“Alliance Ecological Interplanetary Observation Union?” Phule stared at the three inspectors, a puzzled look on his face. “But we shouldn’t be under their jurisdiction. This planet has its own sovereign government …”
“That may be so, Captain,” said Snieff. “But we certainly aren’t about to take your word for it. All the preliminary reports indicate that we might just be in time to prevent an environmental disaster. And nothing I’ve seen so far suggests anything to the contrary. Beginning with your driving a vehicle out to our landing site. Are you Legionnaires so lazy you can’t use your own feet? Have you forgotten how to march?”
“Wh-what?” sputtered Phule. “I don’t understand …”
“Sir, I think we’d best get out of the inspectors’ way and let them do their work,” said Beeker. “And next time you receive an environmental impact questionnaire, I suggest you give it to someone other than Tusk-anini to fill out.”
Phule nodded, understanding at last. “In that case, I think we’d best head back to camp. Inspector Snieff …”
“Chief Inspector Snieff, thank you,” said the woman.
“Yes, of course, Chief Inspector,” said Phule. “If there’s anything you need from my people, please let me know. We’ll be happy to cooperate.”
“I certainly hope so,” said Chief Inspector Snieff. “The law provides very hefty penalties for obstruction of an environmental inspection.”
“We don’t have anything to hide,” said Phule. “You’ll see when you arrive at our guest quarters …”
“Oh, no,” said Snieff. “Regulations prohibit us from accepting accommodations with a suspected violator. We’ll be setting up our own camp, Captain. I think you’ll find it an instructive example of a minimal-impact inhabitation. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to finish unloading.”
“Of course,” said Phule.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” came Gears’s voice. “If you’ll just call off your dog …” Snieff ignored him as she plastered a bright orange sticker to the door of the hoverjeep. It said in block letters, “IMPOUNDED FOR POLLUTION.”
“Woof!” said Barky, the Environmental Dog. “Woof woof, woof woof woof!”
* * *
Legion boot camp was like nothing Thumper (as Zigger now called himself) had ever seen before. For one thing, the population was predominantly made up of humans—although there were enough members of other species to keep him from feeling completely outnumbered. He was the only Lepoid on the base, though—at least, the only one he’d seen in his bewilderingly rapid trip through the initial processing area.
That had been an experience he’d just as soon forget. Luckily, it had gone quickly enough that it seemed to be over almost before it started. But not before he’d been poked and prodded by doctors, and the autodoc had jabbed his arm with at least a dozen inoculations for diseases the Legion thought his race might be susceptible to on distant planets. (The doctors had spent a good half hour looking him up on the base’s medical expert system before deciding which inoculations he was likely to need and which were likely to be more danger than help. He’d still been woozy most of the next day—maybe a reaction to the shots, maybe something else.)
All the humans were given ultrashort regulation haircuts. Being of a short-furred species, Thumper was spared that indignity, at least. But he was issued a black Legion jumpsuit at least three sizes too large, and combat boots that no imaginable breaking-in would ever make comfortable for his elongated feet. He was all ready to protest this treatment, but he realized that none of the other new recruits’ uniforms were the right size, either. Half an hour of searching and trading found him a jumpsuit that fit him better, and his was the almost right size for another recruit—a lanky, bespectacled human who had adopted the Legion name “Spider.” Nobody in the outfit had a pair of boots that fit Thumper. Since appearing without boots was defined as being out of uniform, a serious offense against Legion discipline, that was going to be a problem.
But Thumper had plenty of other problems to distract him from the boots. Prime among these was his drill instructor, Sergeant Pitbull, who seemed to be of primarily human origin, although there were whispers that he was at least part something else. Exactly what that something else might be, none of the recruits was willing to say—at least not where the sergeant might hear it, which was apparently everywhere in the barracks. At least, the sergeant had an uncanny ability to storm into a room immediately after one of the recruits had said something mildly critical of Legion discipline and to chew out the offender in terms none of them had dreamed of before they had joined the Legion.
It was on their third night of training that Thumper and his new comrades simultaneously realized that the Legion recruiters had actually told them the truth about one thing: Legion boot camp wasn’t going to be easy. “By St. Elrod and all powers, I never knew there were so many places I could hurt,” said Sharky, lying flat on his bunk, just after lights out.
“That ain’t nothing,” said Spider. “I never knew there were so many different wrong ways to wear a uniform. Seems like I jes’ can’t do it right, nohow.”
Thumper nodded. Even having found a uniform that fit properly, he was still having trouble getting it to look right—or so the sergeants seemed to think. “I guess they want us to pay attention to all the details,” he said; “When you’re in a hostile environment, one little detail could make the difference …”
“Oh, bull,” said Spider. “Tell me what difference it gonna make how I fasten my sleeve button!”
“That’s not what I mean,” said Thumper. “The point is, they want to train us so we don’t overlook anything. Then, when you’re in a combat situation, you’re less likely to overlook something that could kill you …”
“Ain’t nobody ever been killed by a sleeve button that I heard of,” insisted Spider.
Thumper was about to try his explanation again when somebody hissed “Pitbull!” and the entire bunkroom fell silent in fear of the sergeant’s wrath. For once the sergeant didn’t materialize; but by the time the recruits realized it was a false alarm, half of them were asleep, and nobody else seemed inclined to take up the thread.
The one part of Legion life that Thumper found congenial was the healthy dose of physical activity: drill, exercise, hard labor, and more drill. Perhaps this was because he had come to the Legion not as a last chance to escape from an intolerable existence back home, but as an actual lifelong goal. Running, marching, and doing endless calisthenics shouldn’t bother someone who had kept himself in good physical condition, he kept telling his buddies. Most of the time, they were too exhausted to answer him. But the looks they shot in his direction were eloquent, had he only been able to read them.
At last, even his friend Sharky, whom he’d met on the space liner that brought them to Legion boot camp, warned him that he was getting “too gung ho.” They’d ended up in the same recruit platoon by the simple expedient of showing up at the processing center at the same time.
“What’s wrong with being gung ho?” asked Thumper.
“You’re making the other guys look bad,” said Sharky. “We’re all in this together, you know. It ain’t good if you show up your buddies.”
“I’m not trying to show anybody up,” Thumper protested. “I’ve always wanted to be a legionnaire. Now that I am one, why shouldn’t I try to be a good one?”
“’Cause you make things harder for the rest of us,” Sharky explained. “If most of us want to punk out after a hundred push-ups and you keep on going, the sarge is going to get on our asses to keep up with you.”
“Gee, I never thought of that,” said Thumper. “But don’t you want to be all that you can be? If you do more pushups, you’ll get stronger. That could be important when the crunch comes …”
“Crunch? What crunch?” Sharky scoffed. “The Alliance hasn’t been in a real war since my grandpa was a kid.”
“No, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen …”
“Against who?
” Sharky demanded. “Every time we meet a new race, they want to join up with us on account of the trade advantages. Like those lizards out on Zenobia.”
Thumper shook his head. “There was a civil war on Landoor …”
“Sure, and that wasn’t much more than a food fight, from what I hear tell,” said Sharky. “Nobody except the locals got hurt. All the Legion did was go in to mop up, and they spent more time lying on the beach than anything else. So why make things any tougher than you have to?”
“You can’t assume just because things have been easy lately that it’s always going to be like that,” insisted Thumper.
“Hey, I’m just trying to give you a clue,” said Sharky. “If you play along with the other guys, everybody’s happy. Make too many waves, nobody’s gonna be happy—and they’re gonna know whose fault it is.”
“All right, I understand you,” said Thumper, with a nod and a smile. He didn’t say what he was thinking. He didn’t have to. His actions would do the talking for him, when the time came.
* * *
“The slots, huh?” Tullie Bascomb shook his head in disbelief at what the security monitors were showing. “Most of the guys who think they can beat the house by playing some kind of homemade system go for blackjack,” he said. “Or poker, if they think they can win steady enough to cover the house percentage.”
Doc grinned. “That’s for sure. Only suckers play the quantum slots—they’re the worst bet in the joint. You showed us that, back when the captain first brought us to Lorelei.”
“Yeah,” said Bascomb. “I guess the captain didn’t tell his old man that, though. Look at him pumping the tokens into those machines!”
“Yeah, I saw him pretty near knock down two white-haired little old ladies who tried to horn in on a machine he’d been priming,” said Doc. “He’s got the fever, all right.”
“Well, he’s a grown man,” said Bascomb. “And I guess he can afford to lose a few bucks. Hell, I doubt we could put a serious dent in his bankroll if we set up a row of thousand-dollar-a-pull machines. That doesn’t mean I’m not tempted, though …”
“Nah, what’s the point? At that price, nobody but Victor Phule could ever afford to play ’em,” said Doc. “And what would the payouts have to be …?”
“High enough to make a billionaire’s palms sweaty,” said Bascomb. “Right now, I think he’s just playing on principle—he thinks the payouts are too generous, and he’s trying to prove the point. To really get him hooked, we’d need to offer something big—even a million bucks is probably small potatoes, when you’re talking about someone who’s used to supplying armaments to entire planets.”
Doc rubbed his chin and leaned forward to point at Victor Phule’s image on the security monitor. “What if we did set up a bank of machines for nobody but Pop Phule to play? Offer him a jackpot that’ll make even his mouth water—title to the whole darn casino, for example—but at impossibly long odds. Once he’s thrown enough tokens down the slot, then he’ll have to admit that we aren’t giving away money.”
“You’ve got an evil mind,” said Bascomb, chuckling. “Only one problem I can see with it. We don’t own the casino—Omega Company does, and we can’t offer a prize we aren’t able to deliver if somebody does win it. Not even on Lorelei, where the house rules and the laws of the land are pretty damn close to one and the same.”
“So we make the odds so impossible that he can’t possibly win, is all,” Doc insisted. “Let’s say he’s got to get five simultaneous jackpots on five different machines … or some other combination that only comes up once in a trillion times.”
Bascomb shook his head. “It’s tempting, you know, Doc? But we can’t do anything as screwy as that without getting the captain to sign off on it. I don’t care if we would be setting those crooked slots to teach his father a lesson—bad business is bad business, even when you keep it in the family.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Doc. “In fact, has anybody gotten in touch with Captain Jester? He’d want us to tell him that his father’s here, I’m pretty sure of that.”
“I got his OK before showing the old man the books,” said Bascomb, snapping his fingers. “But this is a new wrinkle, and I’m not sure whether he’d go along with it. Guess the only thing to do is get him on the horn and ask.”
“Right,” said Doc. He pressed one of the studs on his wrist chronometer and nodded. “It’s midafternoon at Zenobia Base, so he’s likely to be in reach of a vidphone. Do you want to call him, or shall I? Or shall we just send a priority message and let him get back to us?”
“Seeing that it’s during his business hours, I think we better tell him this in person,” said Bascomb. “And since I’m in charge of the gambling end of the business, I guess I ought to be the one to make the call. You want to talk to him, too? He might have a few questions you can answer as well as I can.”
“Sure, why not?” said Doc. He waved a hand in the direction of the monitor. “One good thing—our main problem’s not going anywhere. Except maybe to the cashier’s window for another batch of tokens.”
“Let’s hope he makes that particular trip a lot of times,” said Bascomb, with a thin smile. He gestured toward a door, and the two men went to the office to place a call to Captain Jester.
* * *
“YOU FARKING SLUGS DISGUST ME!” roared a voice that seemed far too loud for an ordinary human’s vocal apparatus. Thumper jerked his eyes open, awaking from the utterly exhausted sleep he’d been in a fraction of a second before. He automatically checked the time: Five in the morning. The drill instructor, Sergeant Pitbull, was right on time, fully dressed and ready to eat raw recruits for breakfast. Thumper had last seen him only six hours before, when he’d put the squad of new legionnaires to bed with threats and curses.
Thumper still hadn’t figured out how the drill instructor managed to stay alert and fit on what must be even less rest than the recruits were getting, but he’d come to take it for granted. Every task he demanded of the recruits—including some that at first had seemed impossible—Sergeant Pitbull could perform better than any of them, despite being at least ten years older. Even Thumper, who had already learned that he was in better physical condition than almost all his fellow recruits, couldn’t beat the sergeant in any direct competition—especially in hand-to-hand combat, where the sergeant seemed to have a bottomless repertory of dirty tricks. Even in an outright sprint, where Thumper was sure he had the advantage, Sergeant Pitbull had somehow managed to make him trip and fall before he got three steps from the start.
Worst of all, it seemed as if the sergeant was always angry. One night, after lights out, the whispered conversation in the bunkhouse got to the subject of whether anyone could remember hearing a friendly remark pass Pitbull’s lips. The closest anyone could come was, “THAT’S RIGHT, WAY TO STOMP HIS WORTHLESS CIVVY ASS!” when a hulking recruit named Crunch put Spider in the infirmary with a dislocated shoulder during judo practice. And while Crunch was probably right that the sergeant meant it as a compliment on his judo technique, most of the other recruits agreed with Spider’s heated protestation that congratulating one of the recruits for injuring another wasn’t his idea of a “friendly word.”
Then Sergeant Pitbull slammed the door open and bellowed, “SHUT UP, YOU STINKING BUGS!” (He seemed never to have learned to speak softly.) In the utter silence that followed this remark, he continued, “WHEN I TURN THE LIGHTS OUT, YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO FARKING SLEEP, NOT YAMMER LIKE A BUNCH OF SCHOOLGIRLS! THERE’LL BE PUNISHMENT DETAIL FOR THE WHOLE FARKING SQUAD!” After that, even Crunch conceded the point. Pitbull had been as good as his word—next morning, there were a hundred extra push-ups for everyone.
But this was another morning, which meant another chance for Pitbull to deal out arbitrary punishment. Thumper and all his buddies scrambled out of their bunks and came to attention. There was just a glimmer of a chance that today they might manage to avoid extra pushups or some other equally unpleasant task. Not much of a
chance, but Thumper had gotten in the habit of grasping at even minuscule chances. Along the way, he’d gotten much better at push-ups than he’d ever imagined being. It wasn’t what he’d seen himself doing when he’d dreamed of joining the Legion, but if his experience so far was any indication, push-ups were a significant component of Legion life.
“LISTEN UP, YOU FILTHY SKIME-EATERS,” roared Sergeant Pitbull. Thumper wasn’t sure what a skime was, but after hearing the sergeant, he knew he didn’t want to eat one. Or maybe it was a filthy one he didn’t want to eat … He had only a brief moment to meditate on that question, as the sergeant continued with his high-volume harangue. “TODAY WE’RE GOING OUT TO THE OBSTACLE COURSE,” the sergeant boomed. “THAT’S WHERE WE SEPARATE THE REAL LEGIONNAIRES FROM THE FARKING WEAK-SIBLING CIVVIES. DO YOU BUGS WANT TO BE REAL LEGIONNAIRES?”
“YES, SERGEANT PITBULL!” the squad shouted in chorus. They’d long since learned that any less enthusiastic response would be greeted with scorn. Privately, Thumper wondered whether Sergeant Pitbull might have stood too close to an explosion at some point in his earlier career, damaging his ears in the process. If he were partly deaf, that would explain a lot … but no, the autodocs could fix that …
“FOLLOW ME, YOU BUGS!” said the sergeant, and he set off at a flat-out run—the only speed at which a Legion recruit was allowed to move. Luckily for Thumper, he could outrun everyone in the squad without particularly trying. It was one of the minor advantages of being a Lepoid. He hadn’t found very many of them here in the Legion, so he had acquired a finer appreciation for the ones he’d found. Running easily, he stayed just behind the sergeant until the squad arrived—many of them huffing and puffing despite several weeks of rigorous exercise—at the obstacle course.
The Complete Phule’s Company Boxed Set Page 117
