The Long Watch
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"The Long Watch" is a science fiction short story by Robert A. Heinlein. It appears in Heinlein's short story collections, The Green Hills of Earth and The Past Through Tomorrow. In some views it is not part of his Future History, but rather shares continuity with Space Cadet and several other works. (Actually, though "Space Cadet" is chronologically set some eighty years after "The Long Watch", it was published a year earlier, and the story seems to have grown out of a short remark in the book.)
Originally written for the American Legion and published under the name "Rebellion on the Moon", [1] the patriotic tale features Johnny Dahlquist, a man who faces a coup by a would-be dictator bent on nuclear blackmail.
All nuclear weapons are placed on the Moon in the hands of the Patrol, a group of carefully-selected peacekeepers. The precise political set-up, especially the composition of the political echelon to which the Patrol is accountable, is kept rather vague; in Space Cadet it is mentioned that the Patrol was made of "officers sent by each of the nations then in the Western Federation", a federation obviously dominated by the US. However, a power-hungry cabal of renegades attempts to hold the world hostage with the bombs.
It should be noted that as early as his 1940 story "Solution Unsatisfactory", Heinlein conceived the coming of nuclear weapons and realised the far-reaching political and strategic implication of their creation. In the same story he also came to the conclusion that the only way to avoid a nuclear arms race and the danger of a devastating nuclear war would be to form an International Patrol and entrust it with a monopoly of these weapons — but that this would open the possibility of the Patrol itself seizing world-wide power.
In fact, at the end of the earlier story the main protagonist makes himself the dictator of the world by threatening to obliterate Washington D.C. — and ironically, the story is told from his point of view and his act is presented as unpalatable and "unsatisfactory" but still the lesser evil compared with letting the political echelon (i.e. the President of the United States) go on with irresponsible policies which might lead to a disastrous war.
None of this condoning of a coup was transferred to the present story, where the only motive assigned to the conspirators is a simple hunger for power.
This story, appropriately because of Heinlein's lifelong sense of military honour and duty, was one of only two Heinlein stories published in New Destinies, Vol. VI / Winter 1988 — "Robert A. Heinlein Memorial Issue, edited by Jim Baen.
[edit] Plot summary and discussion
In a 1996 which at the time of writing was nearly half a century in the future and would now count as a kind of alternative history, the 27-year old John Ezra Dahlquist is the junior bomb officer at the base on the Moon from which death and destruction could be shot to any point on Earth below. (He calls himself "Johnny" and so does everybody else around him, and uses the "Ezra" only on the most formal of occasions; but as is disclosed in Space Cadet, posterity would remember him as " Ezra Dahlquist", the solemn enshrined self-sacrificing hero and martyr).
Johnny Dahlquist got a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics, which was followed by a commission in the Space Patrol and a posting to a quite responsible position on the Moon. He is also a married man and the father of a baby girl. For all that, when the story begins there is something very boyish and immature about him, and the story is essentially about the way he makes up for lost time and grows up in a very big hurry.
Dahlquist likes his job as Bomb Officer and feels rather proprietary about "his" bombs, delicate and elaborate pieces of precision engineering - without truly acknowledging that every one of these bombs is a potent engine of death designed to kill human beings in their hundreds of thousands or millions.
He stays out of the intensive political debates going on in the junior officers' mess, which are secretly monitored and recorded by the conspirators in order to compile lists of "reliables" and "unreliables". He accepts "as an abstract idea" the proposition that "it is not safe to leave control of the world in political hands" since the politicians might start a destructive new war, and that it would be better to have power held "by a scientifically selected group, i.e. the Patrol". But he does not think this through, either, and is highly surprised at finding that anybody would actually and concretely start preparing a military coup.
Also (up to the cataclysmic encounter which begins the story) Dahlquist admires Colonel Towers, the Executive Officer, "for his brilliance, his ability to dominate, and for his battle record" — apparently without going too deeply into how the colonel acquired that battle record, against whom he fought and why. Dahlquist himself has no battle record, and nothing but the most abstract knowledge about what is truly involved in deliberately aiming to kill other human beings. (Later generations of young patrolmen would be indoctrinated to admire Dahlquist himself and seek to emulate him — but he would not live to see it happen).
For his part, Towers is well aware of Dahlqist's admiration, and confident of his ability to manipulate the naive young officer and get his services for the unfolding coup — confident enough not to bother coating the pill. Rather, Towers bluntly tells Dahlqist that the conspirators intend to use the bombs at their disposal for "a psychological demonstration on an unimportant town or two, a little blood-letting to prevent an all-out war", and that as Bomb Officer he is expected to actually prepare the bombs for launch. When Dahlqist shows his shock, the colonel rather coarsely says "You can't be squeamish, or you would not be a Bomb Officer" — which has the diametrically opposite effect to what Towers intended. A casual mention of Dahlqist's family also rubs the young officer very much the wrong way.
Having been thus rudely and abruptly introduced to the Facts of Life and forced to take a side, Dahlqist chooses to stage a one-man rebellion, to which he commits himself completely and unreservedly — his admiration for the Towers father-figure having been transformed in a single instant into a blazing and total hatred. He does not think much about abstract principles, such as "Democracy" or "Country" or "The World". His main conscious motivations seem to be to preserve his wife and daughter from the clutches of the would-be dictator Towers, and also to preserve "his" bombs from being abused by the same to kill innocent people.
At least on the conscious level, Dahlqist does not acknowledge that he had embarked on a course likely to lead to his own imminent death. The story follows Dahlqist as he goes step by step closer to the ultimate conclusion of giving up his life — a decision which is never explicitly acknowledged (to himself or to the reader) until the die is irrevocably cast.
First, he gets out on the Lunar surface and into the guarded bomb storage room, using much deception and a moderate amount of physical violence. (The story notes how other bombs, on orbiting ships, were disabled; hence, control of these bombs is all that matters). Then he barricades himself in this unhealthy and radiation-filled bunker and proceeds via radio to alternately negotiate with Towers and the other conspirators, cheat and deceive them by pretending to be still as naive as he was a few days before, and threaten to blow up himself, the bombs and anybody who happens to be nearby. In this way, he slows down the coup's momentum and gives the authorities on Earth time to start counter-measures (which Dahlqist correctly assumes must be going on, but has no way of actually knowing).
However, when growing tired and realizing he could not keep awake much longer and that if he falls asleep the conspirators may regain control, Dahlqist comes to the conclusion that he must disable the bombs beyond Towers' ability to put them back together, and that the only way to achieve that would be to open them up and smash the smooth half-globes of plutonium at the core of each bomb.
A Bomb Officer and the holder of a Doctorate in Nuclear Physics should have known that in doing that fifty times with fifty bombs he would expose himself to a more than fatal dose of radioactivity. Dahlqist probably did know it, but as described by Heinlein he hides from himself the knowledge that he is committing suicide until the deed is done and the Geiger counter starts screaming when he comes near. Thereafter, Dahlqist has nothing more to do but wait for death, his continued defiance of the by-now desperate conspirators receding to the background.
Here, Heinlein cheats a bit. As noted in the Wikipedia article on Radiation poisoning, "cases of acute radiation poisoning [entail] 100% fatality after 7 days (LD 100/7). An exposure this high leads to spontaneous symptoms after 5 to 30 minutes. After powerful fatigue and immediate nausea caused by direct activation of chemical receptors in the brain by the irradiation, there is a period of several days of comparative well-being, called the latent (or 'walking ghost') phase. After that, cell death in the gastric and intestinal tissue, causing massive diarrhea, intestinal bleeding and loss of water, leads to water-electrolyte imbalance. Death sets in with delirium and coma due to breakdown of circulation. Death is currently inevitable; the only treatment that can be offered is pain therapy."
In Heinlein's depiction, Dahlquist (and the reader) is spared the unromantic initial nausea and final diarrhea, and goes to his death purely through the well-being of a "walking ghost": "He accepted, without surprise, the fact that he was not unhappy. There was a sweetness about having no further worries of any sort. He did not hurt, he was not uncomfortable, he was not even hungry." The dying Dahlqist is surrounded by the shades of past heroes (most of them American) of whom he is not aware, but is somehow able to see his wife Edith and know that she was not angry with him for thus abandoning her and their daughter, but was rather "proud but unhappy". In his last moments he busies himself rolling and smoking cigarettes from butts and the butts of butts, and he dies "very happy."
The coup collapses and Towers shoots himself. Dahlquist's thoroughly radioactive body is gingerly recovered by handling equipment and placed in a lead coffin. His apotheosis begins then and there, with the robot ship bearing his radioactive coffin to Earth carrying the insignia of an admiral and being afterwards "thrown away into space, never to be used for a lesser purpose", and the entire world going into mourning for him with all commercial broadcasts stopped and nothing but dirges broadcast on all channels for a whole week. (Heinlein does not mention how well Edith Dahlquist adjusted to having a lifelong career as the Hero's Widow suddenly thrust upon her, and to never again having a private life.)
The last Heinlein's readers hear of Dahlquist is in Space Cadet, which takes place some eighty years later. "Ezra Dahlquist" is still very much a mystical hero, one of "Those who helped create the Tradition of the Patrol". A presentation on his deed, "the day shameful and glorious in the history of the Patrol", is recounted to new recruits, accompanied by the Valhalla theme from Wagner's Götterdämmerung. At each roll-call of the Patrol anywhere, his name is symbolically called together with those of three other heroes, equally self-sacrificing. However, from the fact that Patrol recruits find the story new one can deduce that in the general public outside the ranks of the Patrol, his name had become mostly forgotten during these eight decades.
[edit] Patriotic officer or conscientious objector?
The whole world mourns Dahlquist — but it is very much an American-dominated world, in which the power of the United States is not seriously challenged by the Soviet Union or anybody else. (In that, if not in the details, Heinlein correctly predicted the world of 1996.)
Dahlqist is primarily an American hero, and was clearly intended to be depicted as such. His leaden coffin lands at Chicago Port and is taken to the Illinois town where he was born and where a honor guard of space marines surrounds it "while the dirge continues", and where it is later encased in marble. The shades of previous self-sacrificing heroes who are present unseen at Dahlqist's dying scene and accept him into their august company are mostly American heroes, representing various phases of American history: Colonel Jim Bowie from the Alamo, Captain James Lawrence of the USS Chesapeake from the War of 1812, and Rodger Young — a Second World War hero whose memory Heinlein took up and did much to promote, especially through the later book Starship Troopers (and the film made of that book).
The fourth hero present is "the boy with his finger in the dike" — a fictional Dutch character who seems much better known in America than in Holland itself (see [2]), which is not surprising since he originated in a book written by an American writer, Mary Mapes Dodge's Hans Brinker. The name of Heinlein's story, and possibly some inspiration for its central story line, appear to be drawn from Dodge's story: "How can we know the sufferings of that long and fearful watch — what falterings of purpose, what childish terrors came over the boy as he thought of the warm little bed at home, of his parents, his brothers and sisters, then looked into the cold, dreary night! If he drew away that tiny finger, the angry waters, grown angrier still, would rush forth, and never stop until they had swept over the town" (see [3]).
The American Legion, an organization which never hid its political sympathies and throughout the decades ranged itself behind various conservative causes, commissioned Henlein's story and duly published it in their magazine as the patriotic tale of a self-sacrificing American military officer. (However, the story reportedly had to be "heavily edited" before the Legion accepted it for publication — see [4].) .
The fact is that, despite the aforementioned patriotic passages, the story could be read in a quite different way. Dahlquist, after all, is a very thorough rebel against the discipline of the military organization of which he is part. Within just two or three days he manages to commit the following: Falsification of military documents and orders, with the deliberate intention of deceiving fellow Patrolmen and gaining entry to a highly-sensitive installation which he was not authorized to enter; physically assaulting a fellow Patrolman; repeatedly disobeying a direct order from his superior officer; addressing said superior officer in foul and insulting language, in response to orders; threatening to kill the same superior officer and sundry others and to blow up a key military installation; deliberately destroying vital weapons systems, with the monetary loss conservatively estimated at tens of millions of dollars, and with the conscious and deliberate intention of foiling a crucial military operation which his superiors determined was vitally necessary....
To be sure, all of the above is done in reaction to Dahlquist's superiors being engaged in plotting a military coup. He believes that duly-constituted authority would back up his actions, and is indeed vindicated by posterity. However, Dahlquist possessed no authorization whatsoever from any higher authority, doing all the above completely at his own initiative and on his own responsibility. Moreover, from his character as depicted it is reasonable to assume that he would have likely persisted in his rebellion to the best of his ability, even had Towers succeeded in his ambition to make himself Chief of the World Government and ousted all other higher authority — in which case Dahlquist would have been remembered (at least in the official record) as a despicable traitor.
Seen in that light, Dahlquist can be considered a Conscientious Objector or a rebel against military discipline, a character to inspire actual rebels and objectors. Moreover, his specific act of destroying nuclear weapons to prevent them from being used might appeal to radical anti-nuclear activists, such as the "Plowshares Movement" whose members were imprisoned for entering installations and damaging nuclear arms-related articles. The well-recorded case of the Adam Keller Court Martial offers concrete proof that Heinlein's story did inspire people on the diametrically opposite side of the political spectrum from the American Legion, for whom it was originally written. (Keller, an Israeli reserve soldier turned peace activist, had in 1988 written graffiti on 117 tanks and military vehicles, exhorting fellow soldiers to refuse service in the Occupied Territories; at his court-martial he claimed to have been inspired by "Dahlquist smashing the atom bombs" and recounted the story's plot to the presiding judge.)
The contradictory political message may be considered to be inherent in the character of Heinlein himself: a former naval officer who looked back with wistful affection and some longing at the military life, an outspoken anti-Communist and Cold Warrior — but also a staunch individualist, Libertarian and instinctive opponent of Authority. Later on, this duality was to lead Heinlein to writing within a short time of each other two books, of which one — Starship Troopers — was condemned as "militaristic" and even "fascist" while the other — Stranger in a Strange Land — was to be warmly embraced by and profoundly impact the anti-war "Counterculture" of the 1960s.
