Гарри Гаррисон - There Won't Be War

“No, we don’t have Spock here,” Gatt said in answer to Vargas’ unspoken question. “But we’ve got a lot more important stuff than some pointy-eared alien. Let me give you a little quiz, Vargas, just for fun. What is the first thing a warrior thinks about when he looks over his new battleship?”

Vargas had to give that some serious thought. He wished Lupe were here with him. Although she was stupid and only a woman, she was very good at supplying, through some mysterious feminine intuition, answers which Vargas had on the tip of his tongue but couldn’t quite come up with.

Fortunately for him, this time the answer came unbidden. “Guns!” he said.

“You got it!” Gatt said. “Come with me and let me show you the guns on this sucker.”

Gatt led him to a small car of the sort used to drive the long distances between points in a ship. Vargas tried to remember if they’d had a car like that on Star Trek. He thought not. He thought this ship was larger than the Enterprise. He liked that. He was not afraid of big things.

The little car hummed down the long, evenly lit passageway deep in the interior of the ship. General Gatt was reeling off statistics as they went, explaining how many battalions of men in Darth Vader helmets could be fit into the attack bays, how many tons of rations in the forms of beef jerky and bourbon could be stored in a thousand hundredweights of standard mess kits, and other important details. Soon they reached the area of the ship’s primary armament. Vargas looked admiringly at the large projector tubes, the paralysis wavelength radio, the vibratory beamer, which could shake apart a fair-sized asteroid. His fingers itched to get on the controls of the tractor and pressor beams. But General Gatt told him he would have to be patient for a little while longer. There was nothing around to shoot at. And besides, the main armament wasn’t quite all hooked up yet.

Vargas was loud in his praise of the work done by the scientists of the military. But Gatt had to set him straight on that.

“We have a lot of good boys, to be sure,” Gatt said. “Some of them quite clever. Especially the ones we drafted. This spaceship, however, was not their doing.”

“Whose is it then, sir, if I may enquire?” said Vargas.

“It was the work of a special group of civilian scientists, what they call a consortorium. Which simply means a whole bunch of them. It was a joint European-American-Asian effort. And a damned selfish one.”

“Why do you say that, sir?”

“Because they were building this ship to get away from us.”

“I can hardly believe that, sir,” Vargas said.

“It’s almost unthinkable, isn’t it? They were scared for their puny lives, of course, afraid that they’d all be killed. As it turned out, quite a few of them did get killed. I don’t know what made them think any respectable military establishment would let them escape from the planet with a valuable spaceship.”

“What happened to the scientists, sir?”

“Oh, we drafted them. Put them to work. Their ship was very good but it lacked a few things. Guns, for one. These people had actually thought they could go into outer space without high-powered weaponry. And another problem was that the ships weren’t fast enough. We have learned that space is quite a bit larger than some of our previous estimates at the Military College; therefore, we need really fast ships if we’re ever to get anywhere.”

“Fast ships and strong guns,” Vargas mused. “That’s just what I would have asked for myself. Did you have any trouble getting those things, general?”

“A little at first,” Gatt said. “The scientists kept on saying it was impossible and other downbeat and subversive talk like that. But I handled it. Gave them a deadline, started having executions when our goals weren’t met. You’d be amazed how quickly they picked up the pace.”

Vargas nodded, having used similar methods himself in his day.

“It’s a beautiful ship,” Vargas said. “Is it the only one?”

“What you’re looking at here,” Gatt said, “is the flagship of the fleet.”

“You mean there are more ships?” Vargas asked.

“Indeed there are. Or will be soon. We’ve got the entire worldwide shipbuilding and automobile industries working on them. We need lots of ships, Getulio.”

“Yessir,” Vargas said. The trouble was, he couldn’t think of anything to use ships for, now that everything was conquered. But he didn’t want to come out and say that. He could see there was a little smile on General Gatt’s face, so he guessed that he was about to be told something he hadn’t known before, but which he would find of considerable interest. He waited for a while, and then decided that Gatt wanted him to ask, so he said, “Now, about all these ships, sir ...”

“Yesss?” said Gatt.

“We need these,” Vargas hazarded, “for security—”

Gatt nodded.

“—and to take care of our enemies.”

“Perfectly correct,” Gatt said.

“The only thing that perplexes me,” Vargas said, “is, who exactly are our enemies? I mean, sir, that I was under the impression that we don’t really have any of them left on Earth. Or are there some enemies I haven’t heard about?”

“Oh, we don’t have any enemies left on Earth,” Gatt said. “They have gone the way of the buffalo, the cow, the Airedale, and other extinct species. What we have now, General Vargas, is the God-given opportunity to go forth into space, our Earth troops unified for the first time in history, ready and willing to take on anything that comes along.”

“Anything! In space!” Vargas said, amazed at the size of the idea.

“Yes! Today Earth, tomorrow, the Milky Way, or at least one hell of a good-sized hunk of it.”

“But can we just do that? Take what we want?”

“Why not? If there’s anything out there, it’s just aliens.”

“It’s a wonderful dream, sir. I hope I may be permitted to do my bit for the cause.”

Gatt grinned and punched Vargas on the arm.

“I’ve got a pretty good bit for you, Getulio. How would you like to be my first Marshall of Space, with command of this ship and orders to go forth and check out some new planets for Earth?”

“Me? Sir, you do me too much honor.”

“Nonsense, Getulio. You’re the best fighting general I’ve got. And you’re the only one I trust. Need I say more?”

Gatt made the announcement to the other generals. First he showed them the spaceship. Then he told them he was going into space on a fact-finding mission, with good old Vargas along to actually run the ship. He and Vargas would take a lot of fighting men along, just in case they ran into anything interesting. Gatt was sure there were new worlds to explore out there, and these new worlds, in the manner of new worlds since the beginning of recorded history, were going to bring in millions.

The generals were enthusiastic about the expansion of Earth military power and the promise of a good return on the military business.

Working night and day, the ship was soon provisioned. Not long after that, the armament was all bolted into place. When they tried it out it worked perfectly, all except for one missile which unaccountably got out of control and took out Kansas City. A letter of regret to the survivors and a posthumous medal for all concerned soon put that to rights, however. Shortly afterwards, ten thousand heavily armed shock troops with full equipment marched aboard. It was time for Earth to make its debut in space.

The ship went through its trial runs in the solar system without a problem. Once past Neptune, Vargas told the engineers to open her up. Space was big; there was no time to dawdle. The ship ran up to speed without a tremor.