Cristopher Stasheff - Escape Velocity

“Come off it! No general talks to his subordinates that way!”

Dar held up a palm. “So help me, he did it! I overheard Lieutenant Walker’s communicator.”

“You mean you were in that battle?”

“I had a choice?”

“But I thought you tried to find a hole to crawl into!”

“Sure. I didn’t say I succeeded, did I?”

Sam turned away, glowering. “I still don’t believe it. Why should he be so polite?”

“We figured it out later. In effect, he was telling us it was our war, and it was up to us to fight it; but he was willing to give us advice, if we wanted it.”

“Good advice, I take it?”

“Oh, very good! We had the Wolmen pushed back against the wall in an hour. Then Shacklar told the lieutenants to pull back and give them a chance to get away. They all answered, basically, ‘The hell with that noise! We’ve got a chance to wipe out the bastards!’ ‘Indeed you do,’ Shacklar answered, ‘and they all have brothers and cousins back home—six of them for every one of you. But if you do try to exterminate them—well, you’ll manage it, but they’ll kill two of your men for every one of theirs.’ Well, the lieutenants allowed that he had a point, so they did what he said and pulled back; and the Wolmen, with great daring and ingenuity, managed to get back up over the wall and away.”

“Then he told you to break out the laser cannon?”

“No, he’d sent the cannons home with the guards. Good thing, too; I’d hate to think what those three power-mongers would’ve done with them. But we did have hand-blasters, in the armories. Each of the power-mongers had managed to seize an armory as a power base as soon as he’d recruited a gang. They’d opened the doors and issued sidearms as soon as the sirens screamed. They weren’t much good for the close fighting inside the wall; but, once the Wolmen were over the top and running, we got up on the parapet and started shooting after them, until the lieutenants yelled at us to stop wasting our charges. The Wolmen were running, and they didn’t stop until morning.”

“A victory,” Sam said dryly.

“A bigger one than you think—because as soon as the shooting was over the three would-be warlords showed up with their henchmen, bawling, ‘All right, it’s all over! Turn in your guns! Go home!’ ”

“They what !”

“Well, sure.” Dar shrugged. “After all, they’d opened up the armories for us, hadn’t they? Shouldn’t we give them their guns back now? I mean, you’ve got to see it from their viewpoint.”

“I hope you didn’t!”

“Of course we didn’t. We just turned around grinning, and pointed the guns at them . But we didn’t say anything; we let the lieutenants do the talking.”

“ What talking?”

“It depended. The nice ones said, ‘Hands up.’ The rest of them just said, ‘Fire!’ And we did.”

Sam formed a silent O with her lips.

“It was quick and merciful,” Dar pointed out. “More than they had a right to, really.”

“What did you do without them? I mean, they had provided some sort of social order.”

“I see you favor loose definitions. But while the ashes cooled, the lieutenants got together and did some talking.”

“They elected a leader?”

“Yeah, they could all agree that they needed to. But they weren’t so unanimous about who. There were four main candidates, and they wrangled and haggled, but nobody could agree on anything—I mean, not even enough to call for a vote.”

“How long did they keep that up?”

“Long enough for it to get pretty tense, and the boys on the battlements were getting kind of edgy, eyeing each other and wondering if we were going to be ordered to start burning each other pretty soon.”

“You wouldn’t really have done it!”

“I dunno. That military conditioning runs pretty deep. You don’t know what you’ll do when you hear your lieutenant call, ‘Fire!’ ”

Sam shuddered. “What are you—animals?”

“I understand the philosophers are still debating that one. My favorite is, ‘Man is the animal who laughs.’ Fortunately, Lieutenant Mandring thought the same way.”

“Who’s Lieutenant Mandring?”

“The one with the sense of humor. He nominated General Shacklar.”

Sam whirled, the picture of fury. Then she developed a sudden faraway look. “You know …”

Dar pointed a finger at her. “ That ’s just about the way all the other lieutenants reacted. They started to yell—then they realized he meant it for a joke. After they’d finished rolling around on the ground and had it throttled down to a chuckle, they started eyeing each other, and it got awfully quiet.”

“But Shacklar didn’t even try to talk them into it!”

“He didn’t have to; he’d given them a taste of do-it-yourself government. So they were ready to consider a change of diet—but nobody wanted to be the first one to say it. So Lieutenant Griffin had to take it—he’s the one with the talent for saving other people’s faces. Too bad he can’t do anything about his own…”

“What happened !”

“Oh! Yes … well, all he said was, ‘Why don’t we ask him what he thinks?’ And after they got done laughing again, Lieutenant Able said, ‘It’d be good for a laugh.’ And Lieutenant Walker said, ‘Sure. I mean, we don’t have to do what he says, you know.’ Well, they could all agree on that, of course, so they put Lieutenant Walker up to it, he having spoken last, and he called the General on his wrist com, explained the situation, and asked what he’d do in their place. He said he was willing to serve, but really thought they ought to elect one of their own number.”

Sam smiled. “How nice of him! What’d they do back at Square One?”

“They asked the comedian for a suggestion. He said they ought to call out each lieutenant’s name and have everybody who had confidence in him raise a hand.”

“Who won?”

“Everybody; they all pulled, ‘No confidence.’ So Lieutenant Mandring called for a vote on General Shacklar.”

“How long was the pause?”

“Long enough for everybody to realize they were getting hungry. But after a while they started raising hands, and three hundred sixty out of four hundred went up.”

“This, for the man who had to hide in a fortress? What changed their minds?”

“The chaos, mostly—especially since he’d just done a good job directing them in battle. Soldiers value that kind of thing. So they called Shacklar and told him he was elected.”

“I take it he was glad to hear it.”

“Hard to say; he just heaved a sigh and asked them to form a parliament before they went to lunch and to start thinking about a constitution while they ate.”

“Constitution! In a prison?”

“Why not? I mean, they’d just elected him, hadn’t they?”

Sam developed a faraway look again. “I suppose…”

“So did they. That was the turning point, you see—when we started thinking of ourselves as a colony, not a prison. When we wrote the constitution, we didn’t call Shacklar ‘warden’—we named him ‘governor.’ ”

“Generous of you,” Sam smirked, “considering Terra had done it already.”

“Yeah, but we hadn’t. And once he had the consent of the populace, he could govern without guards.”

“That … makes … a weird kind of sense.”

“Doesn’t it? Only when you can make a whole planet into a prison, of course—and there’s no way out. But that’s the way it is here. So he could send the guards home, and let us fight it out for ourselves.”

“Which made you realize he was better than the natural product.”