by William Tenn
Even so, many of these committed suicide rather than assume the title of Secretary General of the United Nations when the Dendi came back for the glorious Re-Reliberation, a short time after that. This was the liberation, by the way, which swept the deep collar of matter off our planet, and gave it what our forefathers came to call a pear-shaped look.
Possibly it was at this time—possibly a liberation or so later—that the Troxxt and the Dendi discovered the Earth had become far too eccentric in its orbit to possess the minimum safety conditions demanded of a Combat Zone. The battle, therefore, zigzagged coruscatingly and murderously away in the direction of Aldebaran.
That was nine generations ago, but the tale that has been handed down from parent to child, to child’s child, has lost little in the telling. You hear it now from me almost exactly as I heard it. From my father I heard it as I ran with him from water puddle to distant water puddle, across the searing heat of yellow sand. From my mother I heard it as we sucked air and frantically grabbed at clusters of thick green weed, whenever the planet beneath us quivered in omen of a geological spasm that might bury us in its burned-out body, or a cosmic gyration threatened to fling us into empty space.
Yes, even as we do now did we do then, telling the same tale, running the same frantic race across miles of unendurable heat for food and water; fighting the same savage battles with the giant rabbits for each other’s carrion—and always, ever and always, sucking desperately at the precious air, which leaves our world in greater quantities with every mad twist of its orbit.
Naked, hungry, and thirsty came we into the world, and naked, hungry, and thirsty do we scamper our lives out upon it, under the huge and never-changing sun.
The same tale it is, and the same traditional ending it has as that I had from my father and his father before him. Suck air, grab clusters, and hear the last holy observation of our history: “Looking about us, we can say with pardonable pride that we have been about as thoroughly liberated as it is possible for a race and a planet to be!”
Afterword
Though this story was read aloud during protests by students in the nineteen sixties at rallies opposing our participation in the Vietnam War, it was actually written during and about the Korean War, a decade earlier.
My feelings about that situation were really quite simple.
North Korea invaded South Korea across the thirty-eighth parallel. The United States, acting for the United Nations (read, please, the Galactic Federation), came to the aid of South Korea, driving the North Koreans all the way back. Thereupon, the People’s Republic of China, with the backing of the Soviet Union, came to the aid of North Korea, driving the U.S. forces back in turn. The entire matter has not been entirely resolved to this day, leaving the country in a kind of military stasis, with armistice and peace talks coming up in a desultory fashion at Panmunjom, the approximate midpoint.
The period covered was roughly the same as the Red-Scare years that began with the Dies Committee and ended with the Senate censure of Joseph McCarthy in 1954. As a result, the organized Left inveighed against what it called “Truman’s War,” and urged us to get the hell out of Korea; the official Right not only supported the war but considered it perhaps the most crucial element in the battle against the godless Communists.
In writing the story, all I wanted to do was point out what a really awful thing it was to be a Korean (and later a Vietnamese) in such a situation. (But recently I have come to the conclusion that if I had been a Korean, North or South, under those same circumstances, I would very much have welcomed the U.S. intervention. Am I growing old? Or just official?)
As was pretty much the case with “Brooklyn Project,” absolutely none of the top science-fiction magazines wanted to touch the story. It was finally purchased by Bob Lowndes of Columbia Publications for his Future Science Fiction, then the butcher-paper bottom of the field.
When I at last read the story in print, I was quite proud of it. But nobody, absolutely nobody, seemed to notice it.
Not even the F.B.I.
Written 1950 / Published 1953
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