Two grenades tore up the ground thirty or forty meters from the structure. In a good imitation of panic, it started belching out a continuous stream of bubblesstill, none coming lower than two meters off the ground. We kept hunched down and continued to advance.
Suddenly, a seam appeared in the building, widened to the size of a large door, and Taurans came swarming out.
Grenadiers, hold your fire. B team, laser fire to the left and right, keep em bunched up. A and C, rush down the center.
One Tauran died trying to turn through a laser beam. The others stayed where they were.
In a suit, its pretty awkward to run and try to keep your head down, at the same time. You have to go from side to side, like a skater getting started; otherwise youll be airborne. At least one person, somebody in A team, bounced too high and suffered the same fate as Chin.
I was feeling pretty fenced-in and trapped, with a wall of laser fire on each side and a low ceiling that meant death to touch. But in spite of myself, I felt happy, euphoric at finally getting the chance to kill some of those villainous baby-eaters.
They werent fighting back, except for the rather ineffective bubblesobviously not designed as an antipersonnel weaponand they didnt retreat back into the building, either. They just milled around, about a hundred of them, and watched us get closer. A couple of grenades would caulk them all, but I guess Cortez was thinking about the prisoner.
O.K., when I say go, were going to flank em. B team will hold fireSecond and Fourth to the right, Sixth and Seventh to the left. B team will move forward in line to box them in.
Go! We peeled off to the left. As soon as the lasers stopped, the Taurans bolted, running in a group on a collision course with our flank.
A Team, down and fire! Dont shoot until youre sure of your aimif you miss you might hit a friendly. And fer Chrissake save me one!
It was a horrifying sight, that herd of monsters bearing down on us. They were running in great leapsthe bubbles avoiding themand they all looked like the one we saw earlier, riding the broomstick; naked except for an almost transparent sphere around their whole bodies, that moved along with them. The right flank started firing, picking off individuals in the rear of the pack.
Suddenly a laser flared through the Taurans from the other side, somebody missing his mark. There was a horrible scream and I looked down the line to see someone, I think it was Perry, writhing on the ground, right hand over the smoldering stump of his left arm, seared off just below the elbow. Blood sprayed through his fingers and the suit, its camouflage circuits scrambled, flickered black-white-jungle-desert-green-gray. I dont know how long I staredlong enough for the medic to run over and start giving aidbut when I looked up the Taurans were almost on top of me.
My first shot was wild and high, but it grazed the top of the leading Taurans protective bubble. The bubble disappeared and the monster stumbled and fell to the ground, jerking spasmodically. Foam gushed out of his mouth-hole, first white, then streaked with red. With one last jerk he became rigid and twisted backwards, almost to the shape of a horseshoe. His long scream, a high-pitched whistle, stopped just as his comrades trampled over him and I hated myself for smiling.
It was slaughter, even though our flank was outnumbered five to one. They kept coming without faltering, even when they had to climb over the drift of bodies and parts of bodies that piled up high, parallel to our flank. The ground between us was slick red with Tauran bloodall Gods children got hemoglobinand, like the teddy-bears, their guts looked pretty much like guts to my untrained eye. My helmet reverberated with hysterical laughter while we cut them to gory chunks. I almost didnt hear Cortez.
Hold your fireI said HOLD IT damn it! Catch a couple of the bastards, they wont hurt you.
I stopped shooting and eventually so did everybody else. When the next Tauran jumped over the smoking pile of meat in front of me, I dove to tackle him around those spindly legs.
It was like hugging a big, slippery balloon. When I tried to drag him down, he just popped out of my arms and kept running.
We managed to stop one of them by the simple expedient of piling half-a-dozen people on top of him. By that time the others had run through our line and were headed for the row of large cylindrical tanks that Cortez had said were probably for storage. A little door had opened in the base of each one.
Weve got our prisoner, Cortez shouted. Kill!
They were fifty meters away and running hard, difficult targets. Lasers slashed around them, bobbing high and low. One fell, sliced in two, but the others, about ten of them, kept going and were almost to the doors when the grenadiers started firing.
They were still loaded with 500-mike bombs, but a near miss wasnt enoughthe concussion would just send them flying, unhurt in their bubbles.
The buildings! Get the damn buildings! The grenadiers raised their aim and let fly, but the bombs only seemed to scorch the white outside of the structures until, by chance, one landed in a door. That split the building just as if it had a seam; the two halves popped away and a cloud of machinery flew into the air, accompanied by a huge pale flame that rolled up and disappeared in an instant. Then the others all concentrated on the doors, except for potshots at some of the Taurans; not so much to get them as to blow them away before they could get inside. They seemed awfully eager.
ALL THIS TIME, we were trying to get the Taurans with laser fire, while they weaved and bounced around trying to get into the structures. We moved in as close to them as we could without putting ourselves in danger from the grenade blaststhat was still too far away for good aim.
Still, we were getting them one by one, and managed to destroy four of the seven buildings. Then, when there were only two aliens left, a nearby grenade blast flung one of them to within a few meters of a door. He dove in and several grenadiers fired salvos after him, but they all fell short, or detonated harmlessly on the side. Bombs were falling all around, making an awful racket, but the sound was suddenly drowned out by a great sigh, like a giants intake of breath, and where the building had been was a thick cylindrical cloud of smoke, solid-looking, dwindling away into the stratosphere, straight as if laid down by a ruler. The other Tauran had been right at the base of the cylinder; I could see pieces of him flying. A second later, a shock wave hit us and I rolled helplessly, pinwheeling, to smash into the pile of Tauran bodies and roll beyond.
I picked myself up and panicked for a second when I saw there was blood all over my suitwhen I realized it was only alien blood, I relaxed but felt unclean.
Catch the bastard! Catch him! In the confusion, the Taurannow the only one left alivehad got free and was running for the grass. One platoon was chasing after him, losing ground, but then all of B team ran over and cut him off. I jogged over to join in the fun.
There were four people on top of him, and fifty people watching.
Spread out, damn it! There might be a thousand more of them waiting to get us in one place. We dispersed, grumbling. By unspoken agreement we were all sure that there were no more live Taurans on the face of the planet.
Cortez was walking toward the prisoner while I backed away. Suddenly the four men collapsed in a pile on top of the creatureeven from my distance I could see the foam spouting from his mouth-hole. His bubble had popped. Suicide.
Damn! Cortez was right there. Get off that bastard. The four men got off and Cortez used his laser to slice the monster into a dozen quivering chunks. Heartwarming sight.
Thats all right, though, well find another oneeverybody! Back in the arrowhead formation. Combat assault, on the Flower.
Well, we assaulted the Flower, which had evidently run out of ammunitionit was still belching, but no bubblesand it was empty. We just scurried up ramps and through corridors, fingers at the ready, like kids playing soldier. There was nobody home.
The same lack of response at the antenna installation, the Salami, and twenty other major buildings, as well as the forty-four perimeter huts still intact. So we had captured dozens of buildings, mostly of incomprehensible purpose, but failed in our main mission; capturing a Tauran for the xenologists to experiment with. Oh, well, they could have all the bits and pieces of the creatures theyd ever want. That was something.
After wed combed every last square centimeter of the base, a scoutship came in with the real exploration crew, Star Fleet scientists. Cortez said, All right, snap out of it, and the hypnotic compulsion fell away.
At first it was pretty grim. A lot of the people, like Lucky and Marygay, almost went crazy with the memories of bloody murder multiplied a hundred times. Cortez ordered everybody to take a sedtab, two for the ones most upset. I took two without being specifically ordered to do so.
Because it was murder, unadorned butcheryonce we had the antispacecraft weapon doped out, we werent in any danger. The Taurans didnt seem to have any conception of person-to-person fighting. We just herded them up and slaughtered them, in the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species. What might have happened if we had sat down and tried to communicate? Maybe it was the second encounter, counting the teddy-bears. But they got the same treatment.
I spent a long time after that telling myself over and over that it hadnt been me who so gleefully carved up those frightened, stampeding creatures. Back in the Twentieth Century, they established to everybodys satisfaction that I was just following orders was an inadequate excuse for inhuman conductbut what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?
Worst of all was the feeling that perhaps my actions werent all that inhuman. Ancestors only a few generations back would have done the same thing, even to their fellowmen, without any hypnotic conditioning.
So I was disgusted with the human race, disgusted with the army, and horrified at the prospect of living with myself for another century or sowell, there was always brainwipe.
The ship that the lone Tauran survivor had escaped in had got away, clean, the bulk of the planet shielding it from Earths Hope while it dropped into Alephs collapsar field. Escaped to home, I guessed, wherever that was, to report what twenty men with hand-weapons could do to a hundred fleeing on foot, unarmed.
I suspected that the next time humans met Taurans in ground combat, we would be more evenly matched. And I was right.
Joe Haldeman
Praised for its authentic portrayal of the emotional detachment and psychological dislocation of soldiers in a millennium-long future war, Joe Haldemans first science fiction novel, The Forever War, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards when it was published in 1974 and was later adapted into a three-part graphic-novel series. Since then, Haldeman has returned to the theme of future war several times, notably in his trilogy Worlds, Worlds Apart, and Worlds Enough and Time, about a future Earth facing nuclear extinction, and Forever Peace, a further exploration of the dehumanizing potential of armed conflict. Haldemans other novels include Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, and the alternate-world opus The Hemingway Hoax, expanded from his Nebula Awardwinning novella of the same name. Haldemans stories have been collected in Infinite Dreams and Dealing in Futures, and several of his essays are mixed with fiction in Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds. His powerful non science fiction writing includes War Year, drawn from experiences during his tour of duty in Vietnam, and 1968, a portrait of America in the Vietnam era. He has also coedited the anthologies Body Armor 2000, Space-fighters, and Supertanks.
SUPERIORITYArthur C. Clarke
IN MAKING THIS STATEMENTwhich I do of my own free willI wish first to make it perfectly clear that I am not in any way trying to gain sympathy, nor do I expect any mitigation of whatever sentence the Court may pronounce. I am writing this in an attempt to refute some of the lying reports broadcast over the prison radio and published in the papers I have been allowed to see. These have given an entirely false picture of the true cause of our defeat, and as the leader of my races armed forces at the cessation of hostilities I feel it my duty to protest against such libels upon those who served under me.
I also hope that this statement may explain the reasons for the application I have twice made to the Court, and will now induce it to grant a favor for which I can see no possible grounds of refusal.
The ultimate cause of our failure was a simple one: despite all statements to the contrary, it was not due to lack of bravery on the part of our men, or to any fault of the Fleets. We were defeated by one thing onlyby the inferior science of our enemies. I repeatby the inferior science of our enemies.
When the war opened we had no doubt of our ultimate victory. The combined fleets of our allies greatly exceeded in number and armament those which the enemy could muster against us, and in almost all branches of military science we were their superiors. We were sure that we could maintain this superiority. Our belief proved, alas, to be only too well founded.
At the opening of the war our main weapons were the long-range homing torpedo, dirigible ball-lightning and the various modifications of the Klydon beam. Every unit of the Fleet was equipped with these and though the enemy possessed similar weapons their installations were generally of lesser power. Moreover, we had behind us a far greater military Research Organization, and with this initial advantage we could not possibly lose.
The campaign proceeded according to plan until the Battle of the Five Suns. We won this, of course, but the opposition proved stronger than we had expected. It was realized that victory might be more difficult, and more delayed, than had first been imagined. A conference of supreme commanders was therefore called to discuss our future strategy.