The Forever War Read online

  “I’ve got to go, Marygay.”

  She didn’t say anything. I didn’t know whether she had heard the announcement.

  “Estelle,” I addressed her directly, gentleman be damned. “Will you—”

  “Yes. I’ll let you know as soon as we can tell.”

  “Well.”

  “It’s going to be all right.” But her expression was grim and worried. “Now get going,” she said, softly.

  By the time I picked my way out into the corridor, the ’box was repeating the message for the fourth time. There was a new smell in the air, that I didn’t want to identify.

  Twenty

  Halfway to the assembly area I realized what a mess I was, and ducked into the head by the NCO lounge. Corporal Kamehameha was hurriedly brushing her hair.

  “William! What happened to you?”

  “Nothing.” I turned on a tap and looked at myself in the mirror. Dried blood smeared all over my face and tunic. “It was Marygay, Corporal Potter, her suit…well, evidently it got a crease, uh…”

  “Dead?”

  “No, just badly, uh, she’s going into surgery—”

  “Don’t use hot water. You’ll just set the stain.”

  “Oh. Right.” I used the hot to wash my face and hand, dabbed at the tunic with cold. “Your squad’s just two bays down from Al’s, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see what happened?”

  “No. Yes. Not when it happened.” For the first time I noticed that she was crying, big tears rolling down her cheeks and off her chin.

  Her voice was even, controlled. She pulled at her hair savagely. “It’s a mess.”

  I stepped over and put my hand on her shoulder. “DON’T touch me!” she flared and knocked my hand off with the brush. “Sorry. Let’s go.”

  At the door to the head she touched me lightly on the arm. “William…” She looked at me defiantly. “I’m just glad it wasn’t me. You understand? That’s the only way you can look at it.”

  I understood, but I didn’t know that I believed her.

  ~~~

  “I can sum it up very briefly,” the Commodore said in a tight voice, “if only because we know so little.

  “Some ten seconds after we destroyed the enemy vessel, two objects, very small objects, struck the Anniversary amidships. By inference, since they were not detected and we know the limits of our detection apparatus, we know that they were moving in excess of nine-tenths of the speed of light. That is to say, more precisely, their velocity vector normal to the axis of the Anniversary was greater than nine-tenths of the speed of light. They slipped in behind the repeller fields.”

  When the Anniversary is moving at relativistic speeds, it is designed to generate two powerful electromagnetic fields, one centered about five thousand kilometers from the ship and the other about ten thousand klicks away, both in line with the direction of motion of the ship. These fields are maintained by a “ramjet” effect, energy picked up from interstellar gas as we mosey along.

  Anything big enough to worry about hitting (that is, anything big enough to see with a strong magnifying glass) goes through the first field and comes out with a very strong negative charge all over its surface. As it enters the second field, it’s repelled away from the path of the ship. If the object is too big to be pushed around this way, we can sense it at a greater distance and maneuver out of its way.

  “I shouldn’t have to emphasize how formidable a weapon this is. When the Anniversary was struck, our rate of speed with respect to the enemy was such that we traveled our own length every ten-thousandth of a second. Further, we were jerking around erratically with a constantly changing and purely random lateral acceleration. Thus the objects that struck us must have been guided, not aimed. And the guidance system was self-contained, since there were no Taurans alive at the time they struck us. All of this in a package no larger than a small pebble.

  “Most of you are too young to remember the term future shock. Back in the seventies, some people felt that technological progress was so rapid that people, normal people, couldn’t cope with it; that they wouldn’t have time to get used to the present before the future was upon them. A man named Toffler coined the term future shock to describe this situation.” The Commodore could get pretty academic.

  “We’re caught up in a physical situation that resembles this scholarly concept. The result has been disaster. Tragedy. And, as we discussed in our last meeting, there is no way to counter it. Relativity traps us in the enemy’s past; relativity brings them from our future. We can only hope that next time, the situation will be reversed. And all we can do to help bring that about is try to get back to Stargate, and then to Earth, where specialists may be able to deduce something, some sort of counterweapon, from the nature of the damage.

  “Now we could attack the Tauran’s portal planet from space and perhaps destroy the base without using you infantry. But I think there would be a very great risk involved. We might be…shot down by whatever hit us today, and never return to Stargate with what I consider to be vital information. We could send a drone with a message detailing our assumptions about this new enemy weapon…but that might be inadequate. And the Force would be that much further behind, technologically.

  “Accordingly, we have set a course that will take us around Yod-4, keeping the collapsar as much as possible between us and the Tauran base. We will avoid contact with the enemy and return to Stargate as quickly as possible.”

  Incredibly, the Commodore sat down and kneaded his temples. “All of you are at least squad or section leaders. Most of you have good combat records. And I hope that some of you will be rejoining the Force after your two years are up. Those of you who do will probably be made lieutenants, and face your first real command.

  “It is to these people I would like to speak for a few moments, not as your…as one of your commanders, but just as a senior officer and advisor.

  “One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and materiel. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures—dozens, literally dozens of factors.”

  I was hearing this, but the only thing that was getting through to my brain was that a third of our friends’ lives had been snuffed out less than an hour before, and he was sitting up there giving us a lecture on military theory.

  “So sometimes you have to throw away a battle in order to help win the war. This is exactly what we are going to do.

  “This was not an easy decision. In fact, it was probably the hardest decision of my military career. Because, on the surface at least, it may look like cowardice.

  “The logistic computer calculates that we have about a 62 percent chance of success, should we attempt to destroy the enemy base. Unfortunately, we would have only a 30 percent chance of survival—as some of the scenarios leading to success involve ramming the portal planet with the Anniversary at light speed.” Jesus Christ.

  “I hope none of you ever has to face such a decision. When we get back to Stargate, I will in all probability be court-martialed for cowardice under fire. But I honestly believe that the information that may be gained from analysis of the damage to the Anniversary is more important than the destruction of this one Tauran base.” He sat up straight. “More important than one soldier’s career.”

  I had to stifle an impulse to laugh. Surely “cowardice” had nothing to do with his decision. Surely he had nothing so primitive and unmilitary as a will to live.

  The maintenance crew managed to patch up the huge rip in the side of the Anniversary and to repressurize that section. We spent the rest of the day cleaning up the area; without, of course, disturbing
any of the precious evidence for which the Commodore was willing to sacrifice his career.

  The hardest part was jettisoning the bodies. It wasn’t so bad except for the ones whose suits had burst.

  ~~~

  I went to Estelle’s cabin the next day, as soon as she was off duty.

  “It wouldn’t serve any good purpose for you to see her now.” Estelle sipped her drink, a mixture of ethyl alcohol, citric acid and water, with a drop of some ester that approximated the aroma of orange rind.

  “Is she out of danger?”

  “Not for a couple of weeks. Let me explain.” She set down her drink and rested her chin on interlaced fingers. “This sort of injury would be fairly routine under normal circumstances. Having replaced the lost blood, we’d simply sprinkle some magic powder into her abdominal cavity and paste her back up. Have her hobbling around in a couple of days.

  “But there are complications. Nobody’s ever been injured in a pressure suit before. So far, nothing really unusual has cropped up. But we want to monitor her innards very closely for the next few days.

  “Also, we were very concerned about peritonitis. You know what peritonitis is?”

  “Yes.” Well, vaguely.

  “Because a part of her intestine had ruptured under pressure. We didn’t want to settle for normal prophylaxis because a lot of the, uh, contamination had impacted on the peritoneum under pressure. To play it safe, we completely sterilized the whole shebang, the abdominal cavity and her entire digestive system from the duo-denum south. Then, of course, we had to replace all of her normal intestinal flora, now dead, with a commercially prepared culture. Still standard procedure, but not normally called for unless the damage is more severe.”

  “I see.” And it was making me a little queasy. Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.

  “This in itself is enough reason not to see her for a couple of days. The changeover of intestinal flora has a pretty violent effect on the digestive system—not dangerous, since she’s under constant observation. But tiring and, well, embarrassing.

  “With all of this, she would be completely out of danger if this were a normal clinical situation. But we’re decelerating at a constant one-half gees, and her internal organs have gone through a lot of jumbling around. You might as well know that if we do any blasting, anything over about two gees, she’s going to die.”

  “But…but we’re bound to go over two on the final approach! What—”

  “I know, I know. But that won’t be for a couple of weeks. Hopefully, she will have mended by then.

  “William, face it. It’s a miracle she survived to get into surgery. So there’s a big chance she won’t make it back to Earth. It’s sad; she’s a special person, the special person to you, maybe. But we’ve had so much death…you ought to be getting used to it, come to terms with it.”

  I took a long pull at my drink, identical to hers except for the citric acid. “You’re getting pretty hard-boiled.”

  “Maybe…no. Just realistic. I have a feeling we’re headed for a lot more death and sorrow.”

  “Not me. As soon as we get to Stargate, I’m a civilian.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” The old familiar argument. “Those clowns who signed us up for two years can just as easily make it four or—

  ” “Or six or twenty or the duration. But they won’t. It would be mutiny.”

  “I don’t know. If they could condition us to kill on cue, they can condition us to do almost anything. Re-enlist.”

  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 one-half 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 worst 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 up 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 partway.”

  “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 hypnoconditioning 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.