Man-Kzin Wars III Read online

  “They used to make bombs out of plutonium.”

  “Bothers you?”

  “Jack, the fission bomb was it in the mass murder department. Like the crossbow. Like the Ayatollah’s Asteroid.” Phoebe’s eyes held mine. Her voice had dropped; we didn’t want to broadcast this all over the restaurant. “Don’t you ever wonder just how much of human knowledge is lost in that . . . black limbo inside the ARM building? Things that could solve problems. Warm the Earth again. Ease us through the lightspeed wall.”

  “We don’t suppress inventions unless they’re dangerous,” I said.

  I could have backed out of the argument; but that too would have disappointed Phoebe. Phoebe liked a good argument. My problem was that what I gave her wasn’t good enough. Maybe I couldn’t get angry enough . . . maybe my most forceful arguments were classified . . .

  Monday morning, Phoebe left for Dallas and a granddaughter. There had been no war, no ultimatum, but it felt final.

  * * *

  Thursday evening I was back in the Monobloc.

  So was Anton. “I’ve played it,” he said. “Can’t talk about it, of course.”

  He looked mildly bored. His hands looked like they were trying to break chunks off the edge of the table.

  I nodded placidly.

  Anton shouldn’t have told me about the broadcast from Angel’s Pencil. But he had; and if the ARM had noticed, he’d better mention it again.

  Company joined us, sampled and departed. Anton and I spoke to a pair of ladies who turned out to have other tastes. (Some bends like to bug the straights.) A younger woman joined us for a time. She couldn’t have been over thirty, and was lovely in the modern style . . . but hard, sharply defined muscle isn’t my sole standard of beauty . . .

  I remarked to Anton, “Sometimes the vibes just aren’t right.”

  “Yeah. Look, Jack, I have carefully concealed a prehistoric Calvados in my apt at Maya. There isn’t really enough for four—”

  “Sounds nice. Eat first?”

  “Stet. There’re sixteen restaurants in Maya.”

  * * *

  A score of blazing rectangles meandered across the night, washing out the stars. The eye could still find a handful of other space artifacts, particularly around the Moon.

  Anton flashed the beeper that would summon a taxi. I said, “So you viewed the call. So why so tense?”

  Security devices no bigger than a basketball rode the glowing sky, but the casual eye would not find those. One must assume they were there. Patterns in their monitor chips would match vision and sound patterns of a mugging, a rape, an injury, a cry for help. Those chips had gigabytes to spare for words and word patterns the ARM might find of interest.

  So: no key words.

  Anton said, “Jack, they tell a hell of a story. A . . . foreign vehicle pulled alongside Angela at four-fifths of legal max. It tried to cook them.”

  I stared. A spacecraft matched course with the Angel’s Pencil at eighty percent of lightspeed? Nothing man-built could do that. And warlike? Maybe I’d misinterpreted everything. That can happen when you make up your code as you go along.

  But how could the Pencil have escaped? “How did Angela manage to phone home?”

  A taxi dropped. Anton said, “She sliced the bread with the, you know, motor. I said it’s a hell of a story.”

  * * *

  Anton’s apartment was most of the way up the slope of Maya, the pyramidal arcology north of Santa Maria. Old wealth.

  Anton led me through great doors, into an elevator, down corridors. He played tour guide: “The Fertility Board was just getting some real power about the time this place went up. It was built to house a million people. It’s never been fully occupied.”

  “So?”

  “So we’re en route to the east face. Four restaurants, a dozen little bars. And here we stop—”

  “This your apt?”

  “No. It’s empty, it’s always been empty. I sweep it for bugs, but the authorities . . . I think they’ve never noticed.”

  “Is that your mattress?”

  “No. Kids. They’ve got a club that’s two generations old. My son tipped me off to this.”

  “Could we be interrupted?”

  “No. I’m monitoring them. I’ve got the security system set to let them in, but only when I’m not here. Now I’ll set it to recognize you. Don’t forget the number: Apt 23309.”

  “What is the ARM going to think we’re doing?”

  “Eating. We went to one of the restaurants, then came back and drank Calvados . . . which we will do, later. I can fix the records at Buffalo Bill. Just don’t argue about the credit charge, stet?”

  “But—Yah, stet.” Hope you won’t be noticed, that’s the real defense. I was thinking of bailing out . . . but curiosity is part of what gets you into the ARM. “Tell your story. You said she sliced the bread with the, you know, motor?”

  “Maybe you don’t remember. Angel’s Pencil isn’t your ordinary Bussard ramjet. The field scoops up interstellar hydrogen to feed a fusion-pumped laser. The idea was to use it for communications too. Blast a message half across the galaxy with that. A Belter crewman used it to cut the alien ship in half.”

  “There’s a communication you can live without. Anton . . . What they taught us in school. A sapient species doesn’t reach space unless the members learn to cooperate. They’ll wreck the environment, one way or another, war or straight libertarianism or overbreeding . . . remember?”

  “Sure.”

  “So do you believe all this?”

  “I think so.” He smiled painfully. “Director Bernhardt didn’t. He classified the message and attached a memo, too. Six years of flight aboard a ship of limited size, terminal boredom coupled with high intelligence and too much time, elaborate practical jokes, yadda yadda. Director Harms left it classified . . . with the cooperation of the Belt. Interesting?”

  “But he had to have that.”

  “But they had to agree. There’s been more since. Angel’s Pencil sent us hundreds of detailed photos of the alien ship. It’s unlikely they could be faked. There are corpses. Big sort-of cats, orange, up to three meters tall, big feet and elaborate hands with thumbs. We’re in mucking great trouble if we have to face up to such beasties.”

  “Anton, we’ve had three hundred and fifty years of peace. We must be doing something right. The odds say we can negotiate.”

  “You haven’t seen them.”

  It was almost funny. Jack was trying to make me nervous. Twenty years ago the terror would have been fizzing in my blood. Better living through chemistry! This was all frightening enough; but my fear was a cerebral thing, and I was its master.

  I wasn’t nervous enough for Anton. “Jack, this isn’t just vaporware. A lot of those photos show what’s maybe a graviton generator, maybe not. Director Harms set up a lab on the Moon to build one for us.”

  “Funded?”

  “Heavy funding. Somebody believes in this. But they’re getting results! It works!”

  I mulled it. “Alien contact. As a species we don’t seem to handle that too well.”

  “Maybe this one can’t be handled at all.”

  “What else is being done?”

  “Nothing, or damn close. Silly suggestions, career-oriented crap designed to make a bureau bigger . . . Nobody wants to use the magic word. War.”

  “War. Three hundred and fifty years out of practice, we are. Maybe C. Cretemaster will save us.” I smiled at Anton’s bewilderment. “Look it up in the ARM records. There’s supposed to be an alien of sorts living in the cometary halo. He’s the force that’s been keeping us at peace this past three and a half centuries.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Mmm. Well, Anton, this is a lot more real for you than me. I haven’t yet seen anything upsetting.”

  I hadn’t called him a liar. I’d only made him aware that I knew nothing to the contrary. For Anton there might be elaborate proofs; but I’d seen nothing, and heard only a scary
tale.

  Anton reacted gracefully. “Of course. Well, there’s still that bottle.”

  Anton’s Calvados was as special as he’d claimed, decades old and quite unique. He produced cheese and bread. Good thing; I was ready to eat his arm off. We managed to stick to harmless topics, and parted friends.

  * * *

  The big catlike aliens had taken up residence in my soul.

  Aliens aren’t implausible. Once upon a time, maybe. But an ancient ETI in a stasis field had been in the Smithsonian since the opening of the twenty-second century, and a quite different creature—C. Cretemaster’s real-life analog—had crashed on Mars before the century ended.

  Two spacecraft matching course at near lightspeed, that was just short of ridiculous. Kinetic energy considerations . . . why, two such ships colliding might as well be made of antimatter! Nothing short of a gravity generator could make it work. But Anton was claiming a gravity generator.

  His story was plausible in another sense. Faced with warrior aliens, the ARM would do only what they could not avoid. They would build a gravity generator because the ARM must control such a thing. Any further move was a step toward the unthinkable. The ARM took sole credit (and other branches of the United Nations also took sole credit) for the fact that Man had left war behind. I shuddered to think what force it would take to turn the ARM toward war.

  I would continue to demand proof of Anton’s story. Looking for proof was one way to learn more, and I resist seeing myself as stupid. But I believed him already.

  On Thursday we returned to Suite 23309.

  “I had to dig deep to find out, but they’re not just sitting on their thumbs,” he said. “There’s a game going in Aristarchus Crater, Belt against flatlander. They’re playing peace games.”

  “Huh?”

  “They’re making formats for contact and negotiation with hypothetical aliens. The models all have the look of those alien corpses, cats with bald tails, but they all think differently—”

  “Good.” Here was my proof. I could check this claim.

  “Good. Sure. Peace games.” Anton was brooding. Twitchy. “What about war games?”

  “How would you run one? Half your soldiers would be dead at the end . . . unless you’re thinking of rifles with paint bullets. War gets more violent than that.”

  Anton laughed. “Picture every building in Chicago covered with scarlet paint on one side. A nuclear war game.”

  “Now what? I mean for us.”

  “Yah. Jack, the ARM isn’t doing anything to put the human race back on a war footing.”

  “Maybe they’ve done something they haven’t told you about.”

  “Jack, I don’t think so.”

  “They haven’t let you read all their files, Anton. Two weeks ago you didn’t know about peace games in Aristarchus. But okay. What should they be doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How’s your chemistry?”

  Anton grimaced. “How’s yours? Forget I said that. Maybe I’m back to normal and maybe I’m not.”

  “Yah, but you haven’t thought of anything. How about weapons? Can’t have a war without weapons, and the ARM’s been suppressing weapons. We should dip into their files and make up a list. It would save some time, when and if. I know of an experiment that might have been turned into an inertialess drive if it hadn’t been suppressed.”

  “Date?”

  “Early twenty-second. And there was a field projector that would make things burn, late twenty-third.”

  “I’ll find ’em.” Anton’s eyes took on a faraway look. “There’s the archives. I don’t mean just the stuff that was built and then destroyed. The archives reach all the way back to the early twentieth. Stuff that was proposed, tanks, orbital beam weapons, kinetic energy weapons, biologicals—”

  “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 make 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 else they’ll ram a car into a crowd, or strangle—”

  “We wouldn’t find enough. 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 in hanging up. “How are things in Aristarchus?”

  “Clavius. We’ve been moved out. We’ve got half the space we used to, and we needed 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 but for Jennifer.

  If she’d stayed on in Aristarchus . . . or been kept on . . .

  Human medics like Jennifer 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 these problems are psychological.

  Anton’s “peace games” must be stressful as Hell.

  Chapter 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 it like espionage, and Navy is different yet. We may have lost some of the military vocations over the centuries. We’ll have to re-invent 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.