Authors choice v1 0, p.23
Authors Choice (v1.0), page 23
Even as they began their jockeying of death, roaring about the sky in great screaming of agonized machinery, great roaring of rockets and jets, he realized that the other must have spotted Alex’s beetle toward the end of a patrol, and comparatively was physically exhausted.
Only that would account for die fact that the foe’s reactions were obviously slow. Ordinarily, a buzz-fighter gave as much as he took. Indeed, it had some advantages over the tiny beetle. For one thing, it mounted a heavier firepower, a greater supply of bolts. The beetle’s sole armament were the two mini-rockets, nuclear charged and capable of blasting a fairly good-sized town. Alex didn’t know how many bolts the buzz-fighter boasted, but he knew it was considerably more than two.
He dropped sharply in a feint, came up roaring from below.
He had blisters of cold sweat on his forehead, could feel his shirt sticking to his back. He inevitably perspired in action. Safe, hundreds of thousands of miles away from the combat he might be, but in action you largely forgot that. Not completely though. At least in your subconscious you knew you were untouchable. But how about that enemy pilot? If his craft took a bolt, then all was over. At most, Alex would get a reprimand for being inept.
For the briefest of split seconds, the buzz-fighter was in his sighter screen, past the cross-hairs, but in it. He slashed his fist out at the trigger button and his screen blurred momentarily as the beetle’s weight dropped suddenly with the release of the mini-rocket.
Then there was glare!
A near hit? Had the missile’s sensors caught enough of the enemy’s heat to detonate?
Or was it another fluke blast? The mini-rockets Armament was turning out these days weren’t up to the original standards. Which wasn’t surprising in view of the improvising they had to do, what with limited materials.
He came around in a roar—a roar tens upon tens of thousands of miles from his ear—and banged the screens to increased magnification.
And stared.
He had never seen before a buzz-fighter merely crippled. On all other occasions when he had come against the enemy fighters, they had flared up like magnesium upon being hit. Flared up from the atomic attack in such wise that there could be no question of survival on the part of the Comic pilot.
But now this one was fluttering to earth, like a wounded airborne bird.
He kicked controls around and headed for it He had a double problem. He had exactly one mini-rocket left and couldn’t waste it. The enemy pilot must be destroyed beyond any doubt. There were a limited number of Comic pilots left, and each one departed hastened the day when the war could be considered over and the general’s oft-proclaimed return to earth became a reality.
But there was also the chance that the enemy was still in condition to mount a counterattack on his diminutive enemy. Alex had no way of knowing whether or not the other was still conscious, but he must assume that he was. The buzz-fighter had caught only the edge of the mini-rocket blast and had evidently had delicate equipment so smashed that it was no longer fully operative.
He came in with care. Since the brief battle had been fought in the same area he had patrolled the day before, the buzz-fighter managed to sink to a landing in the meadow in which Alex had spotted the cow the previous day.
He banked around quickly, and dropped the beetle’s speed. Perhaps the other was dead. In which case, the thing was to make every effort to get a full-size combat unit down here with a freighter-craft and try to capture the buzz-fighter intact, before the lads on the super-Sputnik caught on and fired a real flattener to blast this whole section of the Balkans. The technicians and scientists there at moon-base had never had the opportunity to take apart a buzz-fighter. Given such a chance, it might lead to some discovery that would make a decisive difference in the prosecuting of the war.
But no. Even as he maneuvered his diminutive fighter into the clearing, a figure broke from the side of the enemy craft and dashed for the woods. At the same split second, the buzz-fighter began to glow in heat, and rapidly crumbled into a mass of flaming nothingness.
The Comic had sabotaged his craft. Alex swore, but his obscenities broke off in the middle.
The other was garbed in shorts and halter, and blond hair was streaming behind even as she ran for what little protection the trees might offer.
Meaninglessly, as he darted his beetle after her, the thought came to his mind, was the briefness of clothing due to heat in the buzz-fighter or was it a matter of saving weight?
There was something strangely familiar in her desperate flight, and then it came to him. She ran as Anna ran. As Anna had once run. Her figure, too, was Anna’s. Youthful, firm, but all rounded woman. This enemy pilot could be no more than in her mid-twenties.
He had heard that the Comics used women as well as men in the war in space and air, but he had secretly thought it propaganda, as he thought most of the atrocity stories. Evidently, it was true enough. Comic manpower was evidently as short as his own side’s.
She was nearly to the edge of the clearing, running desperately hard.
She must have known, as he so well knew, that her flight was meaningless. A bolt from his beetle would blast everything in an area the diameter of a mile, reducing it to nothing. But life is so much to be lived, even the last ultimate minute.
Suddenly he pulled back the control stick and, pointing the beetle skyward, hit at the same moment both the remaining mini-rocket trigger and the speed lever. The bolt went arching off into the depths of space, and the beetle headed home.
He threw it into automatic and came to his feet, rubbing the back of his neck as hard as he could press fingers into the flesh.
He went out into the corridor and headed toward the exec’s office. Nick was on the desk, as he had been the day before.
Nick looked up. “Thought you were on patrol over the Balkans.”
“I was. I fired both my bolts. I’ve got the beetle on automatic coming in for fresh mini-rockets.”
Nick looked at him. “Two bolts to finish off a cow?”
“A buzz-fighter jumped me, while I was going in to blast the animal. I managed to hit it.”
Nick was immediately doubly alert. “Wonderful!” He reached for a report pad. “Absolutely sure of destruction?”
“Yes,” Alex said. “It burnt to a crisp.”
“Wonderful!” Nick crowed, writing rapidly. “You’ll get another citation.”
Alex said wearily, “I feel pooped, I think I’ll take a nap.”
Before he turned to leave, Alex said slowly, “Nick, why do we call them Comics?”
“Eh?” The other continued writing the report.
“The enemy, over in that super-Sputnik of theirs, the artificial satellite.”
Nick thought about it, finally shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I suppose it’s derived from the fact that in the old days we used to ridicule them by saying their young people, their students, spent more time reading cartoon books, comic books, you know, than they did studying the sciences.”
“Oh,” Alex mused. “I wonder what they call us.”
Nick said stiffly, “I would hardly know, but probably something unworthy of our admitted idealistic goals.”
Alex made his way to his quarters and slumped down on his bed. His face worked as he stared up at the ceiling. Somehow, he thought that she would survive. The cow was there.
Lieutenant Alex Moiseyevich Menzhinsky knew he was a traitor. The thing was—she ran so very much like Anna had run, back when there was an Anna, back when they’d both been youngsters on the collective.
Comment on Retaliation
Almost a quarter of a century ago, I was standing watch on the bridge of an Army transport in the South Pacific. The radio man—and even now I can recall the strange look on his face—brought a news item. Hiroshima had just been vaporized by what the brief item named an atomic bomb.
It had been a-building a long time, but I think that it was then, as I leaned on the ship’s rail and stared off in the general direction of Japan, that I stopped primarily being an American, a citizen of the United States, and became first a member of the human race.
You know. A bleeding heart. A do-gooder. Synonymous with crackpot.
We have various other snide terms to denote he who believes that the present socio-economic systems that prevail in the world are antiquated and need radical change. That war is a monstrosity that can and must be ended if the race is to continue. That poverty is an anachronism that could be quite easily eliminated on a worldwide basis.
However, I like to believe that it was not my emotions that led me to take my stand. Throughout my adult life my pursuits have been in political economy, history, anthropology; the social sciences, rather than the physical ones, in which I can largely at sea.
Following the war, I spent more than fifteen years making my way about the world doing travel articles for the men’s magazines, touching on some sixty countries. These embraced a wide range of politico-economic systems. Fascist countries, such as Spain and Portugal; monarchies, such as the Arab states; Communist dictatorships, including all the European ones, save only Albania; offbeat experiments, such as Israel; pseudo-socialism, such as that of Scandinavia; various levels of capitalism, from more or less classic Switzerland to the state capitalism of the United States and Great Britain; not to speak of the chaotic mishmashes to be found in the newly liberated colonies.
Through that period, from time to time I found myself in the midst of this military revolt, that minor war, the other attempted revolution.
And emerged from it all strong in the belief that man has evolved to the point where he can no longer think in terms of being an American, an Englishman, a Russian, a Chinese, a Bolivian…
No longer can he afford the skip of heart when “Old Glory” is paraded down the street, a tear in the eye when the band plays “God Save the Queen,” a patriotic stirring when the soldiers goose-step past to “Deutschland Uber Alles”
In the near future, the race, in my belief, will evolve a new socio-economic system that will eliminate national boundaries, wars, poverty and class-divided society—including the “New Class” of the Communist bureaucracies. We will do this, or we will die.
Do you wish a blueprint of the new society for which I propagandize?
I do not have one.
My purpose, in the science fiction I write, is to stimulate imagination so that many minds will perhaps be directed toward the problem. It is astonishing how few persons consider the possibility that the socio-economic system under which they live might be changed, and even for the better. So much are we conservative creatures of habit that to tell, say, a Moroccan, an American or a Russian that his lot might be improved if feudalism, capitalism or Communism, as the case may be, were overthrown and a new socio-economic system established, would be to tell him what he knows is nonsense. His belief that his socioeconomic system is the best possible is as ingrained as is his religion.
Of course, when it applies to the other fellow, it is easier to comprehend. Obvious indeed, that the Russians should overthrow their dictatorial bureaucracy—to the American. And obvious that capitalism should be abolished in America—to a Russian. And both can see that the Moroccan isn’t going to get anywhere until he revolts against that sultan-king and his parasitical feudalistic family.
So my stories are devoted almost exclusively to extrapolation in the field of the social science. Delving into what might happen if anarchism, technocracy, syndicalism, Communism in all its varieties, or socialism in its range from the pink or garden variety of England’s Labor Party to the Marxian socialism of Americans DeLeonists, were ever to be established.
Somewhere in here, a reader is saying, “This is fine, Reynolds using capitalism and Communism interchangeably as examples of social systems calling for overthrow. But he’s lucky he’s living in a country where he is free to write what he believes. Suppose he was a Russian?”
Actually, I wish that was more true than it is. That freedom to write what one believes.
In truth, the Russian author, too, can write what he will. But since the publishing houses are state-owned, it is unlikely that it will be printed if his beliefs do not conform. And he may even be harassed by the government.
In the West, the writer can write what he wishes, but he, also largely, might as well tear it up afterward if it doesn’t conform. Because the publishing houses are privately owned and print that which the owners want to print, nothing more. And the offbeat writer may even be harassed by such as MacCarthy, the Un-American Activities Committee, the John Birch Society, the F.B.I. I have a writer friend who is forbidden a passport because he fought in Spain; a lifelong anti-Communist, he leans toward syndicalism.
Even in science fiction we are not so free as many think.
A few years ago, I wrote a humor story entitled “Russkies Go Home!” which involved a future in which the Soviets had achieved their goals and were so affluent that they had become the objectionable tourists of the future. As individuals, the Russians were portrayed as the friendly, compatible people 1 have ever found them in my Russian travels.
Science fiction editor Horace Gold decided to buy the story and asked that it be expanded, a request pro writers paid on a word basis love to receive. However, by the time the yarn was lengthened, the U-2 affair, or some such, had developed and Horace, though professing still to like the story, wrote that it had become “a casualty of the Cold War.” In this case, the story was accepted elsewhere.
It is not a lone example; many of my things have been rejected as “too controversial.”
But science fiction still is the most nearly free of all fiction fields and ideas such as those in “Retaliation” can still be expressed.
Indeed, it has been to my astonishment that so few of the writers in our genre have extrapolated in the field of evolution of society. A storyteller of the ability of Isaac Asimov will spin his yarns of the Foundation, set a few thousand years hence. And what socio-economic system has evolved by then? Something new? Certainly not! They haven’t even got capitalism. They’ve gone back to feudalism. The same applies to the Weapons Shops series of van Vogt. The worlds of tomorrow have progressed in most satisfying fashion in every science, save the social sciences. Wars are still being fought, now on a galaxy-wide basis, whole star systems going up into cinders; feudalistic barons swagger about toting atomic swords; the poor are still with us, evidently man, despite his progress, having not been able to achieve to the point of adequately feeding, clothing and sheltering himself.
Really, gentlemen!
It is understandable that our Russian colleagues dare not try to envison a world of the future in which what they call Communism has been superseded by a superior system. At best, they wouldn’t be published, at worst they’d be clobbered.
But in spite of what I have said above in regard to conforming editors, we in the West do not labor under their handicap. We are free to picture a tomorrow which has risen above our dog-eat-dog society. A tomorrow that no longer knows war, exploitation of man by man, corrupt politicians, the ulcer-breeding rat race for false status, and the multitude of other evils that are our present socioeconomic system.
We are on our mettle! Why cannot we be the vanguard in the social sciences as well as the physical ones? Cartmill foresaw nuclear weapons, Clarke the communications satellite; there are a hundred other examples from the days of Verne and Wells to the present. Why do we hesitate to deal with extrapolation in socio-economics, or, when we do, cry disaster?
Mack Reynolds
Unknown Author, Authors Choice (v1.0)
