Another Rambling Legend From the War

I put a warning finger to my lips, but it was unnecessary. Across the gap, Ganja was at least as ready and aware as I. He, too, had seen the cautious figure that had just come into view. It was a classic ambush; no matter how suspicious the passerby, he had ultimately no choice but to plunge through the narrow gap, behind which we waited to strike.

After a predictable but useless moment's caution, our prey stepped through. We were on him in an instant as he struggled to escape our grasp. Finally, pinned beneath us, he decided it was useless and ceased resisting. He laughed.

"All right, all right, fair's fair. Now let me up, my bones aren't as flexible as they used to be, and this ground's mighty tough, even for Astroplastic. Well, what the devil are you young fools waiting for? Let me up!"

Ganja looked at me with that nasty look in his eye, like he got when he threw Aunt Tandera's merkin in the recycler. I decided to act before he got the chance. "Only if you'll tell us a story about the War!" I said.

Uncle Filly -- everybody used to call him that when he wasn't listening, even though he hated it and tried to make us all call him Fillmore -- got one of those put-on frowns all over his face, and made out that we were blackguards and thieves and all that. But we knew he loved to tell those old stories, and anyway I figured it was a good way to get back at Ganja for the sand in Herring's wheels. So Ganja had to let him up, because I made the offer, and anyway he couldn't have held Uncle Filly down without my help. Uncle Filly dusted himself off, pretended to glare at us one last time, and then settled down to the serious business of telling stories.

Telling stories was the only thing Uncle Filly was good at. He'd had at least thirty years to do nothing else, so he'd built up quite a stock of them, from the history tapes mostly, although he liked to claim some of them were from his own memories. Ganja and I didn't believe that even Uncle Filly was really old enough to have fought in the war, but he sure wouldn't admit to anything else.

"You want to hear about World War Two?" he asked, knowing we wouldn't. "I bet I've got a hundred stories you haven't heard about that one." He probably did, too, but we couldn't be bothered with tales of his grandfather. "I guess that means you want to hear about the Petroleum war again."

"And make it one we haven't heard," Ganja growled threateningly.

Uncle Filly just laughed. "Well, I still do have a few of those, you know, but I've been saving them for a special occasion. I guess being bushwhacked by you young scallawags is special enough, though. All right, you little monsters, sit down and I'll tell you about the time I almost caught me a Cy-spy."

"You mean the time a Cy-spy almost caught you!" Ganja mocked, and for once I had to suspect he was right; no one ever caught a Cy-spy. If you saw one you either ran the other way or tried to get rid of it kamikaze-style. So I was very interested in seeing what kind of nonsense old Filly was going to try to make us believe this time.

We settled down on the grass -- in places it's not so bad, if they've put in a shag -- to lie down and listen to his yarn. On my back, I saw the deceptively spacious sky with its clear plastic and a few stars twinkling beyond. We were moving through space at millions of miles per hour, relative to just about anything. The closer you are to the center of the universe, the faster you'll think we were moving. Even a photon would have thought that we were moving, although we were doing it in the wrong direction from its perspective.

To me, it was a lazy summer boyhood night, like every night, or every day. No great wind blew at my hair, to give me the illusion of movement, only a soft synthetic summer breeze. Synthetic birds and crickets gave their nightly concert, but there were no mosquitos, no black flies, no poisonous snakes. Nothing existed that could disturb the tranquility of the night. So Uncle Filly talked on, and as I listened to his words I felt utterly detached, as if he were speaking in Sanskrit and I was just listening to be polite. But I heard every word, and they stuck with me even after I was all grown up and we'd made it to New Milwaukee. I never wanted to be a historian, though, and now that they want this all for posterity I can't do any better than to just tell you the story in Uncle Filly's own words. You can judge for yourself how true it is; I never really decided. But it does have a certain ring to it, you'll see that for sure.

"It was already what they called Phase Four of the war by then. You know all about Phase One, over forty years of war, mostly economic, but with a few big proxy battles. Phase Two I haven't talked about much because it happened so fast; all of a sudden Europe was gone, and there we were, still two big countries drooling after all the Arab oil, only now both were properly scared after seeing what used to be Europe just sitting there like the end of the world. So everybody sobered up for a while, and Phase Three was real peaceful, like the eye of a hurricane or the Titanic before they felt the iceberg. But what nobody knew was that the generals weren't being as quiet as they seemed. Oh, sure, everybody gave up nuclear weapons after seeing Europe go in an afternoon, but they kept on making weapons, each one worse than the last. They just weren't nuclear, so people figured they couldn't be so bad. And you both know where that kind of army logic ended."

"Shut up and tell the story!" Ganja snapped. Nobody wanted to hear how stupid people were, how easily it could all have been avoided. If Uncle Filly got started like that, it could be a long and depressing week or so before he finally stopped. So Ganja wouldn't listen to it at all. He wanted heroics, stories of action and adventure from the War, and I liked them better that way myself, I have to admit. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, you know, and boys do love to play war games. Girls too, for that matter.

"All right, I know, the Cy-spy. We didn't know much about them back then, really. We knew it was a "safe" weapon, like the binary bomb -- safe until you set it off, that is. As long as you didn't get it mad at you, it was harmless and inert, and you wouldn't mind one in the house next door. At least, that's what the Army said.

"They said that the Russians had released a lot of Cy-spies in our area; about 98% of the population, maybe more, had been wiped out immediately. So now the neighborhood was good and safe. After all, once the Cy-spy had gassed all the people and animals, it let loose another gas that neutralized the poison, so that no long term environmental damage was done. At least, that was the plan. And it seemed to work, too, most of the time, like in our neighborhood, where a day after the attack you could walk the streets in perfect safety, except for the stench the bodies gave off. We really thought that the Army had finally gotten it all figured out -- they could keep killing off most of the people, repopulating, and doing it again, without hurting the plants or otherwise ruining the planet to the point that it couldn't all be done again. I guess it's for the best that they were wrong. That probably would've been even worse than what we ended up with.

"Anyway, I was trying to stay alive, that's all, when an Army jeep came along and drafted me. Drafted me! Just like that, I was a soldier, with no one around for miles that I could even say "How about that?" to. They sent me to patrol the McArdle Roadway.

"The McArdle Way was the only road down the front of Mount Washington to downtown Pittsburgh. Still is, I imagine, if you could go there and look around. The Army had its local command center up at the top, and they were afraid Russian ground troops might come sneaking up somehow, so they put me in the way. I was supposed to report to them every thirty seconds on the Walkie-talkie. If I didn't report for forty-five seconds, they knew the Russians had gotten me. It was cheaper and faster to put me there with a walkie-talkie than to set up a TV camera. After all, there were lots of roads, and there was still no shortage of expendable people, but there weren't nearly enough cameras. I'm sure the military planning departments had already noted the shortage for use in planning the next war.

"Anyway, I wasn't too happy with the job, but those Army people didn't take 'No' for an answer from a live human, so I started doing ten hour daily shifts on the McArdle Way. And it was there, on my sixth day, that I met the Cy-spy."

"I saw a Cy-spy once," Ganja interrupted. "It was out in the desert near Cleveland, Ohio. Mama and I went there to look for parts in an old computer factory we heard was mostly still standing, and we found a Cy-spy not twenty yards from the gate. We just turned around and ran. Never got the parts."

"Course you didn't," I said, feeling bold, "Nobody goes near a Cy-spy and lives to tell."

"Almost nobody," said Uncle Filly firmly, "it depends on the person and on the Cy-spy. After the first wave of Cy-spies, there weren't very many people or animals, and there were incredible quantities of plants. Just amazingly dense foliage everywhere. Some of the Cy-spies started to get confused, since nothing looked like what they'd been programmed to destroy. And some of them were just plain programmed wrong."

"And that made them leave people alone?" Ganja demanded, in evident disbelief.

"Not usually, but now and then. Mostly it just made them strange. That meant they were less perfect than they were supposed to be, and it gave people like me a chance. A small chance, mind you, but with my luck... well, I'm here, aren't I? That ought to tell you something."

"It tells me you're just making all of this up!"

This was obviously a real blow to Uncle Filly, and I would've socked Ganja in the jaw if I thought it would've helped. But Uncle Filly just shook his head and looked sad, like he'd heard it all before and just couldn't do anything about it. "You've got to trust people sometimes, Ganja," he said quietly. "If you always think everyone's out to lie to you and to cheat you, well, you'll end up like those horrible old generals who shot the people that were bringing them medicine. If you can't trust people, you might as well sit down for dinner with a Cy-spy yourself."

Ganja made no reply, staring sullenly at the ground. "Go on, Uncle Filly," I asked. "What happened when you saw the Cy-spy?"

"Well," Uncle Filly took a deep breath, rubbed his hands together with obvious glee, and resumed his tale with the gusto of one sitting down to a banquet after a hard day's unfed work. "I had just finished my twice-a-minute report -- it was 2:04 on the button, I even remember that, but I sure couldn't tell you the date -- when I heard something that for the life of me sounded exactly like a man clearing his throat. How exactly he'd come up to me so quietly, him on wheels and all those Pittsburgh potholes to navigate, I'll never imagine. But there he was, not four feet away from me, a Cy-Spy in the flesh. He was four feet tall, round and fat, with two miniature video cameras mounted in rotating strips on his body, one near the top and one near the bottom. Those strips could rotate all the way around his body to let him see just about--"

"I've seen one, I know what they look like. Just tell the story," Ganja interrupted, but Uncle Filly was now calmly and firmly not to be perturbed.

"Well, so you've seen one, but your young sister here hasn't, so just SHUT UP please and let me tell it right, and go away if you don't like it." Fat chance there was that Ganja would go away, and didn't Uncle Filly know it! "Anyway, it looked a lot like a water softener on wheels, except you know it had that robot's mind, and that tube looking straight at you like the mouth of death itself. When it talked, you heard it from a speaker near the tube, so your gaze was immediately drawn to that hole where you knew the poison would come from. And I just froze there, too dumb or scared to move or talk or anything. But after I'd been quiet a few seconds, it spoke."

"`It's just about time for you to report that everything's OK, isn't it?' it asked me. I nodded, and called in again, confused but somehow sure that I'd just been warned not to mention its presence.

"`2:04 and a half and McArdle clear,' I said, just the usual seven words, and then, now that I was using my voice again, I asked the Cy-Spy `Can I help you?' real calmly, like I was talking to a customer in the bakery before the war." Here Ganja laughed and made an extremely nasty comment about dumb bakers, which I ignored as unworthy of comment, but my uncle smiled. "Yes, it was a dumb thing to say, but there wasn't much else I could've said, now was there? `Nice weather we're having, please don't gas me to death,' would that have been better? As a matter of fact, it must have been a pretty good thing to say, because it got the Cy-Spy to talking, which I liked a darn sight better than gassing.

"`Pardon the intrusion, sir,' it said to me, `but I am under orders to kill everyone in my vicinity eventually, destroying myself afterwards to avoid capture, and I was wondering if this was perhaps the right time to do it. I've found a great deal that is not as I was given to expect, since I was activated in this city, and therefore I am now uncertain as to the timing of my mission, and was hoping you would be able to assist me with advice, for which I would be most grateful.'

"Well, close your mouths, you urchins, and don't look so skeptical there, Ganja, those were damned smart machines, and I was in one hell of a fix. I mean, I knew it was smart enough to figure out that I was its enemy, its target, so I figured it wasn't just going to accept my advice and wander away to study Nietzsche if I told it to. I decided to try to be as calm and rational as it was being -- after all, it was just as much in danger of dying as I was, even if it managed not to care about it, right? So I tried to act like my Daddy would've done -- Daddy was a clinical psychologist, you know, and --"

"We know," said Ganja. Uncle Filly really could be just dreadfully boring on the subject of his father. "Just go ahead," I added, to make it clear that even I wouldn't tolerate a digression about Great-uncle Sigmund, even if he really was Filly's great uncle.

"Oh, Lord, you kids don't let a man think, do you? Well, I didn't miss a beat then in answering that robot, I just asked him, `Well, what do you think?'

"`I think that my mission has mostly already been done. We were supposed to destroy 97 to 99 percent of the population, and we seem to have hit that target a while back already.'

"`I see', I told him, although I sure didn't. `In that case, why are you talking to me?'

"The Cy-Spy rotated its visual plates in a quick little jerk that reversed itself, a motion that you'd have to call a shrug if you saw it. `I'm bored,' it told me. `I've spent seven days just wandering around, waiting for the population to grow enough for me to be able to do my job again. Do you have any idea how long this is going to take?'

"So there it was, my young friends, plain as the laser burns on my face! The robot was just waiting for us to repopulate so that it could kill us, but nobody'd bothered to tell it how long it would have to wait! Anyway, I decided right away that I was going to be a hero, that I was going to find a way to get it back to headquarters to be dismantled. Oh, sure, maybe I was foolish even to try, but wouldn't that have been something, eh? Might've even avoided spending two more years on the McArdle Way if I'd succeeded, I still believe that, and I still think I came close to doing it, too.

"Anyway, next thing I know my radio is buzzing, and I'm fifteen whole seconds late in my report. Up on Mount Washington, I knew, all hell must be breaking loose, red alert for Russian attack. I call in and apologize. 'My mind must've wandered,' I tell them. They threaten me with a firing squad if it happens again, and now I'm facing the Cy-Spy alone again. There's an idea in my mind already, mostly formed but still a little fuzzy 'round the edges, of how I'm going to trick the Cy-Spy into coming back to base with me.

"`I'm not the right person to ask,' I tell it, `but the big brass up on this hill here seem to know just about everything, or think they do, so they're probably the ones to ask about any repopulation plans. Maybe you'd like to talk to some of them?'

"Well, children, to make a long story short, the simple truth is that that robot -- maybe all of them, but that one in particular -- was just as stark raving crazy as any general, wandering around talking to itself in the ruins of Pittsburgh. It had this fine and strange sense of ethics, of all things, that made sense to it, if not to you or me. It wanted to do the right thing, and the right thing, it knew, was to kill a hell of a lot of people at the right time. It just couldn't figure out when was the right time. But anyway it saw through my trick pretty quickly; it figured that there was no way it was going to walk away from the base after it walked into it, and it was right. It had stopped me because I wasn't a threat alone and unmasked, but it wouldn't follow me into a crowd of experts in gas masks and protective armoring.

"It was very polite, though; when it was sure I couldn't give it any useful advice, it said to me that it was a pleasure to meet me. `Perhaps we'll meet again some day,' it said, but I sure hoped not. It bid me `Goodbye' as it turned and started to walk -- well, roll is the right word, I guess -- back down towards Pittsburgh.

"`Wait!' I shouted to it, nothing really in my mind at all except that there was my chance to be a hero calmly rolling out of my life. The Cy-Spy spun around when I called for it, but this time its timing was bad, and it hit one of those famous potholes, fell over, and began to slowly leak a bluish gas. Naturally I ran like hell, and I guess the leak was a slow one, because I'm here talking to you now. But by the time troops in gas masks got down there, nothing was left but a few hunks of metal -- once the gases were gone it didn't see anything else to do but blow up, I guess, and that was that.

"The strange thing was that it wasn't until a week or so later that I realized that it must have been one of ours, not a Russian at all! I mean, why would a Russian Cy-Spy know how to speak English? All the testing would've gone on in Russian and once it got here it wasn't supposed to talk, just to kill people. So I started doing some discreet snooping around -- you had to be really careful, of course, because the army could shoot you in a minute if it had a mind to -- and of course nowadays we all know what I found out: the first Cy-spies released were the ones that got out of the labs accidentally, so naturally they were our own. The man who told me about this was only surprised that any of these original ones were still around, and I never did figure out how that happened. Maybe the damn thing just got lost looking for a population center."

Ganja and I were quiet for a minute; I don't know what he was thinking, but I was looking at the sky, as ever, watching for the ships that would take us to New Milwaukee, which could come any minute, any day, any decade. They told us that New Milwaukee still had air you could breathe, and they were building cities that didn't even need domes to protect the inhabitants. I used to dream about life without a dome, though I couldn't really imagine what it would be like when I was awake. I'd heard Uncle Filly's stories about what he called weather, but they were even harder to believe than his war stories. I closed my eyes and saw Uncle Filly and the Cy-Spy arguing on the mountainside, and smiled, wondering if there would be mountains on New Milwaukee where I could argue with other machines. I couldn't imagine; New Milwaukee was just a fable to me, like ghosts and Russians and birds.

I guess Uncle Filly's story was mostly true, because in those years between the end of the War and the time the spaceships finally came to our dome, the Cy-Spies did just about every other weird and psychotic thing a robot can do. One of them out near Denver took all its poison gas, filled a standard dome-supply canister with it, and put it in with the other canisters in the shed that held the Denver dome's air supply. That made sense, of course, it was just a fairly clever way to kill everyone in Denver. But then the Cy-Spy actually went out and told someone about it, as if to give them a sporting chance of finding it before they had to use it in their air supply. (They couldn't find it, by the way, and everyone died.) And of course, lots of them just got mixed up and released the antidote before the poison, which is one of the things that screwed up the military's plans for a repopulation and another war. And it was that and other things -- the satellite lasers that were supposed to only melt airplanes but flooded half of Asia when they got confused and melted all the snows in the Himalayas, or the microbes that ate all the Russians' oil but then somehow found their way through to eat all that Arab oil under the desert we were fighting for and then caused the sand dunes to collapse -- things like that were what made life on Earth outside the dome nothing but a memory in the feeble minds of oldsters like Uncle Filly, who is himself now only a memory in the minds of feeble oldsters like me.

I was only sixteen when the ships finally came, and Uncle Filly was already two years dead, but I'd seen enough by that time to know better than to be very hopeful for the long term. Sure, New Milwaukee is a lovely planet; there's a blue sky, green fields, and wonderful rivers blood-red with edible fungi. Most of the wildlife is harmless, and what isn't is rapidly disappearing. But even Earth was pretty once, my Uncle said, although not even he claimed to remember that far back. They say now that our new weapons really are safe, clean, and a needed defense against potential aggression from New Toledo, and the youngsters nod sagely.

Besides, after each of the world wars on Earth, the crazies said we'd never survive another one, and we've done all right so far, haven't we?