What are you?”

  Ian looked from his far distance down into Tyburn’s eyes and the sadness rang as clear in his voice finally, as iron-shod heels on barren rock.

  “I am a man of war,” said Ian, softly. . With that, he turned and went on; and Tyburn saw him black against the winter-bright sky, looming over all the other departing passengers, on his way to board the spaceship.

  <>

  * * * *

  Wars, and rumors of wars . . .

  Not since the 1948-1950 period of intense activity by the World Federalists and the Association of Atomic Scientists has there been so much concentration on war themes in speculative writing. But there is a difference.

  The pre-Korean stories were, by and large, prophetic warnings: end-of-the-world, or atomic-mutation, or back-to-barbarism themes. There are still elements of this, but the emphasis has shifted in a way both hopeful and dismaying.

  Dismaying, because the crusaders are no longer with us: None of these writers seems to be working out of any belief that the war-situation (“dirty little wars” and “police actions”; perpetual disarmament conferences; missile-gap measurements; hot-lines and panic-buttons; coalitions and realignments; threats and retaliations) will get better before it gets worse.

  Hopeful, because (with the loss of the bright-lining thought that the too terrible weapon had actually been discovered) the approach is now more analytical than agit-prop, more sociological than polemic; concerned with the motives and mores of war, and with the psychological and cultural causes and effects. Why do we do this thing? And what does it do to us?

  Gordon Dickson initiated an extensive exploration of the military culture and the psychology of the fighting man with his explosive novel Dorsail in 1959. Since then, he and others have worked the same basic material in a number of interesting ways—but none, to my taste, so effectively or excitingly as the Dorsai series. (A new novel. Soldier, Ask Not, will be published shortly by Delacorte.)

  Within the field, the only notable attempts at examination of war-directed forces at work in our own culture have been those of Mack Reynolds and John Brunner. But from points all around the perimeter recently, there has come a steady peppering of fantasy, parable, and allegory, turning an analytic (and usually sardonic) eye on the behavior of nations—especially our own—and the wondrous workings of what we still oddly call “diplomacy.” (Tom Lehrer’s “Send the Marines”: . . . For might makes right./Until they’ve seen the light,/They’ve got to be protected,/All their rights respected,/Till someone we like is elected . . . And then there was Dean Acheson’s parable “The Fairy Princess” in the Reporter. And of course
Abram Tertz’s The Makepeace Experiment from Pantheon.)

  * * * *

  MARS IS OURS!

  ART BUCHWALD

  When it was discovered by American and Russian space probes that there was indeed life on Mars, an immediate foreign ministers’ conference in Geneva was called to decide what to do about it.

  The United States, through its Secretary of State, announced that America had no territorial designs on the planet and the U.S. position was that the Martians should be free to choose their own government, providing of course that it was not Communist-dominated or leftist-inspired.

  The Soviet minister said that if the Martians wanted to overthrow the reactionary rulers who were probably exploiting the Martian masses, his country would have no choice but to come to their aid. He said that if the Martians requested it, the Soviet Union would supply them with planes, rockets, and up-to-date radar.