Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (42 page)

"Those weren't bomb-drops," he said. "They were fighter-drops. Fighter-bombers, probably. They'll be here next."

His words were prophetic. They were—

The GS patrol had flown into day, through it, and back into night again, on a course that roughly quartered the globe, by the time the last drop was made. Task Leader and Red Stripe Three pulled up to orbital altitude together and cut power. Polka Dot Leader had already made her pickup and the others were dropping down to do the same, but it would be some time before Red Stripe's parasites completed their missions.

Reports were coming in regularly, it was already obvious that the strike would be completely successful, and the task commander was in a jovial mood. There were losses, of course, even with a ten-to-one superiority in speed and an astronomical edge in armament a planet-wide action against an alert and savagely resistant foe cannot be fought without losses, but they were well within the calculated margin the commander had sent back to base in his preliminary estimate. He had done a good, workmanlike job, and he knew it. Adequate recognition would come at base, but in the meantime he wanted to explain just how good a job it was, and he could not very well do this to military personnel; they were all below him in rank so he sought out the civilian observer from the Department of Minorities and Backward Peoples.

"How do you like it?" he asked. "Good, fast, clean job, don't you think? All we have to do now is pick up our chicks, seed the inhibitor, and get out."

The Department man was somewhat dazed, he had never ever seen anything quite like this before. "Well, yes, I suppose so," he said. "How many casualties do you think there will be?"

The task commander pulled at his lip, mentally extrapolating the reported losses. "Not more than twenty," he said, confidently, "just over one per centVery cheap, really, for a planetary action of this scope."

"No, no," the Department man said impatiently. "I know our own losses are light. The others, I mean, the Terrestrials, how many of those do you think we're killing?"

"Well, I hadn't really tried to guess." the task commander said uneasily. He had not thought of the natives before as people, he was familiar with them, of course, from the years of observation and his briefing; but he had been thinking only in terms of installations to be destroyed.

"I suppose they'll run rather high," he said. "We've tried to avoid nonstrategic targets, but you can't rip the heart out of a heavily militarized planet without killing people. Yes, I suppose their casualties
will
be heavy."

He scratched thoughtfully at his nose. "Um-m-m . . . military crews . . . civilian personnel . . . we're pinpointing our strikes, you understand, but population is so
dense
in some areas, we can't confine fission products, vapors, dusts, and I don't suppose they are at all well protected . . . let's say three or four million, in all."

The Department man stared at him. "Three or four million? Do you suppose the Council knew that when they authorized this raid?"

"Of course they did," the task commander said impatiently. "You have to remember this planet is already heavily overpopulated, well over two billion, it's really bursting at the seams, these people breed like flies. Actually, four million is only two tenths of a per cent, or less, of the total population. A minor famine or epidemic could take that many, the next atomic war could have taken ten or twenty percent, if we hadn't pulled their teeth.

"It's bad, I'll grant you that," he added hastily, seeing the look on the Department man's face. "Even tragic. But you have to look at things like this rationally, from the long view. These people have to be controlled for their own good, we can't let them just run loose to slaughter each other and perhaps even destroy the planet.

"With the advanced weapons they had, they were like idiot children playing with machine guns."

The Pentagon was not, in the raiders' operations, a military target. In the midst of disaster and confusion, Intelligence and Communications still functioned, if not smoothly, at least adequately. The basic picture of the raid and its effect began to shape up almost before the last raider had slid up through the atmosphere to join the formation orbiting effortlessly above.

First, there was no longer in any part of the world, so far as careful reconnaissance could determine, any store of fissionable material nor any plant for processing such material. Where these had been were now boiling pits of liquid magma, with the air above and about lethally charged with radioactive debris. Either the raiders had perfect intelligence, or they had instruments able to sniff out the stuff with uncanny precision, in either event they had got them all.

Second, most of the nuclear technicians—and this included the best technical and scientific brains in the world—had gone with their works.

Third, the raiders were extraterrestrial. They had not spared any major nation, and they were too well-armed and well-organized, they did not fit in any Earthly technology.

Whence they had come, and whither gone, no one could say with assurance, but their purpose was clear—to see that men did not again use nuclear energy for either war or peace.

Forty-eight hours later, as the inhibitor settled down from the stratosphere, a secondary interdict became manifest. Men would also no longer use chemical explosives. Above a pressure of two hundred psi, chemical reactions were self-damping. Hydroelectric and steam plants functioned normally, low-compression engines and jets idled without power; but guns fizzled damply and high-compression engines stalled. A ceiling had been put on the compact power available to man.

Attempts were made at censorship, the enormity of the raid's implications were so obvious that the most stringent measures were indicated. Presses and editions were impounded, reporters locked up and even shot, a straight embargo on all nonmilitary long-distance communications was clamped down, security officers sprouted new ulcers and went sleepless. But it was too big, too sudden and unexpected, too spectacular. Even after years of indoctrination and screening and stringent regulation, there were too many poor security risks in the services, too many leaks, too many people who simply refused to understand the necessity for keeping their mouths and minds and eyes and ears closed in matters of military significance. And in every community there were the loud-mouths and wise-acres who could draw and spread conclusions from the fact that Oak Ridge and Brookhaven and Hanford and Los Alamos were hit, that their automobiles no longer ran, that guns would not shoot.

The news got out.

Men of good will had been talking disarmament for years. Now they had it, a free gift from heaven, somewhat roughly delivered but none the less effective.

After the first shock, thoughtful men everywhere began to consider what it might mean—

"It means," Paul Bonner said, "rescue at the eleventh hour, the Marines have landed, the courier has ridden up with the reprieve." He sipped appreciatively at his second preprandial martini. "These are very good, dear."

His wife, curled at his feet before the fireplace, nodded complacently.

"It means," he continued, "men can relax and live again. Here we were, sitting on a powder magazine, the few sane ones among us at the mercy of the brainless yuts giving each other hotfeet, and now suddenly some watchful intelligence, like a careful parent, has snatched the matches away."

"I'm going to miss our car," his wife sighed.

"I shan't," Bonner said positively. "There were too many cars, too many airplanes, too much speed. Man's machines evolved faster than he. We weren't built to cover miles in split minutes. Now we can slow down and catch up, consolidate our gains, live at a more natural pace, take time to think and really live. I say, it's a cheap price to pay."

And:

"The fact of disarmament itself," Professor Salton wrote in his diary, "is of secondary significance, and must have been adjudged so by the raiders themselves. Had they been chiefly intent on demilitarizing the planet, they would not logically have confined themselves to the targets they chose. The logic of complete demilitarization would have included the dispersal of armies in the field and the destruction of all heavy industry which might contribute to the manufacture of munitions other than chemical and nuclear explosives. It is significant that stores of poison gas and biological warfare centers were not attacked.

"The inference can therefore be drawn that the raiders were socially sophisticated enough, and sufficiently well informed, to recognize the deep imbalance in our culture between the physical and social sciences.

"Their primary concern was to right this imbalance."

The professor turned a page and sat for a moment with poised pen, seeing not the blank sheet before him, but the panorama of western history, developing in tracings of ever more complex scope from the first few crabbed scribblings of the Sumerians.

"The focus of the main stream of human thought and inquiry," he wrote, "proceeds across the broad canvas of the plenum not in a steady progression, but in complicated pendulumlike sweeps from extreme to extreme—Hegelian thesis and antithesis, except that the final result is never a simple balancing, the synthesis results rather from the shading in of all areas between the opposite poles of thought until the distinction is lost and it all becomes one. This pendulum has multidimensional articulation, so that the trace is never a simple linear function, it never covers exactly the same area twice. Its movement is a complex function of all the things men have known or thought about since the beginning of time.

"The European Renaissance came as a reaction to the sterile perfectionism of Augustinian idealism. Because its impetus derived from an extreme of preoccupation with human behavior and morals, it not only swung wildly to the opposite extreme of rigidly objective experimentalism, but it spent its major force in the field of physical science. This was no accident, it was an inevitable outgrowth of the spirit of the times and the antecedents of our culture.

"We have now worked around the periphery of physical knowledge till we have again reached the pole of intuitive rationalism, where the universe melts into a confusing amorphism only scholars can feel at home in. Men of inquiring and independent minds must inevitably recoil into a simpler atmosphere where sight and touch again have meaning.

"The next swing should have directed us back to a concern with human motivation and activity.

"There were several indications that this trend was indeed developing.

"Men were wondering seriously why they thought like men, in a world engineered for the comfort of their animal bodies; as five hundred years earlier they had wondered why men had bodies, if only the soul were important. The development of the physical sciences had subtly loosened the hold of superstition on the minds of men, so that if they were unwilling to follow, they at least tolerated, students who classified the cherished opinions of themselves and others as phenomena in the physical universe, and called all the physical universe a valid field for objective inquiry. Scattered engineers and clinicians here and there were beginning to establish functional relations between pride and pay scales, human fellowship and production records, social status and sexual mores. The alchemistic mind-doctors were seeking the philosopher's stone which would transmute the dross of our individual foibles into shining gold—but stumbling here and there on factual discoveries scientists might later turn to good account. Perhaps Korzybski had written the 'Novum Organum' of a new Renaissance. And the germs of new mathematics that could handle the manifold variables were sprouting. The time was ready for a Newton.

"But it came too late. It needed fifty or a hundred years to get its growth, and with the helium bomb the world no longer had that time left.

"So the Raiders came. In effect, they moved the clock of our conquest of the physical world back a hundred years. Before they came, we had passed the peak of the gasoline age and were moving into the atomic age. When they left, we were back in the age of steam.

"Undoubtedly, in the years to come, men will again discover energy sources as powerful as those they lost, but it will take time, perhaps not as long as the original hundred years, but still a breathing spell. And in that time the science of human behavior will have its chance. By the time we are ready to fly to the stars again, or have the power to blast whole armies out of existence, we will have means of controlling ourselves so that this power is used with cunning foresight for the good of man, rather than suicidal, like an idiot child playing with a machine gun.

"This is the best thing that could have happened to men."

And:

A writer who had dedicated the best years of his life to a crusade against the pointless stupidities and petty unthinking cruelties of his fellowmen, at two bits a word, was putting the finishing touches on a rush article.

"Pride," he wrote, "goeth before a fall—and men who thought they had tamed all nature, and were looking for new worlds to loot in the stars, have suddenly learned they have a master. The simple-minded barbarians who strutted valorously with the power of thousands of horses at their command have seen their most prized works crumble like sand castles before the tide.

"It was a lesson men sorely needed, the simple lesson of humility.

"In my own mind, for the first time since Hiroshima, is peace and good will and comfortable assurance that me and mine will live out our normal span in a world of men chastened and rendered less cocksure by this experience.

"I say, God bless the raiders—"

There were, of course, some who were not quite so sure—

On a hillside in Asia some two months after the raiders had come, Sergeant Albert Baker sat in the bright summer sun watching through glasses the mouth of a low pass. A cloud of dust rose there which came quickly down into the valley. Sparkles of light from burnished lance-tips flashed from the cloud. A Mongol swordsman with horsetails tied to his cap cantered out ahead and reined up to look around.