Soft come the dragons

every nerve in his body. What was he frightened of? And what was this feeling of familiarity all about? He was more than normally afraid for Laurie. After all, she was only pregnant. Suddenly, he hoped to hell it would be a girl. And then the shivers were gone as he rushed for the car. He was warm, the world was wonderful, and there was no longer a sense of familiarity. Suddenly things were very much different and very new indeed.
     
     
     
     
     
     

DRAGON IN THE LAND
       
    There has been a great deal of talk about McLuhanism, Marshall McLuhan's philosophies on our electric world of superfast communications. McLuhan says we are all drawing the world tighter and tighter together into a Global Village, and that when mankind is that close, war will gradually disappear. "Dragon in the Land," directly extrapolates from that thesis. Herein is the final war. And when enemies meet—one in defeat, the other in triumph—and find, perhaps grudgingly, that the Global Village concept and the war have made them brothers, they find that caring for someone not of your fatherland requires no more effort than loving your own father. I think there is a dragon in the land of our own time, of the here and now. It seems to be the dragon of peace, a good beast, and it is winning friends and influencing more people every day. This story brought me over thirty letters from fans so far, and it is good to know there are people willing to take the time to sit down and write and say, "Peace." Another story of mine called "Muse" has garnered forty-five letters to date, and it concerns the same idea, namely that all men—indeed, all living creatures—are linked in the scheme of things and are, in a sense, brothers. And people are banning together to protest industrial plants being built in places where there was once natural beauty . . . And left-wingers and right-wingers are fighting pollution with a growing vehemence . . . And a former Commandant of the Marines goes on speaking tours against the Vietnamese war where we kill each other without knowing why . . . Sometimes I think it pays to be an optimist . . .
     
    we invaded Mother China and no one tried to stop us. The government had collapsed six days before, and the Chief of Staff of what remained of the hungry, ragtag Chinese People's Army had requested our immediate assistance. Still, when the destroyer Barbara Dee wallowed to a full stop off the coast of Luichow Peninsula in the South China Sea, every gun was trained on the shore. And every man in those first landing craft unsnapped his holster. After all, we were landing in China! We had been asked to bail them out. And, indirectly, to bail ourselves out too. . . .
    Since the foolproof Nuclear Shields, conventional warfare had evaporated. This did not mean an end to war—just an end to War-as-We-Knew-It. After the pacification of the angry atom: germ warfare. In the forty-one years since the end of the atom-age war threat, both ideological camps had made great advances in this new form of combat. The game went on ...
    The game of killing. As the landing craft surged toward the shore, I thought of my father—my dead father.
    The Chinese were more skilled at virus development, as even the Freeworld Propaganda Bureau reluctantly admitted. Fortunately we led the field in Analysis and Immunization. IBM and Rand had designed the equipment my A&I team used. It was every bit as incredible as the Chinese production capabilities.
    We hoped it wouldn't fail us now.
    What little we knew of the chaos on the Chinese mainland didn't help our spirits any. Dr. Lin Chi's pet secret project had gotten out of hand at Yangchun Laboratories. The staff had perished, even as it fled. Dr. Lin Chi had lived long enough to reach a destruct lever, blasting the labs to rubble. But the disease spread, now claiming victims as far west as Homalin, Burma, and as far east as Shanghai. The Chinese philosophy on A&I had always been: Don't waste money on cures; spend it on weapons. We can afford to lose some people. That was backfiring now.
    In one week, the death toll spiraled toward five million. The Chinese A&I couldn't handle it. On the morning of the twelfth day, eleven million dead, the government fell. On the afternoon of the fifteenth day, the Chief of Staff formally surrendered, then asked for help.
    Open hands. No guns.
    I was the first American to touch foot on conquered China. How to tell what it was like? Not patriotic fervor, certainly. More