Divine Intervention

There Will Be No War after This One

Earth is now well known for her peaceful ways. She is a model of good behavior, though she is an extremely impoverished civilization. She has eschewed war forever.

But some people do not realize that it was not always so. There was a time, and not too long ago, when Earth was dominated by some of the worst military badasses to be found anywhere. The armed forces, which held power in the last days before The Great Awakening, were almost unbelievably inept in their policies.

It was at this time that Earth, achieving single rule at last under General Gatt and his marshals, entered interstellar civilization, and, a few short years later, went through the famous incident with the Galactic Effectuator that led them to put war behind them forever. Here is the true story of that encounter.

At dawn on September 18, 2331, General Vargas’ Second Route Army came out of the mists around Redlands, California, and pinned down Wiedermayer’s loyalist troops on the San Francisco Peninsula. Wiedermayer, last of the old democratic regime generals, the appointee of the discredited Congress of the United States, had been hoping to get his troops to safety by ship, perhaps to Hawaii. He did not know at that time that the Islands had fallen to military rule. Not that it mattered; the expected transports never arrived. Realizing that further resistance was futile, Wiedermayer surrendered. With him fell the last military force on the planet which had supported civilian rule. For the first time in its history, Earth was utterly and entirely in the hands of the war lords.

Vargas accepted Wiedermayer’s surrender and sent a messenger to the Supreme Commander, General Gatt, at his North Texas headquarters. Outside his tent, the men of Vargas’ army were camped in pup tents across two grassy fields. The quartermasters were already getting ready the feasts with which Vargas marked his victories.

Vargas was a man somewhat shorter than medium height, thickset, with black curly hair on a big round skull. He had a well-trimmed black mustache, and heavy black eyebrows that met in a bar above his nose. He sat on a campstool. A stubby black cigar smoldered on a corner of the field table beside him. Following long-established practice, Vargas was calming himself by polishing his boots. They were genuine ostrich, priceless now that the last of those great birds had died.

Sitting on the cot across the tent from him was his common-law wife, Lupe. She was red-headed, loud-mouthed, with strong features, a strident voice, and an indomitable spirit. They had been fighting these wars together for most of their adult lives. Vargas had risen from the lowly rank of Camp Follower’s Assistant to General in command of Supreme General Gatt’s Western Forces. He and Lupe had campaigned in many parts of the world. The Second Route Army was highly mobile, able to pack up its weapons one day in Italy and appear the next day in California or Cambodia or wherever needed.

Now at last Vargas and his lady had a chance to relax. The troops were spread out on the big plain near Los Gatos. Their campfires sent thin wavering streamers of gray smoke into the blue sky. Many of Wiedermayer’s surrendered troops had joined the victors. The campaign was over. Maybe all the battles were won; for as far as Vargas could remember, they seemed to have run out of opponents.

It was a good moment. Vargas and Lupe toasted each other with California champagne, and then pushed their gear off the folding double bed in preparation for more earnest celebrating. It was just then that the messenger arrived, tired and dusty from many hours in the helicopter, with a telegram from General Gatt.

Gatt’s telegram read, The last opposition to our New Order has collapsed in North America. Final resistance in Russia and Asia has ended. At last, the world is under single unified command! Loyal General and Dear Friend, you must come to me at once. All the generals are coming here to help me celebrate our total victory over all those who opposed us. We will be voting on our next procedures and course of action. I very much want for you to be here for that. Also I tell you in strictest confidence, there has been a surprising new development. I cannot even talk about it over the telegram. I want to discuss it with you. This is of greatest importance! Come immediately! I need you!

When the messenger left, Vargas turned to Lupe. “What could be so important that he can’t even entrust it to a telegram? Why can’t he give me a hint?”

“I don’t know,” Lupe said. “But it worries me that he wants you to come to him.”

“Woman, what are you talking about? It is a compliment!”

“Maybe it is, but maybe he simply wants you in where he can keep an eye on you. You command one of the last of the independent armies. If he has control of you, he has everything.”

“You forget,” Vargas said, “he has everything anyway. He has personal command of five times as many men as I do. Besides, John Gatt is my friend. We went to school together in East Los Angeles.”

“Oh, I know all that,” Lupe said. “But sometimes friendship doesn’t last long when it’s a question of who’s going to have the supreme power.”

Vargas said, “I have no ambitions for any more power than I got.”

“But does Gatt know that?”

“He knows it,” Vargas said, and he sounded sure, but not absolutely sure.

“But maybe he doesn’t believe it,” Lupe said. “After all, power changes a man. You’ve seen how it’s changed some of the other generals.”

“Yes, I know. The Russian and Vietnamese independents. But they can’t hold out against Gatt. This time the world is going to be under a single command. John Gatt is going to be the first supreme ruler of Earth.”

“Is he worthy of that?” Lupe asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Vargas said, annoyed. “It’s an idea whose time has come. Life has been too crazy with everybody fighting everybody else. One supreme military commander for all Earth is going to work a lot better for everyone.”

“Well,” Lupe said, “I hope so. So are we going?”

Vargas thought about it. Despite the brave front he had shown to Lupe, he was not without his doubts. Who could tell what Gatt might do? It would not be the first time a victorious general made sure of his position by executing his field generals under pretext of throwing a party. Still, what was the alternative? The men of the Second Route Army were personally loyal to Vargas, but in a showdown battle, Gatt and his five-fold superiority in men and material would have to prevail.

And Vargas had no desire for the supreme command. He was a good field general. But he was not cut out for supreme command and had no desire for it. Gatt ought to know that about him. He had said it often enough.

“I will go see Gatt.”

“And me?” Lupe asked.

“You’ll be safe here with my troops.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lupe said. “Where you go, I go. That’s what a Camp Follower does.”

Vargas had been fighting in Italy before Gatt ordered him to airlift his army to California for the showdown with Wiedermayer, so he hadn’t much idea of the level of destruction of America. His flight by Air Force jet from San Francisco to Ground Zero, Texas, showed him plenty of burned-out cities and displaced populations.

But Ground Zero itself looked all right. It was a new city which Gatt had created. In the center of it was a big sports palace, larger than the Coliseum or the Astrodome or any of those old-world sports palaces. Here warrior-athletes and cheerleaders from all over the world could assemble for the sports rituals of the military.

Vargas had never seen so many generals (and generals’ ladies) in his life. All of General Gatt’s field commanders were there, men who had been fighting the good fight for military privilege all over the world. Everybody was in a good mood, as may be imagined.

Vargas and Lupe checked into the big convention hotel which had been especially built for this occasion. They went immediately up to their hotel room.

“Eh,” Lupe said, looking around at the classy furnishings of their suite, “this is ver’ nice, ver’ nice.”

Actually she could speak perfectly good English, but in order to be accepted among the other Camp Followers who hadn’t been raised with her advantages, she had decided that she had to speak with a heavy accent of some sort.

Lupe and Vargas had had to carry up their own luggage to the room since the hotel was so new that the bellboys didn’t have security clearances yet.

General Vargas was still dressed for combat. He wore the sweat-stained black khaki uniform of the 30th Chaco campaign, his most famous victory, and with it the lion insignia of a Perpetual Commander in the Eternal Corps.

He set down the suitcases and dropped into a chair with a moue of annoyance: he was a fighting general, not a luggage-carrying general. Lupe was standing nearby gaping at the furniture. She was dressed in her best pink satin whore’s gown. She had a naughty square crimson mouth, a sexy cat’s face, snaky black hair, and legs that never stop coming above a torso that would not let go. Yet despite her beauty she was a woman as tough in her own way as the general, albeit with skinnier legs.

Vargas was heavyset, unshaven, with a heavy slouchy face and a small scrubby beard that was coming in piebald. He had given up shaving because he didn’t think it looked sufficiently tough.

Lupe said to him, “Hey, Xaxi (her own pet name for him), what we do now?”

Vargas snarled at her, “Why you talk in Russian accent? Shut up, you don’t know nothing. Later we go to meeting room and vote.”

“Vote?” Lupe said. “Who’s going to vote?”

“All the generals, dummy.”

“I don’t get it,” Lupe said. “We’re fascists; we don’t need no stinkin’ votes.”

“It’s lucky for you that I love you,” Vargas said, “because sometimes you’re so stupid I could kill you. Listen to me, my baby vulture, even fascists have to vote sometime, in order to arrive fairly at the decision to keep the vote away from everyone else.”

“Ah,” Lupe said. “But I thought that part was understood.”

“Of course it’s understood,” Vargas said. “But we can only count on it for sure after there’s been a vote among ourselves agreeing that that’s how things are going to be. Otherwise we might lose everything we’ve worked for. The vote is necessary to secure our beloved revisionist counterrevolution.”

“I guess that’s true,” Lupe said, scratching her haunch, then, remembering her manners, quickly scratching Vargas’ haunch. She went to the refrigerator and got herself a drink of tequila, champagne, and beer, her favorite mixture.

“Is that all this vote’s about?” she asked Vargas.

Vargas was sitting in the living room with his spurred heels up on the coffee table. The coffee table scratched nicely. Vargas knew that they probably put in new coffee tables for each new group of generals who came through. But he enjoyed scratching it anyway. He was a simple man.

“We got also other things we got to vote about,” he told her.

“Do I have to vote too?” Lupe said.

“Naah,” Vargas said. “You’re a woman. Recently we voted to disenfranchise you.”

“Good,” Lupe said, “voting is a bore.”

Just then there was a knock at the door.

“Come in!” Vargas called out.

The door opened and a tall goofy-looking guy, with droopy lips and narrow little eyes, wearing a gray business suit came in. “You Vargas?” he said.

“Yeah,” Vargas said. “And try knocking before you come in next time or I break your back.”

“This is business,” the guy said. “I’ve brought you a bribe.”

“Oh, why didn’t you say so?” Vargas asked. “Sit down, have a drink.”

The goofy-looking guy took a thick envelope out of an inside jacket pocket and handed it to Vargas. Vargas looked into the envelope. It was stuffed with a thousand eagle double simoleon bills.

“Hell,” Vargas said, “you can barge in any old time. What is this for, or shouldn’t I ask?”

“I told you; it’s a bribe,” the guy said.

“I know it’s a bribe,” Vargas said. “But you haven’t told me what, specifically, I’m being bribed for.”

“I thought you knew. Later, when the voting starts, we want you to vote yes on Proposition One.”

“You got it. But what is Proposition One?”

“That civilians should henceforth be barred from the vote until such time as the military high command decides they are reliable.”

“Sounds good to me,” Vargas said.

After the guy left, Vargas turned to Lupe, grinning. He was very happy about the bribe, even though he would have voted yes on Proposition One anyhow. But bribes were traditional in elections—he knew that from the history books, to say nothing of the oral tradition. Vargas would have felt unliked and neglected if General Gatt had not thought him worth the bother to bribe.

He wanted to explain this to Lupe but she was a little dense, tending not to understand the niceties. But what the hell, she looked great in her pink satin whore’s nightgown.

“Come in, old boy, come in!” That was Gatt’s voice, booming out into the anteroom. Vargas had just arrived and given his name to the prune-faced clerk in the ill-fitting Battle Rangers uniform, clerical division.

It was gratifying to Vargas that Gatt asked for him so soon after his arrival. He would not have liked to cool his heels out in the waiting room, even though he would have been in good company. General Lin was there, having just secured China and Japan for Gatt’s All-Earth Defensive League. General Leopold was there, plump and ridiculous in his complicated uniform copied from some South American general’s fantasy. He had completed the conquest of South America as far south as Patagonia. Below that, who cares? Generalissimo Ritan Dagalaigon was present, the grim-faced Extremaduran whose Armada de Gran Destructividad had secured all of Europe west of the Urals. These were famous men whose names would live in history. Yet he, Vargas, was ushered into Gatt’s private office before all the rest of them.

John Odoacer Gatt was tall with flashing eyes and a charismatic manner. He showed Vargas to a seat and poured him a drink and laid out two lines for him without even asking. Gatt was known as an imperious entertainer.

“We’ve won the war, buddy,” Gatt said to Vargas. “The whole thing. All of it. Everything. It’s the first time in the history of mankind that the entire human race has been under a single command. It is an unprecedented opportunity.”

Vargas blinked. “For what?”

“Well,” Gatt said, “for one thing, we are finally in a position to bring peace and prosperity to the human race.”

“Wonderful ideals, sir.”

“Actually,” Gatt said, “I’m not so sure how we can turn a profit on this.”

“Why do you say that, mi general?”

“It has been a long and costly war. Most countries’ economies are wrecked. It will be a long time before things can be put straight. Many people will go hungry, maybe even starve. It’ll be difficult even for the military to turn a buck.”

“But we knew all this,” Vargas said. “We discussed this in detail during the war. Of course there will be a difficult period of recovery. How could it be otherwise? It may take a hundred years, or even longer. But we are humans, and under the stable rule of the military we will recover and bring universal prosperity to all.”

“That, of course, is our dream,” Gatt said. “But suppose we could speed it up? Suppose we could go directly to the next stage? Suppose we could move directly from this, our victory, to prosperity for everyone on Earth? Wouldn’t that be splendid, Getulio?”

“Of course, of course,” Vargas said. John Odoacer Gatt was getting him a little nervous. He didn’t know what this was leading up to. “But how could this be possible?”

“Let’s talk more about it after the vote tomorrow,” Gatt said.

The delegates’ voting room was a large and circular chamber equipped with comfortable chairs and a cluster of overhead lighting. In the center was a circular stage that revolved slowly so that those in the center would by turns be facing all the delegates. On the platform was the steering committee for the first provisional and temporary world military government.

The generals, Vargas included, voted in a brisk and unanimous manner to disenfranchise all civilians outside of those few approved ones already assembled at the delegate hall. The civilians were stripped of the vote, habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and all other liberal encumbrances until such time as they could be relied upon to vote in a prescribed manner. This was a very important measure because the military had found out long ago that civilians were inherently untrustworthy and even traitorous.

Next the generals faced the serious question of disarmament, or, as they called it, unemployment. Disarmament meant there would be hard times ahead because war on Earth was finished as a business since everybody was now under a unified command and there was no one to fight. None of the generals liked the idea of giving up war entirely, however, and General Gatt said there might be a way around that and promised there would be an announcement about that later.

The conference ended with a good cheer and boisterous camaraderie among the various military satraps. Vargas very much enjoyed the reception afterwards, where Lupe made a big hit in her blue, yellow and red ball gown.

After the reception, General Gatt took Vargas aside and asked to meet him tomorrow morning at eight hundred hours sharp at the Ground Zero Motor Pool.

“I have a proposition to put to you,” Gatt said. “I think you will find it of interest.”

Vargas, accompanied by Lupe, was at the Ground Zero Motor Pool at the appointed hour. That morning he was wearing his sash of Commander in the Legion of Death, and also his campaign medals from the sacking of New York. He’d come a long way from when he was a mere bandit’s apprentice.

Soon they were speeding out of the city into the flat desert countryside. It was a time of blooming, and there were many little wild flowers carpeting the desert floor with delicate colors.

“This is really nice,” Vargas said.

“It used to belong to some Indian tribe,” the driver said. “I can never remember which one. They’re all gone now to Indianola.”

“What’s that?”

“Indianola is the new industrial suburb in Mississippi where we’re relocating all the Indians in America.”

“They used to be all scattered around the country, didn’t they?” Vargas said.

“They sure did,” the driver said. “But it was sloppy that way.”

“Seems a pity, though,” Vargas said. “Indians have been in the country a long time, haven’t they?”

“They were always griping anyhow,” the driver said. “Don’t worry, they’ll get used to our way of doing things.”

The secret installation was in a tangle of hills some thirty miles west of Ground Zero. General Gatt came out of his temporary headquarters to greet Vargas. There was a pretty young woman with him. Gatt had thoughtfully brought along his mistress, a young lady named Lola Montez—not the original one, a relative, these names tend to run in the family—who immediately put her arm in Lupe’s and took her away for cigarettes, dope, coffee, bourbon, and gossip. Generals’ mistresses are good entertainers and it’s traditional for the military to be hospitable.

Once the two generals were alone, they could settle down to business. First some small talk about how the armed forces security groups were successfully doing away with anyone who felt that things should be handled in a different way. Most of these malcontents were quiet now. It was amazing what the Central Committee had been able to do in the way of cleaning things up.

“It’s a beginning,” General Gatt said. “These ideas of social perfectability have been around as long as there has been a military. But this is the first time we’ve had all the soldiers on our side.”

General Vargas asked, “What are you going to do about local groups who want to do their own thing or worship their own gods—that sort of stuff?”

“If they really want freedom, they can join the military,” Gatt said. “Our fighting men enjoy perfect freedom of religion.”

“And if they don’t want to join the military?”

“We tell them to shut up and go away,” Gatt said. “And if they don’t, we shoot them. It saves a lot of arguing, and helps us avoid all the cost of keeping prisons and guards.”

General Gatt explained that one of the great advantages of universal peace was that world government could finally afford to put some money into worthwhile projects.

“Oh,” Vargas said, “you mean like feeding the poor and stuff like that?”

“I don’t mean that at all,” Gatt said. “That’s been tried and it hasn’t worked.”

“You’re right,” Vargas said. “They just keep on coming back for more. But what sort of worthwhile project do you mean?”

“Come with me and I’ll show you,” Gatt said.

They left General Gatt’s office and went to the command car. The driver was a short, thickset, Mongolian-looking fellow with long bandit mustaches, wearing a heavy woollen vest in spite of the oppressive heat. The driver saluted smartly and opened the door for the generals. They got into the command car and drove for twenty minutes, stopping at a huge hangerlike building all by itself on the desert. Guards let them through a concertina of barbed wire to a small side door that led inside.

The building was really huge. From the inside it looked even larger. Gazing up toward the ceiling, Vargas noticed several birds fluttering overhead. But amusing as this spectacle was, what he saw next took his breath away, leaving him gasping in amazement.

He said to Gatt, “Is this real, John, or some optical illusion you’re projecting?”

General Gatt smiled in his mysterious way that seemed easy but was not. “It’s real enough, Getulio, old boy. Look again.”

Vargas looked. What he saw, towering many stories above him, was a spaceship. Lupe had shown him enough drawings and diagrams in newspapers like The Brazilian Enquirer and others of that ilk for him to know what it was. It was unmistakably a spaceship, colored a whale gray and with tiny portholes and a dorsal fin.

“It’s amazing, sir,” Vargas said, “just amazing.”

“Bet you never knew we had this,” Gatt said.

“I had no idea,” Vargas assured him.

“Of course not,” Gatt said. “This has been kept a secret from everybody except the ruling council. But you’re a part of that ruling council now, Getulio old boy, because I’m appointing you a freely elected member of it as of today.”

“I don’t get it,” Vargas said. “Why me?”

“Come inside the ship,” Gatt said. “Let me show you a little more.”

There was a motorized ramp that led up into the interior of the ship. Gatt took Vargas’ arm and led him up.

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 fitted 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 of 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 consortium. 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.”

“Yessir,” Vargas said. The trouble was, he couldn’t think of anything to use ships for, now that everything was conquered. But he didn’t want to come out and say that. He could see there was a little smile on General Gatt’s face, so he guessed that he was about to be told something he hadn’t known before, but which he would find of considerable interest He waited for a while, and then decided that Gatt wanted him to ask, so he said, “Now, about all these ships, sir…”

“Yesss?” said Gatt.

“We need these,” Vargas hazarded, “for security—”

Gatt nodded.

“—and to take care of our enemies.”

“Perfectly correct,” Gatt said.

“The only thing that perplexes me,” Vargas said, “is, who exactly are our enemies? I mean, sir that I was under the impression that we don’t really have any of them left on Earth. Or are there some enemies I haven’t heard about?”

“Oh, we don’t have any enemies left on Earth,” Gatt said. “They have gone the way of the buffalo, the cow, the Airedale, and other extinct species. What we have now, General Vargas, is the God-given opportunity to go forth into space, our Earth troops unified for the first time in history, ready and willing to take on anything that comes along.”

“Anything! In space!” Vargas said, amazed at the size of the idea.

“Yes! Today Earth, tomorrow the Milky Way, or at least one hell of a good-sized hunk of it.”

“But can we just do that? Take what we want?”

“Why not? If there’s anything out there, it’s just aliens.”

“It’s a wonderful dream, sir. I hope I may be permitted to do my bit for the cause.”

Gatt grinned and punched Vargas on the arm.

“I’ve got a pretty good bit for you, Getulio. How would you like to be my first Marshal of Space, with command of this ship and orders to go forth and check out some new planets for Earth?”

“Me? Sir, you do me too much honor.”

“Nonsense, Getulio. You’re the best fighting general I’ve got. And you’re the only one I trust. Need I say more?”

Gatt made the announcement to the other generals. First he showed them the spaceship. Then he told them he was going into space on a fact-finding mission, with good old Vargas along to actually run the ship. He and Vargas would take a lot of fighting men along, just in case they ran into anything interesting. Gatt was sure there were new worlds to explore out there, and these new worlds, in the manner of new worlds since the beginning of recorded history, were going to bring in millions.

The generals were enthusiastic about the expansion of Earth military power and the promise of a good return on the military business.

Working night and day, the ship was soon provisioned. Not long after that, the armament was all bolted into place. When they tried it out it worked perfectly, all except for one missile which unaccountably got out of control and took out Kansas City. A letter of regret to the survivors and a posthumous medal for all concerned soon put that to rights, however. Shortly afterwards, ten thousand heavily armed shock troops with full equipment marched aboard. It was time for Earth to make its debut in space.

The ship went through its trial runs in the solar system without a problem. Once past Neptune, Vargas told the engineers to open her up. Space was big; there was no time to dawdle. The ship ran up to speed without a tremor.

Lastly, the hyperspace jump control worked perfectly. They popped out of the wormhole into an area rich with star systems, many of which had nice-looking planets.

Time passed. Not too much of it, but enough so you know you’ve really gone somewhere.

Soon after this passage of time, the communications officer reported a tremble of movement on the indicator of the Intelligence Detector. This recent invention was a long-range beam which worked on something the scientists called Neuronal Semi-Phase Amplification, or NSPA. The Military-Scientific Junta in charge of technology felt that a detector like this would be useful for finding a race that might be worth talking to.

“Where’s the signal coming from?”

“One of them planets out there, sir,” the communications officer said, gesturing vaguely at the vast display of stars visible through the ship’s transparent shield.

“Well, let’s go there,” Vargas said.

“Have to find what star it belongs to first,” the communications officer said. “I’ll get right on it.”

Vargas notified Gatt, who, from the luxury of his suite which was supplied with everything a fighting man could want—women, guns, food, booze, dope—told him to carry on.

Vargas gave the orders to carry on at best speed.

The big spaceship drilled onward through the vacuum of space.

DeepDoze technology let the soldiers pass their time in unconsciousness while the ship ate up the parsecs. The special barbarian shock troops were stacked in hammocks eight or ten high. The sound of ten thousand men snoring was enormous but not unexpected. One man from each squad was detailed to stay awake to brush flies off the sleepers.

More time passed, and quite a few light years sped by, when a flash of green light from the instrumentation readout telltale told the duty officer that they were nearing the source of the signal.

He got up and went to the captain’s quarters in the quickest way, by express elevator and pneumo tube.

Vargas was in deep sleep when a hand tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

“Hmmmf?”

“Planet ahead, sir.”

“Call me for the next one.”

“I think you’d better check this out, sir,”

Vargas got out of bed grumpily and followed the man down to the Communications Area.

“Something is coming through,” the operator of the Intelligence Scanner said.

General Vargas looked over his shoulder. “What’ve you got there, son?”

“I think it’s an intelligent bleep,” the operator said.

General Vargas blinked several times, but the concept did not come clear. He glared at the operator, sucking his lips angrily until the operator hastily said, “What I’m saying, sir, is that our forward-scanning intelligence-seeking beam has picked up a trace. This may be nothing, of course, but it’s possible that our pattern-matching program has found an intelligent pattern which, of course, argues the presence of intelligent life.”

“You mean,” Vargas said, “that we are about to discover our first intelligent race out in the galaxy?”

“That is probably the case, sir.”

“Great,” Vargas said, and announced to his crew and soldiers that they should wake up and stand by.

The planet from which the signal had come was a pretty place with an oxygen atmosphere and plenty of water and trees and sunshine. If you wanted some nice-looking real estate, this planet could be a good investment, except that it was a long commute back to Earth. But this was not at all what Vargas and his men had been looking for. The various drone probes sent out from Earth in the last century had already found plenty of real estate. Robot mining in the asteroids had already dropped the price of minerals to unprecedented lows. Even gold was now commonly referred to as yellow tooth-filling material. What the Earthmen wanted was people to conquer, not just another real estate subdivision in deep space.

The Earth ship went into orbit around the planet. General Vargas ordered down an investigation team, backed up by a battle group, it in turn backed up by the might of the ship, to find the intelligent creatures on this planet, which in the planetary catalog was called Mazzi 32410A.

A quick aerial survey showed no cities, no towns, not even a hamlet. More detailed aerial surveys failed to show the presence of pastoral hunters or primitive farmers. Not even barefooted fruit gatherers could be found. Yet still the intelligence probe on the ship continued to produce its monotonous beep, sure and unmistakable sign that intelligent life was lurking somewhere around. Vargas put Colonel John Vanderlash in charge of the landing party.

Colonel John Vanderlash brought along a portable version of the intelligence detector, for it seemed possible that the inhabitants of this planet had concealed themselves in underground cities.

The portable intelligence beam projector was mounted on an eight-wheeled vehicle capable of going almost anywhere. A signal was soon picked up. Vanderlash, a small man with big shoulders and a pockmarked face, directed his driver to follow it. The crew of the eight-wheeler stood to their guns, since intelligent beings were known to be dangerous. They were ready to retaliate at the first sign of hostile intent, or even sooner.

They followed the beam signal into an enormous cave. As they moved deeper into it, the signal grew stronger, until it approximated Intelligence Level 5.3, the equivalent of a man thinking about doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. The driver of the foremost assault vehicle shifted to a lower gear. The vehicle crept forward slowly, Colonel Vanderlash standing in the prow. He figured the intelligent beings had to be around here somewhere, probably just around the corner…

Then the operator announced that the signal was fading.

“Stop!” Vanderlash said. “We’ve lost them! Back up!”

The vehicle backed. The signal came back to strength.

“Stop here!” Vanderlash said, and the eight-wheeler skidded to a stop. They were in the middle of the signal’s field of maximum strength.

The men stared around them, fingers on triggers, breaths bated.

“Doesn’t anyone see anything?” Vanderlash asked.

There was a low mutter of denial among the men. One of them said, “Ain’t nothin’ here but them moths, sir.”

“Moths?” Vanderlash said. “Moths? Where!”

“Right ahead of us, sir,” the driver said.

Vanderlash looked at the moths dancing in the vehicle’s yellow headlight beam. There were a lot of them. They darted and flashed and turned and cavorted and twirled and sashayed and dodged and danced and fluttered and crepusculated and do-so-doed.

There was a pattern in their movements. As Vanderlash watched, a thought came to him.

“Point the intelligence beam at them,” he said.

“At the moths, sir?” the intelligence beam operator asked incredulously.

“You heard me, trooper. Do what you’re told.”

The operator did as he was told. The dial on the intelligence machine immediately swung to 7.9, the equivalent of a man trying to remember what a binomial equation was.

“Either some wise guy aliens are playing tricks on us,” Vanderlash said, “or… or…”

He turned to his second in command, Major Lash LaRue, who was in the habit of filling in his superior officer’s thoughts for him when Colonel Vanderlash didn’t have time to think them himself.

“Or,” Major LaRue said, “the moths on this planet have developed a group intelligence.”

It took the Communications Team less than a week to crack the communications code which the moth entity employed. They would have solved it quicker if any of them had thought to compare the moths’ dot and dash pattern with that of Morse Code.

“Are you trying to tell me,” Vargas said, “that these alien moths are communicating by Morse Code?”

“I’m afraid so, sir,” the communications officer said. “But it’s not my fault, sir. Furthermore, these moths are acting like a single entity.”

“What did the moth entity say to you?”

“It said, ‘Take your leader to me.’“

Vargas nodded. That made sense. Aliens were always saying things like that.

“What did you tell it?” Vargas asked.

“I said we’d get back to him.”

“You did good,” Vargas said. “General Gatt will want to hear about this.”

“Hot damn,” Gatt said. “Moths, huh? Not exactly what we were looking for, but definitely a beginning. Let’s get down there and talk with this—you couldn’t call him a guy, could you?”

Down in the cave, Gatt and Vargas were able to communicate with the moth entity with the assistance of the Chief Signalman. It was an eerie moment. The Earthmen’s great battle lanterns cast lurid shadows across the rocky floor. In the cave opening, flickering in a ghostly fashion, the moths spun and fluttered, darted and dived, all cooperating to produce Morse signals.

“Hello,” Gatt said. “We’re from Earth.”

“Yes, I know,” the Moth entity said.

“How’d you know that?”

“The other creature told me.”

“What other creature?”

“I believe he is referring to me,” a voice said from deep in the cave.

It startled the Earthmen. Every gun trained on the cave entrance. The soldiers watched, some breathing shallowly and others with bated breath. And then, through the swirling mists and the multicolored brilliance of the searchlights, a figure like that of a small, oddly shaped man stepped into the light.

The alien was small and skinny and entirely bald. His ears were pointed and he had small antennae growing out of his forehead. Everybody knew at once that he was an alien. If there was any doubt of that, it was soon expunged when he opened his mouth. For out of that rosebud-like orifice came words in recognizably colloquial English, the very best kind.

Gatt directed the Telegrapher to ask, “First of all, Alien, how come you speak our language?”

The alien replied, “We have long been in contact with your race, for we are those you refer to as Flying Saucer people. When we first established a presence on your world of Earth a foolish clerical error led us to believe that Morse was your universal language. By the time we discovered our error, Morse was firmly established in our language schools.”

“Oh. That accounts for it, then,” Gatt said. “It would have been too much of a coincidence for you people to have developed the English language on your own.”

“I quite agree,” the alien replied.

“At least we have the language problem out of the way,” Gatt said. “We can’t go on referring to you as ‘The Alien.’ What shall we call you?”

“My people are called Magellanics in your language,” the Alien said. “And we all have the same last name. So you could either call me Magellanic, which is also the name of my planet, or Hurtevurt, which is my first name.”

“Hurtevurt Magellanic,” Gatt said. “Quite a mouthful. I suppose there’s an explanation for why you’re called ‘Magellanic.’ I mean we have a word like that in our own language.”

“We borrowed the word from your language,” Hurtevurt said. “We like the sound of it better than our previous name for the planet, Hzuüutz-kril.”

“Ah. Makes sense. Now, is this planet your home world? If so, where’s everybody else?”

“It is not my home world,” Hurtevurt said. “This is a world populated solely by intelligent moths. It is far from my home world.”

“Whatcha doing here? Exploring or something?”

“No, General. I was sent here as a Watcher by the members of my underground. I was watching for your great ship.”

“How’d you know we’d be coming?”

“We didn’t. We just sent out Watchers in case somebody does come along. You see, my people, the Magellanics, are in a whole lot of trouble.”:

Gatt turned to Vargas and remarked, “You know, it isn’t enough we are the first Earthmen in history to contact aliens, these have to be aliens with problems, yet.”

“I don’t think that possibility was ever forecast,” Vargas said.

“Well,” Gatt said, “we may as well hear this creature’s problems in comfort. This cave is decidedly chilly, and I don’t believe we brought along any refreshment.” He turned to the alien, and, speaking through his Telegrapher, said, “How about coming aboard my ship and we’ll talk it over? I presume you breathe oxygen and drink liquids and all that.”

“I have long missed your excellent intoxicants,” Hurtevurt said. “Yes, lead the way, my leader.”

“This is starting out well,” Gatt remarked to Vargas as they started back to the ship.

When he was comfortable, with a glass of Irish whiskey in his hand, and a Slim Jim to munch on, Hurtevurt said, “Long have we of Planet Magellanic lived as free entities. But now our planet has been conquered by a cruel foe whose customs are not ours.”

“Somebody took over your planet, did they?” Gatt remarked. “Tell us about it.”

Hurtevurt struck an orator’s pose and declaimed, “Dank they were and glaucous-eyed, the ugly and bad-smelling Greems who attacked us from a far star-system. They came down in spider-shaped ships, and red ruin followed in their wake. Not content with murder, rapine, and pillage, they humiliated us by making us worship a giant ragwort.”

“That’s really low,” Vargas said.

“All in all it’s intolerable. We’d much rather you Earthians took us over.”

Hurtevurt made an odd smacking sound. Gatt turned to Vargas. “What was that?”

“It sounded to me like a wet kiss,” Vargas said.

“That’s disgusting,” Vargas said, “but it shows a good spirit. Want us to take over your planet, huh?”

“Yes,” the Alien sang, “we want to be ruled by you, nobody else will do, bo bo padoo. Do you like it? It is a song we sing to keep up our courage in the dark times ahead. You must rescue us. Let me show you pictures of the Greems.”

The pictures, made by a process similar to Polaroid, showed creatures who seemed to be a cross between a spider, a crab, and a wolverine.

“Hell,” Gatt said, “anyone would want to be rescued from something like that. Tough fighters, are they?”

“Not at all,” Hurtevurt assured him. “I can assure you that with your brave fighting men and superior weaponry, you will have no trouble defeating them and taking over my planet. It will be easy, for you see, the enemy has withdrawn all of their forces except a local garrison. Once you take them over, the place is yours. And you will find Magellanic is a very good planet, filled with good- looking women who admire military Earthmen, to say nothing of gold and precious things. This, gentlemen, is a planet worth having.”

Gatt said, “Sounds pretty good, huh, Vargas?”

“And we would like to formally invest you, General Gatt, with the hereditary kingship of our planet.”

“Do you hear that?” Gatt said to Vargas. “They want to make me king! But forget about the kingship thing. What’s really important is the fact that we can take over this whole planet for the profit of Earth. And it’ll be one of the easiest wars on record. And what better way of meeting new peoples than by conquering them, eh?”

“You know something?” Vargas said. “You’ve really got something there.”

To the Alien, Gatt said, “Okay, son, you’ve got a deal.”

“That is wonderful,” the Alien said.

Just then a small dot of light appeared in a corner of the room. It grew, and then it expanded.

“Well, rats,” said Hurtevurt. “Just what I needed.”

“What is it?”

“It’s the Galactic Effectuator.”

“Who’s that?” Gatt asked.

“One of the busybodies from Galactic Central come to tell us how to run our lives.”

“You didn’t mention anything about Galactic Central.”

“I can’t tell you the entire history of the galaxy in an hour, can I? Galactic Central is a group of very ancient civilizations at the core of this galaxy, just as the name implies. The Centerians, as they are called, try to maintain the status quo throughout the galaxy. They want to keep things as they used to be. If they had their way, they’d go back to the Golden Age before the Big Bang, when things were really quiet.”

“They wouldn’t let us help you take back your planet?”

Hurtevurt shook his head. “The Galactic Arbitrators never okay any change. If they see what you’re up to, they’ll nix it.”

“Are they powerful enough to do that?”

“Baby, you’d better believe it,” Hurtevurt said.

“So the war’s off.”

“Not necessarily.” Hurtevurt took an object from the pouch attached to his waist and opened it. It was a long pole wound with fine wire. He handed it to Vargas.

“Wave that at him before he has a chance to deliver his message. He’ll go away and report to his superiors. Galactic Central will figure there was a mistake, since no one would dare zap a Galactic Effectuator. They will send another Effectuator.”

“So they do send another Effectuator. Am I supposed to zap that one, too?”

“No. You’re allowed only one mistake by Galactic Central. After that, they crush you.”

“How does zapping the first one help us?”

“It gives us time. In the time between the first and second Effectuators, you’ll be able to occupy our planet and establish your rule. When the second Effectuator comes and learns the situation, he’ll confirm you in power.”

“Why would the second Effectuator do that when the first one wouldn’t?”

“I told you, it’s because Galactic Central tries to preserve any political situation its Effectuators discover. It’s change that Galactic Central is opposed to, not any particular instance of it. Trust me, I know about these things. When he comes in, just wave the rod at him.”

“We don’t want to kill anyone,” Gatt said. “Unnecessarily, that is.”

“Don’t worry,” Hurtevurt said. “You can’t kill an Effectuator.”

And then the Galactic Effectuator appeared before them. He was very tall and seemed to be made entirely of metal. That, and his flat, tinny voice, confirmed Vargas’ suspicion that the Effectuator was a robot.

“Greetings,” said the Effectuator. “I have come from Galactic Central to bring a message…”

Gatt gave Vargas a meaningful look.

“Therefore,” said the Effectuator, “know all men by these presents—”

“Now?” Vargas asked in a whisper.

“Yes, now,” Gatt said.

Vargas waved the pole. The Galactic Effectuator looked startled, then vanished.

“Where did he go?” Vargas asked the Alien.

“Into a holding space,” the Alien said. “He’ll reassemble himself there, then report back to Galactic Central.”

“You’re sure he’s not hurt?”

“I told you, you can’t hurt an Effectuator because he’s a robot. In fact, only robots are permitted to be Galactic Effectuators.”

“Why is that?”

“To ensure that they won’t defend themselves if attacked by barbarians such as yourself.”

“Well, whatever,” Gatt said. “Let’s get on with business. Where’s this planet of yours we’re going to conquer? Excuse me, I mean liberate.”

“Take me to your computer,” Hurtevurt said. “I will program him to take us there.”

The Earthship, with its sleeping troopers and its card-playing officers, hurtled on through space. Several time periods passed without event. Vargas wanted to know why it was taking so long. Hurtevurt rechecked his calculations and told him they were almost there. Vargas went to report this to Supreme Commander Gatt. While he was reporting, the Intelligence Meter sounded off. The planet Magellanic lay dead ahead.

“Go get ‘em, tiger,” Gatt said to Vargas.

“But I don’t know how,” Vargas said. “An entire planet… .”

“You remember how we used to sack cities, don’t you?”

Vargas grinned and nodded. How could he forget.

“Just go to Magellanic and do the same thing. It’s just the scale that changes.”

There was really no way of finding out in advance how much armament the alien occupiers of Magellanic might put up against them. Vargas decided to try a bold yet conservative tactic. He’d just go in and take over the joint. What the hell, it had worked for the Hittites.

The great ship from Earth roared down through the atmosphere. Hurtevurt pointed out the leading city on the planet, the one from which all power emanated. That made it convenient. Vargas sent out five thousand shock troops armed with horrifying and instantaneous weapons. The remaining five thousand were kept in reserve. As it turned out, they weren’t needed.

General Vargas wrote home soon after the successful conquest of Magellanic:

Dear Lupe, I promised to tell you about the invasion. It went very well. So well, in fact, that at first we suspected some sort of treachery. We airdropped a first force of a thousand picked men, armed to the teeth, into the big square in the middle of the main city here, which is called Megalopolis. Our boys landed during a folk dancing festival and there was quite a bit of confusion, as you can imagine, since the population thought our boys were demonstrating war dances. We cleared that up soon enough.

The remaining four thousand troopers of the first wave came down just outside the city, since there was no room to pack them into the town square. The lads marched into Megalopolis in good order, and they got an enthusiastic greeting from the citizens, who seemed delighted to see them.

The Magellanics took in the situation quickly, and had flowers and paper streamers handy to give our boys a proper welcome. There were no unfortunate incidents, aside from several local women getting trampled in their eagerness to show our boys a nice welcome.

Magellanic is a very nice planet, prosperous, and with a nice climate except at the poles where we don’t go. We have seen no signs of the alien invaders that Hurtevurt told us about. Either they are holed up in the hills, or they all left when our ship approached.

Now it is a week later. We have been very busy and I am writing hastily so this letter can go out with the first load of booty which we’re sending to Earth.

Our Art Squads have done a fine job of combing the planet. As we promised the men, the first haul is theirs.

Frankly, the stuff doesn’t look like much. But we’ve collected whatever we can find in the way of furniture, postage stamps, gold, silver, and precious stones, and that sort of thing.

It’s too bad that we have to ship it all back to Earth at government expense and sell it for the troops. But that’s what we promised and otherwise they might mutiny.

We’re also sending back some of the local food surpluses. I just hope there’s a market for cranko nuts and pubble fruit back on Earth. Personally, lean do without it.

I forgot to mention, we are sending back to Earth our first draft of Magellanic workers. We had no trouble collecting them. A lot of people on this planet have volunteered to do stoop labor in the fields and unskilled crap work in the factories for starvation wages. This is useful because nobody on Earth wants to do that stuff anymore.

I’ll write again soon. Much love, my baby vulture.

Six months later, Vargas received the following message from General Gatt, now on Earth fulfilling his duties as Supreme Leader and Total Commander:

Getulio, I’m dashing this off in great haste. We need a total change in policy and we need it fast. My accountants have just brought me the news that our occupation is costing us more than it is bringing in by a factor often. I don’t know how this happened. I always thought one made a profit out of winning a war. You know I’ve lived by the motto, “To the victor goes the spoils.”

But it isn’t working that way here. The art treasures we brought back have brought in very little on Earth’s art market. In fact, leading art critics have declared that the Magellanics are in apre-artistic stage of their development! We can’t sell their music, either, and their furniture is both uncomfortable to sit in, ugly to look at, and tends to break easily.

And as if that isn’t bad enough, now we have all these Magellanics on Earth doing cheap labor. How can cheap labor not be cost- efficient? My experts tell me we’re putting millions of Earth citizens out of work, and using up all our tax revenue because the first thing a Magellanic does when he gets here is go on the dole until he finds a really good job.

That’s the trouble, you see. They’re not content to stay in the cheap labor market. They learn fast and now some of them are in key positions in government, health, industry. I wanted to pass a law to keep them out of the good jobs, but my own advisers told me that was prejudiced and nobody would stand for it.

So listen, Getulio, stop at once from sending any more of them to Earth. Be prepared to take back all the ones I can round up and ship back to you. Prepare an announcement saying that the forces of Earth have succeeded in their goal of freeing the Magellanics from the cruel conquerors who had been pressing their faces into the dirt and now they’re on their own.

As soon as you can, sooner if possible, I want you to pull all our troops out, cancel the war, end the occupation, and get yourself and your men home as fast as you can.

I forgot to mention, these Magellanics are unbelievablyfertile. The ones here on Earth need only about three months from impregnation to birth. They have a whole lot of triplets and quintuplets, too. Getulio, we have to get rid of these moochers fast, before they take over our planet and eat us out of house and home.

Close up and come home. We’ll think of something new.

When Vargas told the news to Captain Arnold Stone, his Chief Accountant, he asked for an accounting to show how much profit they had been showing during their stay on Magellanic.

“Profit?” Stone said with a short, sardonic laugh. “We’ve been running at a loss ever since we got here.”

“But what about the taxes we imposed?”

“Imposing is one thing, collecting is another. They never seem to have any money.”

“What about the Magellanic workers on Earth? Don’t they send back some of their wages?”

Stone shook his head. “They invest every cent of it in Earth tax-free municipal bonds. They claim it’s an ancient custom of theirs.”

“I never liked them from the start,” Vargas said. “I always knew they’d be trouble.”

“You got that right,” Stone said.

“All right, get someone in Communications to prepare an announcement for the population here. Tell them that we’ve done what we came here to do, that is, free them from the cruel hand of whoever it was who was oppressing them. Now we’re going away and they can do their own thing and lots of luck.”

“That’s a lot,” Stone said. “I’d better get the boys in intelligence to help with the wording.”

“Do that,” Vargas said. “And tell somebody to get the ships ready for immediate departure.

That was the idea. But it didn’t work out that way.

That afternoon, as Vargas sat in his office playing mumbly peg with his favorite Philippine bolo knife and dreaming of being back with Lupe, there was a flash of brilliance in the middle of the floor. Vargas didn’t hesitate a moment when he saw it. He dived under the desk to avoid what he assumed was an assassination attempt.

It was sort of nice, under the desk, even though it was not a particularly sturdy desk, Magellanic furniture-building being what it was. Still, it gave Vargas a feeling of protection, and time to unhol- ster his ivory-handled laser blaster.

A voice said, “If you try to use that on me, you are going to be very sorry.”

Vargas peered out and saw, standing in the middle of his office, the characteristic metal skin and flashing eyes of the Galactic Effectuator.

“Oh, it’s you,” Vargas said, getting out from under the table with as much dignity as circumstances allowed. He reholstered his firearm, took his seat at his desk again, and said, “Sorry about that, Galactic Effectuator. I thought it might be an assassination team. Can’t be too careful, you know. Now, what can I do for you?”

“The first thing,” the Galactic Effectuator said, “is not to try zapping me again. We let you get away with it once. Try again and the Galactic Forces will nuke you back to the Stone Age. If you think I’m kidding, take a look out the window.”

Vargas looked. The sky was dark with ships. They were big ships, as you’d expect of a Galactic Force.

“I want to apologize for zapping you earlier,” Vargas said. “I was acting on bad advice. I’m glad you’ve come. You’re just in time to hear me declare the end of Earth’s occupation. Maybe you’d like to watch us get out of here and go home.”

“I know that is what you are planning,” the Effectuator said. “I’m here to tell you it’s not going to be quite as easy as that.”

“Why not?”

“Galactic policy is to keep the status quo, whatever it is. We were unable to prevent you from declaring war on Magellanic. That is the one mistake you’re allowed. You’ve got this place, now you have to keep it.”

“Believe me,” Vargas said, “this sort of thing will never happen again. Can’t we just apologize and forget it?”

“No,” said the Effectuator. “You can’t get out of it as easily as that. War was your idea, not ours. Now you’re stuck with it.”

“But the war’s over!”

“According to Galactic Rules, the war is only over when those you attacked say it’s over. And I can assure you, the Magellanics are very satisfied with things as they are.”

“I’m starting to get the feeling,” Vargas said, “that these Magellanics tricked us. That Hurtevurt and his story! It reminds me of something to do with a bird. But I can’t quite remember what.”

“Permit me to refresh your memory,” the Effectuator said. “I have made a study of birdlife throughout the galaxy, so I know there is a bird called the cuckoo on your planet. It lays its egg in other birds’ nests and they take care of it. That is what the Magellanics have done to you Earth folks.”

“What in hell are you talking about?” Vargas said, his voice blustery but shaky.

“They get you to take over their planet. They get you to take their surplus workforce to your own world. Once there, you can’t get rid of them. But that’s what you get for trying to practice charity without taking thought for the consequences.”

“Charity, hell! We were doing war!”

“In the Galactic view,” the Effectuator said, “war is a form of charity.”

“How do you figure?”

“We believe that war entails a number of selfless and exemplary actions. First there’s the duty of rapine, which we define as the willingness to transfer large quantities of your planet’s best sperm to a civilization that badly needs it. Your troops have done well that way. Next there’s the duty of pillage, which is the act of cleansing the artistic life of a conquered people by carting away vast quantities of their inferior art treasures in order to unblock their creative self-expression and allow them to produce newer, better works. Finally we have the duty of education and self-improvement, which you have performed by taking in large numbers of Magellanic’s surplus and idle population to your own planet, where you support them until they are smart enough to put your own people out of work.”

Vargas thought for a while, then shrugged and said, “You got it right, Galactic Effectuator. But how do we end it?”

“That’s always the difficult part,” the Effectuator said. “Maybe, with some luck, you can find some other planet that’ll be crazy enough to take over both your planet and Magellanic. That’s the only way you’re going to get off the hook.”

That is how, upon entering Galactic Civilization, Earth gave up war forever. And that is why there are Earthmen on all the civilized planets of the galaxy. They can be found on the street corners of dusty alien cities. They speak all languages. They sidle up to you and say, “Listen, Mister, would you like to take over a planet with no trouble at all?”

Naturally, no one pays them the slightest attention. Even the newer civilizations have learned that war costs too much and charity begins at home.