We still didn’t know whether we were getting deep enough to kill the queens—but we did know that the Bugs didn’t like these tactics; our intelligence through the Skinnies and on back into the Bugs themselves was definite on this point. Besides, we cleaned their colony off Sheol completely this way. Maybe they managed to evacuate the queens and the brains…but at least we were learning to hurt them.
But so far as the Roughnecks were concerned, these gas bombings were simply another drill, to be done according to orders, by the numbers, and on the bounce.
Eventually we had to go back to Sanctuary for more capsules. Capsules are expendable (well, so were we) and when they are gone, you must return to base, even if the Cherenkov generators could still take you twice around the Galaxy. Shortly before this a dispatch came through breveting Jelly to lieutenant, vice Rasczak. Jelly tried to keep it quiet but Captain Deladrier published it and then required him to eat forward with the other officers. He still spent all the rest of his time aft.
But we had taken several drops by then with him as platoon leader and the outfit had gotten used to getting along without the Lieutenant—it still hurt but it was routine now. After Jelal was commissioned the word was slowly passed around among us and chewed over that it was time for us to name ourselves for our boss, as with other outfits.
Johnson was senior and took the word to Jelly; he picked me to go along with him as moral support. “Yeah?” growled Jelly.
“Uh, Sarge—I mean Lieutenant, we’ve been thinking—”
“With what?”
“Well, the boys have sort of been talking it over and they think—well, they say the outfit ought to call itself: ‘Jelly’s Jaguars.’”
“They do, eh? How many of ’em favor that name?”
“It’s unanimous,” Johnson said simply.
“So? Fifty-two ayes…and one no. The noes have it.” Nobody ever brought up the subject again.
Shortly after that we orbited at Sanctuary. I was glad to be there, as the ship’s internal pseudo-gravity field had been off for most of two days before that, while the Chief Engineer tinkered with it, leaving us in free fall—which I hate. I’ll never be a real spaceman. Dirt underfoot felt good. The entire platoon went on ten days’ rest & recreation and transferred to accommodation barracks at the Base.
I never have learned the co-ordinates of Sanctuary, nor the name or catalogue number of the star it orbits—because what you don’t know, you can’t spill; the location is ultra-top-secret, known only to ships’ captains, piloting officers, and such…and, I understand, with each of them under orders and hypnotic compulsion to suicide if necessary to avoid capture. So I don’t want to know. With the possibility that Luna Base might be taken and Terra herself occupied, the Federation kept as much of its beef as possible at Sanctuary, so that a disaster back home would not necessarily mean capitulation.
But I can tell you what sort of a planet it is. Like Earth, but retarded.
Literally retarded, like a kid who takes ten years to learn to wave bye-bye and never does manage to master patty-cake. It is a planet as near like Earth as two planets can be, same age according to the planetologists and its star is the same age as the Sun and the same type, so say the astrophysicists. It has plenty of flora and fauna, the same atmosphere as Earth, near enough, and much the same weather; it even has a good-sized moon and Earth’s exceptional tides.
With all these advantages it barely got away from the starting gate. You see, it’s short on mutations; it does not enjoy Earth’s high level of natural radiation.
Its typical and most highly developed plant life is a very primitive giant fern; its top animal life is a proto-insect which hasn’t even developed colonies. I am not speaking of transplanted Terran flora and fauna—our stuff moves in and brushes the native stuff aside.
With its evolutionary progress held down almost to zero by lack of radiation and a consequent most unhealthily low mutation rate, native life forms on Sanctuary just haven’t had a decent chance to evolve and aren’t fit to compete. Their gene patterns remain fixed for a relatively long time; they aren’t adaptable—like being forced to play the same bridge hand over and over again, for eons, with no hope of getting a better one.
As long as they just competed with each other, this didn’t matter too much—morons among morons, so to speak. But when types that had evolved on a planet enjoying high radiation and fierce competition were introduced, the native stuff was outclassed.
Now all the above is perfectly obvious from high school biology…but the high forehead from the research station there who was telling me about this brought up a point I would never have thought of.
What about the human beings who have colonized Sanctuary?
Not transients like me, but the colonists who live there, many of whom were born there, and whose descendants will live there, even unto the umpteenth generation—what about those descendants? It doesn’t do a person any harm not to be radiated; in fact it’s a bit safer—leukemia and some types of cancer are almost unknown there. Besides that, the economic situation is at present all in their favor; when they plant a field of (Terran) wheat, they don’t even have to clear out the weeds. Terran wheat displaces anything native.
But the descendants of those colonists won’t evolve. Not much, anyhow. This chap told me that they could improve a little through mutation from other causes, from new blood added by immigration, and from natural selection among the gene patterns they already own—but that is all very minor compared with the evolutionary rate on Terra and on any usual planet. So what happens? Do they stay frozen at their present level while the rest of the human race moves on past them, until they are living fossils, as out of place as a pithecanthropus in a spaceship?
Or will they worry about the fate of their descendants and dose themselves regularly with X-rays or maybe set off lots of dirty-type nuclear explosions each year to build up a fallout reservoir in their atmosphere? (Accepting, of course, the immediate dangers of radiation to themselves in order to provide a proper genetic heritage of mutation for the benefit of their descendants.)
This bloke predicted that they would not do anything. He claims that the human race is too individualistic, too self-centered, to worry that much about future generations. He says that the genetic impoverishment of distant generations through lack of radiation is something most people are simply incapable of worrying about. And of course it is a far-distant threat; evolution works so slowly, even on Terra, that the development of a new species is a matter of many, many thousands of years.
I don’t know. Shucks, I don’t know what I myself will do more than half the time; how can I predict what a colony of strangers will do? But I’m sure of this: Sanctuary is going to be fully settled, either by us or by the Bugs. Or by somebody. It is a potential utopia, and, with desirable real estate so scarce in this end of the Galaxy, it will not be left in the possession of primitive life forms that failed to make the grade.
Already it is a delightful place, better in many ways for a few days R&R than is most of Terra. In the second place, while it has an awful lot of civilians, more than a million, as civilians go they aren’t bad. They know there is a war on. Fully half of them are employed either at the Base or in war industry; the rest raise food and sell it to the Fleet. You might say they have a vested interest in war, but, whatever their reasons, they respect the uniform and don’t resent the wearers thereof. Quite the contrary. If an M.I. walks into a shop there, the proprietor calls him “Sir,” and really seems to mean it, even while he’s trying to sell something worthless at too high a price.
But in the first place, half of those civilians are female.
You have to have been out on a long patrol to appreciate this properly. You need to have looked forward to your day of guard duty, for the privilege of standing two hours out of each six with your spine against bulkhead thirty and your ears cocked for just the sound of a female voice. I suppose it’s actually easier in the all-stag ships…but I’ll take th
e Rodger Young. It’s good to know that the ultimate reason you are fighting actually exists and that they are not just a figment of the imagination.
Besides the civilian wonderful 50 per cent, about 40 per cent of the Federal Service people on Sanctuary are female. Add it all up and you’ve got the most beautiful scenery in the explored universe.
Besides these unsurpassed natural advantages, a great deal has been done artificially to keep R&R from being wasted. Most of the civilians seem to hold two jobs; they’ve got circles under their eyes from staying up all night to make a service man’s leave pleasant. Churchill Road from the Base to the city is lined both sides with enterprises intended to separate painlessly a man from money he really hasn’t any use for anyhow, to the pleasant accompaniment of refreshment, entertainment, and music.
If you are able to get past these traps, through having already been bled of all valuta, there are still other places in the city almost as satisfactory (I mean there are girls there, too) which are provided free by a grateful populace—much like the social center in Vancouver, these are, but even more welcome.
Sanctuary, and especially Espiritu Santo, the city, struck me as such an ideal place that I toyed with the notion of asking for my discharge there when my term was up—after all, I didn’t really care whether my descendants (if any) twenty-five thousand years hence had long green tendrils like everybody else, or just the equipment I had been forced to get by with. That professor type from the Research Station couldn’t frighten me with that no radiation scare talk; it seemed to me (from what I could see around me) that the human race had reached its ultimate peak anyhow.
No doubt a gentleman wart hog feels the same way about a lady wart hog—but, if so, both of us are very sincere.
There are other opportunities for recreation there, too. I remember with particular pleasure one evening when a table of Roughnecks got into a friendly discussion with a group of Navy men (not from the Rodger Young) seated at the next table. The debate was spirited, a bit noisy, and some Base police came in and broke it up with stun guns just as we were warming to our rebuttal. Nothing came of it, except that we had to pay for the furniture—the Base Commandant takes the position that a man on R&R should be allowed a little freedom as long as he doesn’t pick one of the “thirty-one crash landings.”
The accommodation barracks are all right, too—not fancy, but comfortable and the chow line works twenty-five hours a day with civilians doing all the work. No reveille, no taps, you’re actually on leave and you don’t have to go to the barracks at all. I did, however, as it seemed downright preposterous to spend money on hotels when there was a clean, soft sack free and so many better ways to spend accumulated pay. That extra hour in each day was nice, too, as it meant nine hours solid and the day still untouched—I caught up sack time clear back to Operation Bughouse.
It might as well have been a hotel; Ace and I had a room all to ourselves in visiting non-com quarters. One morning, when R&R was regrettably drawing to a close, I was just turning over about local noon when Ace shook my bed. “On the bounce, soldier! The Bugs are attacking.”
I told him what to do with the Bugs.
“Let’s hit dirt,” he persisted.
“No dinero.” I had had a date the night before with a chemist (female, of course, and charmingly so) from the Research Station. She had known Carl on Pluto and Carl had written to me to look her up if I ever got to Sanctuary. She was a slender redhead, with expensive tastes. Apparently Carl had intimated to her that I had more money than was good for me, for she decided that the night before was just the time for her to get acquainted with the local champagne. I didn’t let Carl down by admitting that all I had was a trooper’s honorarium; I bought it for her while I drank what they said was (but wasn’t) fresh pineapple squash. The result was that I had to walk home, afterwards—the cabs aren’t free. Still, it had been worth it. After all, what is money?—I’m speaking of Bug money, of course.
“No ache,” Ace answered. “I can juice you—I got lucky last night. Ran into a Navy file who didn’t know percentages.”
So I got up and shaved and showered and we hit the chow line for half a dozen shell eggs and sundries such as potatoes and ham and hot cakes and so forth and then we hit dirt to get something to eat. The walk up Churchill Road was hot and Ace decided to stop in a cantina. I went along to see if their pineapple squash was real. It wasn’t, but it was cold. You can’t have everything.
We talked about this and that and Ace ordered another round. I tried their strawberry squash—same deal. Ace stared into his glass, then said, “Ever thought about greasing for officer?”
I said, “Huh? Are you crazy?”
“Nope. Look, Johnnie, this war may run on quite a piece. No matter what propaganda they put out for the folks at home, you and I know that the Bugs aren’t ready to quit. So why don’t you plan ahead? As the man says, if you’ve got to play in the band, it’s better to wave the stick than to carry the big drum.”
I was startled by the turn the talk had taken, especially from Ace. “How about you? Are you planning to buck for a commission?”
“Me?” he answered. “Check your circuits, son—you’re getting wrong answers. I’ve got no education and I’m ten years older than you are. But you’ve got enough education to hit the selection exams for O.C.S. and you’ve got the I.Q. they like. I guarantee that if you go career, you’ll make sergeant before I do…and get picked for O.C.S. the day after.”
“Now I know you’re crazy!”
“You listen to your pop. I hate to tell you this, but you are just stupid and eager and sincere enough to make the kind of officer that men love to follow into some silly predicament. But me—well, I’m a natural non-com, with the proper pessimistic attitude to offset the enthusiasm of the likes of you. Someday I’ll make sergeant…and presently I’ll have my twenty years in and retire and get one of the reserved jobs—cop, maybe—and marry a nice fat wife with the same low tastes I have, and I’ll follow the sports and fish and go pleasantly to pieces.”
Ace stopped to wet his whistle. “But you,” he went on. “You’ll stay in and probably make high rank and die gloriously and I’ll read about it and say proudly, ‘I knew him when. Why, I used to lend him money—we were corporals together.’ Well?”
“I’ve never thought about it,” I said slowly. “I just meant to serve my term.”
He grinned sourly. “Do you see any term enrollees being paid off today? You expect to make it on two years?”
He had a point. As long as the war continued, a “term” didn’t end—at least not for cap troopers. It was mostly a difference in attitude, at least for the present. Those of us on “term” could at least feel like short-timers; we could talk about: “When this flea-bitten war is over.” A career man didn’t say that; he wasn’t going anywhere, short of retirement—or buying it.
On the other hand, neither were we. But if you went “career” and then didn’t finish twenty…well, they could be pretty sticky about your franchise even though they wouldn’t keep a man who didn’t want to stay.
“Maybe not a two-year term,” I admitted. “But the war won’t last forever.”
“It won’t?”
“How can it?”
“Blessed if I know. They don’t tell me these things. But I know that’s not what is troubling you, Johnnie. You got a girl waiting?”
“No. Well, I had,” I answered slowly, “but she ‘Dear-Johned’ me.” As a lie, this was no more than a mild decoration, which I tucked in because Ace seemed to expect it. Carmen wasn’t my girl and she never waited for anybody—but she did address letters with “Dear Johnnie” on the infrequent occasions when she wrote to me.
Ace nodded wisely. “They’ll do it every time. They’d rather marry civilians and have somebody around to chew out when they feel like it. Never you mind, son—you’ll find plenty of them more than willing to marry when you’re retired…and you’ll be better able to handle one at that age. Marriage is a young ma
n’s disaster and an old man’s comfort.” He looked at my glass. “It nauseates me to see you drinking that slop.”
“I feel the same way about the stuff you drink,” I told him.
He shrugged. “As I say, it takes all kinds. You think it over.”
“I will.”
Ace got into a card game shortly after, and lent me some money and I went for a walk; I needed to think.
Go career? Quite aside from that noise about a commission, did I want to go career? Why, I had gone through all this to get my franchise, hadn’t I?—and if I went career, I was just as far away from the privilege of voting as if I had never enrolled…because as long as you were still in uniform you weren’t entitled to vote. Which was the way it should be, of course—why, if they let the Roughnecks vote the idiots might vote not to make a drop. Can’t have that.
Nevertheless I had signed up in order to win a vote.
Or had I?
Had I ever cared about voting? No, it was the prestige, the pride, the status…of being a citizen.
Or was it?
I couldn’t to save my life remember why I had signed up.
Anyhow, it wasn’t the process of voting that made a citizen—the Lieutenant had been a citizen in the truest sense of the word, even though he had not lived long enough ever to cast a ballot. He had “voted” every time he made a drop.
And so had I!
I could hear Colonel Dubois in my mind: “Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part…and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.”
I still didn’t know whether I yearned to place my one-and-only body “between my loved home and the war’s desolation”—I still got the shakes every drop and that “desolation” could be pretty desolate. But nevertheless I knew at last what Colonel Dubois had been talking about. The M.I. was mine and I was theirs. If that was what the M.I. did to break the monotony, then that was what I did. Patriotism was a bit esoteric for me, too large-scale to see. But the M.I. was my gang, I belonged. They were all the family I had left; they were the brothers I had never had, closer than Carl had ever been. If I left them, I’d be lost.