Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman Read Free Book Online Page B

individual mechanics' unedited feeds; lots of warboys would cheerfully kill for one. Ray had top-secret clearance and an unaltered jack. If a civilian or a spy got ahold of Emily Vail's crystal, they would see and feel a lot that wasn't on the commercial version, but selected perceptions and thoughts would be filtered out unless you had a jack like Ray's.
    A live waiter in a clean tuxedo brought our drinks. I was splitting a jug of house red with Reza.
    Ray raised a glass. "To peace," he said, actually without irony. "Welcome back, Julian." Amelia touched my knee with hers under the table.
    The wine was pretty good, just astringent enough to make you consider a slightly more expensive one. "Easy week this time," I said, and Ray nodded. He always checked on me.
    A couple of others showed up, and we broke down into the usual interlocking small conversational groups. Amelia moved over to sit with Belda and another man from fine arts, to talk about books. We usually did separate when it seemed natural.
    I stayed with Reza and Ray; when Marty came in he gave Amelia a peck and joined the three of us. There was no love lost between him and Belda.
    Marty was really soaked, his long white hair in lanky strings. "Had to park down the block," he said, dropping his sodden coat on the wheelie.
    "Thought you were working late," Ray said. "This isn't late?" He ordered coffee and a sandwich. "I'm going back later, and so are you. Have a couple more scotches."
    "What is it?" He pushed his scotch away a symbolic inch.
    "Let's not talk shop. We have all night. But it's that girl you said you saw on the Vail crystal."
    "The one who cracked?" I asked.
    "Mm-hm. Why don't you crack, Julian? Get a discharge. We enjoy your company."
    "Your platoon, too," Ray joked. "Nice bunch."
    "How could she fit into your cross-linking studies?" I asked. "She must hardly have been linking at all."
    "New deal we started while you were gone," Ray said. "We got a contract to study empathy failures. People who crack out of sympathy for the enemy."
    "You may get Julian," Reza said. "He just loves them pedros."
    "It doesn't correlate much with politics," Marty said. "And it's usually people in their first year or two. More often female than male. He's not a good candidate." The coffee came and he picked up the cup and blew on it. "So how about this weather? Clear and cool, they said."
    "Love them Knicks," I said.
    Reza nodded. "The square root of minus one." There was going to be no more talk of empathy failures that night.
     
    JULIAN DIDN'T KNOW HOW selective the draft really was, finding people for specific mechanics' slots. There were a few hunter-killer platoons, but they tended to be hard to control, on a couple of levels. As platoons, they followed orders poorly, and they didn't integrate well "horizontally," with other platoons in the company. The individual mechanics in a hunter-killer platoon tended not to link strongly with one another.
    None of this was surprising. They were made up of the same kind of people earlier armies chose for "wet work." You expected them to be independent and somewhat wild.
    As Julian had observed, most platoons had at least one person who seemed like a really unlikely choice. In his outfit it was Candi, horrified by the war and unwilling to harm the enemy. They were called stabilizers.
    Julian suspected she acted as a kind of conscience for the platoon, but it would be more accurate to call her a governor, like the governor on an engine. Platoons that didn't have one member like Candi had a tendency to run out of control, go "berserker." It happened sometimes with the hunter-killer ones, whose stabilizers couldn't be too pacifistic, and it was tactically a disaster. War is, according to von Clausewitz, the controlled use of force to bring about political ends. Uncontrolled force is as likely to harm as to help.
    (There was a mythos, a commonsense observation, that the berserker episodes had a good effect in the long run, because