Winners! Read online

  “But I had not expected so much killing!”

  “Nor I . . . at this stage of things. There will be more yet, I am afraid, before the immediate purpose is achieved.”

  “You told me—”

  “I told you our hopes, Mwyr. You know as well as I that the Great Science is only exact on the broadest scale of history. Individual events are subject to statistical fluctuation.”

  “That is an easy way, is it not, to describe sentient beings dying in the mud?”

  “You are new here. Theory is one thing, adjustment to practical necessities is another. Do you think it does not hurt me to see that happen which I myself have helped plan?”

  “Oh, I know, I know. Which makes it no easier to live with my guilt.”

  “To live with your responsibilities, you mean “Your phrase.”

  “No, this is not semantic trickery. The distinction is real. You have read reports and seen films, but I was here with the first expedition. And here I have been for more than two centuries. Their agony is no abstraction to me.”

  “But it was different when we first discovered them. The aftermath of their nuclear wars was still so horribly present. That was when they needed us—the poor starveling anarchs—and we, we did nothing but observe.”

  “Now you are hysterical. Could we come in blindly, ignorant of every last fact about them, and expect to be anything but one more disruptive element? An element whose effects we ourselves would not have been able to predict. That would have been criminal indeed, like a surgeon who started to operate as soon as he met the patient, without so much as taking a case history. We had to let them go their own way while we studied in secret. You have no idea how desperately hard we worked to gain information and understanding. That work goes on. It was only seventy years ago that we felt enough assurance to introduce the first new factor into this one selected society. As we continue to learn more, the plan will be adjusted. It may take us a thousand years to complete our mission.”

  “But meanwhile they have pulled themselves back out of the wreckage. They are finding their own answers to their problems. What right have we to—”

  “I begin to wonder, Mwyr, what right you have to claim even the title of apprentice psychodynamician. Consider what their ‘answers’ actually amount to. Most of the planet is still in a state of barbarism. This continent has come farthest toward recovery, because of having the widest distribution of technical skills and equipment before the destruction. But what social structure has evolved? A jumble of quarrelsome successor states. A feudalism where the balance of political, military, and economic power lies with a landed aristocracy, of all archaic things. A score of languages and subcultures developing along their own incompatible lines. A blind technology worship inherited from the ancestral society that, unchecked, will lead them in the end back to a machine civilization as demoniac as the one that tore itself apart three centuries ago. Are you distressed that a few hundred men have been killed because our agents promoted a revolution which did not come off quite so smoothly as we hoped? Well, you have the word of the Great Science itself that, without our guidance, the totaled misery of this race through the next five thousand years would outweigh by three orders of magnitude whatever pain we are forced to inflict”

  “—Yes. Of course. I realize I am being emotional. It is difficult not to be at first, I suppose.”

  “You should be thankful that your initial exposure to the hard necessities of the plan was so mild. There is worse to come.”

  “So I have been told.”

  “In abstract terms. But consider the reality. A government ambitious to restore the old nation will act aggressively, thus embroiling itself in prolonged wars with powerful neighbors. Both directly and indirectly, through the operation of economic factors they are too naive to control, the aristocrats and freeholders will be eroded away by those wars. Anomic democracy will replace their system, first dominated by a corrupt capitalism and later by sheer force of whoever holds the central government. But there will be no place for the vast displaced proletariat, the one-time landowners and the foreigners incorporated by conquest. They will offer fertile soil to any demagogue. The empire will undergo endless upheaval, civil strife, despotism, decay, and outside invasion. Oh, we will have much to answer for before we are done!”

  “Do you think . . . when we see the final result . . . will the blood wash off us?”

  “No. We pay the heaviest price of all.”

  Spring in the high Sierra is cold, wet, snowbanks melting away from forest floor and giant rocks, rivers in spate until their canyons clang, a breeze ruffling puddles in the road. The first green breath across the aspen seems infinitely tender against pine and spruce, which gloom into a brilliant sky. A raven swoops low, gruk, gruk, look out for that damn hawk! But then you cross timber line and the world becomes tumbled blue-gray immensity, with the sun ablaze on what snows remain and the wind sounding hollow in your ears.

  Captain Thomas Danielis, Field Artillery, Loyalist Army of the Pacific States, turned his horse aside. He was a dark young man, slender and snub-nosed. Behind him a squad slipped and cursed, dripping mud from feet to helmets, trying to get a gun carrier unstuck. Its alcohol motor was too feeble to do more than spin the wheels. The infantry squelched on past, stoop-shouldered, worn down by altitude and a wet bivouac and pounds of mire on each boot. Their line snaked from around a prowlike crag, up the twisted road and over the ridge ahead. A gust brought the smell of sweat to Danielis.

  But they were good joes, he thought. Dirty, dogged, they did their profane best. His own company, at least, was going to get hot food tonight, if he had to cook the quartermaster sergeant.

  The horse’s hoofs banged on a block of ancient concrete jutting from the muck. If this had been the old days . . . but wishes weren’t bullets. Beyond this part of the range lay lands mostly desert, claimed by the Saints, who were no longer a menace but with whom there was scant commerce. So the mountain highways had never been considered worth repaving, and the railroad ended at Hangtown. Therefore the expeditionary force to the Tahoe area must slog through unpeopled forests and icy uplands, God help the poor bastards.

  God help them in Nakamura, too, Danielis thought. His mouth drew taut, he slapped his hands together and spurred the horse with needless violence. Sparks shot from iron shoes as the beast clattered off the road toward the highest point of the ridge. The man’s saber banged his leg.

  Reining in, he unlimbered his field glasses. From here he could look across a jumbled sweep of mountainscape, where cloud shadows sailed over cliffs and boulders, down into the gloom of a canyon and across to the other side. A few tufts of grass thrust out beneath him, mummy brown, and a marmot wakened early from winter sleep whistled somewhere in the stone confusion. He still couldn’t see the castle. Nor had he expected to, as yet. He knew this country . . . how well he did!

  There might be a glimpse of hostile activity, though. It had been eerie to march this far with no sign of the enemy, of anyone else whatsoever; to send out patrols in search of rebel units that could not be found; to ride with shoulder muscles tense against the sniper’s arrow that never came. Old Jimbo Mackenzie was not one to sit passive behind walls, and the Rolling Stones had not been given their nickname in jest.

  If Jimbo is alive. How do I know he is? That buzzard yonder may be the very one which hacked out his eyes.

  Danielis bit his lip and made himself look steadily through the glasses. Don’t think about Mackenzie, how he outroared and outdrank and outlaughed you and you never minded, how he sat knotting his brows over the chessboard where you could mop him up ten times out of ten and he never cared, how proud and happy he stood at the wedding . . . . Nor think about Laura, who tried to keep you from knowing how often she wept at night, who now bore a grandchild beneath her heart and woke alone in the San Francisco house from the evil dreams of pregnancy. Every one of those dogfaces plodding toward the castle which has killed every army ever sent against it—every one of them
has somebody at home and hell rejoices at how many have somebody on the rebel side. Better look for hostile spoor and let it go at that. .

  Wait! Danielis stiffened. A rider— He focused. One of our own. Fallon’s army added a blue band to the uniform. Returning scout. A tingle went along his spine. He decided to hear the report firsthand. But the fellow was still a mile off, perforce riding slowly over the hugger-mugger terrain. There was no hurry about intercepting him. Danielis continued to survey the land.

  A reconnaissance plane appeared, an ungainly dragonfly with sunlight flashing off a propeller head. Its drone bumbled among rock walls, where echoes threw the noise back and forth. Doubtless an auxiliary to the scouts, employing two-way radio communication. Later the plane would work as a spotter for artillery. There was no use making a bomber of it; Fort Nakamura was proof against anything that today’s puny aircraft could drop, and might well shoot the thing down.

  A shoe scraped behind Danielis. Horse and man whirled as one. His pistol jumped into his hand.

  It lowered. “Oh. Excuse me, Philosopher.”

  The man in the blue robe nodded. A smile softened his stern face. He must be around sixty years old, hair white and skin lined, but he walked these heights like a wild goat. The Yang and Yin symbol burned gold on his breast.

  “You’re needlessly on edge, son,” he said. A trace of Texas accent stretched out his words. The Espers obeyed the laws wherever they lived, but acknowledged no country their own: nothing less than mankind, perhaps ultimately all life through the space-time universe. Nevertheless, the Pacific States had gained enormously in prestige and influence when the Order’s unenterable Central was established in San Francisco at the time when the city was being rebuilt in earnest. There had been no objection—on the contrary—to the Grand Seeker’s desire that Philosopher Woodworth accompany the expedition as an observer. Not even from the chaplains; the churches had finally gotten it straight that the Esper teachings were neutral with respect to religion.

  Danielis managed a grin. “Can you blame me?”

  “No blame. But advice. Your attitude isn’t useful. Does nothin’ but wear out. You’ve been fightin’ a battle for weeks before it began.”

  Danielis remembered the apostle who had visited his home in San Francisco—by invitation, in the hope that Laura might learn some peace. His simile had been still homelier: “You only need to wash one dish at a time.” The memory brought a smart to Danielis’ eyes, so that he said roughly:

  “I might relax if you’d use your powers to tell me what’s waiting for us.”

  “I’m no adept, son. Too much in the material world, I’m afraid. Somebody’s got to do the practical work of the Order, and someday I’ll get the chance to retire and explore the frontier inside me. But you need to start early, and stick to it a lifetime, to develop your full powers.” Woodworth looked across the peaks seemed almost to merge himself with their loneliness.

  Danielis hesitated to break into the meditation. He wondered what practical purpose the Philosopher was serving on this trip. To bring back a report, more accurate than untrained senses and undisciplined emotions could prepare? Yes, that must be it. The Espers might yet decide to take a hand in this war. However reluctantly, Central had allowed the awesome psi powers to be released now and again, when the Order was seriously threatened; and Judge Fallon was a better friend to them than Brodsky or the earlier Senate of Bossmen and House of People’s Deputies had been.

  The horse stamped and blew out its breath in a snort. Woodworth glanced back at the rider. “If you ask me, though,” he said, “I don’t reckon you’ll find much doin’ around here. I was in the Rangers myself, back home, before I saw the Way. This country feels empty.”

  “If we could know!” Danielis exploded. “They’ve had the whole winter to do what they liked in the mountains, while the snow kept us out. What scouts we could get in reported a beehive—as late as two weeks ago. What have they planned?” Woodworth made no reply.

  It flooded from Danielis, he couldn’t stop, he had to cover the recollection of Laura bidding him good-by on his second expedition against her father, six months after the first one came home in bloody fragments:

  “If we had the resources! A few wretched little railroads and motor cars; a handful of aircraft; most of our supply trains drawn by mules—what kind of mobility does that give us? And what really drives me crazy . . . we know how to make what they had in the old days. We’ve got the books, the information. More, maybe, than the ancestors. I’ve watched the electrosmith at Fort Nakamura turn out transistor units with enough bandwidth to carry television, no bigger than my fist. I’ve seen the scientific journals, the research labs, biology, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics. And all useless!”

  “Not so,” Woodworth answered mildly. “Like my own Order, the community of scholarship’s becomin’ supranational. Printin’ presses, radiophones, telescribes—”

  “I say useless. Useless to stop men killing each other because there’s no authority strong enough to make them behave. Useless to take a farmer’s hands off a horse-drawn plow and put them on the wheel of a tractor. We’ve got the knowledge, but we can’t apply it.”

  “You do apply it, son, where too much power and industrial plant isn’t required. Remember, the world’s a lot poorer in natural resources than it was before the Hellbombs. I’ve seen the Black Lands myself, where the firestorm passed over the Texas oilfields.” Woodworth’s serenity cracked a little. He turned his eyes back to the peaks.

  “There’s oil elsewhere,” Danielis insisted. “And coal, iron, uranium, everything we need. But the world hasn’t got the organization to get at it. Not in any quantity. So we fill the Central Valley with crops that’ll yield alcohol, to keep a few motors turning; and we import a dribble of other stuff along an unbelievably inefficient chain of middlemen; and most of it’s eaten by the armies.” He jerked his head toward that part of the sky which the handmade airplane had crossed. “That’s one reason we’ve got to have Reunification. So we can rebuild.”

  “And the other?” Woodworth asked softly.

  “Democracy—universal suffrage—” Danielis swallowed. “And so fathers and sons won’t have to fight each other again.”

  “Those are better reasons,” Woodworth said. “Good enough for the Espers to support. But as for that machinery you want—” He shook his head. “No, you’re wrong there. That’s no way for men to live.”

  “Maybe not,” Danielis said. “Though my own father wouldn’t have been crippled by overwork if he’d had some machines to help him . . . Oh, I don’t know. First things first. Let’s get this war over with and argue later.” He remembered the scout, now gone from view. “Pardon me, Philosopher, I’ve got an errand.”

  The Esper raised his hand in token of peace. Danielis cantered off.

  Splashing along the roadside, he saw the man he wanted, halted by Major Jacobsen. The latter, who must have sent him out, sat mounted near the infantry line. The scout was a Klamath Indian, stocky in buckskins, a bow on his shoulder. Arrows were favored over guns by many of the men from the northern districts: cheaper than bullets, no noise, less range but as much firepower as a bolt-action rifle. In the bad old days before the Pacific States had formed their union, archers along forest trails had saved many a town from conquest; they still helped keep that union loose.

  “Ah, Captain Danielis,” Jacobsen hailed. “You’re just in time. Lieutenant Smith was about to report what his detachment found out.”

  “And the plane,” said Smith imperturbably. “What the pilot told us he’d seen from the air gave us the guts to go there and check for ourselves.”

  “Well?”

  “Nobody around.”

  “What?”

  “Fort’s been evacuated. So’s the settlement. Not a soul.”

  “But—but—” Jacobsen collected himself. “Go on.”

  We studied the signs as best’s we could. Looks like noncombatants left some time ago. By sledge and ski, I’d gue
ss, maybe north to some strong point. I suppose the men shifted their own stuff at the same time, gradual-like, what they couldn’t carry with ’em at the last. Because the regiment and its support units, even field artillery, pulled out just three-four days ago. Ground’s all tore up. They headed downslope, sort of west by northwest, far’s we could tell from what we saw.”

  Jacobsen choked. “Where are they bound?”

  A flaw of wind struck Danielis in the face and ruffled the horses’ manes. At his back he heard the slow plop and squish of boots, groan of wheels, chuff of motors, rattle of wood and metal, yells and whipcracks of muleskinners. But it seemed very remote. A map grew before him, blotting out the world.

  The Loyalist Army had had savage fighting the whole winter, from the Trinity Alps to Puget Sound—for Brodsky had managed to reach Mount Rainier, whose lord had furnished broadcasting facilities, and Rainier was too well fortified to take at once. The bossmen and the autonomous tribes rose in arms, persuaded that a usurper threatened their damned little local privileges. Their protectees fought beside them, if only because no rustic had been taught any higher loyalty than to his patron. West Canada, fearful of what Fallon might do when he got the chance, lent the rebels aid that was scarcely even clandestine.

  Nonetheless, the national army was stronger: more materiel, better organization, above everything an ideal of the future. Cine O’Donnell had outlined a strategy—concentrate the loyal forces at a few points, overwhelm resistance, restore order and establish bases in the region, then proceed to the next place—which worked. The government now controlled the entire coast, with naval units to keep an eye on the Canadians in Vancouver and guard the important Hawaii trade routes; the northern half of Washington almost to the Idaho line; the Columbia Valley; central California as far north as Redding. The remaining rebellious Stations and towns were isolated from each other in mountains, forests, deserts. Bossdom after bossdom fell as the loyalists pressed on, defeating the enemy in detail, cutting him off from supplies and hope. The only real worry had been Cruikshank’s Sierra Command, an army in its own right rather than a levy of yokels and citymen, big and tough and expertly led. This expedition against Fort Nakamura was only a small part of what had looked like a difficult campaign.