THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman

Whereupon he would assume a wry, tolerant expression and reiterate that I was merely a victim of self-imposed sexual frustration and romantic delusion.

In retrospect, I guess we had a good time arguing with each other. Cure me, he didn’t.

I did have a new friend who sat in my lap all the time. It was the cat, who had the usual talent for hiding from people who like cats and cleaving unto those who have sinus trouble or just don’t like sneaky little animals. We did have something in common, though, since to my knowledge be was the only other heterosexual male mammal within any reasonable distance, He’d been castrated, of course, but that didn’t make much difference under the circumstances.

6

It was exactly 400 days since the day we had begun construction. I was sitting at my desk not checking out Hilleboe’s new duty roster. The cat was on my lap, purring loudly even though I refused to pet it. Charlie was stretched out in a chair reading something on the viewer. The phone buzzed and it was the Commodore.

“They’re here.”

“I said they’re here. A Tauran ship just exited the collapsar field. Velocity .80c. Deceleration thirty gees. Give or take.”

Charlie was leaning over my desk. “What?” I dumped the cat.

“How long? Before you can pursue?” I asked.

“Soon as you get off the phone.” I switched off and went over to the logistic computer, which was a twin to the one on Masaryk ii and had a direct data link to it. While I tried to get numbers out of the thing, Charlie fiddled with the visual display.

The display was a hologram about a meter square by half a meter thick and was programmed to show the positions of Sade-l38, our planet, and a few other chunks of rock in the system. There were green and red dots to show the positions of our vessels and the Taurans’.

The computer said that the minimum time it could take the Taurans to decelerate and get back to this planet would be a little over eleven days. Of course, that would be straight maximum acceleration and deceleration all the way; we could pick them off like flies on a wall. So, like us, they’d mix up their direction of flight and degree of acceleration in a random way. Based on several hundred past records of enemy behavior, the computer was able to give us a probability table:

Days to

Contact Probability

11 .000001

15 .001514

20 .032164

25 .103287

30 .676324

35 .820584

40 .982685

45 .993576

50 .999369

MEDL~N

28.9554 .500000

Unless, of course, Antopol and her gang of merry pirates managed to make a kill. The chances of that I had learned in the can, were slightly less than fifty-fifty.

But whether it took 28.9554 days or two weeks, those of us on the ground had to just sit on our hands and watch.

If Antopol was successful, then we wouldn’t have to fight until the regular garrison troops replaced us here and we moved on to the next collapsar.

“Haven’t left yet.” Charlie had the display cranked down to minimum scale; the planet was a white ball the size of a large melon and Masaryk II was a green dot off to the right some eight melons away; you couldn’t get both on the screen at the same time.

While we were watching a small green dot popped out of the ship’s dot and drifted away from it. A ghostly number 2 drifted beside it, and a key projected on the display’s lower left-hand corner identified it as 2-Pursuit Drone. Other numbers in the key identified the Masaryk II, a planetary defense fighter and fourteen planetary defense drones. Those sixteen ships were not yet far enough away from one another to have separate dots.

The cat was rubbing against my ankle; I picked it up and stroked it. “Tell Hilleboe to call a general assembly. Might as well break it to everyone at once.”

* * *

The men and women didn’t take it very well, and I couldn’t blame them. We had all expected the Taurans to attack much sooner-and when they persisted in not coming, the feeling grew that Strike Force Command had made a mistake and that they’d never show up at all.

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