To the Stars -- And Beyond

by Robert Reginald

  Lefever killed his mike. “Ten? Give me the military commander.”

  “Yessir.” Three seconds. “On the line.”

  Split screen again: a major general in full battle uniform appeared. His face was perplexed and scowling. “Director?”

  “General? I don’t want to know your name. I have command.” Lefever punched in his code and COMMAND OVERRIDE. He looked back to the screen. “Acknowledge.”

  “Acknowledged, sir.” Very unhappy at some bureaucrat giving him orders. But he’d been assigned this task and had known Lefever could take command. “Your orders, sir?” The general was no good at disguising his sarcasm and resentment.

  “Stand by for assault on the Alamo bubble.”

  “Acknowledged. Standing by.”

  “Ten? Set me up a mobile command unit, please.”

  “Yessir.”

  Lefever punched in a panorama shot of the front of the Alamo bubble. Troops were lining up. Armed troops.

  “Director?” The general’s voice.

  “Go ahead, General.”

  “Troops in position all around the bubble. Assault force at the front. Request orders regarding armament, sir.”

  Lefever knew this was the moment. Decision time. His career to make or break. Smith’s life. Everybody in North America calling his or her friends and neighbors to watch. Pundits waxing loquacious. Worldwide, how many billions watching?

  Don’t dare make a mistake.

  Like hell.

  Government will fall.

  To hell with them.

  “General, armament will be projectile weapons. No explosives or lasers, except as needed to breach the entrance to the bubble.” He thought, cover your ass, Lefever, in case you want to change your mind. “One sniper with a tranquilizer gun. Another with a stunner. Bullet proof body armor for all. Shall I repeat?”

  “No, sir,” the general replied with more sarcasm. But etched onto his expression was one of wonder. He didn’t understand yet, and thought he was dealing with some dumbass bureaucrat. But he’d follow an order, which was enough.

  Lefever went and hung from his crossbar.

  “Gee, Chief, you really gonna do it, huh?”

  “Yes.” Lefever dropped to the floor.

  “Your mobile command unit is ready outside.” There were tears in Ten’s voice. His empathy was working overtime. And he suspected, no doubt, what would happen. As Lefever left, Downing keyed open the access panel and said, “Good luck, sir.”

  Lefever waved and stepped outside. A mobile command unit floated in the air, a single soldier to guide it and do the necessary chores. Lefever punched in his code and activated the unit. He strode off toward the Alamo bubble with the unit trailing alongside him.

  When he arrived, he joined the general in front of the troops. He checked the screen and saw John Smith, The Last American, kneeling at the base of the flagpole in front of Crockett and Travis and Bowie’s Alamo, aiming his M-16 at the entrance to the bubble.

  Lefever shored up his resolve. “General, let us invade the United States of America.”

  “The Star Spangled Banner” was playing over the feed and the speakers inside the bubble-dome and at the entrance.

  “Yes, sir,” said the general. He turned to an officer, “Breach the bubble, Colonel.”

  The colonel went to the military com circuit.

  Troops advanced. Lasers went to work on the entry panel, hissing and crackling. The entrance sheared away.

  John Smith fired through the breached bubble on full auto. Soldiers danced out of the way.

  “Sir,” the general spoke to Lefever. “You must give the order to respond fire and specify which weapons.”

  “I understand, General.” Lefever moved forward, the mobile command unit and the general following. Troops poised outside the entrance to the Alamo.

  The final strains of “The Star Spangled Banner” faded.

  Lefever walked to the entrance and inside it.

  “You’re crazy,” the general whispered harshly and unnecessarily.

  “John?”

  Smith stood. “Director Lefever, you have invaded the sovereign territory of the United States of America. In consequence, I hereby declare war. A state of hostility now formally exists between the United States of America and the North American Federation. I call on you to surrender your troops, sir, and end the hostilities. Do you so agree?”

  “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” began playing loudly. Lefever felt Ten Downing burst into empathetic tears. “Mine eyes have seen the glory….”

  Gerrard Lefever made his decision. To hell with politics. To hell with the audience. Give John Smith what he wanted. John was worth more than the whole goddamn bunch put together.

  “I do not agree,” Director Lefever said.

  “The Battle Hymn” peaked.

  “General,” Lefever said, “for the record. Advance your troops. Secure the dome. When fired upon, return fire.”

  “With which weapons, sir?”

  “Projectile weapons, no stunners, no drugs, no tranks. Confirm.”

  “Confirmed and on the record, Director.” The general looked at Lefever with a new appreciation.

  The colonel spoke into his com unit.

  The troops advanced, squeezing slightly together at the breached entrance to the Alamo dome.

  “….truth goes marching on” was fading.

  Smith lifted his M-16 above his head with his right hand. He spoke. “My name is legion. I was at Bunker Hill and Valley Forge. I was at Bull Run and Shiloh. I was at Argonne and Inchon. I served on Tarawa and Saipan. I was at Khe Sanh and Da Nang and Fallujah and Havana. I serve once again at the Alamo. I am the Unknown Soldier, I am the known soldier. I am John Smith. I am an American. My name is legion.”

  He lowered his rifle and fired.

  An immediate fusillade of return fire erupted from the line of soldiers.

  John Smith fell dead at the foot of the American flag in front of the Alamo.

  “Stand your troops down, General.”

  “Yes, sir.” Full of respect.

  Lefever walked forward, feeling Ten Downing’s empathy flow through him.

  The command unit followed him, but he waved it back. He walked to John Smith.

  The body of the Last American was punctured with many wounds, the blows so severe that instant death had precluded much bleeding—he appeared to be merely leaking blood. The grenades were plastic dummies.

  Lefever went to the Alamo’s outside console. His fingers danced on the command keys. “Taps” rang out, long and lonely, the only sound in front of the Alamo. The general and his soldiers remained back, now standing at attention, a respectful and silent audience.

  The company of heroes, John Smith had said.

  Lefever stood at attention himself as the flag dropped slowly down the flagpole.

  “Taps” continued.

  When the flag reached the bottom, Lefever disconnected it from the track, folded it over his arm, and returned to Smith’s body.

  Gerrard Lefever knelt and covered the body of John Smith with the “Stars and Stripes.”

  SMALL WORLD:

  A SMALL STORY

  by Michael Kurland

  It was supposed to solve all our problems, remember?

  That’s what they told us the day the City Manager of Earth stood there and cut the ribbon.

  It was twelve years in the making: a symbolic twelve years to the day after Professor Vanspeepe dropped his braunschweiger sandwich between the charged plates at the east end of his highly-experimental, six-kilometer long gravity-wave discriminator, and noted with mild astonishment that the sandwich had disappeared. Twelve years less one day since Vanspeepe’s research assistant, a zaftig young dedicated physicist named Lena Bright noted the thick smear of organic matter coating the west end plates, and called the professor.

  “Well, what is it?” the professor had asked in his annoyed, don’t-bother-me-with-trivia voice.

  “It smells like
mustard,” little Lena said. “You know, German mustard, like the stuff you use.” It was clear that she suspected him of sneaking over in the middle of the night and sabotaging her end of the experiment. “With maybe a hint of spoiled liverwurst,” she continued accusingly.

  “Ha!” Vanspeepe said. “Listen Lena, turn that thing off at your end and get over here.” He hung up to do some hard thinking. Humbleness, he decided, was the tack: humbleness, modest enthusiasm, and carefully unassumed surprise when the Nobel committee called to inform him.

  Once the thing was done, its theory became immediately obvious to anyone with more than a smattering of matrix algebra, and a thorough topological understanding of n-dimensional space (where n>6), and the only wonder was that no one had thought of it before. The first six years were spent working out some minor velocity transfer problems. “Engineering details,” Professor Vanspeepe explained to anyone who asked—and everyone did—while he tried to figure out how to prevent the braunschweiger sandwich from becoming a smear of spoiled liverwurst at the other end.

  * * * *

  The next six years were spent in constructing the giant concrete-to-bedrock foundations in all major cities, and the connecting supercooled waveguides with their attendant liquid-helium pumping stations and power supplies. It was a tremendous drain of money and resources, but we set to work with a will: the Vanspeepe Matter Transporter Gate Web was supposed to solve all our problems, remember?

  * * * *

  “City Manager of Earth” was the honorary title of the United Nations Secretary for Urban Affairs, but on that Saturday when she cut the ribbon, it was suddenly no longer an exaggeration. One four-inch-wide red silk ribbon, no more than four hundred yards long, it circled the world. New York was where the major ceremony was held; because of its historic association with the United Nations, because its enormous problems exemplified every other major urban area, and because Mayor D’Annunciato won the toss. One snip of the golden scissors and the red silk parted.

  Pulled through the rings atop the brass posts and into the Transgate, it slid out of New York; it fell in loops in Bangkok; it sagged loosely in Tokyo; it drooped in Paris; it noticeably slackened in Sydney. Then, before the lenses of the world television networks, seen live by an estimated eighty percent of humanity, the mayors of the Earth’s major cities stepped through the Transgates and collected in New York’s Central Park Gate to declare One World; de facto, if not de jure.

  It would have been the heads of state—it was originally supposed to be the presidents, prime ministers, kings, generals-in-power-only-until-a-free-election-can-be-held, and the like, but the Secret Service wouldn’t allow the President of the United States to attend (even if he didn’t have to step through a Gate); and the President of France wouldn’t go if the Prime Minister of Great Britain was going; and the Prime Minister of India wouldn’t step through a Transgate for philosophical reasons; and the leaders of all nations not included in this first Web vacillated between boycotting the proceedings entirely and insisting that they would all be present if one of them was present. So it was the mayors, headed by the “City Manager of Earth,” Ms. Edith McSchwartz, who presided over the creation of the World City.

  “We are all of us sisters,” she told the assembled mayors and the watching world. “And now we are all neighbors: women and men, black and white and yellow and brown and…and...and we must strive together to keep our neighborhood which used to be Paris and Rome and New York, Bangkok and Hanoi; but is now—what? Oh, yes, and Tokyo too; and all the other little places I haven’t mentioned, now all together unified as Earth City. We must strive to keep our global neighborhood clean and sanitary, with adequate mass transit for all except to achieve racial balance, and a pollution-free environment where we can all work in peace, breathe clean air, and control our own bodies.

  “We will have problems, we must have problems, but if we, the administrators, work together in good faith to solve them, with an equal day’s pay for an equal day’s work, and my door is always open to any of you. Remember the motto done in needlepoint over my desk: Nothing Urban Is Alien to Me.”

  * * * *

  The Transporter Gate Web brought people, countries, cities, closer together, providing instantaneous transportation at amazingly low cost as promised by the promoters when they were selling, the bond issues. It was now cheaper to go to Sydney than to talk for more than eight minutes on the telephone (station to station, direct dialing, standard daytime rates). But proximity, it was soon discovered, was not love:

  NOTISE * * * * * NOTISE * * * * * NOTISE

  THE BUMS, BEING AN AMALGAMATION OF ALL THE BROOKLYN GANGS, DO HEREBY AND FORTHWITH DECLARE A STATE OF WAR BETWEEN US AND EL FATAHAHA, BEING MERELY A COLLECTION OF STREET ARABIANS AND WHO DESERVES TO BE TAUGHT A LESSON AND FIND OUT WHOSE BOSS.

  R U L E S

  IT HAS BEEN AGREED THAT THE HOME TERRITORIES OF BOTH GANGS ARE OFF LIMITS TO RUMBLE.

  IT HAS BEEN AGREED THAT NEITHER PARTY SHALL PERMIT ANY OF ITS ASSOCIATES OVER THE AGES OF 21 TO PARTICIPATE.

  IT HAS BEEN AGREED THAT WOMENS RIGHTS SHALL BE OBSERVED BUT THIS INCLUDES WOMEN OF THE OGRANISATIONS EXCLUSIVELY.

  IT HAS BEEN AGREED THAT NO WEAPONS BUT STRICTLY ANTI PERSONNEL TYPES ARE TO BE EMPLOYED. THIS RULES OUT BAZOOKAS FOR EXAMPLE, BUT DOES NOT CONSTRAIN THOMAS GUNS.

  IT HAS BEEN AGREED THAT THE SCENE OF THE BATTLE IS TO BE ISTAMBUL, WHICH IS #12 ON THE WEB LOCATER.

  IT HAS BEEN AGREED THAT THE GATE IS NEUTRAL TERRITORY AND WE ARE NORTH AND THE ARABIANS ARE SOUTH.

  IT HAS BEEN AGREED THAT THE RUMBLE WILL TAKE PLACE FRIDAY AT 7 PM BROOKLYN TIME, WHICH COMES OUT TO 2 IN THE MORNING IN ISTAMBUL DUE TO THE TIME DIFFERENCE. GROUPS WILL ASSEMBLE AT 5.

  MEL

  “Abdul, I swear to you as a brother, it’s the most wonderful thing in the world. Nothing can go wrong.”

  “That’s what you swore to me, Ali, the last two times. The last, if it comes to that, dozen times. Always you have a scheme and always you fall on your nose. Except when you fall on my nose.”

  “But this time, Abdul….”

  “Ali, a poor man should not be a promoter. Beg a little, steal a little, but please, stop trying to go into business!”

  “Abdul, this is begging; this is stealing.”

  “Ah!”

  “It is merely a different place to beg; a unique way to steal.”

  “Better. A man should stick to what he knows. Tell me, Ali.”

  “It needs investment capital. Twelve drachma it needs.”

  “It takes money to steal money. What does one do with this twelve drachma?”

  “One buys a token, Abdul, and enters the Transgate.”

  “Ah?”

  “In the blink of a houri’s eye, one is in Paradise.”

  “It is deadly then, this device?”

  “This paradise is called San Francisco.”

  “San Francisco? Forgive me for sounding dubious, Cousin Ali, but what do you know about San Francisco? Do you speak United States of American? How can you beg without speaking? This is beginning to sound like one of your former schemes. The seventh, or was it the eighth, which, as I remember, involved....”

  “Abdul, dear Cousin, hear me out! This is not a second-hand scheme that I heard in the back room of the café; nor is it an idly remembered daydream; nor the restated plot of one of those ancient adventure shows which our beloved government has purchased from abroad for our amusement where the hero’s lips move one way and his voice moves another. This actually happened to my wife’s second cousin, once removed. In his case it was an accident, a misunderstanding; and he failed to see the potential in it. So I went and tried it myself which is where I’ve been for the last two weeks. It works. It is sure. You have my word as a relative.”

  “I hardly trust myself, Ali; why should I trust my cousin? But continue!”

  “The scam is simple, dear cousin: one merely walks away from the Gate in San Francisco in a random direction until one reaches a restaurant. Then
one examines it. If it seems sufficiently qualitative, one enters; if it is lacking in quality, one continues the search. It should not take long; San Francisco is as full of fine restaurants as a seedcake is full of seeds.”

  “Ah?”

  “Then one enters and seats oneself at the table. Shortly one is handed a menu.”

  “One is not merely removed from the premises at the end of a boot-clad foot?”

  “Abdul, realize this: here at home our dress immediately places us at the bottom of the social scale, on the lowest rung of the economic ladder; in San Francisco a burnoose is a burnoose. I suspect a clean, not-too-many-times-mended garment might be desirable, but beyond that….” He finished the sentence with an expressive shrug.

  “And then when one is sitting in this fine restaurant and holding this menu that one cannot read?”

  “One can read the prices. I suggest one merely orders the most expensive item.”

  “Reasonable; it is highly unlikely that the most expensive item would be pork. Or camel. I assume that one then eats this most expensive item? Then one is expected to, somehow, pay for this most expensive item?”

  “They bring a check, a piece of paper upon which is written the price and the government tithe.”

  “Ah. And then?”

  “And then one merely repeats Ay Kan-nod Pai, which is American for ‘I have insufficient funds to meet this obligation’.”

  “And the proprietor merely nods and smiles and wishes one good day and hopes for the quick return of one?”

  “On the contrary: an official is rapidly called, one is taken away to jail until the next day, when one sees the magistrate, who sentences one to serve two weeks further in jail.”

  “Aha! So your proposal is that one should pay for one good meal in a fancy restaurant in San Francisco by spending two weeks and one day in jail. Somehow….”

  “Abdul, if you will show the patience for which you are truly famous for a few more seconds…. The meal in the restaurant, you must understand, is merely the device. Food cooked in the fancy manner of another culture is not necessarily appealing. But, Abdul, the food in that jail, the wonderful food in that jail!”