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Pax Galactica

Ralph Williams

In North America, it was a bright, cool April night when Galactic Security, after several years of careful observation, decided the Solar Phoenix was a little too hot for Terrestrials to play with.

Early Warning, as was its function, made first contact as the ships flashed up over the northwestern horizon. The first report was disbelieved, it was off the grid and too high and too fast—but it was followed almost instantly by contact from three other sites. The controller made a rough mental plot from those first few tracks and did not like it at all. He gnawed his thumbnail for about thirty seconds, and by that time the tracks were going up in plot. The sight decided him. There was no time to be wrong about this, the strangers were closing too fast, better to take a chance on looking silly than to be caught short. He scrambled everything he had and transmitted a fall alert—

On the control deck of the lead ship of the second element, the captain and the task commander of the GS patrol stood watching Earth roll by them fifty miles below.

"We're being tracked," the watch officer said. He did not speak in English, of course, nor in any Earthly tongue. As a matter of fact, he did not speak at all, as we use the term.

The task commander nodded. "Let 'em track. This is task, not reconnaissance. They'll have plenty of reason to know we're here in a few minutes, anyway."

Below, off the starboard bow, a smudge of light marking an airfield suddenly winked out. "Rather effective security they have, at that," he added grudgingly, "considering their technical limitations."

"Coming on first target," the watch officer said.

The task commander glanced at the position plot and stepped over to his station. "Polka Dot Leader, Task Leader," he said, "coming on your target. Advise an execution."

"Polka Dot Leader, Roger," the speaker said, "coming on target." Thirty miles ahead, the first gleaming shape showed gaping holes along its belly as its bays slid open.

"On target," the speaker said.

An orderly array of stubby-winged projectiles drifted leisurely out of her belly.

"All clear, 1319 and a quarter," the speaker said.

"Roger," the task commander said. "Rendezvous." The empty bays of the big silver ship blinked shut and she stuck her nose up and began to climb. Below her, her progeny dipped and swung faster and faster toward Earth, while the remainder of the formation swept past above.

The task commander studied the position plot again. "Polka Dot Two," he said, "coming on your target."

 

The radar did not at first catch the drop, but when the lead ship left formation and began to climb, the controller smelled death on its way. Without thinking twice, he ordered Bomb Warning A. He had no way of knowing what was coming, but those ships up there were certainly nuclear powered, no chemical engine could drive that high and fast, and whatever they laid would be potent. For himself, and the personnel of plot, there was nothing he could do. They had to stay and keep trying. He did not, he thought somewhat gloomily, even have time to worry about it; at that moment the first tracks on the projectiles began to come through, as they separated from the formation, and he began to be very busy.

There was no use trying for the ships themselves, they went over at five times his interceptors' ceiling and six times their speed, he vectored everything he had in on the extrapolated drop course. Even this was useless, he soon found. As they closed with his fighters, the projectiles suddenly put on power and took evasive action. He had guessed they would, a free drop would hardly be made from that altitude and distance, but confirmation did not make him happy. The first projectile sizzled past the fighters at fifteen hundred miles an hour and streaked for the base—

Strategic Air Command alerted on the first flash, and by the time the GS patrol had made its second drop the heavies were rumbling-out onto the runways. They were armed and their eggs snuggled lethally in their bellies, but their pilots did not yet know their targets. Their mission was retaliatory, to get air-borne before the first strike hit them, and to see there were no bases for the enemy to return to. They would get their targets when the enemy was identified.

They never did get them. The first bomber was fifty miles out climbing on course when they got the bad news from their controller. A moment later their own radar picked up the bandit, closing fast from above. The turrets began to swivel, but they were not fast enough, they could not even track the enemy; as he flashed by at two thousand yards something flickered out to touch the big bomber, and it crumpled in on itself and lost speed and began to fall through the night just beginning to be touched by dawn.

The commanding general of SAC himself had observed the action by radar.

"Those weren't bomb-drops," he said. "They were fighter-drops. Fighter-bombers, probably. They'll be here next."

His words were prophetic. They were—

 

The GS patrol had flown into day, through it, and back into night again, on a course that roughly quartered the globe, by the time the last drop was made. Task Leader and Red Stripe Three pulled up to orbital altitude together and cut power. Polka Dot Leader had already made her pickup and the others were dropping down to do the same, but it would be some time before Red Stripe's parasites completed their missions.

Reports were coming in regularly, it was already obvious that the strike would be completely successful, and the task commander was in a jovial mood. There were losses, of course, even with a ten-to-one superiority in speed and an astronomical edge in armament a planet-wide action against an alert and savagely resistant foe cannot be fought without losses, but they were well within the calculated margin the commander had sent back to base in his preliminary estimate. He had done a good, workmanlike job, and he knew it. Adequate recognition would come at base, but in the meantime he wanted to explain just how good a job it was, and he could not very well do this to military personnel; they were all below him in rank so he sought out the civilian observer from the Department of Minorities and Backward Peoples.

"How do you like it?" he asked. "Good, fast, clean job, don't you think? All we have to do now is pick up our chicks, seed the inhibitor, and get out."

The Department man was somewhat dazed, he had never ever seen anything quite like this before. "Well, yes, I suppose so," he said. "How many casualties do you think there will be?"

The task commander pulled at his lip, mentally extrapolating the reported losses. "Not more than twenty," he said, confidently, "just over one per centVery cheap, really, for a planetary action of this scope."

"No, no," the Department man said impatiently. "I know our own losses are light. The others, I mean, the Terrestrials, how many of those do you think we're killing?"

"Well, I hadn't really tried to guess." the task commander said uneasily. He had not thought of the natives before as people, he was familiar with them, of course, from the years of observation and his briefing; but he had been thinking only in terms of installations to be destroyed.

"I suppose they'll run rather high," he said. "We've tried to avoid nonstrategic targets, but you can't rip the heart out of a heavily militarized planet without killing people. Yes, I suppose their casualties will be heavy."

He scratched thoughtfully at his nose. "Um-m-m . . . military crews . . . civilian personnel . . . we're pinpointing our strikes, you understand, but population is so dense in some areas, we can't confine fission products, vapors, dusts, and I don't suppose they are at all well protected . . . let's say three or four million, in all."

The Department man stared at him. "Three or four million? Do you suppose the Council knew that when they authorized this raid?"

"Of course they did," the task commander said impatiently. "You have to remember this planet is already heavily overpopulated, well over two billion, it's really bursting at the seams, these people breed like flies. Actually, four million is only two tenths of a per cent, or less, of the total population. A minor famine or epidemic could take that many, the next atomic war could have taken ten or twenty percent, if we hadn't pulled their teeth.

"It's bad, I'll grant you that," he added hastily, seeing the look on the Department man's face. "Even tragic. But you have to look at things like this rationally, from the long view. These people have to be controlled for their own good, we can't let them just run loose to slaughter each other and perhaps even destroy the planet.

"With the advanced weapons they had, they were like idiot children playing with machine guns."

 

The Pentagon was not, in the raiders' operations, a military target. In the midst of disaster and confusion, Intelligence and Communications still functioned, if not smoothly, at least adequately. The basic picture of the raid and its effect began to shape up almost before the last raider had slid up through the atmosphere to join the formation orbiting effortlessly above.

First, there was no longer in any part of the world, so far as careful reconnaissance could determine, any store of fissionable material nor any plant for processing such material. Where these had been were now boiling pits of liquid magma, with the air above and about lethally charged with radioactive debris. Either the raiders had perfect intelligence, or they had instruments able to sniff out the stuff with uncanny precision, in either event they had got them all.

Second, most of the nuclear technicians—and this included the best technical and scientific brains in the world—had gone with their works.

Third, the raiders were extraterrestrial. They had not spared any major nation, and they were too well-armed and well-organized, they did not fit in any Earthly technology.

Whence they had come, and whither gone, no one could say with assurance, but their purpose was clear—to see that men did not again use nuclear energy for either war or peace.

Forty-eight hours later, as the inhibitor settled down from the stratosphere, a secondary interdict became manifest. Men would also no longer use chemical explosives. Above a pressure of two hundred psi, chemical reactions were self-damping. Hydroelectric and steam plants functioned normally, low-compression engines and jets idled without power; but guns fizzled damply and high-compression engines stalled. A ceiling had been put on the compact power available to man.

Attempts were made at censorship, the enormity of the raid's implications were so obvious that the most stringent measures were indicated. Presses and editions were impounded, reporters locked up and even shot, a straight embargo on all nonmilitary long-distance communications was clamped down, security officers sprouted new ulcers and went sleepless. But it was too big, too sudden and unexpected, too spectacular. Even after years of indoctrination and screening and stringent regulation, there were too many poor security risks in the services, too many leaks, too many people who simply refused to understand the necessity for keeping their mouths and minds and eyes and ears closed in matters of military significance. And in every community there were the loud-mouths and wise-acres who could draw and spread conclusions from the fact that Oak Ridge and Brookhaven and Hanford and Los Alamos were hit, that their automobiles no longer ran, that guns would not shoot.

The news got out.

Men of good will had been talking disarmament for years. Now they had it, a free gift from heaven, somewhat roughly delivered but none the less effective.

After the first shock, thoughtful men everywhere began to consider what it might mean—

 

"It means," Paul Bonner said, "rescue at the eleventh hour, the Marines have landed, the courier has ridden up with the reprieve." He sipped appreciatively at his second preprandial martini. "These are very good, dear."

His wife, curled at his feet before the fireplace, nodded complacently.

"It means," he continued, "men can relax and live again. Here we were, sitting on a powder magazine, the few sane ones among us at the mercy of the brainless yuts giving each other hotfeet, and now suddenly some watchful intelligence, like a careful parent, has snatched the matches away."

"I'm going to miss our car," his wife sighed.

"I shan't," Bonner said positively. "There were too many cars, too many airplanes, too much speed. Man's machines evolved faster than he. We weren't built to cover miles in split minutes. Now we can slow down and catch up, consolidate our gains, live at a more natural pace, take time to think and really live. I say, it's a cheap price to pay."

 

And:

"The fact of disarmament itself," Professor Salton wrote in his diary, "is of secondary significance, and must have been adjudged so by the raiders themselves. Had they been chiefly intent on demilitarizing the planet, they would not logically have confined themselves to the targets they chose. The logic of complete demilitarization would have included the dispersal of armies in the field and the destruction of all heavy industry which might contribute to the manufacture of munitions other than chemical and nuclear explosives. It is significant that stores of poison gas and biological warfare centers were not attacked.

"The inference can therefore be drawn that the raiders were socially sophisticated enough, and sufficiently well informed, to recognize the deep imbalance in our culture between the physical and social sciences.

"Their primary concern was to right this imbalance."

The professor turned a page and sat for a moment with poised pen, seeing not the blank sheet before him, but the panorama of western history, developing in tracings of ever more complex scope from the first few crabbed scribblings of the Sumerians.

"The focus of the main stream of human thought and inquiry," he wrote, "proceeds across the broad canvas of the plenum not in a steady progression, but in complicated pendulumlike sweeps from extreme to extreme—Hegelian thesis and antithesis, except that the final result is never a simple balancing, the synthesis results rather from the shading in of all areas between the opposite poles of thought until the distinction is lost and it all becomes one. This pendulum has multidimensional articulation, so that the trace is never a simple linear function, it never covers exactly the same area twice. Its movement is a complex function of all the things men have known or thought about since the beginning of time.

"The European Renaissance came as a reaction to the sterile perfectionism of Augustinian idealism. Because its impetus derived from an extreme of preoccupation with human behavior and morals, it not only swung wildly to the opposite extreme of rigidly objective experimentalism, but it spent its major force in the field of physical science. This was no accident, it was an inevitable outgrowth of the spirit of the times and the antecedents of our culture.

"We have now worked around the periphery of physical knowledge till we have again reached the pole of intuitive rationalism, where the universe melts into a confusing amorphism only scholars can feel at home in. Men of inquiring and independent minds must inevitably recoil into a simpler atmosphere where sight and touch again have meaning.

"The next swing should have directed us back to a concern with human motivation and activity.

"There were several indications that this trend was indeed developing.

"Men were wondering seriously why they thought like men, in a world engineered for the comfort of their animal bodies; as five hundred years earlier they had wondered why men had bodies, if only the soul were important. The development of the physical sciences had subtly loosened the hold of superstition on the minds of men, so that if they were unwilling to follow, they at least tolerated, students who classified the cherished opinions of themselves and others as phenomena in the physical universe, and called all the physical universe a valid field for objective inquiry. Scattered engineers and clinicians here and there were beginning to establish functional relations between pride and pay scales, human fellowship and production records, social status and sexual mores. The alchemistic mind-doctors were seeking the philosopher's stone which would transmute the dross of our individual foibles into shining gold—but stumbling here and there on factual discoveries scientists might later turn to good account. Perhaps Korzybski had written the 'Novum Organum' of a new Renaissance. And the germs of new mathematics that could handle the manifold variables were sprouting. The time was ready for a Newton.

"But it came too late. It needed fifty or a hundred years to get its growth, and with the helium bomb the world no longer had that time left.

"So the Raiders came. In effect, they moved the clock of our conquest of the physical world back a hundred years. Before they came, we had passed the peak of the gasoline age and were moving into the atomic age. When they left, we were back in the age of steam.

"Undoubtedly, in the years to come, men will again discover energy sources as powerful as those they lost, but it will take time, perhaps not as long as the original hundred years, but still a breathing spell. And in that time the science of human behavior will have its chance. By the time we are ready to fly to the stars again, or have the power to blast whole armies out of existence, we will have means of controlling ourselves so that this power is used with cunning foresight for the good of man, rather than suicidal, like an idiot child playing with a machine gun.

"This is the best thing that could have happened to men."

 

And:

A writer who had dedicated the best years of his life to a crusade against the pointless stupidities and petty unthinking cruelties of his fellowmen, at two bits a word, was putting the finishing touches on a rush article.

"Pride," he wrote, "goeth before a fall—and men who thought they had tamed all nature, and were looking for new worlds to loot in the stars, have suddenly learned they have a master. The simple-minded barbarians who strutted valorously with the power of thousands of horses at their command have seen their most prized works crumble like sand castles before the tide.

"It was a lesson men sorely needed, the simple lesson of humility.

"In my own mind, for the first time since Hiroshima, is peace and good will and comfortable assurance that me and mine will live out our normal span in a world of men chastened and rendered less cocksure by this experience.

"I say, God bless the raiders—"

 

There were, of course, some who were not quite so sure—

 

On a hillside in Asia some two months after the raiders had come, Sergeant Albert Baker sat in the bright summer sun watching through glasses the mouth of a low pass. A cloud of dust rose there which came quickly down into the valley. Sparkles of light from burnished lance-tips flashed from the cloud. A Mongol swordsman with horsetails tied to his cap cantered out ahead and reined up to look around.

Baker's lips drew back in a snarl. This was the enemy. To them, the inhibitor had meant nothing. They threw their guns away, sharpened their lances, and whooped down upon the gun crews, tankers, and machine-gunners who clubbed useless carbines and threw rocks. The first few weeks had been massacre. After that the Americans recovered somewhat from their shock, began to reorganize and pick up edged weapons, to fight their way back to the sea. They were outnumbered and outmaneuvered, they could not in a few days learn a type of warfare devoid of firepower and mechanized supply, and the retreat was mostly a rout.

During that time, only men who moved fast and learned quickly survived. Baker was only nineteen, but he had come all the way, in this fighting he was an old hand, a veteran who knew all the tricks. He could hardly remember what it felt like to ride in a truck, sleep on a full belly, or command weapons that killed in great bursts of flame or sleets of lead. The tools he knew were knife and spear, arbalest and sword. His enemy was not a plane or a tank, it was the flat-faced horseman with sword or lance.

The Americans now stood with their backs to the sea, waiting for evacuation complicated by lack of Diesel- or gasoline-powered landing craft. Their situation was not bad, really, there were not very many of them left to evacuate, most were dead in the hills and plains of the interior; and to some extent supply had caught up with them here, they ate more often and they had a weapon to at least harass the horsemen.

The leading squadrons were well into the valley now, the point abreast of Baker. He moved his magneto box around between his knees and squatted over it, his glasses on the man standing on a spiny ridge at the lower end of the valley. Presently the man signaled, and Baker pressed the plunger. In the valley below, a thin vapor began to creep out from all sides toward the horsemen in the center. Baker carefully checked his sector with his glasses. All cylinders had fired—they almost had to, poison gas was cheap in the United States but dear here where the cylinders were brought up on men's backs, and they had been spread thin.

"All right," he said finally, "let's get out of here before those gooks spot us."

His men needed no urging, they had been uncomfortably aware of their exposed position for some time. They picked up their weapons and moved off at a swift walk along the hillside. There was a small gully they must cross, and here they donned masks before they scrambled down. The bank on the other side was steep, they needed to boost each other up to make it, and they were not all up when half a troop of the enemy, red-eyed and wheezing, came stampeding up out of the valley at them.

Baker saw them coming only a few hundred yards away, with his little force split, half on the bank and half below. He dropped his arbalest to cock it and shouted a warning.

There were three pikes in the party, twelve-foot shafts with heavy, wicked points of razor-ground steel armor scrap. The men had been using these to climb the bank, they snatched them away now and swung out to set them with drilled precision. The other men in the gully had captured swords and bayoneted M-1's, except for Baker and one other with arbalests of jeep spring-leaves and the airplane cable mounted on M-1 stocks. One man, a swordsman, was hanging on the edge of the bank by his elbows, on the verge of hoisting himself over, he twisted his head to look over his shoulder, hesitated a moment, and then slid back down to join them. Baker was glad to see him come, there was another arbalest on the bank, that was a good place for him, but the swordsmen and spearmen up there were useless. Still he could not order them back down, this looked like a death trap. Their left flank anchored on the bank, but their right hung in the air, he grabbed two spearmen and swung them around to give some protection, but there were just not enough of them to cover it adequately. He and the other arbalestier stepped in behind the pikemen and spearmen, who had dropped to their knees, and Baker slipped in a quarrel.

The enemy point swerved in at them, settling his lance, and at five yards Baker shot the horse in the throat. The other arbalestier took the second. A swordsman flashed by on the right and swung viciously at Baker, who parried with the stock of his weapon. At the same moment, from the corner of his eye he saw a horse caught on two of the pikes and one of his spearmen leaping out, yelling, over the pikemen and struggling horses to bayonet its rider. After that there was only dust and confusion and flashing steel and yelling men, and then sudden quiet. It took some minutes for Baker to realize the clash was over and he still alive—actually the enemy had not been anxious to press their charge home or turn his flank, they had only been trying to get out of the valley as quickly as possible and the platoon had been in the way.

Still, it had not been fun, the brief flurry had cost them men. Baker cursed the enemy and the raiders, both, thinking how much difference even one stinking Browning would have made—

 

After twenty years, the inhibitor against high-pressure chemical reaction lost its effectiveness and needed to be re-seeded. It was a routine task for one cruiser, there was no real reason for the former task commander, now deputy fleet admiral, to go along. At the moment, however, things were quiet and Galactic Security labored under an economy budget. The admiral needed the flight-time, and besides he was curious. He held a peculiar affection for Earth, the action of twenty years before had been his first independent task command, and still stood in his mind as a perfectly planned and executed job.

The civilian observer from the Department of Minorities and Backward Peoples went along because the Department wanted a check and he had asked for the assignment. He, too, was curious, this had been an unorthodox and controversial experiment from the start, and he was still unconvinced of its overall desirability.

They came in over the pole on almost the same course they had flown twenty years before, and the admiral was first to notice the change.

"No radar," he said, watching the instruments.

Where before a whole continent had quivered and reacted with alert savagery to their appearance, they now coasted alone through the bright sky, apparently unheeded and unknown to men. It made the admiral vaguely uneasy.

The seeding was to be done at two hundred thousand, in a crisscross pattern which would take several hours, and the Department observer wanted to go down in the tender and make some checks at a lower altitude. The admiral decided to go with him.

They glided down to five thousand feet before applying power, careless of who might see the disk-shaped flier drifting overhead; there was no particular reason to avoid observation now, this planet had already known them.

Over the northern United States, there was superficially little change, the admiral had little difficulty in orienting himself by the photo-charts made more than twenty years before, railroads and highways still cut in straight lines across the plains checker-boarded by wheatfields. Not till they came over the lakes region did they begin to notice significant differences. Here, small villages spotted crossroads where they had not appeared on the old charts, and cities had shrunk and drawn in upon themselves. Once again, the United States was a predominantly rural nation.

In the days immediately after the raid, there had been little change in those cities not directly affected. There were deaths from radiation sickness and poisoning as the debris of the raid sifted through the atmosphere, and film badges and gas masks became a part of the everyday costume of those who could afford them; automobiles rusted where they stood and there were minor inconveniences; but the streetcars still ran, electric signs flashed, and the plumbling worked. In those first days, aside from the blasted areas, the farms and suburbs were hardest hit. Life there had tied itself tightly to the internal-combustion engine, to tractors and trucks and aircraft and Diesel engines.

There were not very many crops planted or harvested in North America that year.

As summer wore on, the cities also began to feel the pinch. Distribution was difficult without trucks, highlands and reservoirs needed helicopters and power boats for maintenance. Prices rose and inconveniences multiplied.

By fall, in the poorer sections, people were starving.

By the next spring, the population of the United States was less than sixty million and the machinery of civilization rusted unattended while people scrabbled for food. The bones of Paul Bonner and his pretty wife lay in a roadside ditch, with spring rains melting the ice and flesh from them.

That summer was bad, too, but the seeds of resurgence were sprouting. The federal gold hoard came out of its vaults to buy food men would not sell for paper, and when the hard yellow coin began to circulate people forgot their despair and their wits sharpened and they looked about for opportunity. Old stern-wheelers slid off the banks and creaked out of sloughs to push tons of Argentine beef and horses and grain up the inland waters from New Orleans. Independent train crews hauled loads for speculators out from St. Louis and Cincinnati and Kansas City. People drifted back to the cities to build steam tractors.

In another year the trains were running on schedules of a sort and a few turbine-powered automobiles and trucks were on the highways.

Five years after the raid, the country was back on its feet, but it was not the same country. Cultures, like individuals, discard patterns of behavior associated with defeat and cherish jealously those associated with gratification. The trauma of sudden almost mortal disaster is apt to intensify these reactions to the point of mania.

From five thousand feet, the country now looked green and prosperous, even the scars of Brookhaven were growing over. The admiral studied the peacefully pastoral scene, the bustling but not overcrowded cities, with approval.

From five thousand feet, he could not see the scavenger-gnawed skeletons still tangled in obscure briar-patches, nor the scars and bitterness and hatred still tangled in people's hearts. If he saw, he did not particularly note the little groups of hard-faced observers here and there who studied his craft through binoculars and carefully filmed its every move.

The Department observer could not see them either, but he was better versed in social phenomena than the military man, and he was not so sure.

"Let's see what Europe looks like," he said.

 

In Asia, after the debacle, the Americans evacuated about twelve thousand troops to Japan. Most of these, being veteran and reliable, were brought back to restore order when the domestic military establishment fell apart. Now again there were detachments in the Philippines and the Pacific Islands, and in Malaya to protect the growing rubber demand, but the mainland of Asia was left to the warlords and khans.

In Europe, defeat had not been so disastrous. The enemy there were almost as heavily mechanized as the NATO nations, and as discomfitted to find themselves suddenly disarmed. Also, they experienced internal troubles from those of their own peoples who had never taken kindly to statism. These troubles were compounded by the fact that the dissident elements were mainly just those who clung to and were most adept with yataghan and knife, bow and lance, horse and camel; many a Muscovite commissar fumbled uselessly with his pistol while Finnish knife or Montenegrin dagger or Ukrainian scythe bit into him.

Still, the enemy had numbers, and under the urge of famine he swept across Europe, looting and burning and killing to the Rhine, sending isolated raiding parties as far as the Pyrenees, then decomposed from internal stresses. His troops frittered away and disappeared, but Europe lacked the energy to recover. When the first great wave of horsemen from the steppes came, the only organized opposition they met was from the scattered American garrisons along the Rhine, and they foraged to the channel, so that in middle Europe hardly stone stood on stone and one might go for miles without seeing a living man.

Here, the admiral could see the skulls even from the air. In Potsdamer-Platz, they were piled in the neat Asiatic habit into a pyramid over fifty feet high.

They swung back across Bavaria then, and along the Rhine, staring wordlessly at the desolation below, livened only by the occasional disorderly gaggle of squat dark riders with their trains of loot. The admiral tugged uneasily at his collar and glanced sidelong at the civilian, but the latter said nothing, and then the admiral suddenly brightened. Away across the Rhine his trained eye had caught a hint of order, a flash of steel. He tapped the pilot's arm and pointed, and they swung down over a marching column of men, coming with burnished arms and steady step and even formation along a highway to cut behind a swarm of the savages.

 

Colonel Albert Baker pulled his horse off to the side and reined around to watch his regiment come up into the battle-line. They were rugged and tough, veterans with a sprinkling of husky recruits from midwestern prairies and Norman farms and Scotch hills, the fastest marching infantry since Grant's, and, with allowances for fire-power, perhaps the deadliest. Still, this was the time they were vulnerable, the next few minutes while they maneuvered directly from the column of march into the line. The colonel did not like it, but he was working on Evaluation's clockwork schedule, and there was nothing much he could do about it. The forward elements of his flanking archers began to drift out onto the plain, and he debated whether to throw them forward as a screen, slowing down his disposition but making a tactically sounder maneuver. Just then a squadron of dragoons jingled past at a trot, and he breathed easier. Corps had promised the cavalry screen, but he distrusted cavalry, they were always skittering off somewhere else when you needed them most, and he had not really believed they would show up.

The 103rd was next in the line, his right flank would rest on them, and he watched now as they moved into position smartly. When they were clear the colonel raised his hand, bugles screamed, and with drums beating to set the step his regiment swung out onto the plain and up into line. Standard-bearers ran forward and dressed and set guidons, squads and companies wheeled and marked time and countermarched, dust rose and swirled in choking clouds, lieutenants and sergeants back-pedaled anxiously and shouted hoarse commands and blew on whistles. The pattern began to fill in. Lines grew out of seeming chaos and weaved back and forth, dressing, and then the regiment was blocked solidly in its place, left flank on the river and right on the 103rd. The colonel eased himself in his saddle and lit a cigar, turning to survey the field as a whole.

For the first time since he had got his orders, he began to see how the battle would shape up. They had cut the hordes off from their train, he saw, far down the valley in his rear women and children, cook fires and wagons and pack animals tangled in a frightened mess. The enemy were strung up the valley, sucked up there probably by skirmishing cavalry, but pausing now to look back at the infantry who had come in behind them. It had been a tricky maneuver, but it had worked, and the enemy now must either fight or run. They would fight, the colonel knew, the horsemen would never leave their women and loot without a battle. He waited with cold confidence, knowing the light cavalry did not exist that could break a division of drilled heavy infantry solidly anchored with protected flanks.

He eased his right leg and studied his own men again. They were at ease now, their places marked by their weapons, some sitting, smoking or chewing field rations, breathing easy and in good shape. To their rear there was a sudden clatter as the batteries of steam centrifugals and mortars galloped up. Must be about time for things to start, the colonel thought sourly, it would be a miracle if artillery was actually spaded in and fired up by the time action joined. He trotted slowly back to his command post and joined his staff.

The horde made up its mind, bunched and began to drift back down the valley. Half a dozen blimps came up over the hills to the right and scattered napalm and spreading blobs of gas on the enemy, and suddenly they picked up speed and started coming like an avalanche, spread out over a half mile front, a wall of dust two hundred feet high surging along with them. The infantry were on their feet now, nervously stamping out butts, opening lanes for the dragoons to stream back through. Behind, there was a whine as the turbine-driven centrifugals came up to speed.

Baker spoke to his bugler. The bugle sang and the lines stiffened and solidified. Company officers ran back and forth dressing the front, and then suddenly the pikemen dropped and set their pikes and raised their shields. What had been an orderly array of men in infantry blue battle dress was now a solid line of glittering steel, reaching from river to cliffs on the far side, backed solidly by the lines of archers and swordsmen, file closers and mobile reserve, a heavy infantry division in line of battle. It made a grim, imposing sight. In the unnoticed flier overhead, the admiral almost fell out of his seat in his excitement, the fighting he knew was nothing like this, but he liked it.

The colonel was alert but unimpressed, he had seen it many times before, and he knew the rest would not be so pretty. He gauged the distance to the enemy, and spoke to his bugler again. The archers stepped out between the pikes and took their stand, leisurely setting their arrows in the ground in preparation for rapid fire. They were the elite, a pikeman or arbalestier could be trained in a few months but an archer needed to grow up with a longbow in his hands to use it effectively, and the colonel guarded them jealously, not because he loved them but because he couldn't get along without them. He wondered now, as he had often before, if the arbalest would ever be technically improved to the point of being a completely satisfactory missile weapon for light infantry.

 

The first ranks of oncoming horsemen were five hundred yards out now, and the mortars popped for the first time and sent a flood of lazy bombs arching overhead to burst and spread blazing napalm. The shouts of officers calling the range came dimly above the general racket, and then the first volley from the archers rose and fell in a cloud and slugs from the centrifugals began to whistle overhead, playing like hydraulic blasts on the onrushing enemy, eroding them away in patches and swathes. The archers were firing at will now, the air was solid with their shafts, it seemed impossible that horse or man could come through that hail and the sickening plop of the firebombs. Still they came, and there rose an answering swarm of arrows from their short stiff bows to rattle on the infantry's upraised shields. The archers skipped nimbly back into their ranks, and from between the now unobscured pikes the flame-throwers spat clouds and flame.

On Baker's front, the enemy broke, they dashed up against the pikes and recoiled, unable to force the flaming wall with its sharp steel core. Neither could they turn and face the gas cloud rolling threateningly in their rear, they raced in tangled streams back and forth parallel to the front, seeking a weak spot, while arbalesters and centrifugals and flame-throwers poured fire relentlessly into them.

The 103rd was not having such good luck. Their front was broken in two places, and one serious melee developed into a momentary break-through. Baker alerted part of his reserve to help if necessary, but they closed up without aid and the cavalry in the rear finished off the few enemy who did come through.

The battle was over now, the rest slaughter. Baker turned his attention again to his own front, watching with cold appreciation the death his regiment was dealing.

The enemy was seeking only escape. Some tried to swim the river, where Baker's archers picked them off at leisure. Some scrambled up the cliffs on the other side, where they made equally good targets, and some drove recklessly back into the gas cloud to strangle. Very few got away. The mass thinned, and then there were only isolated riders racing madly past, and then nothing but a slowly settling cloud of dust, with an occasional limping figure drawing a flurry of fire, riderless horses stampeding aimlessly.

Baker looked at his watch. It was somewhat under two hours since he had ordered his men into action; less than two hours to annihilate a dozen hordes that had harried whole provinces for years—a good day's work.

The admiral settled back into his seat and drew a deep breath.

"Well," he said somewhat inadequately, "I'm afraid we didn't do such a good job of stopping war in this planet."

"We certainly lowered the population level that was worrying you Malthusians, though," the observer said. "That little tiff down there," he waved his hand, "must have helped by five or six thousand."

He rubbed wearily at his face. "No, it's no good," he said heavily. "We never should have permitted this experiment. You shoot-em-up boys are always too anxious to civilize people by gunfire. I am going to recommend that the Department question Security's stand in this matter at the next Council meeting, and urge we review the whole history of our contact with these people. It may not be too late to do something constructive yet."

"Now wait a minute," the admiral said stubbornly. "This may not have gone just according to plan, but it wasn't our plan, you long-hairs were the people who developed this theory that if we could block off the natives' physical expansion they'd be forced to develop a peaceful civilization, all Security did was to implement that plan. And there is some improvement. They may still be killing each other, but at least they aren't using mass weapons any more, it's man to man, between warriors. They aren't blowing up whole cities, women and children, the sick and peaceful along with the belligerent—"

 

The stretcher-bearers were working through the ranks now, picking up the dead and wounded, but they did not bother with the enemy. The dragoons were taking care of them. They were out front again, picking their way gingerly between the burning areas where the bombs had dropped, thrusting and hacking here and there as they found wounded, catching horses, dismounting to pick up an especially interesting bit of loot.

Let them have it, the colonel thought, what he wanted was the wagon train in the rear. There would be the real loot, women and stores and gold and all the stripped wealth of this land fine-combed again and again by the raiders. The colonel fought for his rank and his retirement and vaguer, higher, imponderables he felt but could not have put a name too, but his men fought for loot. There was no rotation in this army, only death or crippling wounds, retirement perhaps for a few who were lucky, at the end of a hard life of constant battle. They needed the occasional fierce satisfactions of stolen women, looted gold and wine, unopposed slaughter and destruction, to balance the hard discipline of their daily life. The colonel knew this, he did not begrudge them their fun, although for disciplinary reasons he liked to take his in quieter form. So now he sat, forgetting the battle already, estimating his chances, plotting cunningly how his regiment should be first to fall upon the camp.

He suddenly noticed some of the men looking up, and pointing, and he, too, looked up and for the first time saw the Galactic observation flier, hanging motionless over the battlefield. His mind went back twenty years, to the gully in Korea, to the hundred thousand men who had left their bones to whiten in that retreat, to his mother and father and brothers and sisters, who had lived near Oak Ridge before the raiders came, in an area still posted as radioactive.

He studied the flier carefully.

"You, too, boy," he thought. "Just wait a while, we'll get to you yet, we haven't forgotten—"

 

Professor Salton was writing in his diary—

"In retrospect," he wrote, "it is obvious that the effect of the raiders upon Terrestrial development was much more complex than at first appeared. They halted the explosive burgeoning of physical power available to man, and forced him to direct his energies in other directions. They gave man time and impetus to develop the social sciences he had forgotten in the sudden unfolding of physical power. But they altered his basic orientation.

"Before the raid, men lived in a world in which they were supreme, and had only each other to fear. The abrupt brutality of the raid, emphasized by its aftermath of famine and disruption, sharply reminded them that they were small fry in a shark-swarming, hostile universe, apt at any moment to be gulped up.

"Five hundred years earlier, they might have withdrawn into a shell of protective humility and prayer. A hundred years later, they might have understood the workings of their own mind well enough to preserve a balance. As it was, they reached instinctively, but in the pattern of an aggressive culture, aggressively.

"Since physical science had failed them, they cast it aside and snatched up the newer, subtler tools of thought and life. The new learning that might have taught men to live with each other was ground and sharpened for hostile uses.

"The millennium of peace, which seemed so close, has again been postponed—"

 

And:

"Colonel Baker," the general said, "I'd like you to meet Major Pellati. He's the man who set up your targets for you this afternoon, the chief of our corps evaluation staff."

"Well, you did a good job on that, major," the colonel said. "Everything folded together like a peddler's pack. I don't think a hundred of those devils got away."

"We didn't intend for very many to get away." The major looked around distastefully. "You like this racket?" he asked abruptly.

It was somewhat noisy. Division headquarters had been set up in an old building, a monolithic concrete relic of the atomic age, as indestructible without explosives as a mountain, and the junior officers had promptly organized a party. They had liberated a varied assortment of women and alcoholic beverages from the enemy camp and rounded up parts of three regimental bands, and the party was going strong.

At one end of the plank bar twenty company officers were harmonizing "Dinah," at the other end a small party of their seniors were rounding up candidates, amid shrieks of girlish laughter, to decorate with lipsticked kisses the shining bald head of the 103rd's colonel—who had gone to sleep, as was his habit, after the fifth drink. Half the band were following Baker's band leader in the "Tennessee Waltz" while the other half played something unidentifiable but certainly not the "Tennessee Waltz." As a finishing touch, three Marine observers within armlength of Baker and Pellati were defiantly bellowing "Zamboanga." It was quite a party.

"Why, yes," Baker said, "it is a little noisy."

With common consent, they picked up a bottle of Calvados from the bar and sought quieter surroundings. "Oops," Pellati said at the first door they tried and backed hurriedly out. "Occupied," he said briefly. They wandered down a long hall and found an alcove housing an ex-window, now ventilated agreeably by the fresh evening air. They sat down on the window ledge with the bottle between them.

"Yes, sir, that was a nice action," Baker said. Something that had been lurking in the back of his mind all day came to the fore. "Were you in Korea?" he asked.

"I was at Inchon. That's where we first used von Neumann's mathematics to evaluate a large-scale operation. Worked pretty good."

"That was before my time. I got there just in time to be right in the middle when the raid hit and the gooks climbed all over us. That's what I was thinking about; this afternoon, I was thinking, 'Boy, I'll bet this learns you buggers a good lesson, I've been saving this twenty years for you.' "

He sucked gently at the bottle. "Did you say you were in Evaluation at Inchon?" he asked suddenly. "Didn't know they had anything like that then."

"Well, it was pretty crude stuff," the major said. "Experimental. Half mathematics and half good guessing."

"It still looks like magic to me."

"It isn't. Tactics isn't an art any more, or even science. It's just engineering. If your intelligence is good, and you know what you've got to work with, all you have to do is work up the equations. With those savages we were fighting today, you don't even have to make allowances for independent thought, they don't think, just react like machines. Once you know the basic pattern of that reaction, you can just about predict every move they'll make for the next six months. Then it's just a question of being in the right place at the right time."

"Did you see that raider flier this afternoon?" he asked abruptly.

Baker nodded.

"Those are the ones we'll have to sweat for," the major said.

"Well," Baker said piously, "I hope to live to see the day, but I don't know; they've got a pretty big edge on us in weapons—"

"Weapons don't mean a thing, colonel. Disparity in armament is simply one of the factors to which we assign weights in the tactical and strategic equations." He took a cigar from his pocket and lit it carefully, staring cross-eyed down his long nose.

"Twenty years ago, we put our faith in gadgets—radar and guns and engines and nuclear explosives—and you remember what happened. We learned our lessons. There's always somebody with bigger and better stuff. So now we learn to use what we do have with maximum effect, and stick to simple weapons we know won't fail us. Our hole card is the infantryman walking on his own two legs with good solid steel in his hands.

"We can't lose, because we don't depend on tools, we depend on knowing what people are going to do with tools, and adapt our own action to the circumstances. With the Latin-Americans we used a combination of force and economic and moral action. With the British, we used economic and political means. With these gooks, we use force at the moment, it's cheaper to kill them than to educate them. I don't know just what we'll use with the Raiders, but we'll take them, don't ever doubt that, all in good time, after we've cleaned our own house and have this planet organized.

"I worked on the initial evaluation, right after the raid, we had plenty of material to work up, and we learned enough even then to show they had weaknesses. Our biggest unit is still working on it, every time somebody comes up with a new refinement they work it down a little finer, every time we get new data it goes into the mill. The pictures we got of that fellow this afternoon are on the way back already. That's what we want now, little things, which side the pilot sits on, what part of the battle interested them, anything to fill in the picture.

"Some day, they'll land, get close enough for us to get our hands on them, and we'll be ready for them."

The major took the cigar out of his mouth and spat.

 

The watch chief socio-technician was monitoring reports by radio-fax, television, and voice; and keeping up a running fire of commentary for the evaluators and calculators who were screening the material and feeding it into the machines.

"Raider landing as predicted," he said, "near major urban center— Chicago. Bless Bess, what a ship, big as the Queen Mary—"

Machines clicked and chattered and hummed smoothly.

"Plan Sugar-fourteen, modification three on basis current information, just initiated."

"Somebody's dragging their feet," one of the calculators said. "I just cranked out modification five, and mod-4 was acknowledged by Field control at 2113."

"Log it," the watch chief advised. "They'll try to bounce it on us, they're always wrong but they keep hoping."

"Mod-4 coming up," he added. "Only three and a half minutes late, they're outdoing themselves today. That's old Fatso running to the ship instead of walking— Which stupid knothead took my coffee cup?"

On a balcony overlooking the control center, the commanding officer was explaining the operation to some high brass.

"Well, I can see you have a nice operation here," a general said. "Very smooth. But what I don't understand is how you Evaluation people are so sure the Raiders don't have something equivalent to our own Strategic and Tactical Evaluation. If they do, what are we going to do then?"

"They can't have," the CO said positively. "Remember, we've been evaluating these people for fifty years.

"In order to have STE, you have to have a basic science of human motivation. And they don't have it. The Raid itself is our basic evidence for that. There's no indication that they had anything whatever to gain from the raid, they did it to save us from self-destruction.

"A race that can destroy half a planet's population, forcibly impose its will on an alien race, not for the legitimate aim of self-preservation but because it wants to play God, can't possibly understand even the first rudiments of social control. That type of thinking is authoritarian, symptomatic of egotistic atomism.

"No, we'll take them all right. We have to. The universe isn't safe with people like that running loose, living in an insane world of subjective surrealism, but acting on men who live and die in the real world of objective events.

"They're like idiot children playing with a machine gun."

 

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