There Won't Be War

“So the attitude test you took didn’t come right out and say ‘How would you like to get the enemy in your sights and fry him?’ Most people in their right mind would say—”

“But I would-” His eyes actually glittered. “I mean I’ve really thought about it a lot! What it would look like and all.”

“What it would feel like.”

He smiled. “Yeah.”

The counselor tapped three times on the test packet. “That’s in here, all right. But it’s just boyish enthusiasm. Playing soldier. You’re going to be a solid citizen. A peaceable, well-adjusted man who makes a real contribution to society. You’re the lucky one.”

He shook his head slowly. “But Duncan—”

“Duncan was a true psychopath, a born killer who hid it so well he fooled even his brother. That 68 is about as low as I’ve ever seen. Don’t envy him. He’s probably dead by now. If he’s not dead, he’s going through hell.”

Eric kept shaking his head and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “He was a nice guy, though.”

“Jack the Ripper was probably a nice guy.”

“Well ... thanks. Better get to class.” He paused at the door. “But I might see him again. I mean, like, you came back.”

“That’s right. Counselors are all people who’ve been sent to the Zone. People who lived long enough to change.”

“Well. Maybe.”

“We can hope.” He watched the boy trudge away, deep in thought, and suppressed a grin. Sometimes the satisfactions of this job were not at all subtle.

The front of the landing craft unhooked and slapped forward with a blinding spray of foam. The boys charged out, terrified, frantic, into the smell of roasting flesh—

The first ones on the beach stopped dead. The next ones piled up behind them, and the boy who had fixed his bayonet just missed skewering Duncan.

Twenty meters up the beach, under a red and white striped awning, four pretty girls in brief bathing suits tended a suckling pig that turned over coals, roasting. Tubs of ice with cold drinks.

An older man in a bathing suit held up a drink, toasting them. Duncan didn’t recognize him at first, without coat and tie. It was Ian Johnson, the counselor who had condemned him to this place. “Welcome to the Zone,” he called out. “War’s hell.”

Like a number of the others, Duncan pointed his weapon at the sky and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

The girls laughed brightly.

That night, sitting around a bonfire, they learned the actual way of the world. The Zone was the real world, and the island nation where they had gone through childhood and most of their early schooling was actually a prison without walls. Or a zoo without bars, where the zookeepers mingled unnoticed with the specimens.

The Enemy did not exist; there was no war. It was only a ruse to explain why people couldn’t leave, unless they left in uniform. Children like Eric stayed on the island, constantly monitored by observers from the real world, until they trained themselves out of aggressiveness and were allowed to leave. Or they grew up, lived, and died there, their options restricted for everyone’s sake. Their world was a couple of centuries out of date, necessarily, since in the real world everyone had access to technologies that could be perverted into weapons of mass destruction.

It had been a truism since the simple atomic age, that the social sciences hadn’t been able to keep up with the physical ones; that our ability to control the material world had accelerated without our moral strength increasing to accommodate our powers.

There was a war that had to be the last one, and the few survivors put together this odd construct to protect themselves and their descendents from themselves and their descendents.

They still couldn’t change human nature, but they could measure aspects of it with extraordinary reliability. And they could lie about the measurements, denying to a large minority of the population a freedom that they did not know existed.

For some years Duncan went down to the beach on Invasion Day, looking for his brother Eric in the dumbfounded battalions that slogged through the surf into the real world. Then one year he was too busy, and the rest of the years just had the office computer automatically check the immigration lists.

In the other real world, Eric sometimes wondered if his brother was still alive.

Author’s note:

Twenty years ago, my wife had her first real full-time job, teaching Spanish in a rural Florida high school that had recently, reluctantly, become integrated. The students had taken language aptitude tests.and only those with high potential were allowed into her classroom.

Predictably, the elite students—most of whom, surprisingly, had gone through the “inferior” black primary school system—threw themselves into the work with enthusiasm, learning fast, doing extra work, having a good time at it. They were a joy to teach.

About a year later, my wife found out that the office had made a fundamental error. Everyone who took the test, pass or fail, had been allowed into the class. Some of them had language aptitudes far below average.