When they were almost to him, Hendricks raised the pistol waist high and fired.
The two Tassos dissolved. But already a new group was starting up the rise, five or six Tassos, all identical, a line of them coming rapidly toward him.
And he had given her the ship and the signal code. Because of him she was on her way to the moon, to the Moon Base. He had made it possible.
He had been right about the bomb, after all. It had been designed with knowledge of the other types, the David Type and the Wounded Soldier Type. And the Klaus Type. Not designed by human beings. It had been designed by one of the underground factories, apart from all human contact.
The line of Tassos came up to him. Hendricks braced himself, watching them calmly. The familiar face, the belt, the heavy shirt, the bomb carefully in place.
The bomb
As the Tassos reached for him, a last ironic thought drifted through Hendrickss mind. He felt a little better, thinking about it. The bomb. Made by the Second Variety to destroy the other varieties. Made for that end alone.
They were already beginning to design weapons to use against each other.
Philip K. Dick
Regarded as one of the most important writers of science fiction in the twentieth century, Philip K. Dick built his reputation on subtly complex tales of intersecting alternate realities. His novel The Man in the High Castle, set in a future where Japan and Germany emerged victorious from World War II, won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1963 and is regarded as one of the best alternate history tales in science fiction. Dr. Bloodmoney offers a vision of American society in the aftermath of nuclear war. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik, both set in worlds where time slips and reality shifts are the norm, crystallize the mood of paranoia and often comically chaotic instability that characterizes much of his writing. His Valis trilogy, comprised of the novels Valis, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, has been praised for its use of science fiction and fantasy tropes in the service of philosophic and cosmologic inquiry. Several of his best-known stories have been successfully adapted for the screen: his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was filmed as the blockbuster movie Blade Runner in 1982, and his short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale was adapted as Total Recall in 1990. Revival of interest in Dicks work after his death in 1982 led to the publication of his many mainstream novels, several volumes of his collected letters, and the five-volume Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick.
HEROJoe W. Haldeman
1
TONIGHT WERE GOING to show you eight silent ways to kill a man. The guy who said that was a sergeant who didnt look five years older than I. Ergo, as they say, he couldnt possibly ever have killed a man, not in combat, silently or otherwise.
I already knew eighty ways to kill people, though most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. Wed learned that they never schedule anything important for these after-chop classes.
The projector woke me up and I sat through a short movie showing the eight silent ways. Some of the actors must have been brainwipes, since they were actually killed.
After the movie a girl in the front row raised her hand. The sergeant nodded at her and she rose to parade rest. Not bad-looking, but kind of chunky about the neck and shoulders. Everybody gets that way after carrying a heavy pack around for a couple of months.
Sirwe had to call sergeants sir until graduationmost of those methods, really, they lookedkind of silly.
For instance?
Like killing a man with a blow to the kidneys, from an entrenching tool. I mean, when would you actually just have an entrenching tool, and no gun or knife? And why not just bash him over the head with it?
He might have a helmet on, he said reasonably.
Besides, Taurans probably dont even have kidneys!
He shrugged. Probably they dont. This was 1997, and wed never seen a Tauran: hadnt even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome. But their body chemistry is similar to ours, and we have to assume theyre similarly complex creatures. They must have weaknesses, vulnerable spots. You have to find out where they are.
Thats the important thing. He stabbed a finger at the screen. Thats why those eight convicts got caulked for your benefityouve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a megawatt laser or just an emery board.
She sat back down, not looking too convinced.
Any more questions? Nobody raised a hand.
O.K.tench-hut! We staggered upright and he looked at us expectantly.
Screw you, sir, came the tired chorus.
Louder!
SCREW YOU, SIR!
One of the armys less-inspired morale devices.
Thats better. Dont forget, predawn maneuvers tomorrow. Chop at 0330, first formation, 0400. Anybody sacked after 0340 gets one stripe. Dismissed.
I zipped up my coverall and went across the snow to the lounge for a cup of soya and a joint. Id always been able to get by on five or six hours of sleep, and this was the only time I could be by myself, out of the army for a while. Looked at the newsfax for a few minutes. Another ship got caulked, out by Aldebaran sector. That was four years ago. They were mounting a reprisal fleet, but itll take four years more for them to get out there. By then, the Taurans would have every portal planet sewed up tight.
Back at the billet, everybody else was sacked and the main lights were out. The whole companyd been dragging ever since we got back from the two-week lunar training. I dumped my clothes in the locker, checked the roster and found out I was in bunk 31. Damn it, right under the heater.
I slipped through the curtain as quietly as possible so as not to wake up my bunkmate. Couldnt see who it was, but I couldnt have cared less. I slipped under the blanket.
Youre late, Mandella, a voice yawned. It was Rogers.
Sorry I woke you up, I whispered.
Sallright. She snuggled over and clasped me spoon-fashion. She was warm and reasonably soft. I patted her hip in what I hoped was a brotherly fashion. Night, Rogers.
Gnight, Stallion. She returned the gesture, a good deal more pointedly.
Why do you always get the tired ones when youre ready and the randy ones when youre tired? I bowed to the inevitable.
2
Awright, lets get some back inta that! Stringer team! Move it upmove up!
A warm front had come in about midnight and the snow had turned to sleet. The permaplast stringer weighed five hundred pounds and was a bitch to handle, even when it wasnt covered with ice. There were four of us, two at each end, carrying the plastic girder with frozen fingertips. Rogers and I were partners.
Steel! the guy behind me yelled, meaning that he was losing his hold. It wasnt steel, but it was heavy enough to break your foot. Everybody let go and hopped away. It splashed slush and mud all over us.
Damn it, Petrov, Rogers said, why didnt you go out for Star Fleet or maybe the Red Cross? This damn things not that damn heavy. Most of the girls were a little more circumspect in their speech.
Awright, get a move on, stringersEpoxy team! Dog em! Dog em!
Our two epoxy people ran up, swinging their buckets. Lets go, Mandella. Im freezin.
Me, too, the girl said earnestly.
Onetwoheave! We got the thing up again and staggered toward the bridge. It was about three-quarters completed. Looked as if the Second Platoon was going to beat us. I wouldnt give a damn, but the platoon that got their bridge built first got to fly home. Four miles of muck for the rest of us, and no rest before chop.
We got the stringer in place, dropped it with a clank, and fitted the static clamps that held it to the rise-beams. The female half of the epoxy team started slopping glue on it before we even had it secured. Her partner was waiting for the stringer on the other side. The floor team was waiting at the foot of the bridge, each one holding a piece of the light stressed permaplast over his head, like an umbrella. They were dry and clean. I wondered aloud what they had done to deserve it, and Rogers suggested a couple of colorful, but unlikely possibilities.
We were going back to stand by the next stringer when the Field Firsthe was named Dougelstein, but we called him Awrightblew a whistle and bellowed, Awright, soldier boys and girls, ten minutes. Smoke em if you got em. He reached into his pocket and turned on the control that heated our coveralls.
Rogers and I sat down on our end of the stringer and I took out my weed box. I had lots of joints, but we werent allowed to smoke them until after night-chop. The only tobacco I had was a cigarro butt about three inches long. I lit it on the side of the box; it wasnt too bad after the first couple of puffs. Rogers took a puff to be sociable, but made a face and gave it back.
Were you in school when you got drafted? she asked.
Yeah. Just got a degree in Physics. Was going after a teachers certificate.
She nodded soberly. I was in Biology.
Figures. I ducked a handful of slush. How far?
Six years, bachelors and technical. She slid her boot along the ground, turning up a ridge of mud and slush the consistency of freezing ice milk. Why the hell did this have to happen?
I shrugged. It didnt call for an answer, least of all the answer that the UNEF kept giving us. Intellectual and physical elite of the planet, going out to guard humanity against the Tauran menace. It was all just a big experience. See whether we could goad the Taurans into ground action.
Awright blew the whistle two minutes early, as expected, but Rogers and I and the other two stringers got to sit for a minute while the epoxy and floor teams finished covering our stringer. It got cold fast, sitting there with our suits turned off, but we remained inactive, on principle.
I really didnt see the sense of us having to train in the cold. Typical army half-logic. Sure, it was going to be cold where we were going; but not ice-cold or snow-cold. Almost by definition, a portal planet remained within a degree or two of absolute zero all the time, since collapsars dont shineand the first chill you felt would mean that you were a dead man.
TWELVE YEARS BEFORE, when I was ten years old, they had discovered the collapsar jump. Just fling an object at a collapsar with sufficient speed, and it pops out in some other part of the galaxy. It didnt take long to figure out the formula that predicted where it would come out; it just traveled along the same lineactually an Einsteinian geodesicit would have followed if the collapsar hadnt been in the wayuntil it reaches another collapsar field, whereupon it reappears, repelled with the same speed it had approaching the original collapsar. Travel time between the two collapsars is exactly zero.
It made a lot of work for mathematical physicists, who had to redefine simultaneity, then tear down general relativity and build it back up again. And it made the politicians very happy, because now they could send a shipload of colonists to Fomalhaut for less than it once cost to put a brace of men on the Moon. There were a lot of people the politicians would just love to see on Fomalhaut, implementing a glorious adventure instead of stirring up trouble at home.
The ships were always accompanied by an automated probe that followed a couple of million miles behind. We knew about the portal planets, little bits of flotsam that whirled around the collapsars; the purpose of the drone was to come back and tell us in the event that a ship had smacked into a portal planet at .999 of the speed of light.
That particular catastrophe never happened, but one day a drone did come limping back alone. Its data were analyzed, and it turned out that the colonists ship had been pursued by another vessel and destroyed. This happened near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, but since Aldebaranian is a little hard to handle, they named the enemy Taurans.
Colonizing vessels thenceforth went out protected by an armed guard. Often the armed guard went out alone, and finally the colonization effort itself slowed to a token trickle. The United Nations Exploratory and Colonization Group got shortened to UNEF, United Nations Exploratory Force, emphasis on the force.
Then some bright lad in the General Assembly decided that we ought to field an army of footsoldiers to guard the portal planets of the nearer collapsars. This led to the Elite Conscription Act of 1996 and the most rigorously selected army in the history of warfare.
So here we are, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging elitely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on how useful our skill in building bridges will be, on worlds where the only fluid will be your occasional standing pool of liquid helium.
3
About a month later, we left for our final training exercise; maneuvers on the planet Charon. Though nearing perihelion, it was still more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto.
The troopship was a converted cattlewagon, made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Dont think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance.
The whole trip took three weeks, accelerating at 2 Gs halfway; decelerating the other half. Our top speed, as we roared by the orbit of Pluto, was around one twentieth of the speed of lightnot quite enough for relativity to rear its complicated head.
Three weeks of carrying around twice as much weight as normalits no picnic. We did some cautious exercises three times a day, and remained horizontal as much as possible. Still, we had several broken bones and serious dislocations. The men had to wear special supporters. It was almost impossible to sleep, what with nightmares of choking and being crushed, and the necessity of rolling over periodically to prevent blood pooling and bedsores. One girl got so fatigued that she almost slept through the experience of having a rib rub through to the open air.