Future Wars . . . and Other Punchlines Read online

  Meanwhile, Tom Hawthorne took his plump self off in the single-seater rocket which, up to then, had doubled as a lifeboat.

  The schedule called for him to make a rough three-hour scouting survey in an ever-widening spiral from our dome. This had been regarded as a probable waste of time, rocket fuel, and manpower—but a necessary precaution. He was supposed to watch for such things as bug-eyed monsters out for a stroll on the Lunar landscape. Basically, however, Tom’s survey was intended to supply extra geological and astronomical meat for the report which Monroe was to carry back to Army Headquarters on Earth.

  Tom was back in forty minutes. His round face, inside its transparent bubble helmet, was fish-belly white. And so were ours, once he told us what he’d seen.

  He had seen another dome.

  “The other side of Mare Nubium—in the Riphaen Mountains,” he babbled excitedly. “It’s a little bigger than ours, and it’s a little flatter on top. And it’s not translucent, either, with splotches of different colors here and there—it’s a dull, dark, heavy gray. But that’s all there is to see.”

  “No markings on the dome?” I asked worriedly. “No signs of anyone—or anything—around it?”

  “Neither, Colonel.” I noticed he was calling me by my rank for the first time since the trip started, which meant he was saying in effect, “Man, have you got a decision to make!”

  “Hey, Tom,” Monroe put in. “Couldn’t be just a regularly shaped bump in the ground, could it?”

  “I’m a geologist, Monroe. I can distinguish artificial from natural topography. Besides—” he looked up—“I just remembered something I left out. There’s a brand-new tiny crater near the dome—the kind usually left by a rocket exhaust.”

  “Rocket exhaust?” I seized on that. “Rockets, eh?”

  Tom grinned a little sympathetically. “Spaceship exhaust, I should have said. You can’t tell from the crater what kind of propulsive device these characters are using. It’s not the same kind of crater our rear jets leave, if that helps any.”

  Of course it didn’t. So we went into our ship and had a council of war. And I do mean war. Both Tom and Monroe were calling me Colonel in every other sentence. I used their first names every chance I got.

  Still, no one but me could reach a decision. About what to do, I mean.

  “Look,” I said at last, “here are the possibilities. They know we are here—either from watching us land a couple of hours ago or from observing Tom’s scoutship—or they do not know we are here. They are either humans from Earth—in which case they are in all probability enemy nationals—or they are alien creatures from another planet—in which case they may be friends, enemies or what-have-you. I think common sense and standard military procedure demand that we consider them hostile until we have evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, we proceed with extreme caution, so as not to precipitate an interplanetary war with potentially friendly Martians, or whatever they are.

  “All right. It’s vitally important that Army Headquarters be informed of this immediately. But since Moon-to-Earth radio is still on the drawing boards, the only way we can get through is to send Monroe back with the ship. If we do, we run the risk of having our garrison force, Tom and me, captured while he’s making the return trip. In that case, their side winds up in possession of important information concerning our personnel and equipment, while our side has only the bare knowledge that somebody or something else has a base on the Moon. So our primary need is more information.

  “Therefore, I suggest that I sit in the dome on one end of a telephone hookup with Tom, who will sit in the ship, his hand over the firing button, ready to blast off for Earth the moment he gets the order from me. Monroe will take the single-seater down to the Riphaen Mountains, landing as close to the other dome as he thinks safe. He will then proceed the rest of the way on foot, doing the best scouting job he can in a spacesuit.

  “He will not use his radio, except for agreed-upon nonsense syllables to designate landing the single-seater, coming upon the dome by foot, and warning me to tell Tom to take off. If he’s captured, remembering that the first purpose of a scout is acquiring and transmitting knowledge of the enemy, he will snap his suit radio on full volume and pass on as much data as time and the enemy’s reflexes permit. How does that sound to you?”

  They both nodded. As far as they were concerned, the command decision had been made. But I was sitting under two inches of sweat.

  “One question,” Tom said. “Why did you pick Monroe for the scout?”

  “I was afraid you’d ask that,” I told him. “We’re three extremely non-athletic Ph.D.s who have been in the Army since we finished our schooling. There isn’t too much choice. But I remembered that Monroe is half-Indian—Arapahoe, isn’t it, Monroe?—and I’m hoping blood will tell.”

  “Only trouble, Colonel,” Monroe said slowly as he rose, “is that I’m one-fourth Indian and even that . . . Didn’t I ever tell you that my great-grandfather was the only Arapahoe scout who was with Custer at the Little Big Horn? He’d been positive Sitting Bull was miles away. However, I’ll do my best. And if I heroically don’t come back, would you please persuade the Security Officer of our section to clear my name for use in the history books? Under the circumstances, I think it’s the least he could do.”

  I promised to do my best, of course.

  After he took off, I sat in the dome over the telephone connection to Tom and hated myself for picking Monroe to do the job. But I’d have hated myself just as much for picking Tom. And if anything happened and I had to tell Tom to blast off, I’d probably be sitting here in the dome all by myself after that, waiting . . .

  “Broz neggle!” came over the radio in Monroe’s resonant voice. He had landed the single-seater.

  I didn’t dare use the telephone to chat with Tom in the ship, for fear I might miss an important word or phrase from our scout. So I sat and sat and strained my ears. After a while, I heard “Mishgashu!” which told me that Monroe was in the neighborhood of the other dome and was creeping toward it under cover of whatever boulders were around.

  And then, abruptly, I heard Monroe yell my name and there was a terrific clattering in my headphones. Radio interference! He’d been caught, and whoever had caught him had simultaneously jammed his suit transmitter with a larger transmitter from the alien dome.

  Then there was silence.

  After a while, I told Tom what had happened. He just said, “Poor Monroe.” I had a good idea of what his expression was like.

  “Look, Tom,” I said, “if you take off now, you still won’t have anything important to tell. After capturing Monroe, whatever’s in that other dome will come looking for us, I think. I’ll let them get close enough for us to learn something of their appearance—at least if they’re human or non-human. Any bit of information about them is important. I’ll shout it up to you and you’ll still be able to take off in plenty of time. All right?”

  “You’re the boss, Colonel,” he said in a mournful voice. “Lots of luck.”

  And then there was nothing to do but wait. There was no oxygen system in the dome yet, so I had to squeeze up a sandwich from the food compartment in my suit. I sat there, thinking about the expedition. Nine years, and all that careful secrecy, all that expenditure of money and mind-cracking research—and it had come to this. Waiting to be wiped out, in a blast from some unimaginable weapon. I understood Monroe’s last request. We often felt we were so secret that our immediate superiors didn’t even want us to know what we were working on. Scientists are people—they wish for recognition, too. I was hoping the whole expedition would be written up in the history books, but it looked unpromising.

  Two hours later, the scout ship landed near the dome. The lock opened and, from where I stood in the open door of our dome, I saw Monroe come out and walk toward me.

  I alerted Tom and told him to listen carefully. “It may be a trick—he might be drugged . . . .”

  He didn’t act drugged, though—not exact
ly. He pushed his way past me and sat down on a box to one side of the dome. He put his booted feet up on another, smaller box.

  “How are you, Ben?” he asked. “How’s every little thing?”

  I grunted. “Well?” I know my voice skittered a bit.

  He pretended puzzlement. “Well what? Oh, I see what you mean. The other dome—you want to know who’s in it. You have a right to be curious, Ben. Certainly. The leader of a top-secret expedition like this—Project Hush they call us, huh, Ben—finds another dome on the Moon. He thinks he’s been the first to land on it, so naturally he wants to—”

  “Major Monroe Gridley!” I rapped out. “You will come to attention and deliver your report. Now!” Honestly, I felt my neck swelling up inside my helmet.

  Monroe just leaned back against the side of the dome. “That’s the Army way of doing things,” he commented admiringly. “Like the recruits say, there’s a right way, a wrong way and an Army way. Only there are other ways, too.” He chuckled. “Lots of other ways.”

  “He’s off,” I heard Tom whisper over the telephone. “Ben, Monroe has gone and blown his stack.”

  “They aren’t extraterrestrials in the other dome, Ben,” Monroe volunteered in a sudden burst of sanity. “No, they’re human, all right, and from Earth. Guess where.”

  “I’ll kill you,” I warned him. “I swear I’ll kill you, Monroe. Where are they from—Russia, China, Argentina?”

  He grimaced. “What’s so secret about those places? Go on—guess again.”

  I stared at him long and hard. “The only place else—”

  “Sure,” he said. “You got it, Colonel. The other dome is owned and operated by the Navy. The goddam United States Navy!”

  THE DAY THEY GOT BOSTON

  by Herbert Gold

  Here’s a sparkling and witty account of an accidental nuclear exchange. Of course, Fail-Safe used the same idea, though seriously, and Dr. Strangelove also played it for laughs, but Herbert Gold was there first, poking fun at the age of Mutual Assured Destruction. (Before someone points out that Peter Bryan George’s 1958 novel, Red Alert, was the basis for Dr. Strangelove, I’ll mention that Red Alert was another deadly serious treatment of the idea, and the resultant Kubrick flick bears scant resemblance to it.)

  Herbert Gold was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924, and moved to New York when he was 17. At Columbia University, he studied philosophy and was a friend of several Beat Generation writers, such as Allen Ginsberg and Anais Nin. On a Fulbright fellowship, he did graduate studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. While there, he wrote his first novel, Birth of a Hero, which was published in 1951. He has written more than thirty books and received the Sherwood Anderson Award for Fiction, the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal, and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. His latest novel is When a Psychopath Falls in Love. He has taught at the University of California at Berkley, at Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. He lives in San Francisco. And, if I may insert a clarification, he is not H. L. Gold (whose “H” stood for Horace), the celebrated editor of Galaxy magazine in the 1950s.

  Even before the missile struck, their leader went on the air to apologize.

  “First,” he said, “have you heard the story about the constipated Eskimo with the ICBM? But let’s be serious a moment. It isn’t our fault! One of our lieutenants got drunk, and the rubber band holding a bunch of punch cards broke, and the card stamped boston fell into place—a combination of human and mechanical factors, friends. . . .”

  (It landed with sweet accuracy in a patch of begonias in the Commons. The entire city was decimated and the sea rushed through to take its place. Cambridge and Harvard University also lay under atomic waste and the tidal wave.)

  “we’re sorry!” sobbed their leader. “Truly, sincerely sorry. The lieutenant has been sent to Siberia. His entire family, under the progressive Anti-Fascist Soviet penal reform policy, has joined him for rehabilitation therapy in the salt mines. All the rubber bands in the entire Anti-Fascist Workers for Peace and Democracy Missile Control Network are being screened for loyalty. I feel terribly humble and sincere this evening. It’s the triumph of brute accident over Man’s will, which aft gang agley, as our poet Mayakovsky once put it. We’re sorry, friends across the mighty sea! Nothing like this must ever happen again.”

  Our reprisal system had not gone into action at once for two reasons: (a) A first wild rumor that Cuba had at last declared war on us, and, (b) Man, we just, like, hesitated. (Who can tell if those blips on the radar screen really mean anything? I mean, like, you make a mistake and POW, I mean . . . And then the hometown newspaper really gets after you.) This fear of the hometown paper, this hesitation may have saved the universe from an immediate holocaust. Castro made no promises, but said that his barbados were ready and waiting in front of their teevees.

  The U.S. of A. lay in a state of shock. A powerful faction of skilled psychiatric observers argued that this instance of national catatonic neurosis was justified more by external event than by internal oedipal conflict. Many people had close relatives in Boston—not everybody, but enough to justify the virus of gloom which seemed to be making the rounds. The American League would have to replace a team just as the season began. The roads from New York to Maine were in bad shape.

  Their Leader shrieked, “Don’t retaliate, my friends. My dear friends. Don’t Retaliate. We will send reparations, delegations of workers, peasants, and intellectuals, petitions of condolence; the Kharkov soccer team will play out the Red Sox schedule. But don’t retaliate, or we will be led to destroy each other utterly, dialectically! It was a mistake! Could happen to anyone! His pals gave a little birthday party for this here lieutenant, see, you know how it is, they drank it up a little, and then these rubber bands tend to become crispy with age . . .”

  Harvard gone. Boston beans homeless. A churning hole in American history.

  The mayor of Boston, Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, sent a telegram to the mayor of Boston, Tennessee:

  EXTEND HEARTFELT REGRETS AND SYMPATHY TO THE PEACE-LOVING WORKERS OF THE UNITED STATES ON OCCASION OF TRAGIC DISAPPEARANCE OF ONE OF ITS OLDEST CITIES. AS AMERICAN POET W. WHITMAN SAID, “BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP LET NOTHING YOU DISMAY.” AZONOVITCH, MAYOR, NOW LARGEST BOSTON IN WORLD.

  By a miracle, both Radcliffe and Wellesley were spared. However, there were no men for the coming Spring Weekend. By another miracle, due to the influence of radioactive—er—the scientists had been attending a conference at Boston University—the Radcliffe students were now physically entitled to console the Wellesley girls in their deep mourning at Spring Weekend.

  “A miracle!” cried Norman Vincent Peale, joining with their Leader in an appeal to forgive and forget. “We are being tested from on high. What happened at Radcliffe on that turbulent occasion is proof positive that there is a power in the universe making for righteousness, and also for intergroup balance with special reference to sexual harmony.”

  “do not retaliate,” cried out their Leader, and he was joined in this appeal by their foremost ballet dancers, film directors, and violinists. They also made proud reference to their other rubber bands, punched cards, and lieutenants with a bead on New York, Washington, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Denver, Los Angeles, and every American city down to the size of Rifle City, Colorado. “If you retaliate, we are all doomed to become epiphenomena floating in a Marxist-Leninist Anti-Fascist Outer Space.” (Were they threatening us again?)

  Senator Morris Russell, D., of Colorado, was one of the first to recover his senses. “Of course it was an accident,” he said. “Lieutenants will be lieutenants and accidents will happen, ha ha. But we can’t allow this sort of accident. How will it look in the eyes of the rest of the world? Those yellow hordes to the East are very conscious of Face, y’know. America has lost enough face already, what with the corruption in television quiz shows and the disorganization of our youth in those coffee-drinking espresso parlors. We must strike a blow for peace by wiping out Moscow!”

  we
couldn’t agree more, with our boy morrie, declared a banner held up by all the residents of Rifle City, Colorado. It happened that none of them had relatives in Boston and so they could speak uncorrupted by grief or other private interest. Their sheriff had divested himself of his stock in the Boston & Maine Railroad. Their rage and sense of national dignity was expressed with typical, folkloristic Western dignity. They called each other “Slim” and “Buster” at meetings, sang Yippee-Yi-yo-cow-yay, and urged immediate decimation of the entire European continent. (They were a little weak on geography and wanted to make sure that the Roosians got theirs.)

  Our Side hesitated.

  Their Side went on the air with round-the-clock telethons. Mothers in Dnieprpotrovsk sent quilts with quaint illustrations from Baba-Yaga and other classical Russian tales to the few survivors in Waltham and Weldon. The Chief of Staff of their anti-fascist atomic service announced that he was going into a retreat on the Caucasus for two weeks of contemplation. A publicity release from their Embassy in Washington announced that his favorite hobbies were Reading, Tennis, and the Beat Generation, in that order, and that his wife, who was retreating with him, liked American musicals and collected Capezio shoes. One of their composers was preparing a memorial symphony, entitled, “The Lowells Speak Only to God”; one of their critics was already preparing his attack on the symphony as formalistic, abstract, and unrooted in Russian folk themes.

  We waited. Their Leader wept openly, live on tape, and the tape was broadcast every hour.

  The clamor for revenge and forgiveness, forgiveness and revenge, wracked the nation, indeed, the entire world. The citizens of Avignon, France, sent an elementary geography textbook as a civic contribution to the public library of Rifle City, Colorado.