The Forever War Series Page 11

  That was a chiller.

  Later on we tried to make love, but both of us had too much to think about.

  I got to see Marygay for the first time about a week later. She was wan, had lost a lot of weight and seemed very confused. Doc Wilson assured me that it was just the medication; they hadn’t seen any evidence of brain damage.

  She was still in bed, still being fed through a tube. I began to get very nervous about the calendar. Every day there seemed to be some improvement, but if she was still in bed when we hit that collapsar push, she wouldn’t have a chance. I couldn’t get any encouragement from Doc Wilson or Estelle; they said it depended on Marygay’s resilience.

  The day before the push, they transferred her from bed to Estelle’s acceleration couch in the infirmary. She was lucid and was taking food orally, but she still couldn’t move under her own power, not at 1—½ gees.

  I went to see her. ‘Heard about the course change? We have to go through Aleph-9 to get back to Tet-38. Four more months on this damn hulk. But another six years’ combat pay when we get back to Earth.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Ah, just think of the great things we’ll—’

  ‘William.’

  I let it trail off. Never could lie.

  ‘Don’t try to jolly me. Tell me about vacuum welding, about your childhood, anything. Just don’t bullshit me about getting back to Earth.’ She turned her face to the wall.

  ‘I heard the doctors talking out in the corridor, one morning when they thought I was asleep. But it just confirmed what I already knew, the way everybody’d been moping around.

  ‘So tell me, you were born in New Mexico in 1975. What then? Did you stay in New Mexico? Were you bright in school? Have any friends, or were you too bright like me? How old were you when you first got sacked?’

  We talked in this vein for a while, uncomfortable. An idea came to me while we were rambling, and when I left Marygay I went straight to Dr Wilson.

  ‘We’re giving her a fifty-fifty chance, but that’s pretty arbitrary. None of the published data on this sort of thing really fits.’

  ‘But it is safe to say that her chances of survival are better, the less acceleration she has to endure.’

  ‘Certainly. For what it’s worth. The commodore’s going to take it as gently as possible, but that’ll still be four or five gees. Three might even be too much; we won’t know until it’s over.’

  I nodded impatiently. ‘Yes, but I think there’s a way to expose her to less acceleration than the rest of us.’

  ‘If you’ve developed an acceleration shield,’ he said smiling, ‘you better hurry and file a patent. You could sell it for a considerable—’

  ‘No, Doc, it wouldn’t be worth much under normal conditions; our shells work better and they evolved from the same principles.’

  ‘Explain away.’

  ‘We put Marygay into a shell and flood—’

  ‘Wait, wait. Absolutely not. A poorly-fitting shell was what caused this in the first place. And this time, she’d have to use somebody else’s.’

  ‘I know, Doc, let me explain. It doesn’t have to fit her exactly as long as the life-support hookups can function. The shell won’t be pressurized on the inside; it won’t have to be because she won’t be subjected to those thousands of kilograms-per-square-centimeter pressure from the fluid outside.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

  ‘It’s just an adaptation of — you’ve studied physics, haven’t you?’

  ‘A little bit, in medical school. My worse courses, after Latin.’

  ‘Do you remember the principle of equivalence?’

  ‘I remember there was something by that name. Something to do with relativity, right?’

  ‘Uh-huh. It means that … there’s no difference being in a gravitational field and being in an equivalent accelerated frame of — it means that when the Anniversary is blasting five gees, the effect on us is the same as if it were sitting on its tail on a big planet, on one with five gees’ surface gravity.’

  ‘Seems obvious.’

  ‘Maybe it is. It means that there’s no experiment you could perform on the ship that could tell you whether you were blasting or just sitting on a big planet.’

  ‘Sure there is. You could turn off the engines, and if—’

  ‘Or you could look outside, sure; I mean isolated, physics-lab type experiments.’

  ‘All right. I’ll accept that. So?’

  ‘You know Archimedes’ Law?’

  ‘Sure, the fake crown — that’s what always got me about physics, they make a big to-do about obvious things, and when it gets to the rough parts—’

  ‘Archimedes’ Law says that when you immerse something in a fluid, it’s buoyed by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces.’

  ‘That’s reasonable.’

  ‘And that holds, no matter what kind of gravitation or acceleration you’re in—In a ship blasting at five gees, the water displaced, if it’s water, weighs five times as much as regular water, at one gee.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So if you float somebody in the middle of a tank of water, so that she’s weightless, she’ll still be weightless when the ship is doing five gees.’

  ‘Hold on, son. You had me going there, but it won’t work.’

  ‘Why not?’ I was tempted to tell him to stick to his pills and stethoscopes and let me handle the physics, but it was a good thing I didn’t.

  ‘What happens when you drop a wrench in a submarine?’

  ‘Submarine?’

  ‘That’s right. They work by Archimedes’—’

  ‘Ouch! You’re right. Jesus. Hadn’t thought it through.’

  ‘That wrench falls right to the floor just as if the submarine weren’t weightless.’ He looked off into space, tapping a pencil on the desk. ‘What you describe is similar to the way we treat patients with severe skin damage, like burns, on Earth. But it doesn’t give any support to the internal organs, the way the acceleration shells do, so it wouldn’t do Marygay any good …’

  I stood up to go. ‘Sorry I wasted—’

  ‘Hold on there, though, just a minute. We might be able to use your idea part-way.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking it through, either. The way we normally use the shells is out of the question for Marygay, of course.’ I didn’t like to think about it. Takes a lot of hypno-conditioning to lie there and have oxygenated fluorocarbon forced into every natural body orifice and one artificial one. I fingered the valve fitting imbedded above my hipbone.

  ‘Yeah, that’s obvious, it’d tear her — say … you mean, low pressure—’

  ‘That’s right. We wouldn’t need thousands of atmospheres to protect her against five gees’ straight-line acceleration; that’s only for all the swerving and dodging — I’m going to call Maintenance. Get down to your squad bay; that’s the one we’ll use. Dalton’ll meet you there.’

  Five minutes before injection into the collapsar field, and I started the flooding sequence. Marygay and I were the only ones in shells; my presence wasn’t really vital since the flooding and emptying could be done by Control. But it was safer to have redundancy in the system and besides, I wanted to be there.

  It wasn’t nearly as bad as the normal routine; none of the crushing-bloating sensation. You were just suddenly filled with the plastic-smelling stuff (you never perceived the first moments, when it rushed in to replace the air in your lungs), and then there was a slight acceleration, and then you were breathing air again, waiting for the shell to pop; then unplugging and unzipping and climbing out—

  Marygay’s shell was empty. I walked over to it and saw blood.

  ‘She hemorrhaged.’ Doc Wilson’s voice echoed sepulchrally. I turned, eyes stinging, and saw him leaning in the door to the locker alcove. He was unaccountably, horribly, smiling.

  ‘Which was expected. Doctor Harmony’s taking care of it. She’ll be just fine.’
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  6

  Marygay was walking in another week. ‘Confraternizing’ in two, and pronounced completely healed in six.

  Ten long months in space and it was army, army, army all the way. Calisthenics, meaningless work details, compulsory lectures — there was even talk that they were going to reinstate the sleeping roster we’d had in basic, but they never did, probably out of fear of mutiny. A random partner every night wouldn’t have set too well with those of us who’d established more-or-less permanent pairs.

  All this crap, this insistence on military discipline, bothered me mainly because I was afraid it meant they weren’t going to let us out. Marygay said I was being paranoid; they only did it because there was no other way to maintain order for ten months.

  Most of the talk, besides the usual bitching about the army, was speculation about how much Earth would have changed and what we would do when we got out. We’d be fairly rich: twenty-six years’ salary all at once. Compound interest, too; the $500 we’d been paid for our first month in the army had grown to over $1500.

  We arrived at Stargate in late 2023, Greenwich date.

  The base had grown astonishingly in the nearly seventeen years we had been on the Yod-4 campaign. It was one building the size of Tycho City, housing nearly ten thousand. There were seventy-eight cruisers, the size of Anniversary or larger, involved in raids on Tauran-held portal planets. Another ten guarded Stargate itself, and two were in orbit waiting for their infantry and crew to be outprocessed. One other ship, the Earth’s Hope II, had returned from fighting and had been waiting at Stargate for another cruiser to return.

  They had lost two-thirds of their crew, and it was just not economical to send a cruiser back to Earth with only thirty-nine people aboard. Thirty-nine confirmed civilians.

  We went planetside in two scoutships.

  7

  General Botsford (who had only been a full major the first time we met him, when Stargate was two huts and twenty-four graves) received us in an elegantly appointed seminar room. He was pacing back and forth at the end of the room, in front of a huge holographic operations chart.

  ‘You know,’ he said, too loud, and then, more conversationally, ‘you know that we could disperse you into other strike forces and send you right out again. The Elite Conscription Act has been changed now, five years’ subjective in service instead of two.

  ‘And I don’t see why some of you don’t want to stay in! Another couple of years and compound interest would make you independently wealthy for life. Sure, you took heavy losses — but that was inevitable, you were the first. Things are going to be easier now. The fighting suits have been improved, we know more about the Taurans’ tactics, our weapons are more effective … there’s no need to be afraid.’

  He sat down at the head of the table and looked at nobody in particular.

  ‘My own memories of combat are over a half-century old. To me it was exhilarating, strengthening. I must be a different kind of person than all of you.’

  Or have a very selective memory, I thought.

  ‘But that’s neither here nor there. I have one alternative to offer you, one that doesn’t involve direct combat.

  ‘We’re very short of qualified instructors. The Force will offer any one of you a lieutenancy if you will accept a training position. It can be on Earth; on the Moon at double pay; on Charon at triple pay; or here at Stargate for quadruple pay. Furthermore, you don’t have to make up your mind now. You’re all getting a free trip back to Earth — I envy you, I haven’t been back in fifteen years, will probably never go back — and you can get the feel of being a civilian again. If you don’t like it, just walk into any UNEF installation and you’ll walk out an officer. Your choice of assignment.

  ‘Some of you are smiling. I think you ought to reserve judgment. Earth is not the same place you left.’

  He pulled a little card out of his tunic and looked at it, smiling. ‘Most of you have something on the order of four hundred thousand dollars coming to you, accumulated pay and interest. But Earth is on a war footing and, of course, it is the citizens of Earth who are supporting the war. Your income puts you in a ninety-two-percent income-tax bracket: thirty-two thousand might last you about three years if you’re careful.

  ‘Eventually you’re going to have to get a job, and this is one job for which you are uniquely trained. There are not that many jobs available. The population of Earth is nearly nine billion, with five or six billion unemployed.

  ‘Also keep in mind that your friends and sweethearts of two years ago are now going to be twenty-one years older than you. Many of your relatives will have passed away. I think you’ll find it a very lonely world.

  ‘But to tell you something about this world, I’m going to turn you over to Captain Siri, who just arrived from Earth. Captain.’

  ‘Thank you, General.’ It looked as if there was something wrong with his skin, his face; and then I realized he was wearing powder and lipstick. His nails were smooth white almonds.

  ‘I don’t know where to begin.’ He sucked in his upper lip and looked at us, frowning. ‘Things have changed so very much since I was a boy.

  ‘I’m twenty-three, so I was still in diapers when you people left for Aleph … to begin with, how many of you are homosexual?’ Nobody. ‘That doesn’t really surprise me. I am, of course. I guess about a third of everybody in Europe and America is.

  ‘Most governments encourage homosexuality — the United Nations is neutral, leaves it up to the individual countries — they encourage homolife mainly because it’s the one sure method of birth control.’

  That seemed specious to me. Our method of birth control in the army is pretty foolproof: all men making a deposit in the sperm bank, and then vasectomy.

  ‘As the General said, the population of the world is nine billion. It’s more than doubled since you were drafted. And nearly two-thirds of those people get out of school only to go on relief.

  ‘Speaking of school, how many years of public schooling did the government give you?’

  He was looking at me, so I answered. ‘Fourteen.’

  He nodded. ‘It’s eighteen now. More, if you don’t pass your examinations. And you’re required by law to pass your exams before you’re eligible for any job or Class One relief. And brother-boy, anything besides Class One is hard to live on. Yes?’ Hofstadter had his hand up.

  ‘Sir, is it eighteen years public school in every country? Where do they find enough schools?’

  ‘Oh, most people take the last five or six years at home or in a community center, via holoscreen. The UN has forty or fifty information channels, giving instruction twenty-four hours a day.

  ‘But most of you won’t have to concern yourselves with that. If you’re in the Force, you’re already too smart by half.’

  He brushed hair from his eyes in a thoroughly feminine gesture, pouting a little. ‘Let me do some history to you. I guess the really important thing that happened after you left was the Ration War.

  ‘That was 2007. A lot of things happened at once. Locust plague in North America, rice blight from Burma to the South China Sea, red tides all along the west coast of South America: suddenly there just wasn’t enough food to go around. The UN stepped in and took over food distribution. Every man, woman, and child got a ration booklet, allowing thim to consume so many calories per month. If tha went over ther monthly allotment, tha just went hungry until the first of the next month.’

  Some of the new people we’d picked up after Aleph used ‘tha, ther, thim’ instead of ‘he, his, him,’ for the collective pronoun. I wondered whether it had become universal.

  ‘Of course, an illegal market developed, and soon there was great inequality in the amount of food people in various strata of society consumed. A vengeance group in Ecuador, the Imparciales, systematically began to assassinate people who appeared to be well-fed. The idea caught on pretty quickly, and in a few months there was a full-scale, undeclared class war going on all over the world. The
United Nations managed to get things back under control in a year or so, by which time the population was down to four billion, crops were more or less recovered, and the food crisis was over. They kept the rationing, but it’s never been really severe again.

  ‘Incidentally, the General translated the money coming to you into dollars just for your own convenience. The world has only one currency now, calories. Your thirty-two thousand dollars comes to about three thousand million calories. Or three million k’s, kilocalories.

  ‘Ever since the Ration War, the UN has encouraged subsistence farming wherever it’s practical. Food you grow yourself, of course, isn’t rationed … It got people out of the cities, onto UN farming reservations, which helped alleviate some urban problems. But subsistence farming seems to encourage large families, so the population of the world has more than doubled since the Ration War.

  ‘Also, we no longer have the abundance of electrical power I remember from boyhood … probably a good deal less than you remember. There are only a few places in the world where you can have power all day and night. They keep saying it’s a temporary situation, but it’s been going on for over a decade.’

  He went on like that for a long time. Well, hell, it wasn’t really surprising, much of it. We’d probably spent more time in the past two years talking about what home was going to be like than about anything else. Unfortunately, most of the bad things we’d prognosticated seemed to have come true, and not many of the good things.

  The worst thing for me, I guess, was that they’d taken over most of the good parkland and subdivided it into little farms. If you wanted to find some wilderness, you had to go someplace where they couldn’t possibly make a plant grow.

  He said that the relations between people who chose homolife and the ones he called ‘breeders’ were quite smooth, but I wondered. I never had much trouble accepting homosexuals myself, but then I’d never had to cope with such an abundance of them.

  He also said, in answer to an impolite question, that his powder and paint had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. It was just stylish. I decided I’d be an anachronism and just wear my face.