Battle Station

by Ben Bova

  As I write this, just over a year has elapsed since President Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech of March 23, 1983. The concept of placing defensive weapons in orbit, where they could blunt a nuclear missile attack, is not new to the readers of Analog. But it caught most of the rest of the world—including the academics —by surprise.

  In a small way, I was present at the birth of this new idea. In 1965 I was manager of marketing for the Avco Everett Research Laboratory, where the breakthrough into truly high-power lasers was made. I helped to arrange the first top-secret briefing in the Pentagon, where Avco’s scientists revealed to the Defense Department that lasers of incredible power could now be developed. I was privy to some of the earliest studies on the possible use of laser-armed satellites to destroy attacking ballistic missiles.

  In the years since then, I have written about these possibilities in novels such as Millennium and Kinsman. I have just completed a nonfiction book, Assured Survival, that examines the technical, military, and political implications of space-based defenses and other high-technology approaches to preventing war.

  In the course of these years, I have learned two things:

  1. We have at our fingertips the means to prevent nuclear war.

  2. Most of the entrenched academic scientists and strategic analysts will resist any move toward this new possibility.

  Indeed, their resistance is already quite evident. The Union of Concerned Scientists has denounced the “Star Wars” concept of space-based missile defense as technologically infeasible and economically ruinous. Carl Sagan, Hans Bethe, and many former science advisors to presidents have similarly inveighed against placing weaponry in space.

  Many strategic analysts have made it quite clear that they prefer MAD, in which the two superpowers disdain defending their cities and offer their own civilian populations as hostage to the goodwill of their adversary. Their tortured logic is that, by building defenses, we will so frighten the Soviets that they will launch the long-dreaded nuclear attack upon us. Defensive systems, they say, are not only impossible, immoral, and expensive, but destabilizing as well.

  For forty years the world has witnessed an arms race of steadily escalating, constantly more frightening weapons of attack. The atomic bomb and the V-2 rocket have evolved into the hydrogen bomb and the ICBM with its MIRVed warheads. The Cold War has been a natural consequence of this horrifying technology. With weapons that are too terrible to use, neither the United States nor Soviet Russia has dared to attack the other. But because each possesses such powerful weapons, neither one will back down and accommodate its adversary. The result, a stalemate of terror.

  Now the technological drive is toward a new kind of weaponry, the weapons of defense: very high-power lasers and other energy weapons of pinpoint accuracy, directed by very smart computers, are beginning to give the defense its chance to catch up with the onense—after forty years.

  But after two generations of equating weaponry with mass destruction, most of the academic community automatically reacts adversely to any talk of new weapons. The media depends on “knowledgeable” academics to inform the world of what is possible and impossible in the world of science. The media goes to these same academics to check on technological pronouncements coming out of the Department of Defense and other branches of government.

  Most of these academics are poorly informed about the latest work in weaponry, in large part because such work is generally classified secret by the Pentagon. And their bias, fed by memories of Hiroshima. and Vietnam, is against weapons development. Hence their resistance to weapons that can defend the world against nuclear missiles and more conventional machines of destruction.

  The readers of Analog certainly are better informed than most Americans about the feasibility of high-tech weapons. Networks of satellites armed with lasers or other advanced defensive weapons will work, and they will be deployed in the 1990s. Even if the system costs a trillion dollars, no American government would be able to resist the pressure to defend this nation against missile attack—once the American public becomes convinced that such a system will work.

  Will the deployment of defensive satellites trigger the nuclear holocaust we all want to avoid? Not likely. It will take many years, perhaps a decade, to establish an effective system. In that time, the Russians will either negotiate us out of it, build their own defensive system to keep abreast of us, or perhaps even join us in creating a global defensive system that will protect every nation on Earth against attack by any nation.

  That last possibility seems as farfetched as flying to the Moon seemed in 1944. But it is equally inevitable. For just as the technologies of offensive weaponry led to the Cold War, the new technologies of defensive weaponry will eventually lead the politicians to create an international system where nuclear war—perhaps all kinds of war—will be sternly repressed by a true multinational peacekeeping force.

  Perhaps we will have to come to the very brink of the nuclear abyss before we draw back and begin to place our reliance on defenses and new political arrangements that will make war impossible. Perhaps the mushrooms will have to bloom again, and it will take a nuclear engagement of some sort to make the nations realize that an international peacekeeping force is necessary.

  But it will happen. And it will happen, most likely, in this way:

  Both the United States and the Soviet Union will test defensive, antimissile weapons in orbit before the end of the 1980s. Despite the wailings of those who would rather live under the terror of nuclear annihilation, both superpowers will begin to deploy defensive systems in orbit during the 1990s. This will be a time of very high international tensions, as the two superpowers and their allies jockey for advantage, both in orbital space and at the conference table. A new arms race will have begun: a defensive arms race.

  By the turn of the century, there may well be two separate networks of defensive satellites in orbit. Neither defensive system will be foolproof; the of fense will always be able to get a few missiles through to their targets. But a few is not enough. The defensive systems in orbit will make it virtually impossible for either side to launch a nuclear attack upon the other. Slowly, but with the certainty of time, the nuclear-tipped missiles will become obsolete.

  In time, the peoples of the world will become accustomed to having guardians orbiting overhead, preventing nuclear missile attack. The governments of the world will start to cooperate more as the terror of nuclear annihilation recedes. Eventually (and this may be a long time from now) the two orbital defensive systems will be merged into one, as even the two superpowers learn how to trust one another.

  In 1941, as war raged in Europe and Asia and was soon to engulf the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enunciated the Four Freedoms, which he wished to see promulgated everywhere in the world. Among them was Freedom From Fear. In today’s world, where the nations spend more than $600 billion per year on armaments, the fear of war and annihilation is stronger than ever within us. But we can create a world without war, we can gain our freedom from fear, if we are wise enough to use the tools that technology is forging for us.

  The ancient Greeks worshiped two war deities: Ares (the Roman Mars) was the aggressive, bloodthirsty god of violence who enjoyed nothing better than to see men fighting and killing each other; Athena, who sprang full-grown from the brow of Zeus bearing shield and spear, was originally a battle goddess. But as time evolved, Athena became the gray-eyed goddess of wisdom, of learning, of civilization and democracy. Her symbol was the owl, and ancient Athens became her special city. She remained a warrior goddess, but she represented to the Greeks the craft of defensive war, of strategy and planning, of careful preparations that can minimize bloodshed.

  It is time that we, with this generation of awesome weapons in our hands, turn away from bloody Ares and his battle lust and turn toward wise Athena. It is time that we begin the long, difficult road toward a world of peace, a world that is freed from the crushing burden of armaments, a world where orb
ital guardians make it impossible for any nation to attack its neighbors, a world in which our children and our children’s children will be free at last of the fear of war.

  We have at our fingertips the tools to fulfill the ancient prophecy of Isaiah:

  And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

  Béisbol

  There are other (better!) ways for nations to compete than by going to war. The Greeks figured that out more than two thousand years ago.

  I got this crazy idea one day—if the United States began its rapprochement with Communist China by sending Ping-Pong players to Peking, maybe someday we would start to make up with Castro’s Cuba by sending a baseball team to Havana. As I mulled it over in my mind, a certain Mr. Lucius J. Riccio, of New York City, suggested the same thing in a letter to The New York Times of March 3, 1985.

  I realized that I could not waste time mulling. The idea would slip away from me if I didn’t get the story onto paper.

  The first draft of the tale was pretty dull. Thank heaven, I was smart enough to look up Alfred Bester, one of the great talents of our age—especiaMy when it comes to sparking up a story idea. Alfie’s mind works in leaps and bounds, and after an evening of swapping ideas and swilling booze, “Béisbol” just about wrote itself.

  So thank you, Alfie. See you at the World Series. (Or maybe not. I’m a Red Sox fan, and I don’t think I could stand another crushing blow like the 1986 Series.)

  Nixon sat scowling in the dugout, his dark chin down on the letters of his baseball uniform, his eyes glaring. It wasn’t us he was mad at; it was Castro.

  Across the infield, the Cubans were passing out cigars in their dugout. Top of the ninth inning and they were ahead, 1-0. We had three more chances at their robot pitcher. So far, all the mechanical monster had done was strike out fourteen of us USA All-Stars and not allow a runner past first base.

  Castro looked a lot older than I thought he’d be. His beard was all gray. But he was laughing and puffing on a big cigar as his team took the field and that damned robot rolled itself up to the mound.

  Nixon jumped to his feet. He looked kind of funny in a baseball uniform, like, out of place.

  “Men,” he said to us, “this is more than a game. I’m sure you know that.”

  We all kind of muttered and mumbled and nodded our heads.

  “If they win this series, they’ll take over all of the Caribbean. All of Central America. The United States will be humiliated.”

  Yeah, maybe so, I thought. And you’ll be a bum again, instead of a hero. But he didn’t have to go up and try to bat against that Commie robot. From what we heard, they had built it in Czechoslovakia or someplace like that to throw hand grenades at tanks. Now it was throwing baseballs right past us, like a blur.

  “We’ve got to win this game,” Nixon said, his voice trembling. “We’ve got to!”

  It had seemed like a good idea. Use baseball to reestablish friendly relations with Cuba, just like they had used Ping-Pong to make friends with Red China. So the commissioner personally picked an All-Star team and Washington picked Nixon to manage us. It would be a pushover, we all thought. I mean, the Cubans like baseball, but they couldn’t come anywhere near matching us.

  Well, pitching may be 80 percent of the game, but scouting is 200 percent more. We waltzed into Havana and found ourselves playing guys who were just about as good as we were. According to a CIA report, their guys were pumped up on steroids and accelerators and God knows what else. They’d never pass an Olympic Games saliva test, but nobody on our side had thought to include drug testing in the ground rules.

  Oh, we won the first two games okay. But it wasn’t easy.

  And then the Commies used their first secret weapon on us. Women. It was like our hotel was all of a sudden invaded by them. Tall show-girl types, short little señoritas, redheads, blondes, dark flashing eyes and luscious lips that smiled and laughed. And boobs. Never saw so many bouncing, jiggling, low-cut bosoms in my life.

  What could we do? Our third baseman hurt his back swinging by his knees from the chandelier in his room with a broad in one arm and a bottle of champagne in the other. Two of our best pitchers were so hung over that they couldn’t see their catchers the next morning. And our center fielder, who usually batted cleanup, was found under his bed in a coma that lasted three days. But there was a big smile on his face the whole time.

  By the time the Cubans had pulled ahead, three games to two, Nixon called a team meeting and put it to us but good.

  “This has got to stop,” he said, pacing back and forth across the locker room, hands locked behind his stooped back, jowls quivering with anger.

  “These women are trained Communist agents,” he warned us. “I’ve been getting intelligence reports from Washington. Castro has no intentions of establishing friendly relations with us …”

  Somebody snickered at the words friendly relations, but quickly choked it off as Nixon whirled around, searching for the culprit like a schoolteacher dealing with a bunch of unruly kids.

  “This isn’t funny! If the Commies win this series, they’ll go all through Latin America crowing about how weak the United States is. We’ll lose the whole Caribbean, Central America, the Panama Canal —everything!”

  We promised to behave ourselves. Hell, he was worried about Latin America, but most of us had more important problems. I could just imagine my next salary negotiation: “Why, you couldn’t even beat a bunch of third-rate Cubans,” the general manager would tell my agent.

  More than that, I could see my father’s face. He had spent many years teaching me how to play baseball. He had always told me that I could be a big leaguer. And he had always asked nothing more of me than that I gave my best out on the field. I wouldn’t be able to face him, knowing that we had lost to Castro because we had screwed around.

  We went out there that afternoon and tore them apart, 11—2. That tied the series. The seventh and final game would decide it all.

  That’s when they brought out their second secret weapon: Raoul the Robot, the mechanical monster, the Czechoslovak chucker, the machine that threw supersonic fastballs.

  I thought Nixon would have apoplexy when the little robot rolled itself up to the pitcher’s mound to start the game. It looked sort of like a water cooler, a squat metal cylinder with a glass dome on top. It had two “arms:” curved metal chutes that wound around and around several times and then fired the ball at you. Fast. Very fast.

  Nixon went screaming out onto the field before our leadoff batter got to the plate. Castro ambled out, grinning and puffing his cigar. The huge crowd—the Havana stadium was absolutely jammed—gave him the kind of roar that American fans reserve for pitchers who throw no-hitters in the seventh game of the World Series. He turned, doffed his cap just like any big leaguer would, and then joined the argument raging at the mound.

  Nixon did us proud. He jumped up and down. He threw his cap on the dirt and kicked it. He turned red in the face. He raged and shouted at the umpires —two of them from the States, two from Cuba.

  The crowd loved it. They started shouting “Ole!” every time he kicked up some dirt.

  The umpires went through the rule book. There’s no rule that says all the players have to be human beings. So Raoul the Robot stayed on the mound.

  He struck out the side in the first inning. Leading off the second inning, our cleanup hitter, well rested after his three-day coma, managed to pop a fly to center field. But the next two guys struck out.

  And so it went. Raoul had three basic pitches: fast, faster, and fastest. No curve, no slider, no change-up. His fastballs were pretty straight, too. Not much of a hop or dip to them. They just blazed past you before you could get your bat around. And he could throw either right-handed or left-handed, depending on the batter.

  He couldn’t catch the ball at all. After each pitch the catcher would toss th
e ball to the shortstop, who would come over to the mound and stick the ball in a round opening at the top of the robot’s glassed-in head. Then the machine would be ready to wind up and throw.

  “Hit him in the head,” Nixon advised us. “Break that glass top and knock him the hell out of there.”

  Easy to say. Through the first four innings we got exactly one man on base, a walk. Their catcher adjusted the little gizmo he had clipped to his chest protector, and the mechanical monster started throwing strikes again.

  By the time the ninth inning came around, we had collected two hits, both of them bloop pop-ups that just happened to fall in between fielders. Raoul had struck out fourteen. Nixon was glaring pure hatred across the infield. Castro was laughing and passing out cigars in the Cubans’ dugout.

  Our own pitcher had done almost as well as the robot. But an error by our substitute third baseman, a sacrifice fly, and a squeeze bunt had given the Cubans a 1-0 lead. That one run looked as big as a million.

  Our shortstop led off the ninth inning and managed to get his bat on the ball. A grounder. He was out by half a step. The next guy popped up—not bad after three strikeouts.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. The next man up, Harry Bates, would end the game, and that would be that. I was next after him, and I sure didn’t want to be the guy who made the last out. I went out to the on-deck circle, kneeled on one knee, and watched the final moment of the game.

  “Get it over with, Harry,” I said inside my head.

  “Don’t put me on the spot.” I was kind of ashamed of myself for feeling that way, but that’s how I felt.

  Raoul cranked his metal slingshot arm once, twice, and then fired the ball. It blurred past the batter. Strike one. The crowd roared. “Ole!” The catcher flipped the ball to the shortstop, who trotted over to the mound and popped the ball into the robot’s slot like a guy putting money into a video game.