Terran Federation was losing the war.
We didn’t know that, either. Nor did we know that strenuous efforts were being made to subvert the alliance against us and bring the Skinnies over to our side; the nearest we came to being told about that was when we got instructions, before the raid in which Flores was killed, to go easy on the Skinnies, destroy as much property as possible but to kill inhabitants only when unavoidable.
What a man doesn’t know he can’t spill if he is captured; neither drugs, nor torture, nor brainwash, nor endless lack of sleep can squeeze out a secret he doesn’t possess. So we were told only what we had to know for tactical purposes. In the past, armies have been known to fold up and quit because the men didn’t know what they were fighting for, or why, and therefore lacked the will to fight. But the M.I. does not have that weakness. Each one of us was a volunteer to begin with, each for some reason or other — some good, some bad. But now we fought because we were M.I. We were professionals, with
We certainly didn’t know that we were losing.
Those Bugs lay eggs. They not only lay them, they hold them in reserve, hatch them as needed. If we killed a warrior — or a thousand, or ten thousand — his or their replacements were hatched and on duty almost before we could get back to base. You can imagine, if you like, some Bug supervisor of population flashing a phone to somewhere down inside and saying, “Joe, warm up ten thousand warriors and have ’em ready by Wednesday … and tell engineering to activate reserve incubators N, O, P, Q, and R; the demand is picking up.”
I don’t say they did exactly that, but those were the results. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that they acted purely from instinct, like termites or ants; their actions were as intelligent as ours (stupid races don’t build spaceships!) and were much better co-ordinated. It takes a minimum of a year to train a private to fight and to mesh his fighting in with his mates; a Bug warrior is
Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn’t care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with “lessons from history” is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.
But we were learning. Technical instructions and tactical doctrine orders resulted from every brush with them, spread through the Fleet. We learned to tell the workers from the warriors — if you had time, you could tell from the shape of the carapace, but the quick rule of thumb was: If he comes at you, he’s a warrior; if he runs, you can turn your back on him. We learned not to waste ammo even on warriors except in self-protection; instead we went after their lairs. Find a hole, drop down it first a gas bomb which explodes gently a few seconds later, releasing an oily liquid which evaporates as a nerve gas tailored to Bugs (it is harmless to us) and which is heavier than air and keeps on going down — then you use a second grenade of H.E. to seal the hole.
We still didn’t know whether we were getting deep enough to kill the queens — but we did know that the Bugs didn’t like these tactics; our intelligence through the Skinnies and on back into the Bugs themselves was definite on this point. Besides, we cleaned their colony off Sheol completely this way. Maybe they managed to evacuate the queens and the brains … but at least we were learning to hurt them.
But so far as the Roughnecks were concerned, these gas bombings were simply another drill, to be done according to orders, by the numbers, and on the bounce.
Eventually we had to go back to Sanctuary for more capsules. Capsules are expendable (well, so were we) and when they are gone, you must return to base, even if the Cherenkov generators could still take you twice around the Galaxy. Shortly before this a dispatch came through breveting Jelly to lieutenant, vice Rasczak. Jelly tried to keep it quiet but Captain Deladrier published it and then required him to eat forward with the other officers. He still spent all the rest of his time aft.
But we had taken several drops by then with him as platoon leader and the outfit had gotten used to getting along without the Lieutenant — it still hurt but it was routine now. After Jelal was commissioned the word was slowly passed around among us and chewed over that it was time for us to name ourselves for our boss, as with other outfits.
Johnson was senior and took the word to Jelly; he picked me to go along with him as moral support. “Yeah?” growled Jelly.
“Uh, Sarge — I mean Lieutenant, we’ve been thinking—”
“With what?”
“Well, the boys have sort of been talking it over and they think — well, they say the outfit ought to call itself: ‘Jelly’s Jaguars.’”
“They do, eh? How many of ’em favor that name?”
“It’s unanimous,” Johnson said simply.
“So? Fifty-two ayes … and one no. The noes have it.” Nobody ever brought up the subject again.
Shortly after that we orbited at Sanctuary. I was glad to be there, as the ship’s internal pseudo-gravity field had been off for most of two days before that, while the Chief Engineer tinkered with it, leaving us in free fall — which I hate. I’ll never be a real spaceman. Dirt underfoot felt good. The entire platoon went on ten days’ rest & recreation and transferred to accommodation barracks at the Base.
I never have learned the co-ordinates of Sanctuary, nor the name or catalogue number of the star it orbits — because what you don’t know, you can’t spill; the location is ultra-top-secret, known only to ships’ captains, piloting officers, and such … and, I understand, with each of them under orders and hypnotic compulsion to suicide if necessary to avoid capture. So I don’t want to know. With the possibility that Luna Base might be taken and Terra herself occupied, the Federation kept as much of its beef as possible at Sanctuary, so that a disaster back home would not necessarily mean capitulation.
But I can tell you what sort of a planet it is. Like Earth, but retarded.
Literally retarded, like a kid who takes ten years to learn to wave bye-bye and never does manage to master patty-cake. It is a planet as near like Earth as two planets can be, same age according to the planetologists and its star is the same age as the Sun and the same type, so say the astrophysicists. It has plenty of flora and fauna, the same atmosphere as Earth, near enough, and much the same weather; it even has a good-sized moon and Earth’s exceptional tides.
With all these advantages it barely got away from the starting gate. You see, it’s short on mutations; it does not enjoy Earth’s high level of natural radiation.
Its typical and most highly developed plant life is a very primitive giant fern; its top animal life is a proto- insect which hasn’t even developed colonies. I am not speaking of transplanted Terran flora and fauna—
With its evolutionary progress held down almost to zero by lack of radiation and a consequent most unhealthily low mutation rate, native life forms on Sanctuary just haven’t had a decent chance to evolve and aren’t fit to compete. Their gene patterns remain fixed for a relatively long time; they aren’t adaptable — like being forced to play the same bridge hand over and over again, for eons, with no hope of getting a better one.
As long as they just competed with each other, this didn’t matter too much — morons among morons, so to speak. But when types that had evolved on a planet enjoying high radiation and fierce competition were introduced, the native stuff was outclassed.
Now all the above is perfectly obvious from high school biology … but the high forehead from the research station there who was telling me about this brought up a point I would never have thought of.
What about the human beings who have colonized Sanctuary?
Not transients like me, but the colonists who live there, many of whom were born there, and whose descendants will live there, even unto the umpteenth generation — what about those descendants? It doesn’t do a person any harm not to be radiated; in fact it’s a bit safer — leukemia and some types of cancer are almost unknown there. Besides that, the economic situation is at present all in their favor; when they plant a field of (Terran) wheat, they don’t even have to clear out the weeds. Terran wheat displaces anything native.
But the descendants of those colonists won’t evolve. Not much, anyhow. This chap told me that they could
