“No, really. I’m General Fonebone’s old lady—I’ve got connections. I could probably fix you right up… if you weren’t in too much of a hurry.” She was not staring me in the eyes, and I made a few hasty deductions about General Fonebone’s virility.

  “I’m Jim Balzac. ‘Balz’ to you.”

  “I’m Suzy.”

  Six hours later I was back in the jungle. I had a pair of pants, some four and a half bricks from the General’s private stash, a compass, two Dylan albums and (although I was not to know it for weeks) a heavy dose of clap. I felt great, and it was all thanks to General Fone-bone. If Suzy had not found life in Vietnam so boring, she would never have gone rummaging and uncovered the General’s Secret Stash, a fell collection of strange tabs and arcane caps. She had induced me to swallow the largest single tab in the bunch, an immense purple thing with a skull embossed on it above the lone word: “HEAVY,” and it appeared in retrospect to have been a triple tab of STP cut with ibogaine, benzedrine, coke and just a touch of Bab-O.

  It might just as easily have been Fonebone’s Own—the sensation was totally new to me. But it was certainly interesting. I experienced considerable difficulty in finding my mustache—which of course was right under my nose.

  I could navigate without difficulty, after a fashion. But I discovered that I could whip up a ball of hallucinatory color-swirls in my mind, fire it like a cannon-ball, and watch it burst into a spiderweb of multicolored sparkles, as though an invisible protective shield two feet away walled me off from reality. With care, I could effect changes in the nature of the pulsing balls before they were fired, producing a variety of spectacular fireworks.

  The jungle reared drunkenly above me. My outfit was straight ahead. I forged on, while in my darker crannies gonococcal viruses met and fell in love by the thousands, all unknown.

  A particularly vivid splash of color caught my wandering attention; I had absently concocted a hellish color-ball of surpassing incandescence and detonated it. Its brilliant pattern hung before me a moment, as the rush took hold.

  And then it very suddenly vanished.

  I very nearly fell on my face. When I had my bearings again, I sent out another “shell.” It burst pyrotechnically.

  And as suddenly vanished. It made a noise best reproduced by inhaling sharply through clenched teeth while saying the word “Ffffffup!”; vanished down behind a small hill ahead, sucked downward in a microsecond—only a stoned man could have divined the direction.

  Something on the other side of that hill was eating my hallucinations.

  I moved to the left like a stately zeppelin, caroming gently from the occasional tree. But I had two anchors dragging the ground, and before I got fifteen feet a tangled root brought me down with a crash.

  And just before I hit, I saw something coming over the rise, and I knew that my mind had truly blown at last.

  Coming toward me was a sixteen-foot-tall poached egg with pimples.

  And then the lights—all those lights—went out.

  Yteic-Os moved from concealment, throbbing with astonished elation. No subtle attack was necessary, no cunning stimulus needed to elicit secretions of The Force from this being. Heedless of danger, it radiated freely in all directions, idly expectorating energy-clusters as it walked.

  Then Yteic-Os gasped (almost); for as it became aware of himher, it assumed a prone position, and disappeared. That is, its physical envelope remained, but all emanations ceased utterly; sentience vanished.

  The Voracious One had no means of apprehending a subconscious mind. Such perverse deformities are extremely rare in the universe; heshe had in several billions of eons never chanced to so much as hear of such a thing. This led himher into a natural error: heshe assumed that these odd creatures emanated so incautiously because they had the ability to shut their minds off at will to escape absorption.

  For, you see, thought is electrical in nature, and creative thought is akin to a short circuit, occurring when two unconnected thoughts arc together to form a totally new pattern. And such was Yteic-Os’s diet.

  And so heshe made a serious mistake. Heshe stealthily entered the empty caverns of Private Balzac’s mind to try and restimulate life. Meanwhile, Yteic-Os’s own nature and essence were laid open to the soldier’s subconscious. One of the few compensations humans have for being saddled with such a clumsy nuisance of a subconscious mind is that these distorted clumps of semi-awareness possess a passionate interest in survival. Balzac’s subconscious remained hidden, probing, comprehending the nature of this novel threat. A nebulous plan of defense formed, was stored for the proper time. Yteic-Os searched in vain for Thought, while Thought watched him from ambush, and giggled.

  Consciousness returned to Private Balzac with a jar and a “WHAAAAAT!?!” Yteic-Os, caught by surprise, flipped completely over on his back and rippled indignantly. This upstart would soon be only a belch—or something like one. The Voracious One licked hisher… well, you know what I mean.

  “Whaaaaat!?!”

  I was awake. Somehow it had all been sorted out in my sleep: I didn’t exactly know what the poached egg was, but I knew what it wanted to do. I thought I knew what to do about it. I would absolutely refuse to hallucinate, and starve it to death.

  But I hadn’t reckoned with the Terrible Tab I’d swallowed. I simply could not stop hallucinating! Colored whirlwinds and coruscating rainbows danced all around me like a mosaic in a Mixmaster; my eyeballs were prisms. Slowly the creative force of my mind was leaking away, being sucked into the egg before it could feed-back and regenerate itself.

  I was being drained of originality, of wit, of inventiveness, of all the things that make life groovy. I had a grim vision of myself a few years hence, a short-haired square working in a factory living contentedly in Scarsdale with a frigid wife and a neurotic Pekingese, stumbling over the Cryptoquote in the Daily News and drinking Black Label before the T.V. A grimmer vision I can’t imagine, but I still missed it when, with a sucking sound, it disappeared into the poached egg.

  It was quickly supplanted by other visions, however—but from the past rather than the future. To my utter horror, I realized that it was actually happening: my whole life was passing before my eyes, in little vignettes which were slurped up by the creature as fast as they formed.

  In spite of myself I began watching them. In rapid succession I reviewed a lifetime of disasters: losing my transmission at the head of the Victory Parade, getting bounced out of bed a hair before climax when I accidentally called Betty Sue the wrong name, being violently ill on two innocent customers of Howard Johnson’s…

  Wait! A light-bulb rather unoriginally appeared over my head (and was eaten by the poached egg). Howard Johnson’s!!!! My untimely nausea had come on my third day as a HoJo counter-man, a direct result of the genius of Mr. Johnson himself. Early in his career, Johnson had hit upon the notion of urging all new employees to eat all the ice-cream they wished, for free. He reasoned that they would soon become sick of ice cream, and hence cut employee pilferage from his overhead. The scheme had worked well for him—why not for me?

  Desperately I rammed my forebrain into low gear and cut in the afterburner. I dug into the tangled whorls of my cerebrum for all the creativity that heredity and environment had given men, and began to hallucinate as fast and as intricately as I could. I prayed that the poached egg would O.D.

  Yteic-Os was caught in a quandary. The Force was radiating from this rococo little entity at an intolerable rate, and the creature would not stop projecting! Too heavily occupied in absorbing the torrent of food to roll off hisher back, Yteic-Os was lying on the escape-valve, similar to a whale’s spout, which lay in the center of hisher back.

  The Voracious One screamed—after hisher fashion—and tried frantically to assimilate the superabundance of food, to no avail. Even as heshe thrashed, desperately seeking to free the escape-orifice, heshe swelled, grew, expanded more and more rapidly, like a balloon inextricably linked to an air compressor. Heshe lost hisher egg shape, became round rather than ovoid, swelled, bloated to impossible dimensions, and—

  —the inevitable happened.

  And when I could see again, there was scrambled eggs all over the place.

  I didn’t hang around. Corporal Zeke was delighted to see me—it’s embarrassing to have men under your command bumming joints from the enemy. But he was a little disappointed to learn that I only had four-and-a-half bricks.

  “That’s okay, Corp,” I assured him. “You guys can have my share. I’m straight for life.”

  “What?” gasped Zeke, shocked enough to deliver the first and only one-word speech of his life.

  “Yep. After what I went through on the way over here, I’ll never get stoned again as long as I live. Poached eggs eating hallucinations, cosmic invasion, Howard Johnson—it was just too intense, man, just too intense. A man who could freak out like that didn’t ought to do dope. I’ve had a few bummers before, but I know when I’ve been warned.”

  Zeke was stupefied, but not so stupefied as to fail to try and change my mind. In subsequent weeks he went so far as to leave joints on my pillow, and once I caught him slipping hash into my K-rations. But like I say, I know when I’ve been warned, and you can’t say I’m stupid.

  I live a perfectly content life now that the war is over. Got me a wife, a nice little one-family in Scarsdale that I’ll have entirely paid off in another twenty-five years, and a steady job down at the distributing plant—I get to bring home unlimited quantities of Black Label.

  But sometimes I drink a little too much of it, and my wife Mabel says when I’m drunk—aside from becoming “disgustingly physical”—I often babble a lot. Something about having saved the world…

  Editor's Introduction to:

  SAUL’S DEATH: TWO SESTINAS

  by Joe Haldeman

  Joe Haldeman is a genuine war hero; thus it’s not surprising that he can write realistically about combat. Joe and Gay Haldeman live in Florida when he’s not filling a temporary slot as writer in residence and professor at one or another academic institution.

  Science fiction conventions give plenty of opportunities for writers to get together and sing. Since most of us aren’t able to stay on tune, cleverness of line is generally more important than musical worthiness, and ballads tend to dominate, especially in the wee hours when we sing.

  Joe and Gay Haldeman are exceptions: they’re quite capable of staying on key. They also know a lot of songs.

  I confess I never heard of a sestina before. The form is explained in an afterword. Meanwhile, a genuine science fiction story in sestina format; some of us are likely to perform it at the next big SF convention.

  SAUL’S DEATH: TWO SESTINAS

  by Joe Haldeman

  I

  I used to be a monk, but gave it over

  Before books and prayer and studies cooled my blood,

  And joined with Richard as a mercenary soldier.

  (No Richard that you’ve heard of, just

  A man who’d bought a title for his name).

  And it was in his service I met Saul.

  The first day of my service I liked Saul;

  His easy humor quickly won me over.

  He admitted Saul was not his name;

  He’d taken up another name for blood.

  (So had I—my fighting name was just

  (A word we use at home for private soldier.)

  I felt at home as mercenary soldier.

  I liked the company of men like Saul.

  (Though most of Richard’s men were just

  (Fighting for the bounty when it’s over.)

  I loved the clash of weapons, splashing blood—

  I lived the meager promise of my name.

  Saul promised that he’d tell me his real name

  When he was through with playing as a soldier.

  (I said the same; we took an oath in blood.)

  But I would never know him but as Saul;

  He’d die before the long campaign was over,

  Dying for a cause that was not just.

  Only fools require a cause that’s just,

  Fools and children out to make a name.

  Now I’ve had sixty years to think it over

  (Sixty years of being no one’s soldier).

  Sixty years since broadsword opened Saul

  And splashed my body with his steaming blood.

  But damn! we lived for bodies and for blood.

  The reek of dead men rotting, it was just

  A sweet perfume for those like me and Saul.

  (My peaceful language doesn’t have a name

  (For lewd delight in going off to soldier.)

  It hurts my heart sometimes to know it’s over.

  My heart was hard as stone when it was over;

  When finally I’d had my fill of blood.

  (And knew I was too old to be a soldier.)

  Nothing left for me to do but just

  Go back home and make myself a name

  In ways of peace, forgetting war and Saul.

  In ways of blood he made himself a name

  Though he was just a mercenary soldier)—

  I loved Saul before it all was over.

  II

  A mercenary soldier has no future;

  Some say his way of life is hardly human.

  And yet, he has his own small bloody world

  (Part aches and sores and wrappings soaking blood,

  (Partly fear and glory grown familiar)

  Confined within a shiny fence of swords.

  But how I learned to love to fence with swords!

  Another world, my homely past and future—

  Once steel and eye and wrist became familiar

  With each other, then that steel was almost human

  (With an altogether human taste for blood).

  I felt that sword and I could take the world.

  I felt that Saul and I could take the world:

  Take the whole world hostage with our swords.

  The bond we felt was stronger than mere blood

  (Though I can see with hindsight in the future

  (The bond we felt was something only human:

  (A need for love when death becomes familiar.)

  We were wizards, and death was our familiar;

  Our swords held all the magic in the world.

  (Richard thought it almost wasn’t human,

  (The speed with which we parried others’ swords,

  (Forever end another’s petty future.)

  Never scratched, though always steeped in blood.

  Ambushed in a tavern, fighting ankle-deep in blood,

  Fighting back-to-back in ways familiar.

  Saul slipped: lost his footing and his future.

  Broad blade hammered down and sent him from this world.

  In angry grief I killed that one, then all the other swords;

  Then locked the door and murdered every human.

  No choice, but to murder every human.

  No one in that tavern was a stranger to blood.

  (To those who live with pikes and slashing swords,

  (The inner parts of men become familiar.)

  Saul’s vitals looked like nothing in this world:

  I had to kill them all to save my future.

  Saul’s vitals were not human, but familiar:

  He never told me he was from another world:

  I never told him I was from his future.

  The sestina is an ingenious, intricate form of verse that originated in France around the twelfth century, percolated into Italy, and from there was appropriated by the English. At first glance, it looks like a rather arbitrary logjam, sort of a hybrid of poetry with linear algebra, but it does have a special charm.

  The form calls for six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three-line envoi. The lines don’t rhyme, but they give a sort of illusion of rhyming, by forced repetition. The last words of the first six lines provide the last words of every subsequent line, by a strict system of inside-out rotation. (If the last words of the first stanza are 1-2-3-4-5-6, then the last words of the second are 6-1-5-2-4-3; the third, 3-1-4-1-2-5, and so forth. Claro? The envoi ought to have all six words crammed into its three lines, but the writer is allowed a certain amount of latitude with that, and I’ve taken it.)

  The result, in English at least, is a sort of a chant, which is one of two reasons the form is appropriate for an entertainment like "Saul’s Death.”

  Editor's Introduction to:

  PROJECT HIGH FRONTIER

  by Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham and Robert A. Heinlein

  I am a contributing editor to Survive, a magazine about how to live through the coming crisis times. The worst crisis we could experience would be a nuclear war.

  The best way to survive a nuclear war is not to have one. The best way I know not to have one is to support General Graham’s Project High Frontier.

  Many years ago, Stefan T. Possony and I published a book called THE STRATEGY OF TECHNOLOGY. The book was a success d’estime: that is, it didn’t make us much money, but it did get good reviews. Eventually it was adopted as a text in one of the nation’s War Colleges, so I suppose it had some influence.

  One of the concepts we examined in that book was national strategic doctrine, which at that time was announced as “Assured Destruction.” This seemed a bit odd: that is, one of the most popular stories of the time was that when Robert S. McNamara took office as Secretary of Defense, he invited the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command to discuss his war plans, and particularly the SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan). The general did so, showing how the US forces would be launched against the enemy.

  When the briefing was over, McNamara shuddered. “General,” he said, “you don’t have a war plan. All you have is a kind of horrible spasm.”