Harlan Ellison - Battlefield

SATURDAY

The first needle of the "day" came over Copernicus Sector at 0545...and seven seconds. The battery commander on White's line was an eager-beaver. His bombardment cut short the coffee-pause Black's men had planned to enjoy till at least 0550. When the hi-fi in the ready dome screeched - a vocal transformation of the sonorad blip indicating a projectile coming through - the Black men looked at one another in undisguised annoyance, and banged their bulbs onto file counters.

Someone muttered, "Spoil sport!" and his companions looked at him and laughed; obviously a repple officer, fresh from the Academy.

One of the veterans, who had been with the outfit when Black had been Black One and Black Two - before the service merger - chuckled deep in his throat. He began to dog down the bubble of the pressure suit. But before the plasteel bowl was settled in place, he gibed, "Cookie-boy, you shoulda been up here when White rung in a fullblooded Cherokee named Grindbones or somethin'. You'da been on the line a'reddy at 0500. He was lobbin' 'em in solid by this time...had a hell of a job get tin' him croaked." He chuckled again, and several other officers nodded in remembrance.

The young lieutenant addressed as "Cookie-boy" turned an interested glance on the older man. "How did you manage to kill him? Full-day batteries at double strength? Spearhead through the craters?"

The veteran winked at his friends, and said levelly, "Nope. Easier'n that."

The young lieutenant's attention was trapped.

"Waited till he went down, and had a goon squad put a blade into his neck. Real quick. Next day, had our coffee without sweat."

The young lieutenant was still. His face gradually became a mask of disbelief and horror. "You...you mean you...oh, come on, you aren't serious?"

The veteran stared at him coldly. "Sonny, you know I'm serious." He dogged down the pork-bolts on his helmet. He was out of the conversation.

Yet the lieutenant continued to protest. He stood in the center of the ready dome, his helmet under his arm, his other arm thrown toward the rounded ceiling fu a theatrical pose, and blurted, "But - but that's illegal! When they declared the Moon a battlefield, that was the reason, I mean, what's the sense of using up here to fight, if we still kill each other down there, I mean - "

"Oh, shut up, will you, for Christ's sake!" It was a lean, angular-faced Major with a thread-scar from a single. beam across the brutal cut of his jaw. "This wasn't war, you young clown. This was a matter of a man who fought, and stuck too closely to the rules. What you learned in the Academy was all floss and fine, man, but grow up! Use your noodle. What they taught you there doesn't always apply out here.

"When someone crosses too many wheat fields, he's bound to find a gopher hole. This Indian stepped in one of those, that's all."

The Major turned away, dogged down, and joined the rest of the line company's officers at the exitport. The young lieutenant stood alone, watching them, still muttering to himself. For with the other men on intercom only, they could not hear what he was saying:

"But the war. The - the war. They said we wouldn't chew up the Earth any more. The war...up here it's so much cleaner, a man can fight or die or...but - but they said they killed him on his way down. "He was going home, to Earth, and they killed him - "

The Major turned with sluggish movement in the pressurized dome, and waved a metal-tooled gauntlet at the lieutenant. It was time to move to the units.

The lieutenant hurriedly dogged down, and joined the group. The veteran officer who had first spoken, turned the younger man around with rough good humor, checking the pork-bolts. Then he slapped the lieutenant on his shoulder with a comradely gesture, and they went into the exitport together.

The hi-fi had been screeching constantly for a full three minutes.

Outside, the Blacks and the Whites went into the five thousand and fifty-eighth day of the war. That particular war.

The needles came across all that early morning. In the dead black of the Darkside, their tails winked briefly as vector rockets shifted them on course. No sound broke across the airless cratered surface, but the tremors as each missile struck rang through the bowels of the dead satellite like so many gong-beaters gone mad.

Where they struck, great gouts were ripped from the grey, cadaverous dust of the surface. Brilliant flashes lived for microinstants and then were gone, for without air there could be no flames. Where the needles struck, and the face of the moon tore apart, new craters glared blindly up at space.

At 0830 on the dot, the first waves of armored units spread out from the ragged White line near Sepulchre Crater and advanced across the edge of the Darkside, into the blinding glare of the Lightside. Vision ports sphinctered down into narrow slits; filters that dimmed the blaze of light clicked over the glassene ports; men donned special equipment, and snapped switches that cut in conditioning units and coolant chambers - and turned off the feverishly working heaters.

The armored crabs came first, sliding along, hugging the contours of the moon's face, raising and lowering themselves on stalk-like plasteel rods.

The Black batteries detected their coming, but not their nature, and the first barrages were low-level missiles that zoomed silently through the glaring sunlight, passed completely over the crabs, and shusssssed off into the Darkside, and space, where they would circle aimlessly till the men from Ordnance Reclamation went out with their dampening nets and sucked the missiles into the cargo hatches of the ships.

But as the crabs flopped and skittered their way toward the Black line, the sonorad was able to distinguish more easily what they were. The cry went up in the tracking cells buried deep under the pumice of the moon, and new batteries were readied/launched! Doggie-interceptors screamed silently from their tubes, broke the surface of the moon like skin divers reaching water's surface, and began to follow the line of terrain, humping over rises, slipping into craters, always moving out.

The first ones made contact.

Within the crabs, the shriek of rending metal was a split microsecond ahead of the roar and flash of the doggie exploding. Great gouts of flame roared out angrily...and were gone as quickly, leaving in their place a twisted, bloody scrapheap where the crab had been. Another doggie struck. It caught the crab and lifted it backward and up on its stiltlegs, and then it exploded violently. Pieces of bodies were thrown two hundred feet into the airless nothing above the moon, and fell back soddenly.

All along the line the doggie's were tracking their prey and demolishing them. On the far right flank, one crab managed to train its twenty-thread on an incoming doggie, and exploded the missile before it hit. But it was a short-lived victory, for two others, coming on collision courses, zeroed in and struck simultaneously. The flash was seen fifteen miles away, the roar trembled the ground for thirty miles.

But White's offensive for the day was just beginning. In streaming waves the foot-soldiers were coming up behind the crabs. They were small pips on the sonorad units in Black GHQ, and though they could not tell if what was coming was human or mechanical, Black continued to send out the doggies.

It was a waste of missiles; precisely what White had been counting on. The doggies homed in, and exploded, hundreds of them, each finding a lone man and atomizing him so quickly, no bit of pressure suit, weapon or flesh could be found. The missiles came down like hail, and where each struck, a man died horribly, without time to scream, with his body exploding inward in a frightful implosion of power and fire. Hundreds died all along the line, and as the doomed foot-soldiers drew the fire, the jato teams soared up from White Central and streaked before little gouts of flame, toward the Black perimeter.

Each man wore a harness over his pressure suit, with a jet unit, to drive him across the airlessness. While their brothers died in flaming hell below them, the jato units soared through the empty sky, above the level of the terrain-skimming doggies, and dropped down like hunting falcons on the batteries.

Each man carried, in a drop-pouch, a charge of ferro-atomic explosive on a time fuse. As they whipped over the batteries, the men released their deadly cargos, directly into the barrels of the thread-disruptors, and sped up and away, back for their own lines. It was futile, of course, for sonorad had caught them, and trackbeams snaked out across the sky, picking each man off like moths caught in a flame. The jato units were snuffed out in midair, even as the ferro-atomics went off inside the disruptor barrels.

Great sheets of metal exploded outward, ripping apart the bunkers into which they had been set. The disruptors shattered their linings, throwing their own damping rods out, and in one hell's holocaust of exploding ferro-atomics, the entire battery went skyward. Three hundred men died at once, faces burned off, arms ripped loose from sockets, legs broken and shredded. Bodies cascaded from the sky and the steel ran with blood. It was a typical day in the war.

The trackbeams probed outward, scouring the ground for landmines planted by the foot-soldiers, and exploded them on contact, then moved on. Eventually, they probed at the firm outer shell of the White perimeter. Then the charged trackbeams of White met the Black beams, and they locked. They locked in a deadly struggle, and at opposite ends of those beams, men at control panels, in shock helmets, poured power to their beams, in a visible struggle to beat down the strength of the other.

A surge, a slight edge, a nudge of force, and White was dominant. The beam raced back the length of the weakened Black beam, and in a dome two hundred miles away, a man leaped from his bucket seat and clawed at his helmet...even as his eyes spouted flame, and his mouth crawed open in a ghastly scream. His charred body - burnt black inside - turned half-around, writhing, as the man beat at his dead face, and then he fell across his console. The trackbeam was loose inside the bunker. In a matter of moments, no living thing moved in the bunker dome. But it was a double-edged weapon, for associate trackbeams of the doomed White had centered in, and now five of them joined in racing back along the Black's length. The scene in the White bunker dome was repeated. This time a woman had been under the helmet.

So it went. All day. One skirmish of foot-soldiers with ensnaring nets who stumbled across a Black detonation team, near Abulfeda Crater ended strangely, and terribly.

The detonation team was wrapped in the gooey meshes, but had barely enough time to toss their charges. The charges exploded, killing the ensnaring outfit, but also served to shatter their own helmets. They lay there for minutes, those whose helmets had merely cracked, until their air ran out, and then they strangled to death. The ones who died initially were the lucky.

At day's end, at 1630 hours, the death toll was slightly below average for a weekend. Dead: 5,886. Wounded: 4. Damages: twelve billion dollars, rounded off by the Finance & Reclamation Clerk. The batteries were silent, the crabs back in their depots and pools; the airless dead face of the moon left to the reclamation teams, who worked through the "night, " preparing for Monday rooming, when the war would resume.

The commuters were racked, and as the Blacks filed into their ships, as the Whites boarded theirs, the humming of great atomic motors rolled through the shining corridors of the commuters. Inside, men read newspapers and clung to the acceleration straps for the ride down.

Down to Earth.

For a quiet evening at home, and a quiet Sunday... before the war started again.

Almost as one, they roared free of the slight gravity, and plunged down toward the serene, carefully-tended face of the Earth. The young lieutenant hung from his strap and tried to block out the memory of what had happened that day. Not the fighting. God, that had been just fine. It had been good. The fighting. But what the older men had said. That was like saying there was no God. The moon was for war, the Earth was for peace.

They had knifed a battery sergeant on his way down? He looked about him, but all faces were turned into newspapers. He tried to put it from his mind forcefully.

Behind the commuters, the blasted, crushed and death-sprayed face of the Moon glowed in sharp relief against the black of space.

What had the Major said later:

War is good, but we have to retain our perspective.

SUNDAY

Yolande was in the kitchen dialing dinner when the chimes crooned at her. She turned from the difficult task of dictating dinner to the robochef, and wiped a stray lock of ebony hair from her forehead.

"Bill! Bill, will you answer it...it's probably Wayne and Lotus."

In the living room, 2/Lt. William Larkspur Donnough uncrossed his long legs, sighed as he turned off the tri-V, and yelled back softly, "Okay, hon. I'll get it."

He walked down the long pastel-tiled hall and flipped up the force screen dial, releasing the wall into nothingness. As the wall flicked out and was gone, the outside took form, and standing on Bill and Yolande Donnough's front breezeway were 2/Lt. and Mrs. Wayne M'Kuba Massaro.

"Come on in, come on in, " Bill chuckled at them. "Yo's in the kitch fixing dinner. Here, Lotus, let me have your hood."

He took the brightly-tinted hood and cape offered by the girl, a striking Melanesian with an upturned Irish nose and flaming red hair.

He accepted Wayne Massaro's service cap in the other hand and stuck the apparel to the rack, which turned into the wall, holding the clothing magnetically.

"What'll you have, Wayne, Lotus?"

Lotus raised a hand to signify none for her, but Wayne Massaro made a T with his hands. He wanted a tea- ball with a shot of herro-coke.

When Bill had jiggered the mixture together, warmed it and chilled it again, when they settled down in the formfit chairs, Donnough looked across at the other lieutenant and sighed. "Well, how'd it go your first day up there?"

Massaro frowned deeply.

Lotus broke in before her husband could answer. "Well, if you two are going to talk shop, I'm going in to see if Yo needs help; " She got up, smoothed the sheath across her thighs, and walked into the kitchen.

"She'll never get used to my making the war a career," Wayne Massaro shook his head in affectionate exasperation. "She just can't understand it. "

"She'll get used to it," Bill replied, sipping his own hiskotch. "Lotus still has a lot of that Irish blood in her... Yo was the same way when I came in."

"It's so different, Bill So very different. What they taught us in the Academy doesn't seem quite true up there. I mean - " he struggled to form the right phrase, " - it's not that they're going against doctrine...it's just that things aren't black and white up there - as they said they'd be when I was in the Academy - they're grey now. They don't start the morning bombardments on time, they drink coff when they should be posting, and - and - " He stopped abruptly, and a hardness came into the set of his head. He jerked quickly, and bent to his drink.

"N-nothing," he murmured, principally to himself.

Donnough looked disturbed.

"What happened, Wayne? You flinch-out when the barrage came over?"

Massaro lifted his eyes in a shocked and startled expression. "You aren't kidding, are you?"

Donnough leaned back further, and the formfit closed about him like a womb. "No, I suppose I wasn't. I know you better than that, known you too long."

There was a great deal of respect and friendship in his words. Each man sat silently, holding his drink to his lips. as a barricade to conversation for the moment. Filtered memories of shared boyhoods came to them, and talk was not right at that moment.

Then Massaro lowered the glass and said, "That jato raid came off pretty badly didn't it?" The subject had been altered.

Donnough nodded ruefully, "Yeah, wouldn't you know it. Oh, hell, it was all the fault of that gravel-brained Colonel Levinson. He didn't even send over a force battery cover. It was suicide. But then, what the hell, that's what they're paid for."

Massaro agreed silently and took a final pull at the tea-laced highball. "Uh. Good. More, daddy, morel" Donnough waved a hand at the circle-dial of the robot bartender set into the recreation unit against the wan.

"Dial away, brother frat man. I'm too comfortable to move."

A gaggle of female giggles erupted from the kitchen, and Yolande Donnough's voice came through the grille in the ceiling. "Okay you two heroes...dinner's on. Let's go." Then: "Bill, will you call the kids from downstairs?

"Okay, Yo."

Bill Donnough walked to the dropshaft at one corner of the living room, and slid his fingernail across the grille set into the wall beside the empty pit. Downstairs, in the lower levels of the house - sunk fifty feet into the Earth - the Donnough children heard the rasp over their own speakers, and waited for their father's words.

"Chow's on, monsters. Updecks on the double!"

The children came tumbling from their rooms and the play area, and threw themselves into the sucking force of the invisible riser-beam that lived in the dropshaft. In a second they were whisked up the shaft and stepped out in the living room:

First came Polly with her golden braids tied atop her round little head in the Swedish style. Her hands were clean. Then Bartholemew-Aaron, whose nose was running again, and whose sleeves showed it. Verushka came next, her little face frozen with tears, for Toby had bitten her calf on the way upshaft; then Toby himself, clutching his side where Verushka had kicked him in reflex.

Donnough shook his head in mock severity, and slapped Polly on the behind as he urged them to the table for dinner. "Go on you beasts, roust!"

All but Verushka, the children ran laughing to the dining hall which ran parallel to the tiled front hall of the house. Dark-haired Verushka clung to her daddy's hand and walked slowly with him. "Daddy, are you goin' to the moon tomorra'?"

"That's right, baby. Why?"

"Cause Stacy Garmonde down the block says her old ma - "

"Father, not old man!" he corrected her.

" - her father's gonna shoot you good tomorra'. He says all Blacks is bad, and he's gonna shoot you dead. Tha's what Stacy says, an' she's a big old stink!"

Donnough stopped walking and kneeled beside the wide, dark eyes. "Honey, you remember one thing, no matter what anybody tells you:

"Blacks are good. Whites are bad. That's the truth, sweetie. And nobody's going to kilt daddy, because he's going to rip it up come tomorrow. Now do you believe that?"

She bobbled her bead very quickly.

"Blacks is good, an' Whites is big stinks."

He patted her head with affection. "The grammar is lousy, baby, but the sentiment is correct. Now. Let's eat."

They went in, and the children were silent with heads only half-bowed - half staring at the hot dishes that popped out of the egress slot in the long table - while Donnough said the prayer:

"Dear God above, thank you for this glorious repast. and watch over these people, and insure a victory where a victory is deserved. Preserve us and our state of existence...Amen. "

"Amen." Massaro.

"Amen." Lotus Massaro.

"Aye-men!" the children.

Then the forks went into the food, and mouths opened and dinner was underway. As they sat and discussed what Was what, and who had gotten his, and wasn't it wonderful how the moon was the battlefield, while the Earth was saved from more destruction such as those 20th Century barbarians had dealt it.

"Listen, Bill," Massaro jabbed the fork into the air, punctuating his words, "next Sunday you and Yo and the kids come on over to our hovel. It'll cost you for a robositter next week. We're sick of laying out the credits." They smiled and nodded and the dinner date for next Sunday was fumed up.

MONDAY

The commuter platforms. The ships racked one past another, pointed toward the faint light they could not see. The light of the dead battlefield. Moon. The Blacks in their regal uniforms queueing up to enter the vessels, the Whites in splendid array, about to board ship.

A Black ship lay beside a White one.

Bill Donnough boarded one as he caught a glance at the ship beside. Massaro was in line there. "Go to hell, you White bastard!" he yelled. There was no friendliness there. No camaraderie. "Die, you slob-creepin' Black! Drop!" he was answered.

They boarded the ships. The flight was short. Batteries opened that day - the five thousand and fifty-ninth day of the war - at 0550. Someone had chopped down the eagerbeaver.

At 1149 precisely, a blindbomb with a snooper attachment was launched by 2/Lt William Larkspur Donnough, BB XO in charge of strafing and collision, which managed to worm its devious way through the White defense perimeter force screens. The blindbomb - BB - fell with a skit-course on the bunkerdome housing a firebeam control center, and exploded the dome into fragments.

Later that evening, Bill Donnough would start looking for another home to attend, the following Sunday. Who said war was hell? It had been a good day on the line.