I am huddled under a small overhang of the thing, where one of the spheres joins another. My arm hurts, but the bleeding seems to have stopped. I can’t tell if Spinelli, a few meters in front of me, is still alive, but if he is not dead yet, he soon will be. He has a musket ball in his guts and the sand under him is dark in the rapidly fading light. If the Arabs leave us alone for a few more minutes, I will crawl over to him and give him a drink if he wants it, or maybe tell him a joke. He has not made a sound since he was hit, though.
It happened fast. After we heard the shots, we fell in quickly and marched in their direction. The lieutenant had us check our rifles and the sergeant told us to take a long drink from our canteens, to fix our bayonets, and to loosen our cartridges in their belts.
We marched for about a kilometer, the deep sand deadening the noise of our boots, the lieutenant and the professor ahead. The fat one was talking to the lieutenant, and took his arm once, but was shaken off. The lieutenant handed him one of his pistols. The civilian said something else and then the lieutenant put out an arm and Lard-Face went on his back in the sand. We marched by him and he got up and ran after us. I was near the rear of the column and he ran up beside me, wheezing, and asked me if I knew where I was being led. I said, Yes, Monsieur, those were the muskets of the Arabs we heard. He said, It is not part of our mission to chase natives. That was not a question, so I said nothing. He said, Do you not care that there might be a hundred savages there? That that enfant could be leading all of us to death? I said, Monsieur, I am not an officer; you waste your time speaking to me. Sergeant Kruger had come back to the end of the column by then and he said to him, Monsieur le Professeur, the lieutenant sends his compliments and begs you to guard our rear while he conducts a reconnaissance in force. The professor stopped and I looked quickly around at him after a few steps and saw him standing kneedeep in the sand examining the service revolver the lieutenant had given him.
We marched over the edge of a small dune and there it was, about a hundred meters ahead of us, and beyond it were about fifty Arabs, some cross-legged on their camels and some standing in a small circle on the sand. They spotted us and the lieutenant saw right away that the only cover would be the big silver thing and so he shouted charge and as they ran for their camels and their rifles, we ran for the shelter of the big thing. It looked like five great big shiny cannonballs welded together in a row, but what was important was that we were in the open and if we could get it behind us and throw up some sand as a breastwork, we couldn’t ask for a better place to fight from.
But the sand was deep and we couldn’t run fast enough and the Arabs got the lieutenant and Kruger and twelve others, and I got a ball in the arm, before we got to the thing and dug ourselves in. After the three of us were under cover, we watched them drag away the men who were still alive and begin cutting them up.
They must have been using very small, very sharp knives. We could hear the screams for hours.
So now I am on this side of the thing and Petit and Palewski are on the other side, so I guess they can’t take us by surprise anyway. I don’t know what we can do if they attack in the dark. I guess I will have to shoot Spinelli first and then myself so they can’t cut us up.
The fat man had waited all night behind a dune, peeping over it from time to time at the reflections of starlight and, later in the night, moonlight on the multiple spheres of the object in the depression below. When it began to grow brighter in the east, and he still saw no signs of the Arabs, he finally rose and walked down the gentle slope.
“Soldier,” he said to the man huddled under the curving side of the object. “Soldier, wake up.” The man finally did wake up, and blinked his eyes slowly before focusing them on Paul-Boncour.
“Lard-Face,” said the man, seemingly speaking to himself. “Then it is morning, and we are still alive.” Then his eyes widened, and with a sudden lunge he flattened the savant on the sand. “Don’t make a sound,” he whispered. “I don’t know why they didn’t kill us while we slept, but if they see you walking around, they’ll be on top of us. And we are only four.”
“Let me up, you fool,” said Paul-Boncour loudly. “Do you think I would have come down here if those savages were still around? Get up. Act like a Frenchman! Where are the others?”
The Legionnaire stood up slowly and scanned the desert, warily at first, and then with a flicker of hope in his expression; finally he smiled broadly. He helped the sprawled scientist to his feet and called to the others. “Petit! Palewski! Reveillez-vous! The Arabs have left!” There was no answer. Still smiling, he shouldered his rifle, said to Paul-Boncour, “I’ll go wake them,” and disappeared around the end of the object.
The professor, left alone for a moment, investigated the corpse that lay huddled a few yards in front of Bergaine’s little sandmound emplacement. He prodded it with his boot; frozen. A bad wound too, judging from the dried blood on the sand around the body.
Silly ass, he thought; it was his own fault for following wherever he was led. Still, it was too bad. A total waste of money to train and arm the man, to have him die here like this; and Paul-Boncour was, after all, a taxpayer.
The wounded Legionnaire reappeared from the other side of the object. He looked sick. Paul-Boncour swung on him. “Well, where are the others?” he asked. “You did say there were two others, n’est-ce pas?”
“They’re dead,” said Bergaine. His face was pale. “The Arabs…”
“Well,” interrupted the civilian, shielding his eyes against the rising sun, “Too bad. But we’ve found our bolide, at any rate. Let’s investigate it.”
So every man in the platoon is dead, except me. I guess the professor’s in command now; at least he has a compass, and a map. Even he can get us back to the post, now that we have the food and water the others won’t be needing any more.
I am scraping a shallow grave in the sand for Spinelli, using my rifle butt, when the professor comes over to me and pulls me away. Follow me, he says. I say that I have to bury Spinelli and the others. Oh, they’ll keep for a couple more minutes, says he, come here, I want you to be able to corroborate some things for me when we get back to civilization.
I don’t understand what he means by “corroborate,” but I follow him. First he shows me some lines, like the outline of a door, on the side of the silver thing; I say yes, I see them. He shows me some things like cannon muzzles at one end. I say yes sir, I see them, can I go bury Spinelli now? He says that there is one more thing that I have to see. I follow him, but I’m getting a little angry; after I get done with Spinelli, I am going to have to bury what is left of Petit and Palewski, and I am not looking forward to that.
This last thing he has to show me is a trail, like a trough or a shallow groove in the sand, with marks at intervals along the sides. There are stains in the sand, as if something had leaked into the ground here and there along the trail. I ask him what it is.
Look where it leads from, he says, and points back toward the thing. Sure enough, I can see that it leads right to the door-like markings, and I see also that at one place on the trail the sand is all scuffled and stamped over, as if a group of men had been dancing or fighting on that spot, and there is a great deal of the funny-looking stain around there.
They were waiting for it when it came out, 1 say. The professor is surprised, and says that for a common soldier, I am very quick. I say nothing; that is not a question. I ask him again if he will let me go and finish the burying now so that we can start back to the post before the Arabs decide to return with some friends and show off their work.
He looks surprised, and says, Start back? Of course we do not start back. Not now. Don’t you understand what all this means? A creature of another celestial sphere has visited our planet for the first time. Perhaps he comes in peace, and then again, perhaps as a scout for a warlike race. It is our duty, to Science, to Humanity, to find this étrangère and to fathom his intentions toward mankind! He is shouting and waving his arms at me as he f
inishes his little speech.
I am beginning to think that the professor has gone just a little bit crazy from the sun and the deaths. After all, he is a cultured man and not used to such things. I look at him directly and say gently, Monsieur, we can carry enough water to get back alive only if we start walking now, while we are still strong. We must not linger here or the Arabs will return and find us. We must go back now. I speak very slowly, so that he knows I am in absolute earnest. Otherwise, I say, I will take the compass and the map and start back alone, and you can go after your creature, which is probably dead from the cold and the attentions of the savages anyway.
The professor pulls the lieutenant’s revolver from his pocket and points it at me. We are going after the creature together, my brave Legionnaire, he says, with a little smile. Gather up the food and the canteens. And leave your rifle here, with the dead ones.
It was plain to Paul-Boncour that the creature, whatever it looked like, was badly hurt. The trough in the sand was deeper on one side than on the other, and on the deeper side most of the stains appeared. As the two plodded on, the stains became more frequent, forming a discolored line on the sand.
“The creature that left this trail,” said the scientist to the soldier, “is not only badly hurt, but, I think, unused to the gravity of this planet; as you will note, the trail avoids any suggestion of a grade, winding between dunes rather than attempting to scale them. From the depth of the trough, I would estimate its weight to be about that of a man—perhaps a little less.”
The soldier did not reply. He was bent under the weight of the rations and canteens taken from the dead men, and followed the scientist, walking in the track they were following. One of his arms was roughly bandaged, and he carried it thrust deep into the pocket of his overcoat.
The professor does not notice the difference in the air this afternoon, for he is unused to the deep Sahara; but I notice it, and I can tell that the sand-storm the desert is preparing for us is not one that two men on foot should face in the open. But I walk on behind him, saying nothing.
When the first gust of sand-laden wind buffets us, and the darkness covering the sun suddenly shrouds us in a roaring brown-yellow night, the professor is startled from his concentration. He turns to me in terror and I shout in his ear above the roar of the wind, It is a dust-storm, we must lie down and cover our heads. He throws himself full-length on the sand and covers his face with his hands.
It is then that I fall upon him in the shrieking darkness and smash his skull with a metal canteen. He makes not a sound as he dies, or if he does, it is carried away by the wind. I can no longer see for the sand in my eyes, cutting and stinging; I pull the revolver from his belt, and standing crouched over him, pull at his pockets for the compass and map. A gust of wind, heavy with flying sand, knocks me down and I roll over and over before the fury of it.
It is evening, and I am following the trail of the creature alone. Why? Because there is nowhere else for me to go. After the storm was over, I dug myself out and looked for the professor’s body but it was useless. He is under at least a meter of sand—a better burial than he allowed Spinelli and the others—and all of the dunes have changed. It is hopeless to look for the body, and without the compass and map, there is little possibility of my finding my way back to a fort. But at least I will not die from slow thirst; I have five cartridges remaining in the lieutenant’s revolver. So now I am more or less amusing myself until I decide that I have lived long enough.
I feel that I am very close to the creature now. The trail is obviously fresh; it was made after the sand-storm. It must have been very close, perhaps on the other side of the dune, when I killed the professor.
Its trail seems to curve around the end of this dune, perhaps to circle back again; the creature, fleeing from the Arabs as our little party distracted them from their sport, is as lost as I am. No, even more than I, for I at least stand on the planet and breathe the air native to my kind. But I can comprehend, now, a little of what it must feel, if it feels as we do at all. I decide to try to second-guess it by climbing over the dune.
It lies in the depression between two dunes, not moving at all. It is of a silvery color, like its craft, and is smaller but longer than a man, with many small legs or arms along its body. I half-walk, half-slide down the dune toward it. It begins to move spasmodically as I near it; I stop and wait for a moment. Its movements cease, but I can tell somehow that it is watching me.
I walk slowly toward it, and stop and crouch in the sand about a meter away. It is panting, breathing with a thin whistling sound. With each heave of its sides, small drops of fluid run from dozens of tiny slashes and wet the sand under it. I recognize the cuts. The Arabs had only started with this creature.
Then it moves again, and I look up; there they are atop the dune I have just crossed, a dozen or more dark, silent men in flowing white. They sit on their motionless camels, watching us.
My hand closes upon the revolver, and I glance back at the alien. For the savages I have three cartridges. But the last two are for me and my comrade.
Call it a favor from one stranger to another.
Editor's Introduction to:
THE ECONOMICS OF WAR
by David Friedman, Ph.D
My friend David Friedman is a remarkable man. He has no military experience, but he does have considerable background in military history. He has also several times won the Crown of the East in the Society for Creative Anachronism, that odd group that enjoys dressing in armor and fighting tournaments. The tournament winner receives the Crown.
Dr. Friedman is an economist and a teacher of economics. He is also what is often termed an “extreme libertarian,” which is to say that he considers freedom the highest of values and seeks ways whereby a rational society might do away with coercion. Unlike many of that persuasion, Dr. Friedman has given the subject no little thought, and he does not avoid the hard questions. One may not agree with him, but it is difficult not to be stimulated by him. At worst, one will better understand why one disagrees.
Wars and armies are, by definition, coercive. They pose a real problem for the libertarian: How does a free society counter organized violence? Indeed, can that be done? Must there be taxation, conscription, police and armies? Can there be a rule of rationality and contract?
Inter armes, silent leges; in the face of arms, the law is silent. So, one might think, are contracts and voluntarism. Dr. Friedman seeks insights into why men fight, and why they do not.
The cynic, it is said, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. One might say that Dr. Friedman’s cool rationalism seeks answers in places where they cannot be found. Good soldiers are seldom paid in any coin that economists can quantify.
THE ECONOMICS OF WAR
by David Friedman, Ph.D
“The science of war is moving live men like blocks.”
—Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown’s Body
To most non-economists, economics has something to do with money, and the economics of war presumably has to do with how we pay for the bombs and bullets. Economists have different and broader ideas of what their field is; my own favorite definition is that economics is that approach to understanding human behavior which starts from the assumption that individuals have objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them. From this standpoint, the potential subject matter is all of human behavior (some of my colleagues would include animal behavior as well) and the only test of whether behavior is or is not economic is the ability of our basic assumption to explain or predict it.
Given such a broad definition of economics, one might almost say that all of warfare reduces to the technical problem of making guns that will shoot and the economic problem of getting someone to shoot them, preferably in the right direction. Board games, strategic simulations and popular articles tend to emphasize the technical problems—how far a tank will shoot, what kind of armor it will go through and how many tanks (or knights or hoplites) each si
de has; they generally take it for granted that the playing pieces will go where they are moved. In real battles they frequently do not. The economic problem is why they do not and what can be done about it.
Economics assumes that individuals have objectives. We do not know all of the objectives that any individual has, but we do know that for most of us, staying alive is high on the list. The general commanding an army and the soldier in the front line have, in one sense, the same objectives. Both want their side to win, and both want both of them to survive the battle. The soldier, however, is likely to rank his own survival a good deal higher and the general’s survival a good deal lower in importance than the general does. One consequence of that disagreement is that the general may rationally tell the soldier to do something and the soldier may rationally not do it. Neither is necessarily making a mistake; each may be correctly perceiving how to achieve his ends.
Consider a simple case. You are one of a line of men on foot with long spears; you are being charged by men on horses, also carrying spears (and swords and maces and…). You have a simple choice: You can stand and fight or you can run away. If everyone runs away, the line collapses and most of you get killed; if everyone stands, you have a good chance of stopping the charge and surviving the battle. Obviously you should stand.
It is not so obvious. I have described the consequences if everyone runs or everyone stands, but you are not everyone; all you control is whether you run or fight. If you are in a large army, your decision to run will only very slightly weaken it. If you run and everyone else fights and wins, some of them will be killed and you will not. If you run and everyone else fights and loses, at least they will slow down the attack—giving you some chance of getting away. If everyone runs and you stand to fight, you will certainly be killed; if everyone runs and you run first, you at least have a chance of getting away. It follows that whatever everyone else is going to do, unless you believe that your running away will have a significant effect on who wins (unlikely with large armies), you are better off running. Everyone follows this argument, everyone runs, the line collapses, you lose the battle and most of you get killed.
There Will Be War Volume III Page 16
