I stood in front of the junkyard’s outer gate and felt my stomach turn over slowly, grindingly, the way it had when I saw a whole terrestrial subfleet—close to 20,000 men—blown to bits in the Second Battle of Saturn more than eleven years ago. But then there had been shattered fragments of ships in my visiplate and imagined screams of men in my mind; there had been the expanding images of the Eoti’s box-like craft surging through the awful, drifting wreckage they had created, to account for the icy sweat that wound itself like a flat serpent around my forehead and my neck.
Now there was nothing but a large, plain building, very much like the hundreds of other factories in the busy suburbs of Old Chicago, a manufacturing establishment surrounded by a locked gate and spacious proving grounds—the Junkyard. Yet the sweat on my skin was colder and the heave of my bowels more spastic than it had ever been in any of those countless, ruinous battles that had created this place.
All of which was very understandable, I told myself. What I was feeling was the great-grandmother hag of all fears, the most basic rejection and reluctance of which my flesh was capable. It was understandable, but that didn’t help any. I still couldn’t walk up to the sentry at the gate.
I’d been almost all right until I’d seen the huge square can against the fence, the can with the slight stink coming out of it and the big colorful sign on top:
Don’t Waste Waste Place All Waste Here Remember— Whatever is Worn Can Be Shorn Whatever is Maimed Can Be Reclaimed Whatever is Used Can Be Reused Place All Waste Here —Conservation Police
I’d seen those square, compartmented cans and those signs in every barracks, every hospital, every recreation center, between here and the asteroids. But seeing them, now, in this place, gave them a different meaning. I wondered if they had those other posters inside, the shorter ones. You know: “ We need all our resources to defeat the enemy — and garbage is our biggest natural resource.” Decorating the walls of this particular building with those posters would be downright ingenious.
Whatever is maimed can be reclaimed… I flexed my right arm inside my blue jumper sleeve. It felt like a part of me, always would feel like a part of me. And in a couple of years, assuming that I lived that long, the thin white scar that circled the elbow joint would be completely invisible. Sure. Whatever is maimed can be reclaimed. All except one thing. The most important thing.
And I felt less like going in than ever.
And then I saw this kid. The one from Arizona Base.
He was standing right in front of the sentry box, paralyzed just like me. In the center of his uniform cap was a brand-new, gold-shiny Y with a dot in the center: the insignia of a sling-shot commander. He hadn’t been wearing it the day before at the briefing; that could only mean the commission had just come through. He looked real young and real scared.
I remembered him from the briefing session. He was the one whose hand had gone up timidly during the question period, the one who, when he was recognized, had half risen, worked his mouth a couple of times and finally blurted out: “Excuse me, sir, but they don’t—they don’t smell at all bad, do they?”
There had been a cyclone of laughter, the yelping laughter of men who’ve felt themselves close to the torn edge of hysteria all afternoon and who are damn glad that someone has at last said something that they can make believe is funny.
And the white-haired briefing officer, who hadn’t so much as smiled, waited for the hysteria to work itself out, before saying gravely: “No, they don’t smell bad at all. Unless, that is, they don’t bathe. The same as you gentlemen.”
That shut us up. Even the kid, blushing his way back into his seat, set his jaw stiffly at the reminder. And it wasn’t until twenty minutes later, when we’d been dismissed, that I began to feel the ache in my own face from the unrelaxed muscles there.
The same as you gentlemen…
I shook myself hard and walked over to the kid. “Hello, Commander,” I said. “Been here long?”
He managed a grin. “Over an hour, Commander. I caught the eight-fifteen out of Arizona Base. Most of the other fellows were still sleeping off last night’s party, I’d gone to bed early; I wanted to give myself as much time to get the feel of this thing as I could. Only it doesn’t seem to do much good.”
“I know. Some things you can’t get used to. Some things you’re not supposed to get used to.”
He looked at my chest. “I guess this isn’t your first sling-shot command?”
My first? More like my twenty-first, son! But then I remembered that everyone tells me I look young for my medals, and what the hell, the kid looked so pale—“No, not exactly my first. But I’ve never had a blob crew before. This is exactly as new to me as it is to you. Hey, listen, Commander: I’m having a hard time, too. What say we bust through that gate together? Then the worst’ll be over.”
The kid nodded violently. We linked arms and marched up to the sentry. We showed him our orders. He opened the gate and said: “Straight ahead. Any elevator on your left to the fifteenth floor.”
So, still arm in arm, we walked into the main entrance of the large building, up a long flight of steps and under the sign that said in red and black:
Human Protoplasm Reclamation Center
Third District Finishing Plant
There were some old-looking but very erect men walking along the main lobby and a lot of uniformed, fairly pretty girls. I was pleased to note that most of the girls were pregnant. The first pleasing sight I had seen in almost a week.
We turned into an elevator and told the girl, “Fifteen.” She punched a button and waited for it to fill up. She didn’t seem to be pregnant. I wondered what was the matter with her.
I’d managed to get a good grip on my heaving imagination, when I got a look at the shoulder patches the other passengers were wearing. That almost did for me right there. It was a circular red patch with the black letters TAF superimposed on a white G-4. TAF for Terrestrial Armed Forces, of course: the letters were the basic insignia of all rear-echelon outfits. But why didn’t they use G-1, which represented Personnel? G-4 stood for the Supply Division. Supply!
You can always trust the TAF. Thousands of morale specialists in all kinds of ranks, working their educated heads off to keep up the spirits of the men in the fighting perimeters—but every damn time, when it comes down to scratch, the good old dependable TAF will pick the ugliest name, the one in the worst possible taste.
Oh, sure, I told myself, you can’t fight a shattering, no-quarter interstellar war for twenty-five years and keep every pretty thought dewy-damp and intact, But not Supply, gentlemen. Not this place—not the Junkyard. Let’s at least try to keep up appearances.
Then we began going up and the elevator girl began announcing floors and I had lots of other things to think about.
“Third floor—Corpse Reception and Classification,” the operator sang out.
“Fifth floor—Preliminary Organ Processing.”
“Seventh floor—Brain Reconstitution and Neural Alignment.”
“Ninth floor—Cosmetics, Elementary Reflexes, and Muscular Control.”
At this point, I forced myself to stop listening, the way you do when you’re on a heavy cruiser, say, and the rear engine room gets flicked by a bolt from an Eoti scrambler. After you’ve been around a couple of times when it’s happened, you learn to sort of close your ears and say to yourself, “I don’t know anybody in that damned engine room, not anybody, and in a few minutes everything will be nice and quiet again.” And in a few minutes it is. Only trouble is that then, like as not, you’ll be part of the detail that’s ordered into the steaming place to scrape the guck off the walls and get the jets firing again.
Same way now. Just as soon as I had that girl’s voice blocked out, there we were on the fifteenth floor (“Final Interviews and Shipping”) and the kid and I had to get out.
He was real green. A definite sag around the knees, shoulders sloping forward like his clavicle had curled. Again I was grateful to him. Nothing like having somebody to take care of.
“Come on, Commander,” I whispered. “Up and at ’em. Look at it this way: for characters like us, this is practically a family reunion.”
It was the wrong thing to say. He looked at me as if I’d punched his face. “No thanks to you for the reminder, Mister,” he said. “Even if we are in the same boat.” Then he walked stiffly up to the receptionist.
I could have bitten my tongue off. I hurried after him. “I’m sorry, kid,” I told him earnestly. “The words just slid out of my big mouth. But don’t get sore at me; hell, I had to listen to myself say it too.”
He stopped, thought about it, and nodded. Then he gave me a smile. “OK. No hard feelings. It’s a rough war, isn’t it?”
I smiled back. “Rough? Why, if you’re not careful, they tell me, you can get killed in it.”
The receptionist was a soft little blonde with two wedding rings on one hand, and one wedding ring on the other. From what I knew of current planet-side customs, that meant she’d been widowed twice.
She took our orders and read jauntily into her desk mike: “Attention Final Conditioning. Attention Final Conditioning. Alert for immediate shipment the following serial numbers: 70623152, 70623109, 70623166, and 70623123. Also 70538966, 70538923, 70538980, and 70538937. Please route through the correct numbered sections and check all data on TAF AGO forms 362 as per TAF Regulation 7896, of 15 June, 2145. Advise when available for Final Interviews.”
I was impressed. Almost exactly the same procedure as when you go to Ordnance for a replacement set of stern exhaust tubes.
She looked up and favored us with a lovely smile. “Your crews will be ready in a moment. Would you have a seat, gentlemen?”
We had a seat gentlemen.
After a while, she got up to take something out of a file cabinet set in the wall. As she came back to her desk, I noticed she was pregnant—only about the third or fourth month—and, naturally, I gave a little, satisfied nod. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the kid make the same kind of nod. We looked at each other and chuckled. “It’s a rough, rough war,” he said.
“Where are you from anyway?” I asked. “That doesn’t sound like a Third District accent to me.”
“It isn’t. I was born in Scandinavia—Eleventh Military District. My home town is Goteborg, Sweden. But after I got my—my promotion, naturally I didn’t care to see the folks any more. So I requested a transfer to the Third, and from now on, until I hit a scrambler, this is where I’ll be spending my furloughs and Earth-side hospitalizations.”
I’d heard that a lot of the younger sling-shotters felt that way. Personally, I never had a chance to find out how I’d feel about visiting the old folks at home. My father was knocked off in the suicidal attempt to retake Neptune way back when I was still in high school learning elementary combat, and my mother was Admiral Raguzzi’s staff secretary when the flagship Thermopylae took a direct hit two years later in the famous defense of Ganymede. That was before the Breeding Regulations, of course, and women were still serving in administrative positions on the fighting perimeters.
On the other hand, I realized, at least two of my brothers might still be alive. But I’d made no attempt to contact them since getting my dotted Y. So I guessed I felt the same way as the kid—which was hardly surprising.
“Are you from Sweden?” the blonde girl was asking. “My second husband was born in Sweden. Maybe you knew him—Sven Nossen? He had a lot of relatives in Stockholm.”
The kid screwed up his eyes as if he was thinking real hard. You know, running down a list of all the Swedes in Stockholm. Finally, he shook his head. “No, can’t say that I do. But I wasn’t out of Goteborg very much before I was called up.”
She clucked sympathetically at his provincialism. The baby-faced blonde of classic anecdote. A real dumb kid. And yet—there were lots of very clever, high-pressure cuties around the inner planets these days who had to content themselves with a one-fifth interest in some abysmal slob who boasted the barest modicum of maleness. Or a certificate from the local sperm bank. Blondie here was on her third full husband.
Maybe, I thought, if I were looking for a wife myself, this is what I’d pick to take the stink of scrambler rays out of my nose and the yammer-yammer-yammer of Irvingles out of my ears. Maybe I’d want somebody nice and simple to come home to from one of those complicated skirmishes with the Eoti where you spend most of your conscious thoughts trying to figure out just what battle rhythm the filthy insects are using this time. Maybe, if I were going to get married, I’d find a pretty fluffhead like this more generally desirable than—oh, well. Maybe. Considered as a problem in psychology it was interesting.
I noticed she was talking to me. “You’ve never had a crew of this type before either, have you, Commander?”
“Zombies, you mean? No, not yet, I’m happy to say.”
She made a disapproving pout with her mouth. It was fully as cute as her approving pouts. “We do not like that word.”
“All right, blobs then.”
“We don’t like bl—that word either. You are talking about human beings like yourself, Commander. Very much like yourself.”
I began to get sore fast, just the way the kid had out in the hall. Then I realized she didn’t mean anything by it. She didn’t know. What the hell—it wasn’t on our orders. I relaxed. “You tell me. What do you call them here?”
The blonde sat up stiffly. “ We refer to them as soldier surrogates. The epithet ‘zombie’ was used to describe the obsolete Model 21 which went out of production over five years ago. You will be supplied with individuals based on Models 705 and 706, which are practically perfect. In fact, in some respects—”
“No bluish skin? No slow-motion sleepwalking?”
She shook her head violently, Her eyes were lit up. Evidently she’d digested all the promotional literature. Not such a fluffhead, after all; no great mind, but her husbands had evidently had someone to talk to in between times. She rattled on enthusiastically: “The cyanosis was the result of bad blood oxygenation; blood was our second most difficult tissue reconstruction problem, The nervous system was the hardest. Even though the blood cells are usually in the poorest shape of all by the time the bodies arrive, we can now turn out a very serviceable rebuilt heart. But, let there be the teeniest battle damage to the brain or spine and you have to start right from scratch. And then the troubles in reconstitution! My cousin Lorna works in Neural Alignment and she tells me all you need to make is just one wrong connection—you know how it is, Commander, at the end of the day your eyes are tired and you’re kind of watching the clock—just one wrong connection, and the reflexes in the finished individual turn out to be so bad that they just have to send him down to the third floor and begin all over again. But you don’t have to worry about that. Since Model 663, we’ve been using the two-team inspection system in Neural Alignment. And the 700 series—oh, they’ve just been wonderful.”
“That good, eh? Better than the old-fashioned mother’s son type?”
“Well-1-1,” she considered. “You’d really be amazed, Commander, if you could see the very latest performance charts. Of course, there is always that big deficiency, the one activity we’ve never been able to—”
“One thing I can’t understand,” the kid broke in, “why do they have to use corpses! A body’s lived its life, fought its war—why not leave it alone? I know the Eoti can outbreed us merely by increasing the number of queens in their flagships; I know that manpower is the biggest single TAF problem—but we’ve been synthesizing protoplasm for a long, long time now. Why not synthesize the whole damn body, from toenails to frontal lobe, and turn out real, honest-to-God androids that don’t wallop you with the stink of death when you meet them?”
The little blonde got mad. “Our product does not stink! Cosmetics can now guarantee that the new models have even less of a body odor than you, young man! And we do not reactivate or revitalize corpses, I’ll have you know; what we do is reclaim human protoplasm, we reuse worn-out and damaged human cellular material in the area where the greatest shortages currently occur, military personnel. You wouldn’t talk about corpses, I assure you, if you saw the condition that some of those bodies are in when they arrive. Why, sometimes in a whole baling package—a baling package contains twenty casualties—we don’t find enough to make one good, whole kidney. Then we have to take a little intestinal tissue here and a bit of spleen there, alter them, unite them carefully, activa—”
“That’s what I mean. If you go to all that trouble, why not start with real raw material?”
“Like what, for example?” she asked him.
The kid gestured with his black-gloved hands. “Basic elements like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and so on. It would make the whole process a lot cleaner.”
“Basic elements have to come from somewhere,” I pointed out gently. “You might take your hydrogen and oxygen from air and water. But where would you get your carbon from?”
“From the same place where the other synthetics manufacturers get it—coal, oil, cellulose.”
The receptionist sat back and relaxed, “Those are organic substances,” she reminded him. “If you’re going to use raw material that was once alive, why not use the kind that comes as close as possible to the end-product you have in mind? It’s simple industrial economics, Commander, believe me. The best and cheapest raw material for the manufacture of soldier surrogates is soldier bodies.”
“Sure,” the kid said. “Makes sense. There’s no other use for dead, old, beaten-up soldier bodies. Better’n shoving them in the ground where they’d be just waste, pure waste.”
Our little blonde chum started to smile in agreement, then shot him an intense look and changed her mind. She looked very uncertain all of a sudden. When the communicator on her desk buzzed, she bent over it eagerly.
I watched her with approval. Definitely no fluffhead. Just feminine. I sighed. You see, I figure lots of civilian things out the wrong way, but only with women is my wrongness an all-the-time proposition. Proving again that a hell of a lot of peculiar things turn out to have happened for the best.
“Commander,” she was saying to the kid. “Would you go to Room 1591? Your crew will be there in a moment.” She turned to me. “And Room 1524 for you, Commander, if you please.”
The kid nodded and walked off, very stiff and erect. I waited until the door had closed behind him, then I leaned over the receptionist. “Wish they’d change the Breeding Regulations again,” I told her. “You’d make a damn fine rear-echelon orientation officer. Got more of the feel of the Junkyard from you than in ten briefing sessions.”
She examined my face anxiously, “I hope you mean that, Commander. You see, we’re all very deeply involved in this project. We’re extremely proud of the progress the Third District Finishing Plant has made. We talk about the new developments all the time, everywhere—even in the cafeteria. It didn’t occur to me until too late that you gentlemen might—” she blushed deep, rich red, the way only a blonde can blush “—might take what I said personally. I’m sorry if I—”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” I assured her. “All you did was talk what they call shop. Like when I was in the hospital last month and heard two surgeons discussing how to repair a man’s arm and making it sound as if they were going to nail a new arm on an expensive chair. Real interesting, and I learned a lot.”
I left her looking grateful, which is absolutely the only way to leave a woman, and barged on to Room 1524.
It was evidently used as a classroom when reconverted human junk wasn’t being picked up. A bunch of chairs, a long blackboard, a couple of charts. One of the charts was on the Eoti, the basic information list, that contains all the limited information we have been able to assemble on the bugs in the bloody quarter-century since they came busting in past Pluto to take over the solar system. It hadn’t been changed much since the one I had to memorize in high school: the only difference was a slightly longer section on intelligence and motivation. Just theory, of course, but more carefully thought-out theory than the stuff I’d learned. The big brains had now concluded that the reason all attempts at communicating with them had failed was not because they were a conquest-crazy species, but because they suffered from the same extreme xenophobia as their smaller, less intelligent communal insect cousins here on Earth. That is, an ant wanders up to a strange anthill— zok! No discussion, he’s chopped down at the entrance. And the sentry ants react even faster if it’s a creature of another genus. So despite the Eoti science, which in too many respects was more advanced than ours, they were psychologically incapable of the kind of mental projection, or empathy, necessary if one is to realize that a completely alien-looking individual has intelligence, feelings—and rights!—to substantially the same extent as oneself.
Well, it might be so. Meanwhile, we were locked in a murderous stalemate with them on a perimeter of never-ending battle that sometimes expanded as far as Saturn and occasionally contracted as close as Jupiter. Barring the invention of a new weapon of such unimaginable power that we could wreck their fleet before they could duplicate the weapon, as they’d been managing to up to now, our only hope was to discover somehow the stellar system from which they came, somehow build ourselves not one starship but a fleet of them—and somehow wreck their home base or throw enough of a scare into it so that they’d pull back their expedition for defensive purposes. A lot of somehows.
But if we wanted to maintain our present position until the somehows started to roll, our birth announcements had to take longer to read than the casualty lists. For the last decade, this hadn’t been so, despite the more and more stringent Breeding Regulations which were steadily pulverizing every one of our moral codes and sociological advances. Then there was the day that someone in the Conservation Police noticed that almost half our ships of the line had been fabricated from the metallic junk of previous battles. Where was the personnel that had manned those salvage derelicts, he wondered…
And thus what Blondie outside and her co-workers were pleased to call soldier surrogates.
I’d been a computer’s mate, second class, on the old Jenghiz Khan when the first batch had come aboard as battle replacements. Let me tell you, friends, we had real good reason for calling them zombies! Most of them were as blue as the uniforms they wore, their breathing was so noisy it made you think of asthmatics with built-in public address systems, their eyes shone with all the intelligence of petroleum jelly— and the way they walked!
My friend Johnny Cruro, the first man to get knocked off in the Great Breakthrough of 2143, used to say that they were trying to pick their way down a steep hill at the bottom of which was a large, open, family-size grave. Body held strained and tense. Legs and arms moving slow, slow, until suddenly they’d finish with a jerk. Creepy as hell.
They weren’t good for anything but the drabbest fatigue detail. And even then—if you told them to polish a gun mounting, you had to remember to come back in an hour and turn them off or they might scrub their way clear through into empty space. Of course, they weren’t all that bad. Johnny Cruro used to say that he’d met one or two who could achieve imbecility when they were feeling right.
Combat was what finished them as far as the TAF was concerned. Not that they broke under battle conditions—just the reverse. The old ship would be rocking and screaming as it changed course every few seconds; every Irvingle, scrambler, and nucleonic howitzer along the firing corridor turning bright golden yellow from the heat it was generating; a hoarse yelping voice from the bulkhead loudspeakers pouring out orders faster than human muscles could move, the shock troops—their faces ugly with urgency—running crazily from one emergency station to another; everyone around you working like a blur and cursing and wondering out loud why the Eoti were taking so long to tag a target as big and as slow as the Khan… and suddenly you’d see a zombie clutching a broom in his rubbery hands and sweeping the deck in the slack-jawed, moronic, and horribly earnest way they had…
I remember whole gun crews going amuck and slamming into the zombies with long crowbars and metal-gloved fists; once, even an officer, sprinting back to the control room, stopped, flipped out his side-arm and pumped bolt after bolt of jagged thunder at a blue-skin who’d been peacefully wiping a porthole while the bow of the ship was being burned away. And as the zombie sagged uncomprehendingly and uncomplainingly to the floor plates, the young officer stood over him and chanted soothingly, the way you do to a boisterous dog: “Down, boy, down, down, down, damn you, down!”
That was the reason the zombies were eventually pulled back, not their own efficiency: the incidence of battle psycho around them just shot up too high. Maybe if it hadn’t been for that, we’d have got used to them eventually—God knows you get used to everything else in combat. But the zombies belonged to something beyond mere war.
They were so terribly, terribly unstirred by the prospect of dying again!
Well, everyone said the new-model zombies were a big improvement. They’d better be. A sling-shot might be one thin notch below an outright suicide patrol, but you need peak performance from every man aboard if it’s going to complete its crazy mission, let alone get back. And it’s an awful small ship and the men have to kind of get along with each other in very close quarters…
I heard feet, several pairs of them, rapping along the corridor. They stopped outside the door.
They waited. I waited. My skin began to prickle. And then I heard that uncertain shuffling sound. They were nervous about meeting me!
I walked over to the window and stared down at the drill field where old veterans whose minds and bodies were too worn out to be repaired taught fatigue-uniformed zombies how to use their newly conditioned reflexes in close-order drill. It made me remember a high-school athletic field years and years ago. The ancient barking commands drifted tinily up to me: “ Hup, two, three, four. Hup, two, three, four.” Only they weren’t using hup!, but a newer, different word I couldn’t quite catch.
And then, when the hands I’d clasped behind me had almost squeezed their blood back into my wrists, I heard the door open and four pairs of feet clatter into the room. The door closed and the four pairs of feet clicked to attention.
I turned around.
They were saluting me. Well, what the hell, I told myself, they were supposed to be saluting me, I was their commanding officer. I returned the salute, and four arms whipped down smartly.
I said, “At ease.” They snapped their legs apart, arms behind them. I thought about it. I said, “Rest.” They relaxed their bodies slightly. I thought about it again. I said, “Hell, men, sit down and let’s meet each other.”
They sprawled into chairs and I hitched myself up on the instructor’s desk. We stared back and forth. Their faces were rigid, watchful; they weren’t giving anything away.
I wondered what my face looked like. In spite of all the orientation lectures, in spite of all the preparation, I must admit that my first glimpse of them had hit me hard. They were glowing with health, normality, and hard purpose. But that wasn’t it.
That wasn’t it at all.
What was making me want to run out of the door, out of the building, was something I’d been schooling myself to expect since that last briefing session in Arizona Base. Four dead men were staring at me. Four very famous dead men.
The big man, lounging all over his chair, was Roger Grey, who had been killed over a year ago when he rammed his tiny scout ship up the forward jets of an Eoti flagship. The flagship had been split neatly in two. Almost every medal imaginable and the Solar Corona. Grey was to be my co-pilot.
The thin, alert man with the tight shock of black hair was Wang Hsi. He had been killed covering the retreat to the asteroids after the Great Breakthrough of 2143. According to the fantastic story the observers told, his ship had still been firing after it had been scrambled fully three times. Almost every medal imaginable and the Solar Corona. Wang was to be my engineer.
The darkish little fellow was Yussuf Lamehd. He’d been killed in a very minor skirmish off Titan, but when he died he was the most decorated man in the entire TAF. A double Solar Corona. Lamehd was to be my gunner.
The heavy one was Stanley Weinstein, the only prisoner of war ever to escape from the Eoti. There wasn’t much left of him by the time he arrived on Mars, but the ship he came in was the first enemy craft that humanity could study intact. There was no Solar Corona in his day for him to receive even posthumously, but they’re still naming military academies after that man. Weinstein was to be my astrogator.
Then I shook myself back to reality. These weren’t the original heroes, probably didn’t have even a particle of Roger Grey’s blood or Wang Hsi’s flesh upon their reconstructed bones. They were just excellent and very faithful copies, made to minute physical specifications that had been in the TAF medical files since Wang had been a cadet and Grey a mere recruit.
There were anywhere from a hundred to a thousand Yussuf Lamehds and Stanley Weinsteins, I had to remind myself—and they had all come off an assembly line a few floors down. “Only the brave deserve the future,” was the Junkyard’s motto, and it was currently trying to assure that future for them by duplicating in quantity any TAF man who went out with especial heroism. As I happened to know, there were one or two other categories who could expect similar honors, but the basic reasons behind the hero-models had little to do with morale.
First, there was that little gimmick of industrial efficiency again. If you’re using mass-production methods, and the Junkyard was doing just that, it’s plain common sense to turn out a few standardized models, rather than have everyone different—like the stuff an individual creative craftsman might come up with. Well, if you’re using standardized models, why not use those that have positive and relatively pleasant associations bound up with their appearance rather than anonymous characters from the designers’ drawing boards?
The second reason was almost more important and harder to define. According to the briefing officer, yesterday, there was a peculiar feeling—a superstitious feeling, you might almost say—that if you copied a hero’s features, musculature, metabolism, and even his cortex wrinkles carefully enough, well, you might build yourself another hero. Of course, the original personality would never reappear—that had been produced by long years of a specific environment and dozens of other very slippery factors—but it was distinctly possible, the biotechs felt, that a modicum of clever courage resided in the body structure alone…
Well, at least these zombies didn’t look like zombies!
On an impulse, I plucked the rolled sheaf of papers containing our travel orders out of my pocket, pretended to study it and let it slip suddenly through my fingers. As the outspread sheaf spiraled to the floor in front of me, Roger Grey reached out and caught it. He handed it back to me with the same kind of easy yet snappy grace. I took it, feeling good. It was the way he moved. I like to see a co-pilot move that way.
“Thanks,” I said.
He just nodded.
I studied Yussuf Lamehd next. Yes, he had it too. Whatever it is that makes a first-class gunner, he had it. It’s almost impossible to describe, but you walk into a bar in some rest area on Eros, say, and out of the five sling-shotters hunched over the blow-top table, you know right off which is the gunner. It’s a sort of carefully bottled nervousness or a dead calm with a hair-trigger attachment. Whatever it is, it’s what you need sitting over a firing button when you’ve completed the dodge, curve, and twist that’s a sling-shot’s attacking dash and you’re barely within range of the target, already beginning your dodge, curve, and twist back to safety. Lamehd had it so strong that I’d have put money on him against any other gunner in the TAF I’d ever seen in action.
Astrogators and engineers are different. You’ve just got to see them work under pressure before you can rate them. But, even so, I liked the calm and confident manner with which Wang Hsi and Weinstein sat under my examination. And I liked them.
Right there I felt a hundred pounds slide off my chest. I felt relaxed for the first time in days. I really liked my crew, zombies or no. We’d make it.
I decided to tell them. “Men,” I said, “I think we’ll really get along. I think we’ve got the makings of a sweet, smooth sling-shot. You’ll find me—”
And I stopped. That cold, slightly mocking look in their eyes. They way they had glanced at each other when I told them I thought we’d get along, glanced at each other and blown slightly through distended nostrils. I realized that none of them had said anything since they’d come in; they’d just been watching me, and their eyes weren’t exactly warm.
I stopped and let myself take a long, deep breath. For the first time, it was occurring to me that I’d been worrying about just one end of the problem, and maybe the least important end. I’d been worrying about how I’d react to them and how much I’d be able to accept them as shipmates. They were zombies, after all. It had never occurred to me to wonder how they’d feel about me.
And there was evidently something very wrong in how they felt about me.
“What is it, men?” I asked. They all looked at me inquiringly. “What’s on your minds?”
They kept looking at me. Weinstein pursed his lips and tilted his chair back and forth. It creaked. Nobody said anything.
I got off the desk and walked up and down in front of the classroom. They kept following me with their eyes.
“Grey,” I said. “You look as if you’ve got a great big knot inside you. Want to tell me about it?”
“No, Commander,” he said deliberately. “I don’t want to tell you about it.”
I grimaced. “If anyone wants to say anything—anything at all—it’ll be off the record and completely off the record. Also for the moment we’ll forget about such matters as rank and TAF regulations.” I waited. “Wang? Lamehd? How about you, Weinstein?” They stared at me quietly. Weinstein’s chair creaked back and forth.
It had me baffled. What kind of gripe could they have against me? They’d never met me before. But I knew one thing: I wasn’t going to haul a crew nursing a subsurface grudge as unanimous as this aboard a sling-shot. I wasn’t going to chop space with those eyes at my back. It would be more efficient for me to shove my head against an Irvingle lens and push the button.
“Listen,” I told them. “I meant what I said about forgetting rank and TAF regulations. I want to run a happy ship and I have to know what’s up. We’ll be living, the five of us, in the tightest, most cramped conditions the mind of man has yet been able to devise; we’ll be operating a tiny ship whose only purpose is to dodge at tremendous speed through the fire-power and screening devices of the larger enemy craft and deliver a single, crippling blast from a single oversize Irvingle. We’ve got to get along whether we like each other or not. If we don’t get along, if there’s any unspoken hostility getting in our way, the ship won’t operate at maximum efficiency. And that way, we’re through before we—”
“Commander,” Weinstein said suddenly, his chair coming down upon the floor with a solid whack, “I’d like to ask you a question.”
“Sure,” I said and let out a gust of relief that was the size of a small hurricane. “Ask me anything.”
“When you think about us, Commander, or when you talk about us, which word do you use?”
I looked at him and shook my head. “Eh?”
“When you talk about us, Commander, or when you think about us, do you call us zombies? Or do you call us blobs? That’s what I’d like to know, Commander.”
He’d spoken in such a polite, even tone that I was a long time in getting the full significance of it.
“Personally,” said Roger Grey in a voice that was just a little less polite, a little less even, “personally, I think the Commander is the kind who refers to us as canned meat. Right, Commander?”
Yussuf Lamehd folded his arms across his chest and seemed to consider the issue very thoughtfully. “I think you’re right, Rog. He’s the canned-meat type. Definitely the canned-meat type.”
“No,” said Wang Hsi. “He doesn’t use that kind of language. Zombies, yes; canned meat, no. You can observe from the way he talks that he wouldn’t ever get mad enough to tell us to get back in the can. And I don’t think he’d call us blobs very often. He’s the kind of guy who’d buttonhole another sling-shot commander and tell him, ‘Man, have I got the sweetest zombie crew you ever saw!’ That’s the way I figure him. Zombies.”
And then they were sitting quietly staring at me again. And it wasn’t mockery in their eyes. It was hatred.
I went back to the desk and sat down. The room was very still. From the yard, fifteen floors down, the marching commands drifted up. Where did they latch on to this, zombie-blob-canned meat stuff? They were none of them more than six months old; none of them had been outside the precincts of the Junkyard yet. Their conditioning, while mechanical and intensive, was supposed to be absolutely foolproof, producing hard, resilient, and entirely human minds, highly skilled in their various specialties and as far from any kind of imbalance as the latest psychiatric knowledge could push them. I knew they wouldn’t have got it in their conditioning. Then where —
And then I heard it clearly for a moment. The word. The word that was being used down in the drill field instead of Hup! That strange, new word I hadn’t been able to make out. Whoever was calling the cadence downstairs wasn’t saying, “ Hup, two, three, four.”
He was saying, “ Blob, two, three, four. Blob, two, three, four.”
Wasn’t that just like the TAF? I asked myself. For that matter, like any army anywhere anytime? Expending fortunes and the best minds producing a highly necessary product to exact specifications, and then, on the very first level of military use, doing something that might invalidate it completely. I was certain that the same officials who had been responsible for the attitude of the receptionist outside could have had nothing to do with the old, superannuated TAF drill-hacks putting their squads through their paces down below. I could imagine those narrow, nasty minds, as jealously proud of their prejudices as of their limited and painfully acquired military knowledge, giving these youngsters before me their first taste of barracks life, their first glimpse of the “outside.” It was so stupid!
But was it? There was another way of looking at it, beyond the fact that only soldiers too old physically and too ossified mentally for any other duty could be spared for this place. And that was the simple pragmatism of army thinking. The fighting perimeters were places of abiding horror and agony, the forward combat zones in which sling-shots operated were even worse. If men or materiel were going to collapse out there, it could be very costly. Let the collapses occur as close to the rear echelons as possible.
Maybe it made sense, I thought. Maybe it was logical to make live men out of dead men’s flesh (God knows humanity had reached the point where we had to have reinforcements from somewhere!) at enormous expense and with the kind of care usually associated with things like cotton wool and the most delicate watchmakers’ tools; and then to turn around and subject them to the coarsest, ugliest environment possible, an environment that perverted their carefully instilled loyalty into hatred and their finely balanced psychological adjustment into neurotic sensitivity.
I didn’t know if it was basically smart or dumb, or even if the problem had ever been really weighed as such by the upper, policy-making brass. All I could see was my own problem, and it looked awfully big to me. I thought of my attitude toward these men before getting them, and I felt pretty sick. But the memory gave me an idea.
“Hey, tell me something,” I suggested. “What would you call me?”
They looked puzzled.
“You want to know what I call you,” I explained. “Tell me first what you call people like me, people who are—who are born. You must have your own epithets.”
Lamehd grinned so that his teeth showed a bright, mirthless white against his dark skin. “Realos,” he said. “We call you people realos. Sometimes, realo trulos.”
Then the rest spoke up. There were other names, lots of other names. They wanted me to hear them all. They interrupted each other; they spat the words out as if they were so many missiles; they glared at my face, as they spat them out, to see how much impact they had. Some of the nicknames were funny, some of them were rather nasty. I was particularly charmed by utie and wombat.
“All right,” I said after a while. “Feel better?”
They were all breathing hard, but they felt better. I could tell it, and they knew it. The air in the room felt softer now.
“First off,” I said, “I want you to notice that you are all big boys and as such, can take care of yourselves. From here on out, if we walk into a bar or a rec camp together and someone of approximately your rank says something that sounds like zombie to your acute ears, you are at liberty to walk up to him and start taking him apart—if you can. If he’s of approximately my rank, in all probability, I’ll do the taking apart, simply because I’m a very sensitive commander and don’t like having my men deprecated. And any time you feel that I’m not treating you as human beings, one hundred percent, full solar citizenship and all that, I give you permission to come up to me and say, ‘Now look here, you dirty utie, sir—’ ”
The four of them grinned. Warm grins. Then the grins faded away, very slowly, and the eyes grew cold again. They were looking at a man who was, after all, an outsider. I cursed.
“It’s not as simple as that, Commander,” Wang Hsi said, “unfortunately. You can call us hundred-percent human beings, but we’re not. And anyone who wants to call us blobs or canned meat has a certain amount of right. Because we’re not as good as—as you mother’s sons, and we know it. And we’ll never be that good. Never.”
“I don’t know about that,” I blustered. “Why, some of your performance charts—”
“Performance charts, Commander,” Wang Hsi said softly, “do not a human being make.”
On his right, Weinstein gave a nod, thought a bit, and added: “Nor groups of men a race.”
I knew where we were going now. And I wanted to smash my way out of that room, down the elevator, and out of the building before anybody said another word. This is it, I told myself: here we are, boy, here we are. I found myself squirming from corner to corner of the desk; I gave up, got off it, and began walking again.
Wang Hsi wouldn’t let go. I should have known he wouldn’t. “Soldier surrogates,” he went on, squinting as if he were taking a close look at the phrase for the first time. “Soldier surrogates, but not soldiers. We’re not soldiers, because soldiers are men. And we, Commander, are not men.”
There was silence for a moment, then a tremendous blast of sound boiled out of my mouth. “And what makes you think that you’re not men?”
Wang Hsi was looking at me with astonishment, but his reply was still soft and calm. “You know why. You’ve seen our specifications, Commander. We’re not men, real men, because we can’t reproduce ourselves.”
I forced myself to sit down again and carefully placed my shaking hands over my knees.
“We’re as sterile,” I heard Yussuf Lamehd say, “as boiling water.”
“There have been lots of men,” I began, “who have been—”
“This isn’t a matter of lots of men,” Weinstein broke in. “This is a matter of all —all of us.”
“Blobs thou art,” Wang Hsi murmured. “And to blobs returneth. They might have given at least a few of us a chance. The kids mightn’t have turned out so bad.”
Roger Grey slammed his huge hand down on the arm of his chair. “That’s just the point, Wang,” he said savagely. “The kids might have turned out good—too good. Our kids might have turned out to be better than their kids—and where would that leave the proud and cocky, the goddam name-calling, the realo trulo human race?”
I sat staring at them once more, but now I was seeing a different picture. I wasn’t seeing conveyor belts moving along slowly covered with human tissues and organs on which earnest biotechs performed their individual tasks. I wasn’t seeing a room filled with dozens of adult male bodies suspended in nutrient solution, each body connected to a conditioning machine which day and night clacked out whatever minimum information was necessary for the body to take the place of a man in the bloodiest part of the fighting perimeter.
This time, I saw a barracks filled with heroes, many of them in duplicate and triplicate. And they were sitting around griping, as men will in any barracks on any planet, whether they look like heroes or no. But their gripes concerned humiliations deeper than any soldiers had hitherto known—humiliations as basic as the fabric of human personality.
“You believe, then,” and despite the sweat on my face, my voice was gentle, “that the reproductive power was deliberately withheld?”
Weinstein scowled. “Now, Commander. Please. No bedtime stories.”
“Doesn’t it occur to you at all that the whole problem of our species at the moment is reproduction? Believe me, men, that’s all you hear about on the outside. Grammar-school debating teams kick current reproductive issues back and forth in the district medal competitions; every month scholars in archaeology and the botany of fungi come out with books about it from their own special angle. Everyone knows that if we don’t lick the reproduction problem, the Eoti are going to lick us. Do you seriously think under such circumstances, the reproductive powers of anyone would be intentionally impaired?”
“What do a few male blobs matter, more or less?” Grey demanded. “According to the latest news bulletins, sperm bank deposits are at their highest point in five years. They don’t need us.”
“Commander,” Wang Hsi pointed his triangular chin at me. “Let me ask you a few questions in your turn. Do you honestly expect us to believe that a science capable of reconstructing a living, highly effective human body with a complex digestive system and a most delicate nervous system, all this out of dead and decaying bits of protoplasm, is incapable of reconstructing the germ plasm in one single, solitary case?”
“You have to believe it,” I told him. “Because it’s so.”
Wang sat back, and so did the other three. They stopped looking at me.
“Haven’t you ever heard it said,” I pleaded with them, “that the germ plasm is more essentially the individual than any other part of him? That some whimsical biologists take the attitude that our human bodies and all bodies are merely vehicles, or hosts, by means of which our germ plasm reproduces itself? It’s the most complex biotechnical riddle we have! Believe me, men,” I added passionately, “when I say that biology has not yet solved the germ-plasm problem, I’m telling the truth. I know.”
That got them.
“Look,” I said. “We have one thing in common with the Eoti whom we’re fighting. Insects and warm-blooded animals differ prodigiously. But only among the community-building insects and the community-building men are there individuals who, while taking no part personally in the reproductive chain, are of fundamental importance to their species. For example, you might have a female nursery school teacher who is barren but who is of unquestionable value in shaping the personalities and even physiques of children in her care.”
“Fourth Orientation Lecture for Soldier Surrogates,” Weinstein said in a dry voice. “He got it right out of the book.”
“I’ve been wounded,” I said, “I’ve been seriously wounded fifteen times.” I stood before them and began rolling up my right sleeve. It was soaked with my perspiration.
“We can tell you’ve been wounded, Commander,” Lamehd pointed out uncertainly. “We can tell from your medals. You don’t have to—”
“And every time I was wounded, they repaired me good as new. Better. Look at that arm.” I flexed it for them. “Before it was burned off in a small razzle six years ago, I could never build up a muscle that big. It’s a better arm they built on the stump, and, believe me, my reflexes never had it so good.”
“What did you mean,” Wang Hsi started to ask me, “when you said before—”
“Fifteen times I was wounded,” my voice drowned him out, “and fourteen times the wound was repaired. The fifteenth time— The fifteenth time —Well, the fifteenth time it wasn’t a wound they could repair. They couldn’t help me one little bit the fifteenth time.”
Roger Grey opened his mouth.
“Fortunately,” I whispered, “it wasn’t a wound that showed.”
Weinstein started to ask me something, decided against it and sat back. But I told him what he wanted to know.
“A nucleonic howitzer. The way it was figured later, it had been a defective shell. Bad enough to kill half the men on our second-class cruiser. I wasn’t killed, but I was in range of the back-blast.”
“That back-blast,” Lamehd was figuring it out quickly in his mind. “That back-blast will sterilize anybody for two hundred feet. Unless you’re wearing—”
“And I wasn’t.” I had stopped sweating. It was over. My crazy little precious secret was out. I took a deep breath. “So you see—well, anyway, I know they haven’t solved that problem yet.”
Roger Grey stood up and said, “Hey.” He held out his hand. I shook it. It felt like any normal guy’s hand. Stronger maybe.
“Sling-shot personnel,” I went on, “are all volunteers. Except for two categories: the commanders and soldier surrogates.”
“Figuring, I guess,” Weinstein asked, “that the human race can spare them most easily?”
“Right,” I said. “Figuring that the human race can spare them most easily.” He nodded.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Yussuf Lamehd laughed as he got up and shook my hand, too. “Welcome to our city.”
“Thanks,” I said. “ Son.”
He seemed puzzled at the emphasis.
“That’s the rest of it,” I explained. “Never got married and was too busy getting drunk and tearing up the pavement on my leaves to visit a sperm bank.”
“Oho,” Weinstein said, and gestured at the walls with a thick thumb. “So this is it.”
“That’s right: this is it. The Family. The only one I’ll ever have. I’ve got almost enough of these—” I tapped my medals “—to rate replacement. As a sling-shot commander, I’m sure of it.”
“All you don’t know yet,” Lamehd pointed out, “is how high a percentage of replacement will be apportioned to your memory. That depends on how many more of these chest decorations you collect before you become an—ah, should I say raw material?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling crazily light and easy and relaxed. I’d got it all out and I didn’t feel whipped any more by a billion years of reproduction and evolution. And I’d been going to do a morale job on them! “ Say raw material, Lamehd.”
“Well, boys,” he went on, “it seems to me we want the commander to get a lot more fruit salad. He’s a nice guy and there should be more of him in the club.”
They were all standing around me now, Weinstein, Lamehd, Grey, Wang Hsi. They looked real friendly and real capable. I began to feel we were going to have one of the best sling-shots in—What did I mean one of the best? The best, mister, the best.
“Okay,” said Grey. “Wherever and whenever you want to, you start leading us— Pop.”
Afterword
There’s not much I have to say about “Down Among the Dead Men.” Horace L. Gold said he needed a novelette almost immediately for Galaxy, and most of all he wanted a space opera.
“You’ve never written a space opera, a real bangety-bang space opera,” he said. “Why not?”
“I don’t like them,” I told him. “I don’t like to read them, and I don’t like to write them. Science-fiction westerns: they’re kill-’em-on-Mercury-instead-of-Montana.”
Well, he explained, if—in spite of my bullshit fastidiousness—I managed to write one in the next week, he would give me a large bonus on the word rate and voucher the check through immediately.
As always, in those days, I could very much use the money; so I agreed to think about it. To my surprise, by the time I got home, I had an idea. I began writing.
It went fast. I completed the piece in a weekend.
Horace loved it, bought it. “It’s a real space opera,” he marveled, “but all the important action takes place completely offstage. A tour deforce!”
I rarely agreed with Horace, but I told him I was thoroughly with him on his last sentence.
The point being that, despite its disreputable origin, I have grown to be very fond of this story. I’m almost astonished to say that now I would rank it among my best.
And it is a space opera. Of a kind, anyway.
Written 1954 / Published 1954