by Joe Haldeman
The problem with idealistic solutions to this situation, where we simply wave a magic wand and all the bombs go away, is twofold: One, as I said, the bombs with their threat of apocalypse have brought comparative peace to the second half of this century. Two, the United States and the Soviet Union are not the only ones with bombs.
Dr. Vardanyan and I were both soldiers in the last world war—what we hope will forever remain the last world war. No one who lived through that catastrophe could take lightly the obligation of preventing his children and their children from having to relive it. And if it takes the fear of nuclear Armageddon to keep buried in history the specter of whole continents turned into battlefields, of whole generations of men decimated and decimated again, then that fear does serve a noble purpose. If Dr. Vardanyan and I could wave some magic wand and rid the world forever of nuclear weapons… well, I won’t say we wouldn’t do it. But we certainly wouldn’t do it in ignorance of the possible dire consequences.
What we have agreed upon is a mutual bilateral reduction in the size of our strategic nuclear forces. A drastic reduction, conducted simultaneously, under the supervision of observers from countries aligned with neither the United States nor the Soviet Union.
The third largest nuclear power in the world is Great Britain, with two hundred and ninety-eight warheads capable of delivering ninety-nine megatons of destruction. That is the level to which Dr. Vardanyan and I have agreed to reduce our forces. Nearly a thousandfold. By May Day of next year, both the United States and the Soviet Union will control only two hundred and ninety-eight warheads apiece, yielding a total of no more than ninety-nine megatons.
The distribution of these weapons as to size and type will be worked out according to the defense requirements of each country, but the total number and total yield will be the same. Both countries will undergo continual inspection by neutral observers. In agreeing to this, Dr. Vardanyan has of course departed drastically from the policies of all his predecessors, and the world owes him a vote of heartfelt thanks.
The disarmament process need not be frozen at this level. If Great Britain wishes to reduce its nuclear forces below their present capabilities, and if they will do so under the same conditions of supervision and inspection that Dr. Vardanyan and I have agreed to, then the United States and the Soviet Union will also reduce, to maintain parity. If the British consequently fall below the strength of the fourth nuclear power, which is currently France, with two hundred and two warheads yielding ninety-two megatons, then France will be responsible for setting the benchmark. Then China, then India, and so on down the line.
It isn’t a perfect solution; there is no perfect solution. A lot of voices will be raised, and some heads will doubtless roll, in the process of turning this, our mutual pledge, into diplomatic and legal language satisfactory to all concerned. But the principle is clear, and we will not back away from it.
At this moment Dr. Vardanyan is delivering a speech to the Supreme Soviet in Moscow, via a public television link from the Summer Palace here in Leningrad, outlining our agreement. Journalists are present from all over the world, and the message is being broadcast live on every Soviet television channel.
We want to give the world some breathing space. The principle we’ve set down here will certainly be elaborated and refined by leaders of our countries, of all countries, in the future. What we have tried to do is to ensure that there will be a future.
They’d set a rostrum up right in front of the meeting-room door. I stayed in the room, with the door open a crack, so I missed seeing the president’s face and nuances of gesture. But I could see the expressions on the audience’s faces, which was amusing, and Valerie’s, which was gratifying.
A small room full of hardened pols and newspeople, with a scattering of Secret Service, KGB, and CIA folks. When he said the words mutual bilateral reduction, a lot of jaws dropped open. When he elaborated on it, some people looked like they were going to faint. At the end of his speech, about half the audience burst into wild applause. The other half clapped politely and belatedly and looked at each other in wild surmise.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: JACOB
Without ceremony, Vardanyan walked up onto a hastily erected podium, into a glare of television lights, to the exact spot where Lenin had stood the day the Soviet Union was created. That was what the man beside me told his companion, at least. I wondered whether Lenin had also spoken from behind bulletproof glass.
Vardanyan’s speech may not have been more important than Lenin’s, but it certainly was more surprising to the audience. Not so surprising to me. So Foley had gotten to him.
I wondered whether Fitzpatrick had said the same thing, as advertised. There was an American television team on the other side of the square; I meandered over there and eavesdropped. It was true, according to what their opposite numbers at the Leingrad had told them. Foley had flummoxed the two most powerful men in the world into renouncing the main basis of their power.
What the Politburo and the Congress would have to say about their agreement was yet to be heard. Maybe Vardanyan was headed for a long rest cure. Maybe Fitzpatrick, too.
There were no taxis, but then I guessed there was no need to hurry, either. I walked back down the river toward the bridge to the Leningrad, a mile or so. I was passed by groups of people running in both directions, a lot of happy talking and shouting and passing around of bottles. A lot of mir in the air. Even though it was still light, several barrages of fireworks went off over the river, setups, I suppose, that were supposed to wait until tomorrow.
I checked my watch, subtracting seven hours for Eastern Standard Time. The Today show and Good Morning America would be on in twenty minutes. Their staffs were probably quite busy.
I was tired and wired. I put my last No-Doz between two back teeth and crunched down. The over-whelming gall taste always reminded me of undergraduate days.
Nobody paid any attention to me as I walked up to the Leningrad Hotel entrance. Security people had formed up in a double line so that the luminaries could make it to their limousines, running the gauntlet of photographers. I overheard something about Fitzpatrick staying on in Russia for a few days. Probably a good idea. Probably a number of his compatriots will suggest that he take up residence permanently.
One advantage to being thin is that you can slip through crowds. It only took me a minute to make my way to the edge of the police line. Various people walked through the television lights, looking important. Then came Secretary Froelich, whom I recognized, and then the president, looking at the sidewalk with a sad smile. Behind him was a stranger. The stranger passed within two yards of me, looked straight into my face, and suddenly flinched and turned pale.
It was Foley, by God. It didn’t look like him, but who else could it be?
I smiled and gave him a half salute, then watched the back of his head as he followed Fitzpatrick to the limo. He looked back once, and I was still smiling. Let him fidget.
I wasn’t going to blow the whistle on him. Twice he spared me when he could have greatly simplified his life by killing me, at no danger to himself. Besides, it might work.
His cockeyed scheme might work.
CHAPTER FORTY: NICK
Epilogue
It was Valerie’s idea. Where was the best hiding place for someone who could be history’s richest and most powerful man, independent of any government? A haven of poverty and insignificance, of course, in the swollen heart of the bureaucracy itself: the Peace Corps.
For ten years, she and I toiled in the drought-scourged villages and farms of Rwanda, helping scrape irrigation systems out of the hard crust of the land, teaching English and numbers and our own version of The American Way. She was in her natural element, helping people. For me it was a long decade. As penance, though, I suppose it worked. The bad dream went away, and so did the killing. Though I don’t think I would ever have tried to kill anyone without the watch, and it was in a safe-deposit box on the other side of the world.
Curiously, at the very end time of Valerie’s fertility, she became pregnant. (When she stopped menstruating, we thought it was menopause. It was Nick, junior.) She delivered him in an American hospital, because of the possibility of complications, but we returned to Rwanda and raised Nickie in relative poverty. Being poor didn’t impress him, of course, given his surroundings and companions; and we have tried to raise him in such a way that when he eventually finds out he has millions, that won’t impress him, either.
I came back from Rwanda old and leathery but fit, weighing about what I did in Basic Training. We found a suburban community with good schools and bought a carefully modest house. I took one certificate of deposit out of the safe-deposit box and spread it around several local banks. I took the watch out, put a fresh battery in it, and hilariously tested it on Valerie. Then I returned it to the box, along with the millions in CD’s and securities that lied grown from the cash left over from our second round of plastic surgery in Zacatecas. It looks as if this twenty-first century may turn out better than the previous one. The four largest nuclear powers playing a reverse Mexican standoff, just as Valerie had predicted. Usually it’s France who ditches a warhead, just to make the others scramble. It’s always a small warhead. But every year there are not quite as many bombs around as there were before.
Of course there are still wars, and rumors of war, and we may yet live to see nations consumed in nuclear fire. At least it won’t be the whole planet burning. Not so long as they follow the rules of the game.
But treaties are only promises, and promises are only as good as the people who make them. The warhead factories can be started up as quickly as they were shut down.
This boy of mine is twelve years old. He speaks Russian and French as well as his native English and Swahili, and he keeps the ability secret. His childhood tempered with poverty, he owes allegiance to no god or country or culture; he doesn’t even think of himself as white.
Most people get a watch when they retire. He’ll get his when I think he’s ready to start work.
A Biography of Joe Haldeman
Joe Haldeman is a renowned American science fiction author whose works are heavily influenced by his experiences serving in the Vietnam War and his subsequent readjustment to civilian life.
Haldeman was born on June 9, 1943, to Jack and Lorena Haldeman. His older brother was author Jack C. Haldeman II. Though born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Haldeman spent most of his youth in Anchorage, Alaska, and Bethesda, Maryland. He had a contented childhood, with a caring but distant father and a mother who devoted all her time and energy to both sons.
As a child, Haldeman was what might now be called a geek, happy at home with a pile of books and a jug of lemonade, earning money by telling stories and doing science experiments for the neighborhood kids. By the time he entered his teens, he had worked his way through numerous college books on chemistry and astronomy and had skimmed through the entire encyclopedia. He also owned a small reflecting telescope and spent most clear nights studying the stars and planets.
Fascinated by space, the young Haldeman wanted to be a “spaceman”—the term astronaut had not yet been coined—and carried this passion with him to the University of Maryland, from which he graduated in 1967 with a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy. By this time the United States was in the middle of the Vietnam War, and Haldeman was immediately drafted.
He spent one year in Vietnam as a combat engineer and earned a Purple Heart for severe wounds. Upon his return to the United States in 1969, during the thirty-day “compassionate leave” given to returning soldiers, Haldeman typed up his first two stories, written during a creative writing class in his last year of college, and sent them out to magazines. They both sold within weeks, and the second story was eventually adapted for an episode of The Twilight Zone. At this point, though, Haldeman was accepted into a graduate program in computer science at the University of Maryland. He spent one semester in school. He was also invited to attend the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference—a rare honor for a novice writer.
In September of the same year, Haldeman wrote an outline and two chapters of War Year, a novel that would be based on the letters he had sent to his wife, Gay, from Vietnam. Two weeks later he had a major publishing contract. Mathematics was out of the picture for the near future.
Haldeman enrolled in the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with luminary figures such as Vance Bourjaily, Raymond Carver, and Stanley Elkin, graduating in 1975 with a master of fine arts degree in creative writing. His most famous novel, The Forever War (1974), began as his MFA thesis and won him his first Hugo and Nebula Awards, as well as the Locus and Ditmar Awards.
Haldeman was now at his most productive, working on several projects at once. Arguably his largest-scale undertaking was the Worlds trilogy, consisting of Worlds (1981), Worlds Apart (1983), and Worlds Enough and Time (1992). Immediately before releasing the series’ last installment, however, Haldeman published his renowned novel The Hemingway Hoax (1990), which dealt with the experiences of combat soldiers in Vietnam. The novella version of the book won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, a feat that Haldeman repeated with the publication of his next novel, Forever Peace (1997), which also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
In 1983 Haldeman accepted an adjunct professorship in the writing program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught every fall semester, preferring to be a full-time writer for the remainder of the year. While at MIT he wrote Forever Free, the final book in his now-famous Forever War trilogy.
Haldeman has since written or edited more than a half-dozen books, with a second succession of titles being published in the early 2000s, including The Coming (2000), Guardian (2002), Camouflage (2004)—for which he won his fourth Nebula—and The Old Twentieth (2005). He also released the Marsbound trilogy, publishing the namesake title in 2008 and quickly following it with Starbound (2010) and Earthbound (2011).
A lifetime member and past president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Haldeman was selected as its Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for 2010. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.
After publishing his novel Work Done for Hire and retiring from MIT in 2014, Haldeman now lives in Gainesville, Florida, and plans to continue writing a novel every couple of years.
The author and his brother, Jack, around the year 1948. The image is captioned “Stick ’em up or I’ll shoot. Woy Wogers and the Long Ranger.”
Haldeman in third grade, the year he discovered science fiction.
Haldeman’s mother, Lorena, and a bear cub in Alaska around the year 1950.
Joe and Gay Haldeman on their wedding day, August 21, 1965.
The author, with a cigarette, a beer, and a book, waits for a helicopter to arrive on the tarmac in Vietnam, July 1968.
A pamphlet with details on how to handle prisoners of war. Haldeman carried this with him in Vietnam.
The author in Vietnam, examining bullet holes on a US Army vehicle.
Haldeman and the actor Jimmy Stewart in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, 1968.
The author in Vietnam with a book and sandbags.
Joe and Gay Haldeman with their friend, prominent science fiction personality Rusty Hevelin (at right) in Alaska, 1993.
The author with his Questar telescope in 2004.
Janis Ian, Joe Haldeman, and Anne McCaffrey at the 2005 Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards weekend.
Honoring tradition, Haldeman wears the infamous tiara after winning the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for his novel Camouflage.
Celebrated science fiction author Harry Harrison (at left) and Haldeman dressed as pirates during the 2005 World Fantasy Convention in England.
Joe and Gay Haldeman enjoying the Valley of the Kings in Egypt during a trip to see a total solar eclipse in 2006.
The author outside St. Augustine, Florida, on the first day of a cross-countr
y bicycle trip with his wife in February 2013.
The author’s Hugo and Nebula Awards.
Joe and Gay Haldeman, 2013.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1987 by Joe Haldeman
Cover design by Michel Vrana
978-1-4976-9236-7
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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