A Boy and His Tank (14 page)

I rang the doorbell and Quincy answered. A stairway came down like the one in
Forbidden Planet
, and he was waiting for us at the top of the steps. He looked to be a healthy man in his early thirties, tall, sandy-haired, and athletic. He was casually dressed in grey slacks and a blue t-shirt.

"Good morning," I said as we climbed up to the circular living room. There was a long circular couch around one side and a sheet metal fireplace in the middle. Racks of books and tapes lined the walls, and Mozart played softly from some large stereo speakers.

"I'm Mickolai Derdowski and this is my tank, Agnieshka. We thought we would pay you a social call."

"Welcome! You are our first visitors. It's a pity my wife Zuzanna isn't here, but she's out working. This is Marysia," he said, gesturing to a very young—barely pubescent—girl in a conservative maid's outfit.

Quincy gestured us in and we sat on the couch, a meter from him. Marysia silently went through a tunnel to what must have been a kitchen, for she soon came back with a tray of munchies and some cold beers. After a few moments, the women went off and left Quincy and me alone.

"I knew that Zuzanna would be gone, but with the two of you working alternate shifts, it will be a while before I can see the two of you together, or her at all, for that matter. She has the same shift as Radek, my alternate. It's been months since I've talked to someone who wasn't a tank, a simulation, or my girlfriend, and I've been craving for some human company. You're lucky, being able to have your wife with you."

"There wasn't any luck involved with it. When we volunteered, it was with the express understanding that we would stay together. They went along with it, even though the draft had already been approved."

"The draft?" I said, "This is the first I've heard of any draft."

"You must have joined a few weeks before we did, then. There was quite a flap about it, especially the way it was done."

"What way was that?"

"Well, back in history, when all the wars were fought, they always drafted the healthy young men. Young people who had the most to contribute to the world, and who were actually the most valuable to society. But the council decided to do it backwards, for us. They said that there was no need to risk the young when there were so many of us oldsters around. Fighting in one of these tanks doesn't take any strength or much endurance, after all. You don't have to be healthy to start out with, either. These tanks are better doctors than anything we had on New Kashubia, I can tell you. And you don't have to be male. A woman can do just as well as a man. All you need is judgment and discretion, and that's where a mature person shines. So they started by taking the oldest and feeblest of us, and God! How the people complained!"

"I would have complained too!" I said, "The very thought of sending my grandmother off to fight somebody else's war is horrible!"

"True. But once your grandmother had spent a few days in a tank, she wouldn't be complaining at all. In fact, I guarantee that she will love it. Or rather that she does love it, since if she's over sixty-five, she has almost certainly been drafted."

"And how can you know such a thing?"

"Because I am a great-grandfather myself. Zuzanna and I have eleven great-grandchildren! I tell you that getting into these tanks was the best thing that has happened to us in thirty years. My wife was dying, for lack of decent chemotherapy, and I was in pretty poor shape myself. Look at me now! I'm a young man again, and Zuzanna is her old sexy self."

"In simulation, yes. But in reality?" I said.

"Screw reality! I feel great! What's more, my real body is getting much better. Zuzanna's cancer has been arrested, and it's likely that we both have many years of good, enjoyable life ahead of us."

"If you don't get killed in this war."

"True. But if that does have to happen, well, better me than one of my grandkids. After all, I've had my life, and it's been a good one. They haven't had theirs, yet."

"What if your bodies don't get better?"

"In time, of course, that's going to happen, medicine or no medicine. It'll even happen to you, eventually. But when it does, there is still one more option open to us. Most of these tanks you've seen are Mark XIXs. Did you know that there is also a Mark XX model? They have the same capabilities, but they are thirty percent smaller, so they're that much harder for the enemy to hit. They could shrink them down because they don't have to contain a complete human body, just the brain and the spinal column. When your body finally goes to hell, you don't have to go there along with it! You can become a cyborg and live another thousand years!"

Now
that
was a strange thought, and one I didn't like. I said as much to Quincy.

"I take it that you are a very young man, Mickolai. In your twenties, right? Well, let me tell you that when you are eighty-five, as I am, your thoughts will be different. At my age, a body is no longer a source of joy. It's a source of almost continuous pain, or it would be except for my tank. The thought of doing without a body doesn't bother me in the least, and Zuzanna likes the idea. We were ready to volunteer for the cyborg treatment when the current emergency occurred, and as soon as it's over, we'll likely do it. In combat, it's safer, among other things. They tell me that the process is absolutely painless. If fact, they can even do it to you without your ever knowing it was done, Dream World being what it is."

"Well, my uncle once told me that it takes all kinds of people to make a world, and I guess he's right again. I only wish I'd had the option of working a deal with Kasia, my girlfriend, the way you have with Zuzanna."

"I take it that you didn't exactly volunteer," Quincy said.

"No."

"Well, don't talk about it until you're ready to. I'll still be here to listen. Hell, I've been around since they sent out the first interstellar ships."

"You remember the invention of the Hassan-Smith Transporter?"

"Well, I'm not
that
old. After all, the Hassan-Smith Interstellar Transporter was invented way back in 1972 in Beirut, Lebanon, as part of a program ostensibly designed to transport terrorists quickly and quietly into and out of sensitive areas. The leadership of the organization had no faith in Abdul Hassan's absurd claims, but they supported him because some of his followers were good at time bombs and booby traps, and anyway, he worked cheap."

"That's not quite the way they told it when I was in school."

"Schoolteachers lie a lot. I know. I married one. I'm telling you the way it really happened. On its first tryout, Hassan's fairly simple device worked entirely too well, transporting a Fatimid volunteer two meters into the wall of the cellar where the work was being done. This accident did not dismay the terrorist leadership, for they were quite accustomed to losing half of their followers to premature bombs and so on. After all, explosives are tricky stuff for guys mostly used to herding goats and beating women."

I could tell that he was getting wound up on a favorite topic, the way an old man will, so I just popped another beer, leaned back, and let him rattle on. Hearing a male voice was good after months of exclusively female companionship.

"Unfortunately, it set Hassan's project back fifty years, and Hassan himself for the theological seven thousand, since the inventor, his assistants, all of their notes, and the surrounding nine city blocks were demolished in the blast. Some days you just can't win," he said, shaking his head and taking another drink himself before continuing.

"Three separate right wing Israeli groups claimed credit for the kill, but no one was left alive to dispute their claims, so people soon forgot about it.

"Rumors of Hassan's accomplishments were discounted by the academic community. After all, his only advanced degree was a mere master's granted by a college in North Dakota, for God's sake, and his papers weren't published by the best journals. Obviously a second rater.

"Nothing was done about it for fifty years, until 2021, when a fellow named Christian Artemis Smith became interested in Hassan's work after finding a paper by him in the basement of the
Hoople Weekly Times
. To be sure, Smith was but a lowly history major, but Hassan's basic ideas and circuits were so simple that they could be followed by even the totally uneducated products of American institutions. Working with an E-2 from the local air base who had built his own stereo, success soon followed.

"Fortunately, their device was aimed upward at the first trial, and it was set by mistake for three kilometers instead of the intended three meters. Their test object, a hundred pounds of old newspapers, fluttered down in very poor and shredded condition over two square miles of winter wheat.

"Shortly thereafter, the pair of inventors brought in a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman to help them promote the idea, and they prospered largely because Smith's aunt insisted that the patent be put in his name before she'd lend them another dime.

"Their first public demonstration in 2022 resulted in an atrocious bill from the electric company, which was canceled since nobody believed they could possibly have used that much power.

"It also caused the transport of fourteen tons of limestone to the general vicinity of the moon. The stone, borrowed from the base of a statue of a general that nobody remembered, was pulverized in the process. It came to rest as individual molecules of calcium carbonate, which vacuum and raw sunlight soon converted to carbon dioxide and calcium oxide, the latter of which covered the entire nearside surface of the moon, increasing its albedo by three hundred percent.

"A moon four times brighter than usual got people's attention, lowering the crime rate in some areas and raising it in places where people believed in werewolves."

"You're giving me a very flippant rendition of history, Quincy," I said.

"I'm telling you the unadulterated truth. Anyway, it happens that I am a very flippant man, Mickolai. The trait has high survival value."

"I believe you. But go on with what you were telling me."

"Thank you," he said, opening another beer. "So the General Dynamics division of Tandy Craft soon bought our heroes out for a piddling half billion dollars, which was actually quite a bit of money in those days, and the work was continued in the `proper hands,' with well-educated workers striving diligently in white lab smocks and well-funded laboratories. All of it was under quite proper direction. Smith's moon dusting feat was duplicated in a mere four years, and thereafter progress was steady.

"Smith, meanwhile, retired at the age of twenty-four and spent the remainder of his life writing his autobiography for posterity, and publishing it eventually at his own expense. He was, after all, a history major.

"Once the patents ran out in 2040, a frustrated Tandy Craft employee named Zbigniew Pildewski proved to his own satisfaction that it was impossible to focus the device accurately enough to transmit anything useful over more than six feet, and then only into a hard vacuum. The problem was the lack of a suitable receiver, which he proceeded to design and build with the help of several other former GD-TC employees. They were funded by a wealthy, aging ex-encyclopedia salesman, who became their silent partner.

"In 2041, Pildewski Interplanetary Transport, Inc., was born, with a contract to dispose of seven million tons of New York City garbage a day. They fulfilled their contract without the use of Pildewski's receiver, simply by dumping the trash into the Sun, until a cash customer could be found for all those hydrocarbons and other volatiles on Ceres. After the disposal contracts came the raw materials deals, and nickel-iron from the asteroids was delivered by the megaton to the Yokohama and Sons foundry in Bangkok.

"Within a decade, there were Hassan-Smith devices on or around every major body in the solar system, and the eyes of humanity turned farther outward yet, to the stars.

"You see, the simple fact was that while the solar system was an okay place to visit, and there were a lot of useful things out there, nobody wanted to live in a tin can on Ganymede or Mars any more than they wanted to live in a tin can on the Indian Ocean, which at least has air around it.

"But there had to be planets around some of the stars, and some of them had to be nice enough to make you want to live on them. Funded by the Wealthy Nations Group, an informal, non-UN organization, thousands of robot ships were sent with Hassan-Smith devices into the great deep. They were simple enough. Even crude chemical rockets can reach relativistic speeds if they don't have to carry their fuel with them."

"Excuse me," I said, "But I'm running dry. Agnieshka! Bring us some more beers!" She was there before I had my mouth shut. Things like that happen all the time in Dream World.

"Right," he said, taking a cold one from her. "So ice mines on the moons of Neptune fed solar factories inside the orbit of Mercury. Liquid hydrogen and oxygen were then sent to the robot ships, along with the parts for still more ships to be assembled along the way, to fill out the gaps left by the first few ships. Soon, a sphere of robot ships was expanding from Earth at near light speed, dropping a Hassan-Smith-Pildewski device at every star, even those that didn't look too promising. After all, nobody planned to ever send a rocket there again, and you never can tell, anyway. Through these devices came exploratory robots, and some of them found planets that were interesting.

"They were just in time. By 2075, the world was getting very crowded, and, from the standpoint of the Wealthy Nations Group, it was getting crowded with the wrong sort of people. You know, those funny-looking troublemakers like me who belong to minority groups.

"As new planets began to be discovered, the Wealthy Nations Group made many minorities an offer that they didn't want to refuse. Providing that they took all of their annoying brethren with them and never came back, the Wealthy Nations Group would give them a one-way ticket to a planet of their very own. Of course, some planets were nicer than other planets, and what you got depended on just how badly the Wealthy Nations Group wanted to get rid of you.