There Won't Be War

Slowly, an irrational anger took hold of him. Outmoded desire resurged in him against the invisible, the preternatural, which dwarfed him in its freedom. By God he wouldn’t just stand here quivering. He’d whip this thing. Doc charged along the hall and down into the cellar. His secret identity hung hidden there—the white linen shroud and flour-sack hood of office. And there, across a keg of nails, lay a new branding iron. Its mark was new to him: a cross with extra arms. He didn’t understand it exactly but the iron had a real heft that he liked.

Once in his guise of Cyclops, he took up his sceptre and rebounded up the stairs. At the top stood Lizzie in her nightdress. She seemed drunk or entranced. “Mr. Doc,” she said gently, with acute sadness, but he would not be undone by so obvious a ploy. He struck her with the iron and, when she withstood the blow, struck her again. Hadn’t he cared for her, hadn’t he treated her justly?

The music seemed to race; someone had cranked up the Victrola. Its noise drowned out the thunder of his passing. He would descend upon the workers, scare them into their graves, and only then punish Carpy. Oh, that thankless task would be hardest of all. He had given that boy more than anyone could ask.

Doc stumbled, half-blind within his hood, down the porch steps, music the scent he followed through the night. He’d smash the radio first. “If thine eye offend thee,” he recited triumphantly.

In the darkness, something struck him on the head. He paused. Another stinging tap—this one on the shoulder—made him spin about. What was it? Chestnuts dropping out of season? Then another, harder blow caught him over one eye. Defiant, he raised the iron, and a dozen of the pesky things hammered into him. With a grunt, he collapsed onto one knee. He snatched at one of the objects as it tumbled in the grass. He thought he had hold of a chunk of hail for a moment but it was long and smooth and carefully finished. It was, dear God, a piano key. Alert to his folly, Doc tried to get up to retreat and found that a pile of the keys had amassed around him, the hem of his robe snagged beneath them. He whacked away as the wall grew up. He whipped the iron desperately, until exhaustion and a thousand blows made him reel.

The keys showered down, hard as buckshot. Black and white, they pummeled like fists, spreading dark stains across the shroud, until all that remained was the iron, stuck out like a lightning rod with a good-luck sign at the tip. The heaped keys glistened as bright moonlight reappeared, and the music tinkled artlessly away.

The Long-Awaited Appearance of the Real Black Box Ratislav Durman

Edward Reindrop Horvat never had any illusions that he was an important person. His work as a restorer of Martian relics had no direct influence on the history of mankind; in fact, his influence was really quite negligible. The policy of Isolation had cut off all links between the Earth and Mars but, even without any further flow of artifacts from the Red Planet to Earth, there were still enough so that Edward had no fear that he would have to pass the years before retirement in another profession. The question was whether he would make it to retirement at all.

He was among the first conscripts yet the war did not interest him at all. At the obligatory political education classes during basic training they told him there were twenty reasons for war. The first two were so obviously ridiculous that he didn’t bother to listen to the rest. He slept through them instead since the officer who gave the lectures obviously didn’t care whether anyone listened to him or not.

By the time Edward arrived at the front the bitterness he had acquired in basic training had grown considerably. It bothered him that there was no one whom he could address with any conviction as “Sir” (the only man he knew was worthy of his “Good Morning, Sir” was killed in the first bombardment). It maddened him that instead of engaging in the highest sort of intellectual pursuits he was now forced to carry a rifle. It annoyed him that the only women he met were mindless automations of neurotic sexual compulsives who wanted to have one last orgasm before the end. These were the members of women’s battalions with whom they were ordered to couple in the interests of “reducing psychic tension” among the troops.

But more than anything else it drove him into a rage that he was being forced to kill people who also had no interest in the war, who, if they were lucky, slept during political education lectures, just as he did. His dissatisfaction, however, did not last long. The physical exertions, the constant uncertainty and the everyday presence of death quickly extinguished every emotion. He became an automation which was fine since nothing more was expected of him.

Ten years went by, and death ignored him.