But if Klaus wasn’t the Second Variety—
Suddenly he tensed. Something was coming, walking through the ash beyond the hill. What was it? He strained to see. Figures coming slowly along, making their way through the ash.
Coming toward him.
Hendricks crouched quickly, raising his gun. Sweat dripped down into his eyes. He fought down rising panic, as the figures neared.
The first was a David. The David saw him and increased its pace. The others hurried behind it. A second David. A third. Three Davids, all alike, coming toward him silently, without expression, their thin legs rising and falling. Clutching their teddy bears.
He aimed and fired. The first two Davids dissolved into particles. The third came on. And the figure behind it. Climbing silently toward him across the gray ash. A Wounded Soldier, towering over the David. And—
AND BEHIND THE Wounded Soldier came two Tassos, walking side by side. Heavy belt, Russian army pants, shirt, long hair. The familiar figure, as he had seen her only a little while before. Sitting in the pressure seat of the ship. Two slim, silent figures, both identical.
They were very near. The David bent down suddenly, dropping its teddy bear. The bear raced across the ground. Automatically, Hendricks’s fingers tightened around the trigger. The bear was gone, dissolved into mist. The two Tasso Types moved on, expressionless, walking side by side, through the gray ash.
When they were almost to him, Hendricks raised the pistol waist high and fired.
The two Tassos dissolved. But already a new group was starting up the rise, five or six Tassos, all identical, a line of them coming rapidly toward him.
And he had given her the ship and the signal code. Because of him she was on her way to the moon, to the Moon Base. He had made it possible.
He had been right about the bomb, after all. It had been designed with knowledge of the other types, the David Type and the Wounded Soldier Type. And the Klaus Type. Not designed by human beings. It had been designed by one of the underground factories, apart from all human contact.
The line of Tassos came up to him. Hendricks braced himself, watching them calmly. The familiar face, the belt, the heavy shirt, the bomb carefully in place.
The bomb—
As the Tassos reached for him, a last ironic thought drifted through Hendricks’s mind. He felt a little better, thinking about it. The bomb. Made by the Second Variety to destroy the other varieties. Made for that end alone.
They were already beginning to design weapons to use against each other.
Philip K. Dick
Regarded as one of the most important writers of science fiction in the twentieth century, Philip K. Dick built his reputation on subtly complex tales of intersecting alternate realities. His novel The Man in the High Castle, set in a future where Japan and Germany emerged victorious from World War II, won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1963 and is regarded as one of the best alternate history tales in science fiction. Dr. Bloodmoney offers a vision of American society in the aftermath of nuclear war. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik, both set in worlds where time slips and reality shifts are the norm, crystallize the mood of paranoia and often comically chaotic instability that characterizes much of his writing. His Valis trilogy, comprised of the novels Valis, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, has been praised for its use of science fiction and fantasy tropes in the service of philosophic and cosmologic inquiry. Several of his best-known stories have been successfully adapted for the screen: his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was filmed as the blockbuster movie Blade Runner in 1982, and his short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” was adapted as Total Recall in 1990. Revival of interest in Dick’s work after his death in 1982 led to the publication of his many mainstream novels, several volumes of his collected letters, and the five-volume Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick.
HERO
Joe W. Haldeman
1
“TONIGHT WE’RE GOING to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than I. Ergo, as they say, he couldn’t possibly ever have killed a man, not in combat, silently or otherwise.
I already knew eighty ways to kill people, though most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. We’d learned that they never schedule anything important for these after-chop classes.
The projector woke me up and I sat through a short movie showing the “eight silent ways.” Some of the actors must have been brainwipes, since they were actually killed.
After the movie a girl in the front row raised her hand. The sergeant nodded at her and she rose to parade rest. Not bad-looking, but kind of chunky about the neck and shoulders. Everybody gets that way after carrying a heavy pack around for a couple of months.
“Sir”—we had to call sergeants “sir” until graduation—“most of those methods, really, they looked…kind of silly.”
“For instance?”
“Like killing a man with a blow to the kidneys, from an entrenching tool. I mean, when would you actually just have an entrenching tool, and no gun or knife? And why not just bash him over the head with it?”
“He might have a helmet on,” he said reasonably.
“Besides, Taurans probably don’t even have kidneys!”
He shrugged. “Probably they don’t.” This was 1997, and we’d never seen a Tauran: hadn’t even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome. “But their body chemistry is similar to ours, and we have to assume they’re similarly complex creatures. They must have weaknesses, vulnerable spots. You have to find out where they are.
“That’s the important thing.” He stabbed a finger at the screen. “That’s why those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit…you’ve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a megawatt laser or just an emery board.”
She sat back down, not looking too convinced.
“Any more questions?” Nobody raised a hand.
“O.K.—tench-hut!” We staggered upright and he looked at us expectantly.
“Screw you, sir,” came the tired chorus.
“Louder!”
“SCREW YOU, SIR!”
One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.
“That’s better. Don’t forget, predawn maneuvers tomorrow. Chop at 0330, first formation, 0400. Anybody sacked after 0340 gets one stripe. Dismissed.”
I zipped up my coverall and went across the snow to the lounge for a cup of soya and a joint. I’d always been able to get by on five or six hours of sleep, and this was the only time I could be by myself, out of the army for a while. Looked at the newsfax for a few minutes. Another ship got caulked, out by Aldebaran sector. That was four years ago. They were mounting a reprisal fleet, but it’ll take four years more for them to get out there. By then, the Taurans would have every portal planet sewed up tight.
Back at the billet, everybody else was sacked and the main lights were out. The whole company’d been dragging ever since we got back from the two-week lunar training. I dumped my clothes in the locker, checked the roster and found out I was in bunk 31. Damn it, right under the heater.
I slipped through the curtain as quietly as possible so as not to wake up my bunkmate. Couldn’t see who it was, but I couldn’t have cared less. I slipped under the blanket.