Chapter Seven
The visitors Cal discovered in the orderly room turned out to be young Tack, Joby Loyt, and Walk Blye from his old outfit. Joby and Tack were wearing Section’s tabs, and Walk was now in an officer’s gray uniform with the cloth insignia of a Warrant. They had all been drinking and Walk was well on his way to being drunk, although only someone familiar with him would have recognized the fact. The alcohol in him showed only in the fact that he moved a little more swiftly, and there was an added glitter to his eyes which a stranger might have put down to sheer liveliness, but which those who knew him took for a danger signal.
“How about it, Sec?” said Walk to the Wing Section in charge of Cal’s training unit. The same Wing Section who the first day had threatened them all with what Washun was now enduring on Ortman’s order. “Can we take him off for a little?”
Walk, as Warrant, was only about a rank and a half above the Wing Section, an officer in privilege rather than authority. It allowed him to be more familiar with the Wing than a fully commissioned officer might. The Wing reciprocated. He thought for a second.
“He’s not supposed to leave the Wing area,” he answered.“But there’s a gully in those woods across the road there, if you’ll have him back before bed check and in good shape.”
“Word on it,” said Walk. And the four of them left the orderly room and strolled across into the woods.
About fifty yards back, they found the gully behind a screen of yellow poplar. They made themselves comfortable in it. Thin,flat bottles of bourbon appeared; and Cal learned that his old Wing, along with the original Assault Team were moved in over on the other side of the camp for retraining and shakedown.
“Drink up!” said Walk. And Cal drank thirstily, almost angrily. But there was an awkwardness between them that the drink could not bum away; and he could see that Tack and Joby were affected by it as he was. Walk was an enigma. It was impossible to tell how he felt. He sat in the fading twilight of the woods with them, drinking half again as much as anyone else, as they talked about previous Expeditions. He seemed bored.
When he ran out of liquor and went off to get another bottle he had stashed nearby rather than carry into the Wing area, Cal commented on him, a little bitterly.
“You have to talk very hard to get Walk along?” he asked the other two.
“Hey, no,” said Tack. “It was Walk’s idea. I mean, the rest of us never thought they’d let you loose to talk to us. He set up the whole thing.”
Cal shook his head in puzzlement. Walk came back with the other bottle and the light faded swiftly. The sudden-death drinking they were doing straight from the bottle was beginning to take effect on them all. For a moment time faded and it seemed like the old days. Sitting half in shadow in a stony slope of the gully, Walk drank, lowered the bottle, and crooned to himself in a husky voice.
“—I—ain’t—got—no—ma—ma.” His slightly hoarse tenor floated low upon their ears. “No woman, no baby—”
They all joined in automatically. It was the Mourn, the Assault Soldier’s Mourn, and they had sung it on a hundred drunks be-fore. Half buried among the encroaching shadows they keened their total atonal lament:
“—no love.
I ain’t got no no one.
Nothing but—the Damnservice!
Left my home and I wandered.
Never thought I’d end up like this.
Name on a T.O.' listing—
Number in—the Damnservice!
('Table of Organization.)
I get goofed and lonely,
Thinking of those things that I missed.
Nothing but a Goddam Mulebrain,
Mucked up in—the Damnservice!
Gonna get rich2 next Tuesday.
Wednesday, if the first Drops3 miss.
Bury me where they don’t find me,
To plant me in—the Damnservice!
The last of the twilight was almost gone as they finished singing. They had all become to each other indistinct darknesses in the deeper darkness. Cal felt the fog of the alcohol thickening in his brain; and remembered his kit, uncleaned back at the barracks. He got heavily and a little unsteadily to his feet.
“Got to go,” he said, with a slightly unmanageable tongue. “Thanks for everything. See you mules.”
“Yeah.” It was Tack’s voice. “We’ll get together, you get done with this Basic junk. You come looking for us, Sec. So long.”
“So long, Sec,” said Joby’s voice.
“Sure," this was Walk’s voice, coming low and clear and hard out of blackness. “We’ll see you, Gutless Wonder!”
A jarring, icy shock racked suddenly through Cal, checking him as he stood half-turned. He froze, looking back. Above thei rheads the first pale sky of night was showing dimly through the inky branches of the overhanging trees. But down in the gully where they were, all was steeped in black. Far off, a bird twittered sleepily.
For a moment stark silence hung between them. And then,awkwardly, in a forced manner, Tack began to laugh. And a second later, just as artificially, Joby joined in. A moment later Walk was laughing, too. And then Cal.
But the laughter was not quite genuine, for all that. Cal found his fingers shaking as he fumbled out a cigaret. Ignoring its self-striking end, he scrabbled a chemical lighter from his pocket. Holding cigaret and match, he took a step toward where he knew Walk must be. He stuck the cigaret in his mouth and snapped the lighter.
2Combat Soldier’s Death Benefits, paid to the next of kin.
3Glider and Shoulder Jet Assaults—Personnel.
The flame, springing suddenly into existence, caught Walk’s face hanging apparently in midair, his mouth open, his features contorted with laughter. Then the flame winked out.
“Got to go,” said Cal. He turned and stumbled up the wall of the gully and back toward the Wing area. He heard the laughter dwindle and die behind him.
He made his way back into his own barracks building. The lights were already out, except in the squad room where Ortman slept. The door was open, and as he passed Cal saw the Section Leader working on reports at his desk. Ortman raised his head as Cal passed and for a second the two men looked at each other in silence. Then Cal moved on into the dim forest of double-decker bunks in the big room beyond.
Washun’s bunk was empty. In the lower bunk beside it, the tall Cadet with the mustache was reading in the dim light escaping from Ortman’s open doorway. His eyes came up from his book to fasten balefully upon Cal, as Cal passed to his own lower bunk, farther down the row. The kit still hung uncleaned on the end of the bunk. Cal ignored it. He stripped to his Service shorts and T-shirt and crawled drunkenly under the covers. He closed his eyes and Walk’s face, as he had seen it in that moment’s illumination of the lighter, came rushing at him.
He had had to see Walk’s face in that moment. And he had seen what he had expected. The whatever it was in Walk that must always cause him to try to push things just one step further,had been at operation upon him. Walk had known that if he kept it up, one day he must push too far, must say the unforgivable to Cal. But, like an addict, he had been not able to help himself.
They had been as close as men and soldiers get in service.But they were now openly friends no more. They would have to avoid each other as much as possible, or someday they would be trapped into a situation in which they would have to try to kill each other. Walk had done it. He had done it all on his own,brought it about himself—not because he was drunk, but because of that inner devil of his which drove him to always dare the precipice one inch further.
He had done so, knowing what he was doing. But in the sudden flare of the lighter when Cal had looked, above the wild and laughing mouth, under the officer's cap canted drunkenly over the wide, tanned brow, Walk’s darkly glittering eyes had been crazy with loneliness and grief.
Chapter Eight
Three weeks later, Cal graduated from Basic. With Washun and the Contacts Service trainee with the mustache, and some forty ot
hers from other training contingents, they were shipped to Contacts School, back in Denver. At Contacts School, they drew officer’s gray uniforms with Warrant tabs such as Walk had worn when Cal had last seen him, and were addressed as “Mister” by enlisted men and officers alike. The first day of Contacts School found them seated in the half-moon of seats of a steeply sloped classroom-amphitheater, facing, across a low section of floor, a raised lecture platform that would place their instructor standing behind a high desk and about on a level with the middle row of classroom seats.
A door behind the platform opened, and a small man wearing an officer’s uniform with the insignia of a Colonel limped out with some papers in his hand and laid the papers on the desk.
“Ten-SHUN!” yelled someone. The class rose. The Colonel looked out at them, nodded, and went back to his papers. They stood. Apparently he had forgotten to tell them to sit. When his papers were in order he leaned both elbows on the desk and looked out at them. It was then that they became aware that the look on his face was not that of the weary, little, old, retired officer they had imagined him to be.
“I hope,” he said, with a sort of quiet relish, “that none of you considered Basic was tough. Because, you see, we’re really tough here.”
He ran his eye over their ranks.
“Some of you perhaps discovered that the body responds by adapting to the kind of physical training you received in Basic Training,” he said. “It becomes harder and more fit to endure.Our job here is going to be to make harder and more enduring a different part of you than your bodies. During the next ten weeks, we will attempt to do our best, while staying mostly within the letter of the military regulations applying to officer ranks, to break your spirits.” He paused, slowly opened a slot in the desk, took out a glass of water and sipped from it. He put it back and closed the slot. “From past experience I may tell you that we will succeed with nine out of ten of you. And most of those nine will be made up of those who make the initial mistake of believing we aren’t serious about this.”
He paused and looked them over again.
“And of course,” he said, “while this is going on, you will be studying simultaneously the three training courses required to fit a Contacts Officer for his triple duties. These are”—he held up three fingers as he spoke, one after the other—“Wing and Company aidman during initial assaults and landings; interpreter, translator, and prisoner-of-war administrator, during and immediately following the campaign; and Contacts Administrator with the responsibility of making friends with the beings whose relatives we have just killed, and whose homes we have just destroyed, and whose pride we have just humbled.”
He stopped. He beamed at them in satanically gentle fashion.“And if you achieve these things and graduate, you will be put to work doing them in actual practice. And, if you do them responsibly in actual practice, you will find that those of the conquered who do not despise and hate you will distrust you;that the enlisted man in general will resent you as someone who appears to try to curry favor with non-humans by bribing them with what the enlisted man has just bought from them at the heavy price of his own blood; and the officer ranks in general will regard you as a spy system and hindrance upon them.”
He straightened up.
“Under these conditions, it is taken for granted that you will carry on your duties with a high degree of efficiency, ignore all insults and intrigues against you, and while remaining calm,controlled and pleasant at all times, never allow yourself to lose an argument, or close your eyes to a situation that needs your attention. If you do all this successfully—I say, if”—the Colonel paused to beam again at them—“why, we will no doubt find more for you to do the next time.”
He shuffled his papers together and picked them up. They had evidently been some sort of prop, for he had not referred to them once.
“That’s all, then,” he said gently. “That concludes the lecture for this hour. You might all stand there for the rest of the hour and think it over. Those who wish to drop out will find the School Orderly Room open at all hours. For the ten percent of you who will make it through the course”—he stepped back from the desk so that his small figure with the stiff leg stood in view of them all, and raised his handful of papers with a small flourish—“I salute you, Gutless Wonders!”
He turned and went out by the same door, leaving them standing.
It was, Cal discovered, known as hazing. And it had been practiced by many organizations and cultures since time immemorial, and always with the same purpose: to find out if the individual had an inherent resiliency, an ability to take it, which might be required later on. The only difference here was that it was completely nonphysical. But that, Cal began to recognize, was because it took up where Basic had left off. It was, Cal discovered, as the small Colonel with the game leg had said the first day. They were really tough here.
They were tough in all the unfair ways. There was the matter of the ringers.
The second day’s lecture in the classroom-amphitheater (they were allowed to sit, this time) the small Colonel informed them,not without some apparent relish, that there were an unstated number of fake Cadets among them. The function of each of these fake Cadets was to pick out one or more of the true Cadets and try every possible means to make him wash out of the course.
“Their job,” said the Colonel, “will be to muck you up—” He broke off suddenly, cocking his eye like an interested sparrow at a Cadet in the front row. “Does my language bother you?” the Colonel inquired, and he immediately began to swear at the Cadet in a calm, penetrating voice with every air of enjoyment. The rest of the Class, craning to look at the Cadet, saw him stiffen, and go pale, then red-faced. The Colonel ran down after a minute or so.
“Nor a word from him, either,” said the Colonel, turning to the class and beaming. “But then, I didn’t expect it. I’ve just been looking at his personal file. His family, when he was just about seven years old . . .’’ He commenced reciting in a pleasantly gossiping tone, a catalogue of perversions, cruelties and disgraces dealing with the Cadet’s immediate family, whom the Colonel referred to by their first name. “. . . now his older sister Myra—”
Suddenly the Cadet was on his feet and screaming back at the Colonel. The Colonel stopped and leaned his elbow on the desk in front of him and listened interestedly until the Cadet, suddenly breaking off, turned and bolted from the room.
“Well, well,” said the Colonel briskly, “there’s at least one gotten rid of for today.” He made a mark on the papers in front of him. As he did so, his eye caught Cal’s, whose seat was in the front row. “Thin-skinned, wasn’t he?” he said confidentially to Cal.
“Sir?” said Cal, keeping his expression perfectly blank.
“Ah,” said the Colonel, winking at the class. “Here’s one of those stone-wall characters. Pays no attention. Words-can-never-hurt-me type.” He smiled slowly. “Of course he’s had practice ignoring the opinions of others. I’ve been through his files, too, just as I have with the rest of you. This man’s father was once given fifty lashes in his town park for getting some young men of his town in trouble. Isn’t that true?” he said to Cal. And then his voice lashed out suddenly. “Answer yes or no!”
“Sir—” said Cal.
“Answer yes or no!”
A whiteness, like interior lightning, washed Cal’s mind blind for a second. Then a molten inner anger came to sustain him.
“Yes, sir,” he said, with no change of tone.
“You see?” said the Colonel to the class. “He admits it. And you can see it doesn’t bother him much. If I were the rest of you, I’d keep a fairly respectable distance from him. He looks to me as if he might have picked up his father’s—ah—tastes. ”Someone else in the audience seemed to catch the Colonel’s eyes. “You don’t approve of my instruction methods?” he asked someone over Cal’s head. Cal turned to look as a voice answered.
“No, sir.”
It was Washun, Cal saw. Washun was as
pale as Cal had ever seen him when facing Ortman. But the sound of his voice was as determined.
“Please, suggest an alternative,” said the Colonel.
“I haven’t an alternative immediately in mind, sir.” Washun went even paler. “But someday something better should bew orked out.”
“That’s enough,” interrupted the Colonel. “Your objection is what we call an empty protest and has no practical value whatsoever.” He picked up a pencil and poised it over one of his sheets of paper on the desk before him. “I’ll give you one chance, and one chance only, to withdraw it. Do you withdraw it?”
Washun hesitated for a fractionary moment.
“No, sir,” he said with effort. “You asked me, and—”
“That’s enough. Stand up,” said the Colonel. He made a mark on the paper as Washun rose to his feet. “You have the distinction of having gained the first credit point I’ve given out in this class. All of you remember that. You are supposed to speak out and stick by our guns, whether it does any immediate good or not. However, Mr. Washun, since the exercise of virtue in actual existence usually leads not to an immediate reward, but to additional punishment, you will remain standing for the rest of the hour, as an example to yourself as well as others.”
With that he turned his attention away from Washun and began to torture a Cadet in the second row who had a particularly youthful face. By the time the hour was over he had reduced the class roster by two more candidates.
“Not a good day,” he informed the class as they rose to march out. “And not bad. So-so.”
When he reached the next class, Cal discovered someone had stolen his notes from the classes of the day before.
There was the matter of living conditions. The candidates were bunked four to a room, with study facilities, and ate in a central mess hall. The food and beds were apparently good. But things went wrong with them; first one thing, and then another. The bedding they drew from the Supply Room turned cut to be too short for the bunks. The Section Leader in charge of the Supply Room claimed he had no authority to exchange it for bedding of it he proper size. Sometimes a meal would be unaccountably delayed, or badly served. Solid foods were undercooked, liquid ones, which should have been hot, were ice cold.
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