Hubbard, L. Ron (2 page)

In the history of the world, there have been persons in leadership positions who have not thought things through as well as they might have.

Nor have they always been able to direct matters even skillfully enough to achieve their short-sighted objectives. One of the traditional places where the price for that is paid is in the trenches where the common soldier has to crawl in simple self-preservation. Far less often is the price paid in the distant citadels of power, and even then it is normally paid in bloodless coin, limousines taking the henchmen away to minimum-security detentions or to exile in luxury.

Final Blackout may be taken as an allegory-a speculative work of science fiction that teases, the mind by presenting a world that, oh, could be, oh, yes, sounds plausible, but, well, never actually happened as predicted.

But over forty-nine years, Final Blackout has never ended, and the future runs infinitely long from this moment on.

-Algis Budrys

The son of a career soldier/diplomat, Algis Budrys was born in Europe in 1931 and has been a highly regarded science fiction novelist and editor since the early 1950s. He currently acts as the coordinator in L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of The Future Contest and its associated programs for nurturing new talent. He has taught seminars at Michigan State University, Brigham Young, Pepperdine University, and Harvard. He is equally well known as an award-winning historian and critic of modern speculative fiction. For the Chicago Sun-Times Sunday book review section, he has long written a column on popular literature in general.

-The Publisher

When FINAL BLACKOUT was written there was still a Maginot Line, Dunkirk was just another French coastal town and the Battle of Britain, the Bulge, Saipan, Iwo, V2s and Nagasaki were things unknown and far ahead in history. While it concerns these things, its action will not take place for many years yet to come and it is, therefore, still a story of the future though some of the "future" it embraced (about one-fifth) has already transpired.

When published in magazine form before the war it created a little skirmish of its own and, I am told, as time has gone by and some of it has unreeled, interest in it has if anything increased. So far its career has been most adventurous as a story. The "battle of FINAL BLACKOUT" has included loud wails from the Communists-who said it was profascist (while at least one fascist has held it to be pro-Communist). Its premises have been called wild and unfounded on the one hand while poems (some of them very good) have been written about or dedicated to the Lieutenant. Meetings have been held to nominate to greatness while others have been called to hang the author in effigy (and it is a matter of record that the last at least was successfully accomplished).

The British would not hear of its being published there at the time it appeared in America, though Boston, I am told, remained neutral-for there is nothing but innocent slaughter in it and no sign of rape.

There are those who insist that it is all very bad and those who claim for it the status of immortality. And while it probably is not the worst tale ever written, I cannot bring myself to believe that FINAL BLACKOUT, as so many polls and such insist, is one of the ten greatest stories in its field ever written.

Back in those mild days when Pearl Harbor was a place you toured while vacationing at Waikiki and when every drawing room had its business man who wondered disinterestedly whether or not it's possible to do business with Hitler, the anti-FINAL BLACKOUTISTS (many of whom, I fear, were Communists, whatever those are) were particularly irked by some of the premises of the tale.

. Russia was, obviously, a peace-loving nation with no more thought than America of entering the war. England was a fine, going concern without a thought, beyond a contemptuous aside, for the Socialist who, of course, could never come to power. One must understand this to see why he slashed about and wounded people.

True enough, some of its premises were far off the mark. It supposed, for instance, that the politicians of the great countries, particularly the United States, would push rather than hinder the entrance of the whole world into the war. In fact, it supposed, for its author was very young, that politicians were entirely incompetent and would not prevent for one instant the bloodiest conflict the country had ever known.

Further, for the author was no military critic, it supposed that the general staffs of most great nations were composed of stupid bunglers who would be looking at their mirrors when they should be looking to their posts and that the general worldwide strategy of war would go off in a manner utterly unadroit to the sacrifice of quite a few lives. It surmised that if general staff; went right on bungling along, nations would cease to exist, and it further-and more to the point-advanced the thought that the junior officer, the noncom and, primarily the enlisted man would have to prosecute the war. These, it believed, would finally be boiled down, by staff stupidity, to a handful of unkillables who would thereafter shift for themselves.

FINAL BLACKOUT dealt rather summarily and very harshly, for the author was inexperienced in international affairs-that the anarchy of nations was an unhealthy arrangement maintained by the greed of a few for the privileges of a few and that the "common people" (which is to say those uncommon people who wish only to be let go about their affairs of getting enough to eat and begetting their next generation) would be knocked flat, silly and completely out of existence by these brand-new "defensive" weapons which would, of course, be turned only against soldiers. Bombs, atomics, germs and, in short, science, it maintained, were being used unhealthily and that, soon enough, a person here and there who was no party to the front line sortie was liable to get injured or dusty; it also spoke of populations being affected boomerang fashion by weapons devised for their own governments to use.

Certainly all this was heresy enough in that quiet world of 1939, and since that time, it is only fair to state, the author has served here and there and has gained enough experience to see the error of his judgment.

Everything, it can be said with Pangloss, so far has been for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

There have been two or three stories modeled on FINAL BLACKOUT. I am flattered. It is just a story. And as the past few years proved, it cannot possibly happen.

L.RON HUBBARD Hollywood, 1948

The Lieutenant

He was born in an air-raid shelter-and his first wail was drowned by the shriek of bombs, the thunder of falling Walls and the coughing chatter of machine guns raking the sky.

He was taught in a countryside where A was for Antiaircraft and V was for Victory. He knew that Vickers Wellington bombers had flown non-stop clear to China. But nobody thought to tell him about a man who had sailed a carrack as far in the opposite direction-a chap called Columbus.

War-shattered officers had taught him the arts of battle on the relief maps of Rugby. Limping sergeants had made him expert with rifle and pistol, light and heavy artillery. And although he could not conjugate a single Latin verb, he was graduated as wholly educated at fourteen and commissioned the same year.

His father was killed on the Mole at Kiel. His uncle rode a flamer in at Hamburg. His mother, long ago, had died of grief and starvation in the wreckage which had been London.

When he was eighteen he had been sent to the front as a subaltern. At twenty-three he was commanding a brigade.

In short, his career was not unlike that of any other high-born English lad born after the beginning of that conflict which is sometimes known as the War of Books-or the War of Creeds, or the War Which Ended War or World Wars two, three, four and five. Like any other, with the exception that he lived through it.

There is little accounting for the reason he lived so long, and, having lived, moved up to take the spotlight on the Continental stage for a few seconds out of time. But there is never any accounting for such things.

When officers and men, sick with the hell of it, walked out to find a bullet that would end an unlivable life, he shrugged and carried on. When his messmates went screaming mad from illness and revulsion, he gave them that for which they begged, sheathed his pistol and took over the fragments of their commands. When, outfits mutinied and shot their officers in the back, he squared his own and, faced front, carried on.

He had seen ninety-three thousand replacements come into his division before he had been a year on the Continent. And he had seen almost as many files voided over again.

He was a soldier and his trade was death, and he had seen too much to be greatly impressed with anything. Outwardly he was much like half a million others of his rank; inwardly there was a difference. He had found out, while commanding ack-acks in England, that nerves are more deadly than bullets, and so he had early denied the existence of his own, substituting a careless cheerfulness which went strangely with the somber gloom which overhung the graveyard of Europe. If he had nerves, he kept them to himself. And what battles he fought within himself to keep them down must forever go unsung.

Before he had been a year on the Continent, the dread soldier's sickness-that very learned and scientific result of bacteriological warfare, the climax of years of mutating germs unto final, incurable diseases-had caused a quarantine to be placed on all English troops serving across the Channel, just as America, nine years before, had completely stopped all communication across the Atlantic, shortly after her abortive atom war had boomeranged. Hence, he had not been able to return to England.

If he longed for his own land, shell-blasted though it might be, he never showed it. Impassively he had listened each time to the tidings of seven separate revolutions which had begun with the assassination of the king, a crime which had been succeeded by every known kind of political buffoonery culminating in Communism (for at least that is what they called this ideology, though Marx would have disowned it. And the late, unlamented Stalin would have gibbered incoherently at the heresy of its tenets). And he saw only mirth in the fact that, whereas the crimson banner flew now over London, the imperial standard of the czar now whipped in the Russian breeze.

Seven separate governments, each attacked and made to carry on the war.

Nine governments in Germany in only eighteen years. He had let the ribbons and insignia issued him drop into the mud, wishing with all his kind that all governments would collapse together and put an end to this. But that had never happened. The fall of one side netted attack from the organized other. And turn about. just as the problem of manufacture had unequalized the periods of bombing, so had this served to prolong this war that the brief orgy of atomics, murderously wild, if utterly indecisive, had spread such hatreds that the lingering sparks of decency and forbearance seemed to have vanished from the world. War, as in days of old, had become a thing of hate and loot, for how else was a machine-tooled country to get machines and tools which it could no longer generate within itself.

He knew nothing about these international politics-or at least pretended that he did not. He was, however, in close touch with the effects, for such a collapse was always followed by the general advance of the other side. The fall of his own immediate clique in command meant that he, as a soldier, would be attacked; the: banishing of the enemies' chiefs caused him to attack in turn. But war, to him, was the only actuality, for rarely had he known of that thing of which men spoke dreamily and to which they gave the name 'peace'.

He had seen, in his lifetime, the peak and oblivion of flight, the perfection and extinction of artillery, the birth and death of nuclear physics, the end product of bacteriology, but only the oblivion, extinction, and death of culture.

It had been three years since he had heard an airplane throbbing overhead.

As a child, to him they had been as common as birds, if a shade more deadly. They had flown fast and far and then when the crash of atom bombs in guided missiles had finally blotted out three quarters of the manufacturing centers of the world they had flown no more. For the airplane is a fragile thing which cannot exist without replacement parts, without complex fuels, without a thousand aids. Even the assembly of a thousand partly damaged ships into perhaps fifty that would fly did not give a nation more than a few months' superiority in the air. It was quiet, very quiet. The planes had gone.

Once great guns had rumbled along definite lines. But big guns had needed artfully manufactured shells, and when the centers of manufacture had become too disorganized to produce such a complex thing as a shell, firing had gradually sputtered out, jerkily reviving, but fainter each time until it ceased. For the guns themselves had worn out. And when infantry tactics came to take the place of the warfare of fortresses and tanks, those few guns which remained had, one by one, been abandoned, perforce, and left in ruins to a rapidly advancing enemy. This was particularly true of the smaller field guns which had hung on feebly to the last.

It had been four years since he had received his last orders by radio, for there were no longer parts for replacement. And though it was rumored that G.H.Q. of the B.E.F had radio communication with England, no one could truly tell. It had been seven years since a new uniform had been issued, three years or more since a rank had been made for an officer.

His world was a shambles of broken townships and defiled fields, an immense cemetery where thirty million soldiers and three hundred million civilians had been wrenched loose from life. And though the death which had shrieked out of the skies would howl no more, there was no need. Its work was done.