On April 29, 1983, Associate Editor Stefan T. Possony, addressing the Defense 83 meeting sponsored by the present publication, reported on Dr. Adey’s work and on the work by Dr. A.S. Davydov of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Davydov discovered how the blood-brain barrier can be penetrated by low-frequency beams and directly affect cells in the brain. Possony’s remarks were delivered to a panel studying psychological warfare.
In the U.S., research on directed brain waves has scarcely begun, and the USSR has a lead of approximately twenty-five years. Once it is matured, the new technology will be extraordinarily significant in medicine. It also may have major impacts on communications, intelligence, and psychological operations, and permit deliberate physiological impairment.
The KGB is known to be interested in the program.
It is not known whether the U.S. and other governments are trying to determine whether their countries have become targets of clandestine brain waves beamed from the USSR. Nor are there any indications that work on countermeasures is being contemplated anywhere—except perhaps in the USSR.
For that matter, it is high time that the U.S. government tells the complete story of how and why the American Embassy in Moscow was “beamed.”
Editor's Introduction to:
THREE SOLDIERS
by D. C. Poyer
The secret of empire is to make war feed war.
Militant religions have often employed the technique. The early followers of Mahomet offered captives the choice of “Islam or the sword.” Those who chose Islam were recruited to go forth and conquer. Whole nations were swallowed up and retrained into fighting units. The result was an empire that stretched from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees and threatened Europe for nearly a thousand years until Lepanto.
The British were exceedingly effective at this, with the result that most of India was conquered by a handful of British soldiers leading a large army of Indian troops. As late as World War II the British were able to field brigades of Indian soldiers, and to this day the Ghurka mercenaries are an important component of British strength.
Employment of mercenaries doesn’t always work so well. As Machiavelli observed, incompetent mercenaries will ruin you by losing battles; competent ones will be tempted to rob their paymasters and may eventually take over governing their employers. Still, those who for whatever reason do not care to fight for themselves will continue to look for someone to do it for them. They will look for exceptional loyalty, obedience, and competence; and will devise ever more elaborate tests to aid them in selecting the soldiers they employ.
THREE SOLDIERS
by D. C. Poyer
The blackness opened, and von Rheydt swam up through inky velvet to a consciousness that he had never expected to see again.
He did not move, not even opening his eyes.
Von Rheydt remembered falling face down in the snow, fingers clutching the sudden wetness in the pit of his stomach, hearing the soft crunch of millions of six-pointed ice crystals as his face sank toward the Russian earth.
Hauptmann von Rheydt noticed, without surprise, that he did not feel particularly cold, nor could he feel anything where the bullet had struck him. He was waiting, eyes closed and mind blank, for a Russian bayonet.
The white-coated troops who followed the tanks always checked the fallen Germans for signs of life. That, he thought remotely, must be why he was now face up. One of the Red troops must have turned him over while he was unconscious to check on the seriousness of his wound.
It must be bad if they hadn’t bothered to use a bayonet, he thought. Maybe that was why he couldn’t feel anything in his stomach.
Minutes passed. Von Rheydt waited. It was very quiet.
Too quiet, he thought suddenly. He could hear nothing but his heart. No machine-gun fire, neither the tap-tap-tap of the Degtyarevs nor the high cloth-ripping sound of the German guns. No grunting of tank engines, no shouts of “Oooray!” as the Red Army charged. Not even—and this was the strangest of all—not even the sighing of the wind over the plains of Stalingrad in this year of struggle 1942.
He opened his eyes, tensing himself for the bayonet. Above him was a gray ceiling.
A hospital, he thought. German or Russian? That was easy to answer. The Soviets did not waste hospital space on wounded enemy officers. So he was in friendly hands. A smile creased his thin, blond-stubbled face, and he sat up without thinking. And stared down at the crisp, unstained gray of his battle-dress tunic. No holes. No blood. After several seconds he touched his stomach with one hand. He was unwounded.
Captain Werner von Rheydt, German Army, thirty years old, educated at Göttingen… memory’s all right, he thought confusedly, still looking down at his stomach. Had he dreamed it, then? His brow furrowed. The University… the war… the draft… the Polish campaign, then France, then Yugoslavia, and so to the Russian Front. To Stalingrad with the 44th Infantry, Sixth Army, after four years of war. To the madness of Stalingrad in winter, an entire army surrounded, abandoned, but still fighting…
No, it was not a dream, von Rheydt concluded silently. Line “Violet” had fallen; and in the fighting retreat to “Sunflower,” the Soviet tanks had broken through. He had led a counterattack and had fallen, badly wounded, on a snowy battlefield two thousand miles from home. And he was now—here.
He swung his boots over the edge of the bunk and noticed it for the first time. It was a plain Reichsheer-issue steel bunk, standard thin pallet mattress with a dingy pillow and a gray wool blanket.
He stood up and the momentary sense of reassurance the familiar-looking bunk had given him disappeared. He stared around at a room that was far too strange for a dream.
It’s gray, he thought, but the gray was strange. Not a painted color, but a hard shininess like the dull sheen of polished metal. But the shape—it was the shape of the room that was different. He stood at the bottom of an octagon and at the center of one; the room had eight walls, and its cross-section was an octagon as well. He counted, came up with a total of twenty-six facets.
A pile of what looked like military equipment was stuck oddly to one of the eight vertical walls. Von Rheydt walked forward to investigate, stepped up on a slanted facet of the room to reach up—and found the pile on a slanted face just in front of him. He looked back at the bunk. It too was on a slanted face and looked as if it should come sliding down on him at any moment.
And there was no question but that the facet he had stepped up on was now at the bottom of the room.
Queer, thought von Rheydt. He walked on, stood next to the pile. Now that facet was the floor, and the bunk hung ludicrously on a vertical wall.
Feeling a touch of nausea, he bent to the heap of equipment. It was not his own, he saw, but it was all standard army. Helmet, battle, one, white-painted for winter wear. Canteen. Pack ration. An officer’s dress dagger, which he examined closely, scowling as he saw the double lightning strokes of the SS; the army and Himmler’s thugs had never gotten along, and of late there had been rumors… shadowy but horrible rumors. A dress sword, plain but of good Solingen steel. At the very bottom of the heap he found what he had been hoping for: a Luger. A quick investigation revealed six cartridges in its magazine.
Von Rheydt smiled as he buckled on the pistol belt. Having a weapon made him feel much more confident wherever he was. He buckled on the dagger too, and began walking again, continuing around the room. His boots clicked arrogantly on the hard surface.
Halfway around—the “floor,” inexplicably, still underneath his feet—he noticed a grille set into its surface. He bent to look into it.
A black, grimacing face, horribly furrowed with scars and paint, stared back at him, teeth bared. Von Rheydt recoiled, drawing the dagger. At his motion, the face disappeared, drawn back from the grille.
Beyond wonder, he walked on. In the next facet of the room was a door, or hatch, set flush with the gray surface and of the same material. There was no knob or handle, and he was unable to get the point of the dagg
er far enough into the seam to pry it open. He went on and had almost reached the bunk again before he saw something else on the smooth sameness of gray.
It was another grille. This one he approached with dagger drawn, but there was no one at it. He bent and peered through it, seeing on the other side another room like his own.
“Anyone there?” he called loudly.
The quick pad of footsteps came up to the grille and a moment later a hard-looking, tanned face stared out. A second or so passed, and then the man barked out a question.
It took several seconds for von Rheydt to realize that the strong-jawed, dark-haired man on the other side of the grille had said, “Who are you?”—in Latin.
Von Rheydt searched his mind for the moldy words he had struggled over at Göttingen. “Ego sum… von Rheydt,” he said haltingly. “Ah… sum miles Germanicus… amicus. Amicus, friend. Et tu?”
The other man spoke rapidly; not classical Latin, but a rough, corrupt-sounding tongue with a Spanish rhythm. Von Rheydt caught a word here and there, enough to piece the sense together: “Roman soldier… Nineteenth Legion. Into the forest, the battle against Arminius… spear wound… slept.” The Roman passed a hand over his close-cropped, dark hair, looking puzzled as if trying to remember something. “Slept…”
Von Rheydt started to speak in German, stopped, said in Latin: “You are a Roman soldier?”
“Centurio,” corrected the man, showing a massive gold ring on his powerful-looking hand. “Junius Cornelius Casca, centurion second rank, Nineteenth Legion, General Varus commanding.”
“Centurion Casca… what year is this?”
The other man—Casca—frowned through the grille. “Year? What year? Why, 762, ab urbe condita, and thirty-eighth year of the principate of Augustus.” His heavy brows drew together. “Where are we, German? What prison is this?”
Von Rheydt did not answer immediately for he was chasing a phrase down dusty corridors of his mind. Ab urbe condita… literally, from founding the city… yes, he remembered. The legendary founding of Rome, 753 B.C., the date used to reckon time by the Empire. This man Casca, then, could be… almost two thousand years old?
And then something else clicked in his mind. P. Quinctilius Varus, leading the Nineteenth Legion into Gaul. Sent to crush the Chirusci revolt under Arminius. Surrounded and massacred without a survivor, late in the reign of Augustus Caesar…
“Non certe scire—I don’t know,” he said slowly, trying to match stale school Latin to the cadence the other man used. The Roman laughed, a short, bitter sound.
Von Rheydt looked up from the grille. He looked at the bunk that stuck to the wall like a fly, at the strangeness of the gray metal walls, at the light that filled the room without visible source. He remembered the gravity that followed wherever he walked.
He had been wounded in 1942, on the frozen plains of Stalingrad. Just as this Casca, this Roman, had been wounded in the forests of Teutoburgium in nine A.D. They had been snatched away. But to where? he asked himself. And what year is it in this strange cell—9, or 1942 A.D.?
The Roman had left the grille, and von Rheydt slowly stood up. He looked vacantly around the room, then walked back to the bunk and sat down.
Fifteen minutes later he got up and went to the first grille, the one at which he had seen the black man. He was there again, big hands wrapped around the gray metal bars that separated the rooms. Von Rheydt wondered whether the other man was kneeling too, and if so—where did the room’s gravity come from? From the gray metal of its walls?
“Verstehen Sie Deutsch?”
The man looked back at him without expression, and von Rheydt sat back on his haunches and studied him. The face was broad, thick-lipped and strong; though the paint stripes were obviously meant for adornment or intimidation, the scars looked like battle scars rather than tattoo or ritual mutilation. The man’s hair was done up in a doughnut-shaped ring atop the wide skull, and his eyes, dark and intelligent, were studying the German with every bit as much interest as they were being given. Von Rheydt tried Latin after a time, and then French, of which he had picked up a few words during the 1940 campaign.
No luck. The man was listening intently though, and when von Rheydt paused, he placed his outstretched fingers on his broad, bare chest and said several words in a gutteral, clicking language:
“Ngi wum Zulu.”
Von Rheydt tried to understand but ended by shaking his head in frustration. Did ngi mean “My name is”? If only they had a few words of some language in common!
“You… are English?”
Von Rheydt started. His roommate at school had been English; he had picked up a fair amount of the language. “No. German. Who are you?”
The warrior placed his hand on his chest again and said slowly, “Mbatha. Of… the Zulu. This is… gaol?”
The language lesson lasted for about an hour.
By the time he was fully awake, von Rheydt had rolled out of the bunk and had the Luger in his hand—safety off; Stalingrad reflexes. He scrutinized his surroundings from a crouch before he stood up, holstering the pistol. The room was as empty, the light as steady, as when he had gone to sleep. Only one thing was different: The door had opened. He approached it cautiously, one hand still on the butt of the weapon.
As far as he could make out, the door had disappeared. There were no hinges, and the inside of the jamb was smooth and featureless; it could not have slid inside the wall. He remembered how impressed he’d been with the automatic doors he’d seen before the war in Berlin department stores, and grinned humorlessly.
Feeling a little like a cautious ape, von Rheydt stepped though the door. He looked to either side, down a long, narrow, gray-lit corridor with four welcome right angles to the walls. To his left the corridor fell away into darkness; to his right it was lit with the same sourceless brightness, stretching away into the distance.
There was a high, almost musical note behind him… the sound, he realized, that had awakened him. He turned and found the door in place, locked. He could see no way to open it.
Shrugging, he loosened the dagger in its sheath, placed his hand near the pistol and walked down the corridor to the right. He passed the outline of another door, and then another. A thought struck him, and he tried to step up on a wall; no good. The every-wall-a-floor device wasn’t used in corridors, then.
Octagonal rooms… doors… square corridors… the layout of the place came into focus as he walked. Von Rheydt visualized a grid of octagons, side to side, their corners forming four-sided longitudinal corridors. The corridors would lead the length of… what? The arrangement was an inhumanly efficient utilization of space, so space must be at a premium here. He walked along, staying alert, but thinking as well.
As a boy he had read Hermann Oberth’s and Willy Ley’s books about interplanetary flight. Read them avidly, until his father had thrown them all away and forbidden him to read such trash. Was he aboard such an interplanetary rocket? Or… and von Rheydt felt uneasy at the thought… was he, and the Zulu and the Roman, trapped in something as far beyond his imagination as Stukas and Konigpanzer tanks were beyond Casca’s?
He came to an open hatch, stepped in and snapped to rigid attention, a look of surprise flashing across his face.
The room was gray and octagonal; but in the center of it sat a desk, and at the desk stood a man. A hard-looking man of middle age, dressed in the high-collared tunic and red- striped trousers of a general of the O.K.W.—the General Staff. A man with sharp eyes and a rocklike chin, who nodded to von Rheydt’s astounded salute and motioned to a chair.
“Sit down, Captain,” he said in clear, Prussian-accented German. “Smoke?”
Von Rheydt sat, shook his head. “Thank you, no, Hen-General.”
“Well,” said the general, studying him for a moment while taking a long cigar from a box on the desk, lighting it carefully and exhaling a puff of aromatic smoke. “You are a bit confused, no doubt.”
“That is an understatement, Her
r General.”
“I suppose so. We expected that you would be—you and your two companions. We owe you an explanation. You are here, Captain von Rheydt, because you are a brave man.”
“For Leader and Reich,” said von Rheydt automatically.
The man in the general’s uniform glanced at him sharply. “Yes. Of course. But tell me, Captain. Would you fight as bravely as you fought at Stalingrad—surrounded, outnumbered, abandoned by your leader—if, say the future of your species was at stake?”
“I beg the general’s pardon?” said von Rheydt.
“How did you come here, Captain?”
“Here… I don’t know, Herr General. The last thing I recall is leading an infantry counterattack against Soviet tanks…”
“Against tanks?”
“Those were my orders, Herr General,” said von Rheydt. “And then a strange thing happened. I thought that I was wounded.”
“That is not quite correct. You were killed.”
“Killed… but I am alive!”
“Are you, Captain?”
Frozen, von Rheydt stared at the general’s face. He felt his heart beating, felt the breath that rustled in his throat and the hunger that was beginning to stir in his bowels. “Yes, Herr General, I am alive.”
“You died at Stalingrad in 1942, Captain. I am sorry.”
Von Rheydt gripped the arms of his chair. “Explain yourself, Herr General. This is going beyond a joke!”
The older man chuckled. “This is not a joke, Captain. And I am not a general. Those of your time would not even consider me a man. Especially—you will pardon the emphasis—am I not a German.”
“Not a German…” began von Rheydt, presentiment growing in his mind. “You are not of my time?”
There Will Be War Volume IV Page 28
