Read Vectors for Free Online

picture filled with scenes of battle, again in the desert. The heat, the smoke, the noise, the chaos, almost the smell seemed to spring from the screen.
    "Now, Tolly, what are you seeing?"
    "The Trucial War. I don't know which action. Last week's, maybe, up on the border."
    Merle smiled and raised his glass. "You've got a great eye, Tolly. It's the Trucials, it's even a border skirmish—but it's next week, not last week. You said that Alex Burns is a genius. I agree. Half the battles in that war never happen. They're Alex's simulations. We ship the footage to NBC—they pay for it—and they weave the commentary around it. Much better for them, they don't have to keep a camera team out in the field. About half the footage is genuine fighting. The rest is Alex."
    Suomi's eyes were flicking from the screen to Merle and back again. He was running rapidly through the difficulties, the possibilities. "How can you meet the deliverables? How can you pass an audit?"
    "No audit. Fixed price war, remember? Deliverables ? We maintain the lines we promised—you know, these aren't wars to win, they're to hold the status quo. We find the bidders on the other side, as early in the game as we can. We agree what will be fought, what will be simulated. They buy the simulations they need from us—a tidy profit there for WAWD. We have to mix it up, in case there are parties of journalists or junketing politicians. They see genuine battles. How can somebody tell if the other battles they see on the screen are real?"
    "And you make a profit?"
    "Thirty-five percent. No matter how much the simulations cost, or how much it takes to keep things going smoothly, nothing costs as much as a war—even a small one. One other thing, Tolly. Go and take a look at the war hospitals. There are still deaths, because there are still battles. We stopped the worst maiming a while back, the two of us, when we got rid of the worst weapons. Now, the injuries are down again—and WAWD gets credit for tactics and brilliant fighting."
    Merle Walters raised his glass again. "Here's to the merger of WAWD Corporation and VVV Industries—the War leaders. You'll have to keep up the struggle now, Tolly, until some day maybe we'll get some sense. I'm not optimistic. We're aggressive animals, the lot of us. But here's to War, damn its soul."
    Tolly Suomi was thoughtful. He flexed his shoulders, feeling a new weight there. At last he too raised his glass. "To the merger. And to our motto: War is much too serious a thing to be left to the Government."
    The glasses clinked. On the screen in front of them, the battle raged.
      Afterword.
    This is a pure example of the type known in science fiction as the "If this goes on. . ." species. If Government is willing to contract out the development of weapons, including the conceptual design, fabrication, and testing, why shouldn't they take the logical next step and contract out the war? If they did, what would happen?
    Apart from fairly frequent excursions to England and to the Middle East, I have lived close to Washington D.C. for many years, and have dealt a lot with the Federal Government. The contracting details and bidder's conferences in this story are drawn from the life (if it is appropriate to assign any suggestion of animation to the U.S. Government).
    To anyone who thinks the story could actually happen: sorry, even fixed price contracts are subject to federal audit.

MARCONI, MATTIN, MAXWELL
    Venus Station.Saturday 24th, 2:30 a.m.

    Dear Professor Benson,
    The draft of Gerald Mattin's biography for your volume 'The Lives of the Great Scientists' is finished. I am sending it to you under separate transmission. Sorry to run so close to your deadline, but it's hard to compress his twenty-five years into twenty pages.
    Your other request for new 'personal incidents' and 'intimate touches' from my time working with Mattin is a tough one. As you say, no doubt I knew him as well as any man did. Everybody knows that he saved my