Voyage From Yesteryear

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

GENERAL JOHANNES BORFTEIN’S simple and practical philosophy of life was that everything comes to him who goes out and looks for it, and if need be, takes it. Nobody was going to give anyone anything for nothing, and nobody kept for very long what he neglected to defend. The name of the game was Survival. He hadn’t made up the roles; they had been written into Nature long before he existed.

Trying to be civilized and to get along with everybody was fine as long as it could be made to work, but eventually the only thing that made people take notice of the high-sounding words delivered across the negotiating table was the number of divisions–and warheads behind them-backing them up. And if, when all else failed, the only way left for a nation to look after its interests was to defend them by force, then the best chance for survival lay with ‘ promoting the cause totally and using every expedient that

came at hand; half measures were fatal. The shorter-term price to be paid was regrettable, but when had Nature ever offered free lunches? And in the longer term, what did it mean anyway7 The Soviets had taken twenty million casualties in World War II and emerged to fight World War III three-quarters of a century later. And in that conflict the U.S. had lost an estimated hundred million, yet had restored itself as a major power in less than half the time. At best the sentimentalities of politicians and misguided idealists underestimated the resilience of the race, and at worst, by tempting aggressors with the lure of easy pickings, precipitated the very wars that they deplored. Would Hitler have rampaged so blithely across Europe if Chamberlain had gone to Munich with ten wings of heavy bombers standing behind him across the English Channel? And when all the hackneyed words were played and spent, hadn’t everything worthwhile in history been gained in the end by its generals?

Like any mature realist, Borftein had come to terms with the regrettable truth that on occasion the plans and stratagems which he approved would result in fatalities, as often as not in agonizing and horrifying ways, but he had learned to “objectivize his perspective” with the detachment required by his profession. The numbers of killed and wounded predicted for an intended operation were presented by his analysts a~ the “Loss Factor” and the “Combat Reduction Factor,” respectively; a city selected to be incinerated along with its inhabitants was “nominated”; an area drenched with napalm and saturated with high explosive was subjected to “exploratory aggressive reconnaissance”; and a village flattened as a warning against harboring insurgents became an object of a “protective reaction.” Such were the rules.

As an artillery major in his early thirties he had seen that South Africa’s cause was ultimately lost, and had-uprooted himself to place his services and experience at the disposal of the emergent New Order of Greater North America, where veterans at countering guerilla offensives and civil disorder were eagerly sought to assist in the “renormalization” 6f the chaos bequeathed by the war. Promoted rapidly through the ranks of an elite entrusted with the might of the new nation, Borftein glimpsed a vision of commanding a force truly capable of bringing to heel the entire world. But the vision had been short-lived. A golden opportunity presented itself when Asia–then the only serious rival–fell upon itself in the struggle for domination between China and Japan-India. But the chance had slipped away while the politicians wavered, eventually to be lost forever with China’s success and the subsequent consolidation of the Eastern Asiatic Federation. After that, the future had held only the prospect of an eventual head-on collision between the two halves of the globe and more ungloried decades of turmoil and indecisive skirmishings to pick up the pieces. Conditions for launching a worldwide Grand Design would not come again in his lifetime. And so he had left to seek a more rewarding destiny with the Mayflower II. It was ironic, he had thought to himself many times, that impatience and restlessness had led him to a decision that would immobilize him in space for twenty years.