by Larry Niven
“We don’t want biologicals.”
I thought he hadn’t heard. “Picture crowbars six feet long. A short burn takes them out of orbit, and they steer themselves down to anything with the silhouette you want…a tank or a submarine or a limousine, say. Primitive stuff now, but at least it would do something.” He was really getting into this. The technical terms he was tossing off were masks for horror. He stopped suddenly, then, “Why not biologicals?”
“Nasty bacteria tailored for us might not work on warcats. We want their biological weapons, and we don’t want them to have ours.
“…Stet. Now, here’s one for you. How would you adjust a ’doc to snake a normal person into a soldier?”
My head snapped up. I saw the guilt spread across his face. He said, “I had to look up your dossier. Had to, Jack.”
“Sure. All right, I’ll see what I can find.” I stood up. “The easiest way is to pick schitzies and train them as soldiers. We’d start with the same citizens the ARM has been training since…date classified, three hundred years or so. People who need the ’doc to keep their metabolism straight, or they’ll ram a car into a crowd, or strangle—”
“We wouldn’t find enough of them. When you need soldiers, you need thousands. Maybe millions.”
“True. It’s a rare condition. Well, good night, Anton.”
I fell asleep on the ’doc table again.
Dawn poked under my eyelids and I got up and moved toward the holophone. Caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Rethought. If David saw me looking like this, he’d be booking tickets to attend the funeral.
So I took a shower and a cup of coffee first.
My eldest son looked like I had: decidedly rumpled. “Dad, can’t you read a clock?”
“I’m sorry. Really.” These calls are so expensive that there’s no point hanging up. “How are things in Aristarchus?”
“Clavius. We’ve been moved out. We’ve got half the space we used to, and we’d need twice the space to hold everything we own. Ah, the time change isn’t your fault, Dad, we’re all in Clavius now, all but Jennifer. She—” David vanished. A mechanically soothing voice said, “You have impinged on ARM police business. The cost of your call will be refunded.”
I looked at the empty space where David’s face had been. I was ARM…but maybe I’d already heard enough.
My granddaughter Jennifer is a medic. The censor program had reacted to her name in connection with David. David said she wasn’t with him. The whole family had been moved out except for Jennifer.
If she’d stayed on in Aristarchus…or been kept on…
Human medics are needed when something unusual has happened to a human body or brain. Then they study what’s going on, with an eye to writing more programs for the ’docs. The bulk of those problems are psychological.
Anton’s “peace games” must be stressful as hell.
II
Anton wasn’t at the Monobloc Thursday. That gave me another week to rethink and recheck the programs I’d put on a dime disk, but I didn’t need it.
I came back the next Thursday. Anton Brillov and Phoebe Garrison were holding a table for four.
I paused—backlit in the doorway, knowing my expression was hidden—then moved on in. “When did you get back?”
“Saturday before last,” Phoebe said gravely.
It felt awkward. Anton felt it, too; but then, he would. I began to wish I didn’t ever have to see him on a Thursday night.
I tried tact. “Shall we see if we can conscript a fourth?”
“It’s not like that,” Phoebe said. “Anton and I, we’re together. We had to tell you.”
But I’d never thought…I’d never claimed Phoebe. Dreams are private. This was coming from some wild direction. “Together as in?”
Anton said, “Well, not married, not yet, but thinking about it. And we wanted to talk privately.”
“Like over dinner?”
“A good suggestion.”
“I like Buffalo Bill. Let’s go there.”
Twenty-odd habitués of the Monobloc must have heard the exchange and watched us leave. Those three long-timers seem friendly enough, but too serious…and three’s an odd number…
We didn’t talk until we’d reached Suite 23309.
Anton closed the door before he spoke. “She’s in, Jack. Everything.”
I said, “It’s really love, then.”
Phoebe smiled. “Jack, don’t be offended. Choosing is what humans do.”
Trite, I thought, and Skip it. “That bit there in the Monobloc seemed overdone. I felt excessively foolish.”
“That was for them. My idea,” Phoebe said. “After tonight, one of us may have to go away. This way we’ve got an all-purpose excuse. You leave because your best friend and favored lady closed you out. Or Phoebe leaves because she can’t bear to ruin a friendship. Or big, burly Jack drives Anton away. See?”
She wasn’t just in, she was taking over. Ah, well. “Phoebe, love, do you believe in murderous cats eight feet tall?”
“Do you have doubts, Jack?”
“Not any more. I called my son. Something secretive is happening in Aristarchus, something that requires a medic.”
She only nodded. “What have you got for us?”
I showed them my dime disk. “Took me less than a week. Run it in an autodoc. Ten personality choices. The chemical differences aren’t big, but…infantry, which means killing on foot and doesn’t have anything to do with children…where was I? Yah. Infantry isn’t at all like logistics, and neither is like espionage, and Navy is different yet. We may have lost some of the military vocations over the centuries. We’ll have to reinvent them. This is just a first cut. I wish we had a way to try it out.”
Anton set a dime disk next to mine, and a small projector. “Mine’s nearly full. The ARM’s stored an incredible range of dangerous devices. We need to think hard about where to store this. I even wondered if one of us should be emigrating, which is why—”
“To the Belt? Further?”
“Jack, if this all adds up, we won’t have time to reach another star.”
We watched stills and flat motion pictures of weapons and tools in action. Much of it was quite primitive, copied out of deep archives. We watched rock and landscape being torn, aircraft exploding, machines destroying other machines…and imagined flesh shredding.
“I could get more, but I thought I’d better show you this first,” Anton said.
I said, “Don’t bother.”
“What? Jack?”
“It only took us a week! Why risk our necks to do work that can be duplicated that fast?”
Anton looked lost. “We need to do something!”
“Well, maybe we don’t. Maybe the ARM is doing it all for us.”
Phoebe gripped Anton’s wrist hard, and he swallowed some bitter retort. She said, “Maybe we’re missing something. Maybe we’re not looking at it right.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Let’s find a way to look at it differently.” She was looking straight at me.
I said, “Stoned? Drunk? Fizzed? Wired?”
Phoebe shook her head. “We need the schitz view.”
“Dangerous, love. Also, the chemicals you’re talking about are massively illegal. I can’t get them, and Anton would be caught for sure—” I saw the way she was smiling at me. “Anton, I’ll break your scrawny neck.”
“Huh? Jack?”
“No, no, he didn’t tell me,” Phoebe said hastily, “though frankly, I’d think either of you might have trusted me that much, Jack! I remembered you in the ’doc that morning, and Anton coming down from that twitchy state on a Thursday night, and it all clicked.”
“Okay.”
“You’re a schitz, Jack. But it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Thirteen years of peace,” I said. “They pick us for it, you know. Paranoid schizophrenics, born with our chemistry screwed up, hair-trigger temper and a skewed view of the universe. M
ost schitzies never have to feel that. We use the ’docs more regularly than you do, and that’s that. But some of us go into the ARM…Phoebe, your suggestion is still off. Anton’s crazy four days out of the week, just like I used to be. Anton’s all you need.”
“Phoebe, he’s right.”
“No. The ARM used to be all schitzies, right? The genes have thinned out over three hundred years.”
Anton nodded. “They tell us in training. The ones who could be Hitler or Napoleon or Castro, they’re the ones the ARM wants. They’re the ones you can send on a mother hunt, the ones with no social sense…but the Fertility Board doesn’t let them breed either, unless they’ve got something special. Jack, you were special, high intelligence or something—”
“Perfect teeth, and I don’t get sick in free-fall, and Charlotte’s people never develop back problems. That helped. Yah…but every century there are less of us. So they hire some Antons too, and make you crazy—”
“But carefully,” Phoebe said. “Anton’s not evolved for paranoia, Jack. You are. When they juice Anton up they don’t make him too crazy, just enough to get the viewpoint they want. I bet they leave the top management boringly sane. But you, Jack—”
“I see it.” Centuries of ARM tradition were squarely on her side.
“You can go as crazy as you like. It’s all natural, and medics have known how to handle it since Only One Earth. We need the schitz viewpoint, and we don’t have to steal the chemicals.”
“Stet. When do we start?”
Anton looked at Phoebe. Phoebe said, “Now?”
We played Anton’s tape all the way through, to a running theme of graveyard humor.
“I took only what I thought we could use,” Anton said. “You should have seen some of the rest: Agent Orange. Napalm. Murder stuff.”
Phoebe said, “Isn’t this murder?”
That remark might have been unfair. We were watching this bizarre chunky rotary-blade flyer. Fire leapt from underneath it, once and again…weapons of some kind.
Anton said, “Aircraft design isn’t the same when you use it for murder. It changes when you expect to be shot at. Here—” The picture had changed. “That’s another weapons platform. It’s not just fast; it’s supposed to hide in the sky. Jack, are you all right?”
“I’m scared green. I haven’t felt any effects yet.”
Phoebe said, “You need to relax. Anton delivers a terrific massage. I never learned.”
She wasn’t kidding. Anton didn’t have my muscle, but he had big strangler’s hands. I relaxed into it, talking as he worked, liking the way my voice wavered as his hands pounded my back.
“It hasn’t been that long since a guy like me let his ’doc run out of beta-dammasomething. An indicator light ran out, and he didn’t notice. He tried to kill his business partner by bombing his partner’s house, and got some family members instead.”
“We’re on watch,” Phoebe said. “If you go berserk, we can handle it. Do you want to see more of this?”
“We’ve missed something. Children, I’m a registered schitz. If I don’t use my ’doc for three days, they’ll be trying to find me before I remember I’m the Marsport Strangler.”
Anton said, “He’s right, love. Jack, give me your door codes. If I can get into your apt, I can fix the records.”
“Keep talking. Finish the massage, at least. We might have other problems. Do we want fruit juice? Munchies? Foodlike substances?”
When Anton came back with groceries, Phoebe and I barely noticed.
Were the warcats real? Could we fight them with present tech? How long did Sol system have? And the other systems, the more sparsely settled colony worlds? Was it enough to make tapes and blueprints of the old murder machines, or must we set to building clandestine factories? Phoebe and I were spilling ideas past each other as fast as they came, and I had quite forgotten that I was doing something dangerous.
I noticed myself noticing that I was thinking much faster than thoughts could spill from my lips. I remembered knowing that Phoebe was brighter than I was, and that didn’t matter, either. But Anton was losing his Thursday edge.
We slept. The old airbed was a big one. We woke to fruit and bread and dived back in.
We re-invented the Navy using only what Anton had recorded of seagoing navies. We had to. There had never been space navies; the long peace had fallen first.
I’m not sure when I slid into schitz mode. I’d spent four days out of seven without the ’doc every week for forty-one years excluding vacations. You’d think I’d remember the feel of my brain chemistry changing. Sometimes I do; but it’s the central me that changes, and there’s no way to control that.
Anton’s machines were long out of date, and none had been developed even for interplanetary war. Mankind had found peace too soon. Pity. But if the warcats’ gravity generators could be copied before the warcats arrived, that alone could save us!
Then again, whatever the cats had for weapons, kinetic energy was likely to be the ultimate weapon, however the mass was moved. Energy considerations don’t lie…I stopped trying to anticipate individual war machines; what I needed was an overview.
Anton was saying very little.
I realized that I had been wasting my time making medical programs. Chemical enhancement was the most trivial of what we’d need to remake an army. Extensive testing would be needed, and then we might not get soldiers at all unless they retained some civil rights, or unless officers killed enough of them to impress the rest. Our limited pool of schitzies had better be trained as our officers. For that matter, we’d better start by taking over the ARM. They had all the brightest schitzies.
As for Anton’s work in the ARM archives, the most powerful weapons had been entirely ignored. They were too obvious.
I saw how Phoebe was staring at me, and Anton, too, both gape-jawed.
I tried to explain that our task was nothing less than the reorganization of humanity. Large numbers might have to die before the rest saw the wisdom in following our lead. The warcats would teach that lesson…but if we waited for them, we’d be too late. Time was breathing hot on our necks.
Anton didn’t understand. Phoebe was following me, though not well, but Anton’s body language was pulling him back and closing him up while his face stayed blank. He feared me worse than he feared warcats.
I began to understand that I might have to kill Anton. I hated him for that.
We did not sleep Friday at all. By Saturday noon we should have been exhausted. I’d caught catnaps from time to time, we all had, but I was still blazing with ideas. In my mind the pattern of an interstellar invasion was shaping itself like a vast three-dimensional map.
Earlier I might have killed Anton because he knew too much or too little, because he would steal Phoebe from me. Now I saw that that was foolish. Phoebe wouldn’t follow him. He simply didn’t have the…the internal power. As for knowledge, he was our only access to the ARM!
Saturday evening we ran out of food…and Anton and Phoebe saw the final flaw in their plan.
I found it hugely amusing. My ’doc was halfway across Santa Maria. They had to get me there. Me, a schitz.
We talked it around. Anton and Phoebe wanted to check my conclusions. Fine: we’d give them the schitz treatment. But for that we needed my disk (in my pocket) and my ’doc (at the apt). So we had to go to my apt.
With that in mind, we shaped plans for a farewell bacchanal.
Anton ordered supplies. Phoebe got me into a taxi. When I thought of other destinations she was persuasive. And the party was waiting…
We were a long time reaching the ’doc. There was beer to be dealt with, and a pizza the size of Arthur’s round table. We sang, though Phoebe couldn’t hold a tune. We took ourselves to bed. It had been years since my urge to rut had run so high, so deep, backed by a sadness that ran deeper yet and wouldn’t go away.
When I was too relaxed to lift a finger, we staggered singing to the ’doc with me hanging limply between
them. I produced my dime disk, but Anton took it away. What was this? They moved me onto the table and set it working. I tried to explain: they had to lie down, put the disk here…But the circuitry found my blood loaded with fatigue poisons and put me to sleep.
Sunday noon:
Anton and Phoebe seemed embarrassed in my presence. My own memories were bizarre, embarrassing. I’d been guilty of egotism, arrogance, self-centered lack of consideration. Three dark blue dots on Phoebe’s shoulder told me that I’d brushed the edge of violence. But the worst memory was of thinking like some red-handed conqueror, and out loud.
They’d never love me again.
But they could have brought me into the apt and straight to the ’doc. Why didn’t they!
While Anton was out of the room I caught Phoebe’s smile in the corner of my eye, and saw it fade as I turned. An old suspicion surfaced and has never faded since.
Suppose that the women I love are all attracted to Mad Jack. Somehow they recognize my schitz potential, though they find my sane state dull. There must have been a place for madness throughout most of human history. So men and women seek in each other the capacity for madness…
And so what? Schitzies kill. The real Jack Strather is too dangerous to be let loose.
And yet…it had been worth doing. From that strange fifty-hour session I remembered one real insight. We spent the rest of Sunday discussing it, making plans, while my central nervous system returned to its accustomed, unnatural state. Sane Jack.
Anton Brillov and Phoebe Garrison held their wedding reception in the Monobloc. I stood as best man, bravely cheerful, running over with congratulations, staying carefully sober.
A week later I was among the asteroids. At the Monobloc they said that Jack Strather had fled Earth after his favored lady had deserted him for his best friend.
III
Things ran smoother for me because John Junior had made a place for himself in Ceres.
