Jeffrey D. Kooistra Dykstra's War

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Dykstra nodded. "Fifty
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- Chapter 16
ships, thirty-five System Patrol, the rest Belt. They intercepted the tail end
of the fleet yesterday. We needed to see how we could do against them
ship-to-ship when you take FTL away from them."
"You're obviously not happy," Dykstra said. "We didn't do so well?"
"Oh, we did great. Had a kill ratio of over three-to-one. Their ships wouldn't
even turn around to engage.
And they wouldn't fire until fired upon. But then they'd throw everything at
us that they had until they were spent, then self-destruct. We lost
thirty-eight war boats out there, Doctor. That's a significant percentage of
our combined fleets of military craft. They lost over a hundred. That's
nothing to them."
Knoedler had gotten up and was pacing his office. He continued: "Given a year
and an infinite number of credits, we could convert over every suitable barge,
tug, and pleasure boat in the Solar System into some kind of warship, and we
might have twenty thousand or so. At a three-to-one kill ratio that still
leaves them over a million ships to mop us up with."
"The situation does look grim," Dykstra said. "Doesn't surprise me."
"That's right, God damn it!" Knoedler shouted at him. "It doesn't freaking
surprise you. Why the hell not
! It surprises the shit out of me. What the hell are they, Chris? You've kept
it to yourself what you think about them, what kind of beings you think they
are. You risked being executed for treason so your people could collect those
two we have locked up in the basement. I need to know now what kinds of things
we're up against." Sometime during his tirade Knoedler had resumed his seat
and was leaning toward Dykstra with his hands out, begging.
"Okay. I believe we're up against a billion years of evolution of a purely
operant intelligence," Dykstra said. When he didn't continue, Knoedler got
annoyed.
"Great. Now what does that mean?"
"It is the functional equivalent of saying we are up against creatures without
souls, but that doesn't sound very scientific."
"Well, of course not. No one knows what the soul is, or even if it is "
"Well, we're about to find out," Dykstra snapped, interrupting, "because we
are at war with an equivalently intelligenced species that doesn't have one.
Are you going to argue with me at every point, Colonel? That I will not
tolerate."
Knoedler looked like his head was about to explode. Dykstra allowed himself to
sink just a little more limply into his chair, shamelessly playing the
frail-old-man bit visually.
At that, Knoedler laughed. "Aw, shit, Chris," he finally said. "Okay, consider
me abashed. Lecture at will."
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- Chapter 16
"The Phinons do not think the way we do," Dykstra began. "They do not invent
technology they evolve it. Phinons do not make intuitive leaps. Given
sufficient time their technology eventually evolves the same way a biological
organism does, through fits and starts. Sometimes they miss the obvious the
non-variable collimation of their X-ray laser hand weapons is a good example.
Sometimes they scale
Promethean heights. The beam truncation ability of the same weapon is a good
example of that even
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I'd never thought of that wrinkle in my physics."
"So you're saying that Phinons don't think?"
"They think, Colonel. Like a machine thinks. And that can look quite clever,
indeed. But we need not look for any Phinon political structures, no military
command, no formal structure at all that we would think of as one. The Phinons
as a whole, or at least the ones in this part of the galaxy, are responding to
the stimulus that is the human species. What we are seeing now would be
absolutely predictable to someone who has had perhaps ten thousand years to
observe them."
"And we haven't had the time. But where does the soul fit in?"
"Have you ever heard of B.F. Skinner?" Dykstra asked.
"Twentieth century psychologist, right?"
"Correct. He viewed all organisms, people included, as being nothing more than
the sum of their learned responses to the multitudinous stimuli one encounters
in life. Some of his techniques are still in use and are a godsend to folks
suffering from some disorders, particularly phobias. But as a psychological
theory his views were pure reductionist twaddle, not unlike the same sort of
stupidity that held biology back at the turn of this century, and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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