The War Is Over (© Biswapriya Purkayastha)
Page 3 "I heard the enemy is
putting out peace feelers," BP said. "Are they?" the Director
said, and it was impossible from his voice to understand whether it was a
question at all. On the way to his
laboratory – now the new department, of which he was the chief – BP met D. She
was pushing along some kind of white plastic contraption on wheels, that
resembled a vacuum cleaner. "Congratulations," she said. He frowned. "You’ve
heard?" Her cool, lovely face
broke into an ironic smile. "It’s been all over the place since yesterday," she
said. "Everyone knows. I take it you’ve just been told – the last to know,
huh?" He made a short, clumsy
bow. "As you say, the last to know." D was very beautiful and very remote, and
BP always felt clumsy around her. "How’s your research going?" "Oh, you know, the same
as usual." D was a bluecoat, and had ambitions to move up to green. She had the
drive, the single-minded determination. As far as BP knew, she had no life
outside her work. "It’s nothing as glamorous as yours, of course." With a smile
and a twiddle of her fingers in the air, she walked up the passage, leaving BP
to his thoughts.
The war was over. BP heard of it as he was
on the way down to his quarters. A small knot of bluecoats and whitecoats were
clustered around a little television set in the middle of the corridor.
Normally they’d have made way for a greencoat like a school of sardines parting
before a shark, but they were so intent on the screen that they didn’t even
notice his presence, so he had to stop as well. The air of barely suppressed
excitement was so great that he knew what it would be before he even saw the
screen. The war was over. The
war, which had been going on so long, was over. They’d won. BP stared at the
announcer, at the scenes of flag-waving crowds, watching his own name scroll
past over and over at the bottom of the screen, hardly noticing what it was
saying. Finally he felt the respectful tugging at his sleeve. It was the very pale
whitecoat of the other day, and she was much more deferential now. "The
Director would like to see you, Doctor." The Director was smiling
so broadly that his plump face seemed to split almost in two. He even got up
from behind his desk to greet BP. "Well, well," he said,
"the hero of the hour." "Hero?" BP frowned. "I
don’t understand." "You don’t?" The Director
shook his head genially. "You scientists, you really live in your own world,
don’t you? It’s your invention, my dear man...it’s your invention that won the
war!" "My invention?" BP had
half-risen from his chair. "But it’s not even perfected, or refined in any
way. You know that. You’ve got all my data daily, as you
wanted. We can’t target anything smaller than a big city." "That’s right," the
Director said levelly. "And that’s exactly what we did. Targeted the enemy’s
cities, all at once." BP’s mouth opened,
closed, and opened again. When he spoke, his voice came as a whisper. "You know
what the disruptor does?" "Of course I do." The Director
looked faintly uneasy. "It increases, as you said, molecular energy levels, so
that they give off excess energy as heat and..." "In a closed system," BP
snapped. "In a closed system, like a human body. Those people cooked alive
inside their skins!" The Director shrugged.
"It won the war, didn’t it?" He turned his computer screen towards BP. It
showed the same scenes of massed flag waving celebrations. "See for yourself." BP barely glanced at the
screen. "They were almost finished anyway," he said. "They were suing for
peace, have been for months! Why did this have to be used at all?" "The government made a
decision," the Director said. "They decided to get this over once and for all.
And do you realise..." "What?" [ Continue to page 4 ] |