There Won't Be War

Vargas felt at home almost immediately. The interior of the ship looked exactly like what he had seen on old Star Trek reruns. There were large rooms filled with panels of instruments. There were indirect lighting panels of rectangular shape. There were technicians who wore pastel jumpsuits with high collars. There were avocado green wall-to-wall carpets. It was just what Vargas would have expected if he’d thought about it. He expected to see Spock come out of a passageway at any moment.

“No, we don’t have Spock here,” Gatt said in answer to Vargas’ unspoken question. “But we’ve got a lot more important stuff than some pointy-eared alien. Let me give you a little quiz, Vargas, just for fun. What is the first thing a warrior thinks about when he looks over his new battleship?”

Vargas had to give that some serious thought. He wished Lupe were here with him. Although she was stupid and only a woman, she was very good at supplying, through some mysterious feminine intuition, answers which Vargas had on the tip of his tongue but couldn’t quite come up with.

Fortunately for him, this time the answer came unbidden. “Guns!” he said.

“You got it!” Gatt said. “Come with me and let me show you the guns on this sucker.”

Gatt led him to a small car of the sort used to drive the long distances between points in a ship. Vargas tried to remember if they’d had a car like that on Star Trek. He thought not. He thought this ship was larger than the Enterprise. He liked that. He was not afraid of big things.

The little car hummed down the long, evenly lit passageway deep in the interior of the ship. General Gatt was reeling off statistics as they went, explaining how many battalions of men in Darth Vader helmets could be fit into the attack bays, how many tons of rations in the forms of beef jerky and bourbon could be stored in a thousand hundredweights of standard mess kits, and other important details. Soon they reached the area of the ship’s primary armament. Vargas looked admiringly at the large projector tubes, the paralysis wavelength radio, the vibratory beamer, which could shake apart a fair-sized asteroid. His fingers itched to get on the controls of the tractor and pressor beams. But General Gatt told him he would have to be patient for a little while longer. There was nothing around to shoot at. And besides, the main armament wasn’t quite all hooked up yet.

Vargas was loud in his praise of the work done by the scientists of the military. But Gatt had to set him straight on that.

“We have a lot of good boys, to be sure,” Gatt said. “Some of them quite clever. Especially the ones we drafted. This spaceship, however, was not their doing.”

“Whose is it then, sir, if I may enquire?” said Vargas.

“It was the work of a special group of civilian scientists, what they call a consortorium. Which simply means a whole bunch of them. It was a joint European-American-Asian effort. And a damned selfish one.”

“Why do you say that, sir?”

“Because they were building this ship to get away from us.”

“I can hardly believe that, sir,” Vargas said.

“It’s almost unthinkable, isn’t it? They were scared for their puny lives, of course, afraid that they’d all be killed. As it turned out, quite a few of them did get killed. I don’t know what made them think any respectable military establishment would let them escape from the planet with a valuable spaceship.”

“What happened to the scientists, sir?”

“Oh, we drafted them. Put them to work. Their ship was very good but it lacked a few things. Guns, for one. These people had actually thought they could go into outer space without high-powered weaponry. And another problem was that the ships weren’t fast enough. We have learned that space is quite a bit larger than some of our previous estimates at the Military College; therefore, we need really fast ships if we’re ever to get anywhere.”

“Fast ships and strong guns,” Vargas mused. “That’s just what I would have asked for myself. Did you have any trouble getting those things, general?”

“A little at first,” Gatt said. “The scientists kept on saying it was impossible and other downbeat and subversive talk like that. But I handled it. Gave them a deadline, started having executions when our goals weren’t met. You’d be amazed how quickly they picked up the pace.”

Vargas nodded, having used similar methods himself in his day.

“It’s a beautiful ship,” Vargas said. “Is it the only one?”

“What you’re looking at here,” Gatt said, “is the flagship of the fleet.”

“You mean there are more ships?” Vargas asked.

“Indeed there are. Or will be soon. We’ve got the entire worldwide shipbuilding and automobile industries working on them. We need lots of ships, Getulio.”