Outlawing War

  This brings us to the second really effective measure in the prevention of war, one which has actually been put into limited effect, one which is eminently thinkable. It is very simple: no nation forbidden to go to war by its own laws has ever done so. The two notable examples are Switzerland and Uruguay; in both, the government is legally forbidden to make war unless the nation is physically attacked—and it is axiomatic that one’s own law carries more force than any agreement with a foreign nation or group of nations. Douglas MacArthur, so often damned by liberals as a militarist, saw this clearly and therefore incorporated the provision in the post-war Japanese constitution.

  Such a provision should have been, and eventually will have to be, the first basic condition for membership in the United Nations—or in whatever world organization follows it.

  Let us assume that, in 1944, we had had the good sense to launch our second front up through the Balkans—as Winston Churchill wanted to—instead of into France, thereby isolating Russia from much or all of Eastern Europe. Let us assume, too, that in 1945, instead of letting Russia into the war with Japan—remember, all through the war the Russians were not our allies there—we had had the imagination and the courage to move in force against the Japanese armies in Korea and Manchuria, thereby saving North Korea from the easy Russian takeover it suffered. Let us further suppose that, when we formed the UN in San Francisco, we had insisted on limiting membership to nations willing to subscribe to an acceptable code of behavior. No one would have been excluded except for cause. No one would have been compelled to join.

  The Soviet Union would, almost certainly, have remained on the outside looking in. So might some of the “emerging” nations. But had we had the good sense to limit our financial, scientific, and technological support to members of the club—to those who obeyed the rules—we would have ensured a world organization vastly different from what it is today. If the Communists had refused to mend their ways, they would have had to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps—and they would not now be in the position our bootstraps have put them in: able to disturb the world’s peace on every continent, pose a serious threat to our once preeminent power position, and even endanger our access to vital strategic minerals and materials. The United Nations then would probably have had, at least temporarily, a smaller membership—but its world would have been a far more open one, an infinitely freer one, and a much more prosperous one.

  Which brings up another interesting question: just what would happen even today if we, and perhaps the British and West Germans and French and Scandinavians and all other non-totalitarian nations everywhere (if anyone could get them to agree) were to withdraw from the UN, expel it from United States soil, take over those of its agencies we support already, and form our own private club, functioning according to more civilized rules? And what would happen were we to confine our massive aid to those nations that chose to join us under these rules, sending no more vast grain shipments to the Russians, no more arms except to our declared allies, no more help of any nature to our avowed enemies?

  I suspect that then our strength and our integrity would bring us more firm friends than our policies have won during the past thirty years, three decades during which we have tried to buy and beg the friendship of still-inferior nations, some of whom hate us, some of whom despise us, and most of whom used to have a healthy fear of us.

  As a world, as one people, we finally are confronting space, the great adventure of our time.

  We still have no idea of what—or whom—we will encounter there. We may need desperately to be culturally more coherent than we are, more genuinely united than the UN pretense lets us be, and far more uniformly civilized in the sense of our respect for the rights and liberties of others.

  So why don’t we at least start thinking about the thinkable?

  Day of Succession, by Theodore L. Thomas

  Editor’s Introduction

  If movies are considered to be reflections of popular cultural assumptions, we have a very schizophrenic view of intelligent alien lifeforms. On the one hand, we have the benign observers from outer space—typified in E.T. and the recent Mac and Me—while on the other hand, we have the aliens as super-evil monsters as in Aliens and Predator. Of course there’s no way to know which view is correct. There may not be any aliens out there.

  On the face of it that’s unlikely. Years ago Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi made some after-dinner calculations: take the probability that any given star has planets (low), and that any given planet will have life (even lower), and that life came about there millions of years before it happened on Earth (not low at all given that there’s life in the first place). Multiply those together and you get a low number. Now multiply by the number of known stars in the galaxy, and you get an enormous number of stars that have had life much longer than it has existed on Earth.

  Now consider how far humanity has come in a thousand years; consider where we will be a thousand years from now; and you get Fermi’s famous question, “Where are they?”

  We’ve mostly assumed that wherever they are, they’ll be benign in intent. H. G. Wells had a somewhat different view, but we all know The War Of The Worlds is an obsolete story.

  Under our system of government, military officers take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, and to obey the lawful orders of those in authority. In that order.

  Day of Succession

  Theodore L. Thomas

  General Paul T. Tredway was an arrogant man with the unforgivable gift of being always right. When the object came out of the sky in the late spring of 1979, it was General Tredway who made all of the decisions concerning it. Sweeping in over the northern tip of Greenland, coming on a dead line from the Yamal Peninsula, the object alerted every warning unit from the Dew Line to the radar operator at the Philadelphia National Airport. Based on the earliest reports, General Tredway concluded that the object was acting in an anomalous fashion; its altitude was too low too long. Accordingly, acting with a colossal confidence, he called off the manned interceptor units and forbade the launching of interceptor missiles. The object came in low over the Pocono Mountains and crashed in southeastern Pennsylvania two miles due west of Terre Hill.

  The object still glowed a dull red, and the fire of the smashed house still smoldered when General Tredway arrived with the troops. He threw a cordon around it, and made a swift investigation. The object: fifty feet long, thirty feet in diameter, football-shaped, metallic, too hot to inspect closely. Visualizing immediately what had to be done, the general set up a Command Headquarters and began ordering the items he needed. With no wasted word or motion he built toward the finished plan as he saw it.

  Scientists arrived at the same time as the asbestos clothing needed for them to get close. Tanks and other materiel flowed toward the impact site. Radios and oscillators scanned all frequencies seeking—what? No man there knew what to expect, but no man cared. General Tredway was on the ground personally, and no one had time for anything but his job. The gunners sat with eyes glued to sights, mindful of the firing pattern in which they had been instructed. Handlers poised over their ammunition. Drivers waited with hands on the wheel, motors idling. Behind this ring of steel a more permanent bulwark sprang up. Spotted back further were the technical shacks for housing the scientific equipment. Behind the shacks the reporters gathered, held firmly in check by armed troops. The site itself was a strange mixture of taut men in frozen immobility, and casual men in bustling activity.

  In an hour the fact emerged which General Tredway had suspected all along: the object was not of Earthly origin. The alloy of which it was made was a known high-temperature alloy, but no technology on Earth could cast it in seamless form in that size and shape. Mass determinations and ultrasonic probes showed that the object was hollow but was crammed inside with a material different from the shell. It was then that General Tredway completely reorganized his fire power, and mapped out a plan of action that widened the eyes of those who were to carry it out.

  On the general’s instructions, everything said at the site was said into radio transmitters and thus recorded a safe fifty miles away. And it was the broadcasting of the general’s latest plan of action that brought in the first waves of mild protest. But the general went ahead.

  The object had lost its dull hot glow when the first indications of activity inside could be heard. General Tredway immediately removed all personnel to positions of safety outside the ring of steel. The ring itself buttoned up; when a circle of men fire toward a common center, someone can get hurt.

  With the sound of tearing, protesting metal, a three foot circle appeared at the top of the object, and the circle began to turn. As it turned it began to lift away from the main body of the object, and soon screw threads could be seen. The hatch rose silently, looking like a bung being unscrewed from a barrel. The time came when there was a gentle click, and the hatch dropped back a fraction of an inch; the last thread had become disengaged. There was a pause.

  The heavy silence was broken by a throbbing sound from the object that continued for forty-five seconds and then stopped. Then, without further sound, the hatch began to lift back on its northernmost rim.

  In casual tones, as if he were speaking in a classroom, General Tredway ordered the northern, northeastern, and northwestern regions of the ring into complete cover. The hatch lifted until finally its underside could be seen; it was colored a dull, nonreflecting black. Higher the hatch lifted, and immediately following it was a bulbous mass that looked like a half-opened rose blossom. Deep within the mass there glowed a soft violet light, clearly apparent to the eye even in the sharp Pennsylvania sunshine.

  The machine gun bullets struck the mass first, and the tracers could be seen glancing off. But an instant later the shaped charges in the rockets struck the mass and shattered it. The 105’s, the 101 rifles, the rocket launchers, poured a hail of steel onto the canted hatch, ricocheting much of the steel into the interior of the object. Delay-timed high-explosive shells went inside and detonated.

  A flame tank left the ring of steel and lumbered forward, followed by two armored trucks. At twenty-five yards a thin stream of fire leaped from the nozzle of the tank and splashed off the hatch in a Niagara of flame. A slight correction, and the Niagara poured down into the opening. The tank moved in close, and the guns fell suddenly silent. Left in the air was a high-pitched shrieking wail, abruptly cut off.

  Flames leaped from the opening, so the tank turned off its igniter and simply shot fuel into the object. Asbestos-clad men jumped from the trucks and fed a metal hose through the opening and forced it deep into the object. The compressors started, and a blast of high-pressure air passed through the hose, insuring complete combustion of everything inside. For three minutes the men fed fuel and air to the interior of the object, paying in the metal hose as the end fused off. Flames shot skyward with the roar of a blast furnace. The heat was so great that the men at work were saved only by the constant streams of water that played on them. Then it was over.

  General Tredway placed the burned-out cinder in charge of the scientists, and then regrouped his men for resupply and criticism. These were in progress when the report of the second object came in.

  The trackers were waiting for it. General Tredway had reasoned that when one object arrived, another might follow, and so he had ordered the trackers to look for it. It hit twenty-five miles west of the first one, near Florin. General Tredway and his men were on their way even before impact. They arrived twenty minutes after it hit.

  The preparations were the same, only more streamlined now. The soldiers and the scientists moved more surely, with less wasted motion than before. But as the cooling period progressed, the waves of protest came out of Washington and reached toward General Tredway. “Terrible.” “First contact…” “Exterminating them like vermin…” “Peaceful relationship…” “…military mind.” The protests took on an official character just before the hatch on the second object opened. An actual countermanding of General Tredway’s authority came through just as the rockets opened fire on the half-opened rose blossom. The burning-out proceeded on schedule. Before it was complete, General Tredway climbed into a helicopter to fly the hundred miles to Washington, D. C. In half an hour he was there.

  It is one of the circumstances of a democracy that in an emergency half a dozen men can speak for the entire country. General Tredway stalked into a White House conference room where waited the President, the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, the President pro tempore of the Senate, the House minority leader, and a cabinet member. No sooner had he entered when the storm broke.

  “Sit down, general, and explain to us if you can the meaning of your reprehensible conduct.”

  “What are you trying to do, make butchers of us all?”

  “You didn’t give those… those persons a chance.”

  “Here we had a chance to learn something, to learn a lot, and you killed them and destroyed their equipment.”

  General Tredway sat immobile until the hot flood of words subsided. Then he said, “Do any of you gentlemen have any evidence that their intentions were peaceable? Any evidence at all?”

  There was silence for a moment as they stared at him. The President said; “What evidence have you got they meant harm? You killed them before there was any evidence of anything.”

  General Tredway shook his head, and a familiar supercilious tone crept unbidden into his voice. “They were the ones who landed on our planet. It was incumbent on them to find a way to convince us of their friendliness. Instead they landed with no warning at all, and with a complete disregard of human life. The first missile shattered a house, killed a man. There is ample evidence of their hostility,” and he could not help adding, “if you care to look for it.”

  The President flushed and snapped, “That’s not the way I see it. You could have kept them covered; you had enough fire power there to cover an army. If they made any hostile move, that would have been time enough for you to have opened up on them.”

  The House Speaker leaned forward and plunked a sheaf of telegrams on the table. He tapped the pile with a forefinger and said, “These are some of thousands that have come in. I picked out the ones from some of our outstanding citizens—educators, scientists, statesmen. All of them agree that this is a foolhardy thing you have done. You’ve destroyed a mighty source of knowledge for the human race.”

  “None of them is a soldier,” said the general. “I would not expect them to know anything about attack and defense.”

  The Speaker nodded and drew one more telegram from an inner pocket. General Tredway, seeing what was coming, had to admire his tactics; this man was not Speaker for nothing. “Here,” said the Speaker, “is a reply to my telegram. It is from the Joint Chiefs. Care to read it?”

  They all stared at the general, and he shook his head coldly. “No. I take it that they do not understand the problem either.”

  “Now just a min…” A colonel entered the room and whispered softly to the President. The President pushed his chair back, but he did not get up. Nodding he said, “Good. Have Barnes take over. And see that he holds his fire until something happens.

  Hear? Make certain of that. I’ll not tolerate any more of this unnecessary slaughter.” The colonel left.

  The President turned and noted the understanding in the faces of the men at the table. He nodded and said, “Yes, another one. And this time we’ll do it right. I only hope the other two haven’t got word to the third one that we’re a bunch of killers.”

  “There could be no communication of any kind emanating from the first two,” said General Tredway. “I watched for that.”

  “Yes. Well, it’s the only thing you did right. I want you to watch to see the proper way to handle this.”

  In the intervening hours General Tredway tried to persuade the others to adopt his point of view. He succeeded only in infuriating them. When the time came for the third object to open, the group of men were trembling in anger. They gathered around the television screen to watch General Barnes’ handling of the situation.

  General Tredway stood to the rear of the others, watching the hatch unscrew. General Barnes was using the same formation as that developed by General Tredway; the ring of steel was as tight as ever.

  The familiar black at the bottom of the hatch came into view, followed closely by the top of the gleaming rose blossom. General Tredway snapped his fingers, the sound cracking loud in the still room. The men close to the set jumped and looked back at Tredway in annoyance. It was plain that the general had announced in his own way the proper moment to fire. Their eyes had hardly got back to the screen when it happened.

  A thin beam of delicate violet light danced from the heart of the rose to the front of the steel ring. The beam rotated like a lighthouse beacon, only far far faster. Whatever it touched it sliced. Through tanks and trucks and guns and men it sliced, over and over again as the swift circular path of the beam spun in ever-widening circles. Explosions rocked the site as high explosives detonated under the touch of the beam. The hatch of the object itself, neatly cut near the bottom, rolled ponderously down the side of the object to the ground. The beam bit into the ground and left seething ribbons of slag. In three seconds the area was a mass of fused metal and molten rock and minced bodies and flame and smoke and thunder. In another two seconds the beam reached the television cameras, and the screen went blank.

  The men near the screen stared speechless. At that moment the colonel returned and announced softly that a fourth object was on its way, and that its probable impact point was two miles due east of Harrisburg.