The Forever War Read online

  While the book was being looked at by all those publishers, it was also being serialized piecemeal in Analog magazine. The editor, Ben Bova, was a tremendous help, not only in editing, but also for making the thing exist at all! He gave it a prominent place in the magazine, and it was also his endorsement that brought it to the attention of St. Martin’s Press, who took a chance on the hardcover, though they did not publish adult science fiction at that time.

  But Ben rejected the middle section, a novella called “You Can Never Go Back.” He liked it as a piece of writing, he said, but thought that it was too downbeat for Analog’s audience. So I wrote him a more positive story and put “You Can Never Go Back” into the drawer; eventually Ted White published it in Amazing magazine, as a coda to The Forever War.

  At this late date, I’m not sure why I didn’t reinstate the original middle when the book was accepted. Perhaps I didn’t trust my own taste, or just didn’t want to make life more complicated. But that first book version is essentially the Analog version with “more adult language and situations,” as they say in Hollywood.

  The paperback of that version stayed in print for about sixteen years. Then in 1991 I had the opportunity to reinstate my original version. The dates in the book are now kind of funny; most people realize we didn’t get into an interstellar war in 1996. I originally set it in that year so it was barely possible that the officers and NCOs could be veterans of Vietnam, so we decided to leave it that way, in spite of the obvious anachronisms. Think of it as a parallel universe.

  But maybe it’s the real one, and we’re in a dream.

  Joe Haldeman

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  Introduction by the Author

  I met Thomas Dunne on a dreary winter evening in 1974, at a crowded party in the Algonquin Hotel. That afternoon my agent, Robert P. Mills, had just told me my novel The Forever War was unpublishable. He had shown it to every science fiction editor in town, and they all said it was too controversial.

  The party at the Algonquin was an annual event hosted by the Science Fiction Writers of America, called the Editors/Authors Reception, and it was serious business. It was where you went to wheel and deal. It was also, incidentally, full of people who had rejected a book I thought was timely and important—not to mention taking up more than two years of my life. So I drank a bit before I got there, and when I got there, the wine was free.

  So in fact, the details of my actual meeting with Tom Dunne are a little foggy. I had told Analog editor Ben Bova my tale of woe, and he said, “I have a man you have to meet,” and he steered me to Tom, who was not too plagued by writers because at the time, St. Martin’s didn’t publish adult science fiction. Ben, whose magazine was serializing the novel, pitched it to Tom. Tom’s antiwar sentiment was intrigued, and he did agree to take a look at it.

  He accepted the book with unusual speed, and it was the start of a close and enjoyable literary relationship. Tom was a careful editor and also a hale-fellow-well-met, whenever I managed to get into town from Iowa.

  That hazy night at the Algonquin, though, was a major turning point of my life. If Tom Dunne hadn’t had the courage and acuity to publish that “unpublishable” book, I would probably have gone back to mathematics and wound up drearily teaching. Thanks, Tom.

  Joe Haldeman

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  June 2008

  Introduction by the Publisher

  I first met Joe and his charming wife, Gay, in May of 2011 at the Nebula Weekend hosted by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. Both he and my husband, author Michel J. Sullivan, were participating on a panel entitled, “Old Ways, New Ways.” Michael was just starting his career, having signed with Orbit for The Riyria Revelations, and Joe of course was a legend, a Grand Master that even the moderator, Jack McDevitt, introduced with unmasked awe.

  After the panel, Joe and Gay graciously asked us to join them for lunch. Unfortunately, we already had other plans and I was more than a little disappointed. Luckily for me, I found myself on a couch next to Gay later in the hospitality suite.

  We started chatting about ebooks, and I was mentioning what great success I had been having with both Michael and the science fiction writers that Ridan Publishing represents. Gay astounded me when she mentioned that The Forever War was not in ebook and she only recently learned that the rights where theirs. She told me about her plans to put it out herself and I applauded her initiative. Having done this many times, I knew that something which would be trivial for myself could be very time consuming for someone who had no prior experience. So I offered to produce an ebook format if she sent me an electronic copy of the manuscript. After all, it wouldn’t take me too long and I thought it was imperative that this classic find a wider audience in the new world of ebooks.

  A few weeks went by and I didn’t hear from either Joe or Gay, so I reached out again and asked how getting the raw manuscript was going. They wrote back indicating how they were caring for an ailing friend, and of course they are busy with other things. While I never dreamed they would take me up on the offer, I expressed my desire to put the book out through Ridan Publishing and that way they wouldn’t have to do anything. I was both shocked and delighted when an email returned from Gay stating, “Oh, Robin, what a fine offer! We just talked it over and would like to take you up on it.”

  Having a work of this stature entrusted to Ridan is beyond my wildest imagination. I guess that just shows that you do reap what you sow and karma really does exist. A gesture of generosity has turned into the dream of a lifetime, and I’m thrilled to play a small part in bringing this classic to a whole new world of ebook readers. It is a timeless story as relevant today as when it was first penned over thirty-five years ago. Enjoy.

  Robin Sullivan

  July 2011

  Table of Contents

  Foreword by John Scalzi

  Author’s Note

  Introduction by the Author

  Introduction by the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  About the Author

  PRIVATE MANDELLA

  One

  “Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant.

  I already knew eighty ways to kill people, but 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. We’d learned that they never scheduled anything important for these after-chop classes.

  The projector woke me up and I sat through a short tape showing the “eight silent ways.” Some of the actors must have been brain-wipes, since they were actually killed.

  After the tape 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.

  “S
ir”—we had to call sergeants “sir” until graduation—“most of those methods, really, they looked…kind of silly.”

  “For instance?”

  “Like killing a man with a blow to the kidneys, from an entrenching tool. I mean, when would you actually have only 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 don’t even have kidneys!”

  He shrugged. “Probably they don’t.” This was 1997, and nobody had ever seen a Tauran; hadn’t even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome. “But their body chemistry is similar to ours, and we have to assume they’re similarly complex creatures. They must have weaknesses, vulnerable spots. You have to find out where they are.

  “That’s the important thing.” He stabbed a finger at the screen. “Those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit because you’ve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a megawatt laser or an emery board.”

  She sat back down, not looking too convinced.

  “Any more questions?” Nobody raised a hand.

  “OK. Tench-hut!” We staggered upright and he looked at us expectantly.

  “Fuck you, sir,” came the familiar tired chorus.

  “Louder!”

  “FUCK YOU, SIR!” One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.

  “That’s better. Don’t forget, predawn maneuvers tomorrow. Chop at 03:30, first formation, 04:00. Anybody sacked after 03:40 owes one stripe. Dismissed.”

  I zipped up my coverall and went across the snow to the lounge for a cup of soya and a joint. I’d 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 it’ll 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 company’d 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. Goddammit, right under the heater.

  I slipped through the curtain as quietly as possible so as not to wake up the person next to me. Couldn’t see who it was, but I couldn’t have cared less. I slipped under the blanket.

  “You’re 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.”

  “G’night, Stallion.” She returned the gesture more pointedly.

  Why do you always get the tired ones when you’re ready and the randy ones when you’re tired? I bowed to the inevitable.

  Two

  “Awright, let’s get some goddamn back inta that! Stringer team! Move it up—move your ass 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 wasn’t covered with ice. There were four of us, two at each end, carrying the plastic girder with frozen fingertips. Rogers was my partner.

  “Steel!” the guy behind me yelled, meaning that he was losing his hold. It wasn’t steel, but it was heavy enough to break your foot. Everybody let go and hopped away. It splashed slush and mud all over us.

  “Goddammit, Petrov,” Rogers said, “why didn’t you go out for the Red Cross or something? This fucken thing’s not that fucken heavy.” Most of the girls were a little more circumspect in their speech. Rogers was a little butch.

  “Awright, get a fucken move on, stringers—epoxy team! Dog ’em! Dog ’em!”

  Our two epoxy people ran up, swinging their buckets. “Let’s go, Mandella. I’m freezin’ my balls off.”

  “Me, too,” the girl said with more feeling than logic.

  “One—two—heave!” 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 wouldn’t 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 first (name of Dougelstein, but we called him “Awright”) blew 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 were ordered not 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 wasn’t too bad after the first couple of puffs. Rogers took a puff, just 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 teacher’s certificate.”

  She nodded soberly. “I was in biology…”

  “Figures.” I ducked a handful of slush. “How far?”

  “Six years, bachelor’s 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 fuck did this have to happen?”

  I shrugged. It didn’t 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. Soyashit. It was all just a big experiment. 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.

  There really wasn’t any sense in having us 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 don’t shine—and 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 out it pops in some other part of the galaxy. It didn’t take long to figure out the formula that predicted where it would come out: it travels along the same “line” (actually an Einsteinian geodesic) it would have followed if the collapsar hadn’t been in the way—until it reaches another collapsar field, whereupon it reappears, repelled with the same speed at which it approached the original collapsar. Travel time between the two collapsars…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 had once cost to put a brace of men on the moon. There were a lot of people the politicians would love to see on Fomalhaut
, implementing a glorious adventure rather than 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 limped 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 “Tauran.”

  Colonizing vessels thenceforth went out protected by an armed guard. Often the armed guard went out alone, and finally the 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 elitely conscripted army in the history of warfare.

  So here we were, 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 the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.

  Three

  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. Don’t 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.