Man-Kzin Wars III by Larry Niven (good short books TXT) 📕

they want. I bet they leave the top management boringly sane. But you, Jack—”

“I see it.” Centuries of ARM tradition were squarely on her side.

“You can go as crazy as you like. It’s all natural, and medics have known how to handle it since Only One Earth. We need the schitz viewpoint, and we don’t have to steal the chemicals.”

“Stet. When do we start?”

Anton looked at Phoebe. Phoebe said, “Now?”

* * *

We played Anton’s tape all the way through, to a running theme of graveyard humor.

“I took only what I thought we could use,” Anton said. “You should have seen some of the rest. Agent Orange. Napalm. Murder stuff.”

Phoebe said, “Isn’t this murder?”

That remark might have been unfair. We were watching this bizarre chunky rotary-blade flyer. Fire leaped from underneath it, once and again . . . weapons of some kind.

Anton said, “Aircraft design isn’t the same when you use it for murder. It changes when you expect to be shot at. Here—” The picture had changed. “That’s another weapons platform. It’s not just fast, it’s supposed to hide in the sky. Jack, are you all right?”

“I’m scared green. I haven’t felt any effects yet.”

Phoebe said, “You need to relax. Anton delivers a terrific massage. I never learned.”

She wasn’t kidding. Anton didn’t have my muscle, but he had big strangler’s hands. I relaxed into it, talking as he worked, liking the way my voice wavered as his hands pounded my back.

“It hasn’t been that long since a guy like me let his ’doc run out of beta-dammasomething. An indicator light ran out and he didn’t notice. He tried to kill his business partner by bombing his partner’s house, and got some family members instead.”

“We’re on watch,” Phoebe said. “If you go berserk we can handle it. Do you want to see more of this?”

“We’ve missed something. Children, I’m a registered schitz. If I don’t use my ’doc for three days, they’ll be trying to find me before I remember I’m the Marsport Strangler.”

Anton said, “He’s right, love. Jack, give me your door codes. If I can get into your apt, I can fix the records.”

“Keep talking. Finish the massage, at least. We might have other problems. Do we want fruit juice? Munchies? Foodlike substances?”

When Anton came back with groceries, Phoebe and I barely noticed.

Were the warcats real? Could we fight them with present tech? How long did Sol system have? And the other systems, the more sparsely settled colony worlds? Was it enough to make tapes and blueprints of the old murder machines, or must we set to building clandestine factories? Phoebe and I were spilling ideas past each other as fast as they came, and I had quite forgotten that I was doing something dangerous.

I noticed myself noticing that I was thinking much faster than thoughts could spill from my lips. I remembered knowing that Phoebe was brighter than I was, and that didn’t matter either. But Anton was losing his Thursday edge.

We slept. The old airbed was a big one. We woke to fruit and bread and dived back in.

We re-invented the Navy using only what Anton had recorded of seagoing navies. We had to. There had never been space navies; the long peace had fallen first.

I’m not sure when I slid into schitz mode. I’d spent four days out of seven without the ’doc, every week for forty-one years excluding vacations. You’d think I’d remember the feel of my brain chemistry changing. Sometimes I do; but it’s the central me that changes, and there’s no way to control that.

Anton’s machines were long out of date, and none had been developed even for interplanetary war. Mankind had found peace too soon. Pity. But if the warcats’ gravity generators could be copied before the warcats arrived, that alone could save us!

Then again, whatever the cats had for weapons, kinetic energy was likely to be the ultimate weapon, however the mass was moved. Energy considerations don’t lie . . . I stopped trying to anticipate individual war machines; what I needed was an overview.

Anton was saying very little.

I realized that I had been wasting my time making medical programs. Chemical enhancement was the most trivial of what we’d need to remake an army. Extensive testing would be needed, and then we might not get soldiers at all unless they retained some civil rights, or unless officers killed enough of them to impress the rest. Our limited pool of schitzies had better be trained as our officers. For that matter, we’d better start by taking over the ARM. They had all the brightest schitzies.

As for Anton’s work in the ARM archives, the most powerful weapons had been entirely ignored. They were too obvious.

I saw how Phoebe was staring at me, and Anton too, both gape-jawed.

I tried to explain that our task was nothing less than the reorganization of humanity. Large numbers might have to die before the rest saw the wisdom in following our lead. The warcats would teach that lesson . . . but if we waited for them, we’d be too late. Time was breathing hot on our necks.

Anton didn’t understand. Phoebe was following me, though not well, but Anton’s body language was pulling him back and closing him up while his face stayed blank. He feared me worse than he feared warcats.

I began to understand that I might have to kill Anton. I hated him for that.

* * *

We did not sleep Friday at all. By Saturday noon we should have been exhausted. I’d caught catnaps from time to time, we all had, but I was still blazing with ideas. In my mind the pattern of an interstellar invasion was shaping itself like a vast three-dimensional map.

Earlier I might have killed Anton, because he knew too much or too little, because he would steal Phoebe from me. Now I saw that that was foolish. Phoebe wouldn’t follow him. He simply didn’t have the . . . the internal power. As for knowledge, he was our only access to the ARM!

Saturday evening we ran out of food . . . and Anton and Phoebe