'"Marius" is a science fiction short story by American writer Poul Anderson, first published in the March 1957 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and reprinted in the collections The Horn of Time (1968) and The Psychotechnic League (1981). As a component of the Psychotechnic League future history / alternate history, "Marius" takes place in 1964, six years after the initial nuclear exchanges of World War III. Although it is chronologically the first story in the Psychotechnic League sequence, "Marius" was one of the last to be written. It serves as a prequel to the earlier novella "Un-Man", introducing the character of Étienne Fourre.
Plot summary
In 1964, General Étienne Fourre, once a village apothecary, is the leader of the French Maquisard Brotherhood and serves as France's representative in the Supreme Council of United Free Europe. He is on his way to confront his friend Commandant Jacques Reinach, the chairman of the Supreme Council. Fourre has studied psychodynamics, a mathematical technique for predicting future trends, and he believes that Reinach is leading Europe down a dead-end path. Reinach is sending a tiny delegation to Rio de Janeiro to represent Europe at the relaunch of the United Nations, refuses to establish a parliamentary government, and intends to recognize a neo-fascist dictator as ruler of Macedonia.
Fourre confronts Reinach in his office on the campus of the University of Strasbourg - now used as a makeshift government center - and presents him with an ultimatum: a majority of the Supreme Council have ordered Reinach to step down as chairman. When Reinach refuses, Fourre compares him to the Roman general Gaius Marius, who showed a unique talent as a general and rescued Rome from the barbarian Cimbri, but then proved incompetent in civil politics, inadvertently setting off a civil war that ultimately led to the fall of the Roman Republic. Fourre keeps Reinach distracted with small talk while his men infiltrate the university and stage a coup. As Reinach is about to shoot Fourre, Stefan Rostomily bursts in through his office window and unintentionally kills Reinach.
Tragic Conflict
A tragic conflict - a common theme in many Anderson stories - is at the center of this one. Fourre and Reinach are long-time personal friends and comrades-in-arms, who had been through an enormous lot together; even minutes before Reinach's death, they swap anecdotes and reminisces about their carefree younger life in pre-World War III Paris. Throughout, Fourre hopes against hope that Reinach would give in and that it would be possible to call off the armed confrontation; and at the end, he is consumed with remorse and guilt at having caused his old friend's death. So is the young Rostomily, who had admired Reinach and shot instinctively without realizing whom he was killing.
Despite all the above, Fourre had become convinced by Professor Valti, the Finnish inventor of psychodynamics, that Reinach's "rule of thumb" politics, which were enough to conduct the war and free Europe from Soviet occupation, are woefully inadequate to define the course of the post-war world, and that Reinach's mistakes - taken from the best of intentions - could lead the world to a course ending in another nuclear war, fifty years hence, which humanity might not survive. Such considerations are grave enough to override Fourre's personal friendship with Reinach and lead him to the eventually fatal confrontation.
The story thus has no villains, other than the off-stage sinister figure of the "clever and ruthless" Macedonian dictator Pappas. In effect, the struggle between Reinach and Fourre is a struggle by proxy between Pappas - representing the forces of disruption, political extremism, militarism and tyranny which brought about the recent World War III and might bring another one - and Professor Valti, representing world unification in a regime of liberal democracy subtly "guided" by an elite of scientists. Fourre's victory over Reinach (and over Pappas, whom he would overthrow in the immediate aftermath) ensures that the latter would dominate the world for the next several centuries.