“It was a form of personal combat,” said Ian. “And personal combat is my business. You assumed that Kenebuck was strongly entrenched, facing my attack. But it was the other way around.”
“But you had to come to him—”
“I had to appear to come to him,” said Ian, almost coldly. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have believed that he had to kill me—before I killed him. By his decision to kill me, he put himself in the attacking position.”
“But he had all the advantages!” said Tyburn, his head whirling. “You had to fight on his ground, here where he was strong . . .”
“No,” said Ian. “You’re confusing the attack position with the defensive one. By coming here, I put Kenebuck in the position of finding out whether I actually had the birthday card, and the knowledge of why Brian had gone against orders into enemy territory that night. Kenebuck planned to have his men in the foyer shake me down for the card— but they lost their nerve.”
“I remember,” murmured Tyburn.
“Then, when I handed him the package, he was sure the card was in it. But it wasn’t,” went on Ian. “He saw his only choice was to give me a situation where I might feel it was safe to admit having the card and the knowledge. He had to know about that, because Brian had called his bluff by going out and risking his neck after getting the card. The fact Brian was tried and executed later made no difference to Kenebuck. That was a matter of law—something apart from hoodlum guts, or lack of guts. If no one knew that Brian was braver than his older brother, that was all right; but if I knew, he could only save face under his own standards by killing me.”
“He almost did,” said Tyburn. “Any one of those slugs—”
“There was the medical mech,” said Ian, calmly. “A man like Kenebuck would be bound to have something like that around to play safe—just as he would be bound to set an amateur’s trap.” The boarding horn of the spaceliner sounded. Ian picked up his luggage bag. “Good-by,” he said, offering his hand to Tyburn.
“Good-by ...” he muttered. “So you were just going along with Kenebuck’s trap, all of it. I can’t believe it . . .” He released Ian’s hand and watched as the big man swung around and took the first two strides away toward the bulk of the ship shining in the winter sunlight. Then, suddenly, the numbness broke clear from Tyburn’s mind. He ran after Ian and caught at his arm. Ian stopped and swung half-around, frowning slightly.
“I can’t believe it!” cried Tyburn. “You mean you went up there, knowing Kenebuck was going to pump you full of slugs and maybe kill you—all just to square things for thirty-two enlisted soldiers under the command of a man you didn’t even like? I don’t believe it—you can’t be that cold-blooded! I don’t care how much of a man of the military you are!”
Ian looked down at him. And it seemed to Tyburn that the Dorsai face had gone away from him, somehow become as remote and stony as a face carved high up on some icy mountain’s top.
“But I’m not just a man of the military,” Ian said. “That was the mistake Kenebuck made, too. That was why he thought that stripped of military elements, I’d be easy to kill.”
Tyburn, looking at him, felt a chill run down his spine as icy as wind off a glacier.
“Then, in heaven’s name,” cried Tyburn. “What are you?”
Ian looked from his far distance down into Tyburn’s eyes and the sadness rang as clear in his voice finally, as iron-shod heels on barren rock.
“I am a man of war,” said Ian, softly. . With that, he turned and went on; and Tyburn saw him black against the winter-bright sky, looming over all the other departing passengers, on his way to board the spaceship.
Wars, and rumors of wars . . .
Not since the 1948-1950 period of intense activity by the World Federalists and the Association of Atomic Scientists has there been so much concentration on war themes in speculative writing. But there is a difference.
The pre-Korean stories were, by and large, prophetic warnings: end-of-the-world, or atomic-mutation, or back-to-barbarism themes. There are still elements of this, but the emphasis has shifted in a way both hopeful and dismaying.
Dismaying, because the crusaders are no longer with us: None of these writers seems to be working out of any belief that the war-situation (“dirty little wars” and “police actions”; perpetual disarmament conferences; missile-gap measurements; hot-lines and panic-buttons; coalitions and realignments; threats and retaliations) will get better before it gets worse.
Hopeful, because (with the loss of the bright-lining thought that the too terrible weapon had actually been discovered) the approach is now more analytical than agit-prop, more sociological than polemic; concerned with the motives and mores of war, and with the psychological and cultural causes and effects. Why do we do this thing? And what does it do to us?
Gordon Dickson initiated an extensive exploration of the military culture and the psychology of the fighting man with his explosive novel Dorsail in 1959. Since then, he and others have worked the same basic material in a number of interesting ways—but none, to my taste, so effectively or excitingly as the Dorsai series. (A new novel. Soldier, Ask Not, will be published shortly by Delacorte.)
Within the field, the only notable attempts at examination of war-directed forces at work in our own culture have been those of Mack Reynolds and John Brunner. But from points all around the perimeter recently, there has come a steady peppering of fantasy, parable, and allegory, turning an analytic (and usually sardonic) eye on the behavior of nations—especially our own—and the wondrous workings of what we still oddly call “diplomacy.” (Tom Lehrer’s “Send the Marines”: . . . For might makes right./Until they’ve seen the light,/They’ve got to be protected,/All their rights respected,/Till someone we like is elected . . . And then there was Dean Acheson’s parable “The Fairy Princess” in the Reporter. And of course Abram Tertz’s The Makepeace Experiment from Pantheon.)
MARS IS OURS!
ART BUCHWALD
When it was discovered by American and Russian space probes that there was indeed life on Mars, an immediate foreign ministers’ conference in Geneva was called to decide what to do about it.
The United States, through its Secretary of State, announced that America had no territorial designs on the planet and the U.S. position was that the Martians should be free to choose their own government, providing of course that it was not Communist-dominated or leftist-inspired.
The Soviet minister said that if the Martians wanted to overthrow the reactionary rulers who were probably exploiting the Martian masses, his country would have no choice but to come to their aid. He said that if the Martians requested it, the Soviet Union would supply them with planes, rockets, and up-to-date radar.
The United States said that if the Soviet Union interfered, it would have no choice but to send Marines to Mars to protect the lives of free Martians as well as American tourists who would soon be visiting there.
The real problem was that nobody knew what kind of government the Martians had.
All the photographs showed that there was life on Mars, but unfortunately there were no flags in the pictures to indicate where the Martians stood.