Forever Peace - Joe Haldeman

The colonel who replaced him came from Washington, from General Stanton Roser's Office of Force Management and Personnel. After he'd settled in for a few days, reviewing his predecessor's policies and actions, he quietly reversed the one affecting Julian's old platoon. They would stay jacked until 25 July, as part of a long-standing OFMP study. On the 25th, they'd be brought in for testing and evaluation.

Brought in to Building 31.

Roser's OFMP couldn't directly affect what went on in the huge Canal Zone POW camp; that was managed by a short company from Army Intelligence, which had a platoon of soldierboys attached to it.

The challenge was somehow to have all the POWs jacked together for two weeks without any of the soldierboys or Intelligence officers, one of whom was also jacked, eavesdropping.

To this end they conjured up a colonelcy for Harold McLaughlin, the only one of the Twenty who had both army experience and fluency in Spanish. He had orders cut to go to the Zone to monitor an experiment in extended "pacification" of the POWs. His uniforms and papers were waiting for him in Guadalajara.

One night in Texas, Marty had called all the Saturday Night Special people and asked, in an enigmatic and guarded way, whether they would like to come down to Guadalajara, to share some vacation time with him and Julian and Blaze: "Everyone has been under so much stress." It was partly to benefit from their varied and objective viewpoints, but also to get them across the border before the wrong people showed up asking questions. All of them but Belda said they were able to come; even Ray, who had just spent a couple of weeks in Guadalajara, having a few decades' worth of fat vacuumed out of his body.

So who should be first to show up at la Florida but Belda, after all, hobbling in with a cane and an overloaded human porter. Marty was in the entrance hall, and for a moment just stared.

"I thought it over and decided to take the train down. Convince me it wasn't a big mistake." She nodded at the porter. "Tell this nice boy where to put my things."

"Uh... habitacion dieciocho. Room 18. Up the stairs. You speak English?"

"Enough," he said, and staggered up the stairs with the four bags.

"I know Asher's coming in this afternoon," she said. It was not quite twelve. "What about the others? I thought I might rest until the festivities begin."

"Good. Good idea. Everyone should be in by six or seven. We have a buffet set up for eight."

"I'll be there. Get some sleep yourself. You look terrible." She pulled herself up the stairs with cane and banister.

Marty looked as bad as she said, having just spent hours jacked with McLaughlin going over all the ins and outs, every possible thing that could go wrong with the POW aspect of "the caper," as McLaughlin called it. He'd be on his own most of the time.

There would be no problem as long as orders were followed, since the orders called for all of the POWs to be isolated for two weeks. Most of the Americans didn't like jacking with them anyhow.

After two weeks, starting right after Julian's platoon moved in on Building 31, McLaughlin would take a walk and disappear, leaving the POWs' humanization an irreversible fact of life. Then they would be connected with Portobello and prepare for the next stage.

Marty flopped down on the unmade bed in his small room and stared at the ceiling. It was stucco, and the crusted swirls of it made fantastic patterns in the shifting light that threaded across the room from the top of the shutters that cut off the view of the street; light reflected from the windshields and glittering canopies of the cars that crawled by in the street below, noisily unaware that their old world was about to die. If everything went right. Marty stared at the shifting shadows and catalogued all the things that could go wrong. And then their old world would die, literally.

How could they keep the plan secret, against all odds? If only the humanization didn't take so long. But there was no way around it.

Or so he thought.

I'D BEEN LOOKING FORWARD to seeing the Saturday Night Special crowd again, and there couldn't have been a more welcome setting for the reunion, as tired as we were of road food. The dining table at la Florida was a crowded landscape of delights: a platter of jumbled sausages and another of roasted chickens, split and steaming; a huge salmon lying open on a plank; three colors of rice and bright bowls of potatoes and corn and beans; stacks of bread and tortillas. Bowls of salsa, chopped peppers, and guacamole. Reza was loading a plate when I came in; we exchanged greetings in silly gringo Spanish and I followed his example.

We'd just collapsed in overstuffed chairs, plates balanced on laps, when the others came downstairs in a group, led by Marty. It was a mob, a dozen of the Twenty as well as five from our crowd. I gave up my chair to Belda and filled a small plate to her specifications, saying hello to everyone, and eventually found a piece of floor in a corner with Amelia and Reza, who had also given up his early advantage to a white-haired woman, Ellie.

Reza poured us each a cup of red wine from an un-labeled jug. "Let me see your ID, soldier." He shook his head, drank half the cup and refilled it. "I'm emigrating," he said.

"Better bring lots of money," Amelia said. There were no jobs for Nortes in Mexico. .

"You guys really have your own personal nano-forge?"

"Boy, security is tight around here," I said.

He shrugged. "I sort of heard Marty tell Ray about it. Stolen?"

"No, an antique." I told him as much of the story as I could. It was frustrating; everything I knew about its history came from being jacked with the Twenty, and there was no way to communicate all the nuance and complexity of its shadowy story. Like reading just the face level of a hypertext.

"So technically, it's not stolen. It does belong to you."

"Well, it's not legal for private citizens to own warm fusion plants, let alone the nanogenesis modules-but St. Bartholomew's was chartered by the army in a grant that hid all kinds of spooky classified things. I guess the records got scrambled, and we're sort of caretaking the old machine until someone like the Smithsonian shows up for it."

"Good of you." He attacked a quarter-chicken. "Would I be wrong in assuming that Marty didn't summon us down here for our sage advice?"

"He'll ask your advice," Amelia said. "He asks for mine all the time." She rolled her eyes.

Reza dipped a chicken leg in jalapenos. "But basically, he's covering his rear. His rear flank."

"And protecting you," I said. "As far as we know, nobody's after Marty yet. But they're certainly after Blaze, for this ultimate weapon she knows all about."

"They killed Peter," she murmured.

Reza looked blank and then shook his head sharply. "Your coworker. Who did?"

"The one who came after me said he was from the army's 'Office of Technology Assessment.' " She shook her head. "He was and he wasn't."

"Spooks?"

"Worse than that," I said. I explained about the Hammer of God.

"So why not just go public?" he said. "You didn't plan for it to stay secret."

"We will," I said, "but the later, the better. Ideally, not until we have all the mechanics converted. Not just Portobello, but everywhere."

"Which will take a month and a half," Amelia said, "if everything goes according to plan. I can imagine how likely that is going to be."

"You won't even get to that stage," Reza said. "All those people able to read minds? I'd bet you a month's alcohol ration it'll blow up in your face before you get the first platoon converted."

"No bet," I said. "As little as I need your ration. The only chance we have is to stay a little ahead of the game. Try to be ready for disaster when it strikes."

A stranger sat down with us and I realized it was Ray, the three quarters of him that was left after cosmetic surgery. "I jacked with Marty." He laughed. "God, what a screwball plan. Go away for a couple of weeks and everybody goes crazy."

"Some are born crazy," Amelia said. "Some achieve craziness. We had craziness thrust upon us."

"Bet that's a quote," Ray said, and crunched down on a carrot. He had a plate full of raw vegetables. "True enough, though. One person dead and how many of us to follow? To take on the unlikely task of improving human nature."

"If you want out," I said, "it better be now."

Ray set his plate down and helped himself to some wine. "No way. I've worked with jacks as long as Marty. We've been playing with this idea longer than you've been playing with girls." He glanced at Amelia and smiled and looked down at his plate.

Marty rescued him by dinging a spoon on a water glass. "We have a vast range of experience and expertise here, and won't often all be together in one room. I think it would be smart this first time, though, to limit ourselves to getting our timetable and other information straight-things the jacked people all know in detail, but the rest of us only in bits and pieces."

"Let's take it backward," Ray said. "We conquer the world. What's the step just before that?"

Marty stoked his chin. "September first."

"Labor Day?"

"It's also Armed Forces Day. The one day in the year when we can have a thousand soldierboys marching down the streets of Washington. Peacefully."

"One of the few days," I added, "when most of the politicians are also in Washington. And more or less in one place, at the parade."

"A lot of what happens before, just before that, is control of the news. 'Spin,' they used to call it.

"Two weeks before, we will have finished humanizing the entire POW compound down in Panama City. It's going to be a miracle-all those unruly, hostile captives transformed into a forgiving, cooperative nation, eager to use their newfound harmony to end the war."

"I see where this is going," Reza said. "We'll never get away with it."

"Okay," Marty said. "Where are we going?"

"You get everybody excited about turning these nasty goomie soldiers into angels, and then you whip aside the magic curtain and say, 'Ta-da! We've done the same thing to all our soldiers. By the way, we're taking over Washington.'"

"Not quite that subtle." Marty rolled up a tortilla with a strange mixture of beans, shredded cheese, and olives. "By the time the public learns about it, it will be 'Oh, by the way, we've taken over Congress and the Pentagon. Stay out of our way while we work this out.'" He bit into the tortilla and shrugged at Reza.

"Six weeks from now," Reza said.

"Six eventful weeks," Amelia said. "Just before I left Texas, I sent the rationale for the doomsday scenario to about fifty scientists-everyone in my address book tagged as a physicist or astronomer."

"That's funny," Asher said. "I wouldn't have gotten it, since I'd be in your book as 'math' or 'old fart.' But you'd think some colleague would have mentioned it by now. How long's it been?"

"Monday," Amelia said.

"Four days." Asher filled a mug with coffee and steaming milk. "Have you contacted any of them?"

"Of course not. I haven't dared to pick up a phone or log on."

"Nothing in the news," Reza said. "Aren't any of your fifty publicity-hungry?"

"Maybe it was intercepted," I said.

Amelia shook her head. "It was from a public phone, a data jack in the Dallas train station; maybe a microsecond download."

"So why hasn't anybody reacted?" Reza said.

She kept shaking her head. "We've been so... so busy. I should have..." She set down her plate and fished through her purse for a phone.