Ben Bova - The Watchmen.pdf - Ben Bova - margozap

THE WATCHMEN

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events

portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance

to real people or incidents is purely coincidental-

book or portions thereof in any form,

A Baen Book

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, N.Y. 10471

ISBN: 0-671-87598-1

Cover art by Darrell K. Sweet

First Baen printing, April 1994

Distributed by

Paramount Publishing

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, N-Y. 10020

Printed in the United States of America

Author's Introduction

They say you can't go home again, and as usual, they're

wrong.

In re-reading these two tales of the Star Watch some

thirty years after I wrote them, all of the passions and

motivations that went into the two novels came flooding

back into my mind. I was pleasantly surprised to see how

well the stories hold up, but struck by a deep sense of

sadness to realize that the underlying human problems

that form the focus of the novels are not only still with

us, but are worse today than they were three decades

ago-

Star Watchman was my second novel, and I wrote it

at a time when France was deeply enmeshed in colonial

wars in Algeria and a place that was then known as Indo-

China. French Indo-China, at that. Today we call that

region Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

The problems of colonial wars, and wars by proxy—

where major powers fight "minor" wars in some Third

World country—were uppermost in my mind as I wrote

Star Watchman. Shortly after the novel was first published.

2 Ben Bova

in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson started the

immense American military build-up in Vietnam. Six

years later President Richard M. Nixon enlarged the war

into Laos and Cambodia. Some fifty thousand young

Americans were killed in the fighting.

All through the Vietnam years I kept wondering if I

was crazy or if the people running our government were.

Before undertaking Star Watchman I did a fair amount

of research into the history of colonial wars in general

(including our own Revolution) and of Algeria and south-

east Asia in particular. I began to ask myself, as the Viet-

nam fighting dragged on year after year: Even if we win,

even if Ho Chin Minh surrenders abjectly, what would

we gain? I mean, if I could understand that this war was

fruitless, why couldn't the men in the White House?

Those of us who love science fiction can't help feeling

that, if the-politicians and other leaders of society would

read SF, maybe we wouldn't stumble into the quagmires

that we seem to find with depressing regularity. I don't

think that if LBJ or Nixon had read Star Watchman

either one of them would have changed his policies. But

maybe it would have made them at least mink a little

about what they were doing and where they were

heading.

Incidentally, I have not touched a word of either novel.

By today's standards, they are not politically correct.

Women are called girls, as they were in the Sixties. It's

certainly a male chauvinist society out there on the space

frontier. If anyone's sensibilities are offended by the

implicit attitudes in these novels, they can always go back

and re-read Jane Austen.

The Dueling Machine stemmed from an entirely differ-

ent source. I was working at a high-powered research

laboratory in the Boston area in the early Sixties. In those

days I was a pretty good fencer; even won the New

England saber championship one year (novice class). I

helped to organize a fencing club at the lab. On summer

THE WATCHMEN 3

evenings we practiced outdoors, on the parking lot. Often

our practice was interrupted by the screech of automo-

bile wheels, as drivers passing our lot stared at a bunch

of people merrily trying to stab one another, and forgot

to watch where they were driving.

Myron Lewis was one of the lab's physicists, and

became a good saber fencer. One day, as we were com-

plaining about lawyers (yes, lawyers were not held in high

repute even then), I grumbled that Massachusetts had

made a mistake when it outlawed dueling. Myron quickly

suggested that it would be great if somebody could invent

a dueling machine: a device in which two people could

fight each other to the death, without being physically

harmed,

We had invented Virtual Reality, although neither of

us had the sense to pursue the idea except in fiction,

and the term would not be coined for another twenty-

some years-

1 had earlier written a short story, "The Next Logical

Step," that John Campbell published in Analog, in May

1962. It dealt with a computer system for playing war

games, in which the player experienced—with all his

senses—the battle being fought. Myron and I com-

bined that idea with his to create the dueling machine.

We plotted out a novelet, which I wrote. It was the

cover story in Analog's May 1963 issue, with a superb

cover illustration. That was during the brief era when

Analog was published in large format, rather than

dijgfcst-size.

That novelet became the first third of the novel. The

Dueling Machine, under the sub-tide " The Perfect

Warrior."

The theme of The Dueling Machine is once again

about war, and how to avoid or prevent it- It is a thinly-

disguised speculation on what would have happened in

the late 1930s if doughty Winston Churchill had been

Prime Minister of Britain rather than the pacifistic Neville

4 Ben Bow

Chamberlain. Was World War II inevitable? I do not

believe any event in human history was inevitable.

Which is one reason why we read science fiction, I

think. By looking forward into the possible futures that

we may face, we can begin to make decisions about

which of those futures we would like to live in, and per-

haps even take steps to help that future to come about.

The future is no more inevitable than the past. It is

created by what we do in the present—and what we fail

to do.

So, here are two tales of the future from thirty years

ago. I think they stil! have things to say to today's readers,

and I fondly hope that they are as entertaining now as

they were when they were first written.

Ben Bova

Naples, Florida

PARTI

Star

Watchman

To Mrs. Jaffe, wherever you are

Shinar

The Tel-ran Empire stretched over half the Milky Way

galaxy, from the lonely fringes of the immense spiral of

stars to its richly-packed center. Earth was the capital of

this vast Empire, but the planet Mars was headquarters

for the Star Watch. The Empire's military arm, the Star

Watch had bases on many planets, in all the farthest

reaches of the immense Terran domain. But Mars—

covered from pole to pole with mighty buildings housing

the men and machinery that ran the Star Watch—was

headquarters.

In a small office in one of those buildings, a noncom

was startled out of his usual routine. His desk communi-

cator lit up, and the dour features of the Chief-of-StafT

took form on the screen.

"I want the complete file on Oran VI immediately."

'Tes sir." Before the chiefs image had completely

faded from" the screen, the noncom's fingers were tap-

ping out a message on his desktop keyboard to the mam-

moth computer that held the Star Watch's master files.

8 Ben Bova

He decided to check and make certain that he had

requested the correct information from the computer.

(The possibility of the computer making an error was

unthinkable.) He punched a button on the desk and the

communicator screen lit up again.

The screen showed a map of the Milky Way galaxy,

with the position of the star Oran marked out. It was on

the edge of the Terran Empire, out in one of the farther

spiral arms of the galaxy, near the territory of the Komani

nation. The map faded, and a block of written data filled

tTip scrGCii"

ORAN; galactic coordinates ZJJ 27458330194126-3232.

Eight planets, one terrestrial (Oran VI).

ORAN vi; radius 1.04, density 0.91, gravity 1.025.

Atmosphere Earth-normal (0.004 deviation). Three major

continents, surface 80% sea-covered. Native human pop-

ulation, 3.4 billion (estimated). Economy: rural agricul-

tural; underdeveloped industrial base. Subject to

Imperial Development Plan 400R, priority 3C. Former

colony of Masters, incorporated into Empire immediately

following Galactic War of last century. Native name for

planet: Shinar.

"SHI-NARl"

The square was thronged with people. Shouting, jump-

ing, dancing people. It was hard to see how so many

people could jam into the city square, but still more were

pouring in from every avenue. They waved banners and

held aloft placards. Several groundcars were overturned

and swarmed over. A bonfire glowed near a statue at one

end of the square. The people shouted one word, which

rose and fell like the endless waves of the sea:

"SHI-NARl SHEE-^AR!"

The Terran governor stood frowning on the balcony

of his official residence, at the head of the jam-packed

square. He turned to the garrison commander standing

beside him. "This has got to be stopped!" The governor

THE WATCHMEN 9

had to shout to be heard over the roars of the crowd.

"There'll be another riot down there in a few minutes.

The native police can't handle that mob."

The commander arched his eyebrows. "Sir, if I send

my troops into the square, there may be bloodshed."

'That can't be helped now," the governor said. "Send

in the troops,

Star Watch Junior Officer Emil Vorgens sat in his tiny

compartment aboard the starship and reread his orders

for the tenth time. He found it hard to believe that he

was finally a full-fledged officer of the Star Watch. School

was finished, his commission was safely tucked away in

his travel kit, and here—on plastic film—were the orders

for his first official mission.

He slid the tiny film into his pocket viewer again and

projected the words onto the bare compartment wall:

"You will proceed to Oran VI and assist the Imperial

Governor there in dealing with certain dissident elements

of the native population."

Like most Star Watch orders, there was a good deal

of meaning in the words that were not there. The Star

Watch was the Terran Empire's interstellar miBtary arm.

In fact, the Star Watch pre-dated the Empire, and

existed even back in the old days of the Confederation,

more than a century ago.

It had been the Star Watch that fought the successful

war against the Masters, the war that had made the Ter-

ran Confederation—almost against its own will—the new

masters of most of the galaxy. The problems of ruling

such a vast territory had been solved only by the creation

of the Empire. Now the Star Watch served to control

Ben Bova - The Watchmen.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: