“Really?” Blackie did not quite sneer. “After that masterly analysis, apply your powers of deduction and tell me why Lieutenant Silva failed to transfer him three weeks ago when we arrived around Sanctuary.”
I had wondered about that. The time to transfer a man is the earliest possible instant after you decide to let him go—and without warning; it’s better for the man and the team—so says the book. I said slowly, “Was Lieutenant Silva already ill at that time, Captain?”
“No.”
The pieces matched. “Captain, I recommend Brumby for immediate promotion.”
His eyebrows shot up. “A minute ago you were about to dump him as useless.”
“Uh, not quite. I said it had to be one or the other—but I didn’t know which. Now I know.”
“Continue.”
“Uh, this assumes that Lieutenant Silva is an efficient officer—”
“Hummmph! Mister, for your information, ‘Quick’ Silva has an unbroken string of ‘Excellent—Recommended for Promotion’ on his Form Thirty-One.”
“But I knew that he was good,” I plowed on, “because I inherited a good platoon. A good officer might not promote a man for—oh, for many reasons—and still not put his misgivings in writing. But in this case, if he could not recommend him for sergeant, then he wouldn’t keep him with the team—so he would get him out of the ship at the first opportunity. But he didn’t. Therefore I know he intended to promote Brumby.” I added, “But I can’t see why he didn’t push it through three weeks ago, so that Brumby could have worn his third chevron on R&R.”
Captain Blackstone grinned. “That’s because you don’t credit me with being efficient.”
“S—I beg pardon?”
“Never mind. You’ve proved who killed Cock Robin and I don’t expect a still-moist kaydet to know all the tricks. But listen and learn, son. As long as this war goes on, don’t ever promote a man just before you return to Base.”
“Uh…why not, Captain?”
“You mentioned sending Brumby to Replacement Depot if he was not to be promoted. But that’s just where he would have gone if we had promoted him three weeks ago. You don’t know how hungry that non-com desk at repple-depple is. Paw through the dispatch file and you’ll find a demand that we supply two sergeants for cadre. With a platoon sergeant being detached for O.C.S. and a buck sergeant spot vacant, I was under complement and able to refuse.” He grinned savagely. “It’s a rough war, son, and your own people will steal your best men if you don’t watch ’em.” He took two sheets of paper out of a drawer. “There—”
One was a letter from Silva to Cap’n Blackie, recommending Brumby for sergeant; it was dated over a month ago.
The other was Brumby’s warrant for sergeant—dated the day after we left Sanctuary.
“That suit you?” he asked.
“Huh? Oh, yes indeed!”
“I’ve been waiting for you to spot the weak place in your team, and tell me what had to be done. I’m pleased that you figured it out—but only middlin’ pleased because an experienced officer would have analyzed it at once from the T.O. and the service records. Never mind, that’s how you gain experience. Now here’s what you do. Write me a letter like Silva’s; date it yesterday. Tell your platoon sergeant to tell Brumby that you have put him up for a third stripe—and don’t mention that Silva did so. You didn’t know that when you made the recommendation, so we’ll keep it that way. When I swear Brumby in, I’ll let him know that both his officers recommended him independently—which will make him feel good. Okay, anything more?”
“Uh…not in organization—unless Lieutenant Silva planned to promote Naidi, vice Brumby. In which case we could promote one PFC to lance…and that would allow us to promote four privates to PFC, including three vacancies now existing. I don’t know whether it’s your policy to keep the T.O. filled up tight or not?”
“Might as well,” Blackie said gently, “as you and I know that some of those lads aren’t going to have many days in which to enjoy it. Just remember that we don’t make a man a PFC until after he has been in combat—not in Blackie’s Blackguards we don’t. Figure it out with your platoon sergeant and let me know. No hurry…any time before bedtime tonight. Now…anything else?”
“Well—Captain, I’m worried about the suits.”
“So am I. All platoons.”
“I don’t know all the other platoons, but with five recruits to fit, plus four suits damaged and exchanged, and two more downchecked this past week and replaced from stores—well, I don’t see how Cunha and Navarre can warm up that many and run routine tests on forty-one others and get it all done by our calculated date. Even if no trouble develops—”
“Trouble always develops.”
“Yes, Captain. But that’s two hundred and eighty-six man-hours just for warm & fit, and plus a hundred and twenty-three hours of routine checks. And it always takes longer.”
“Well, what do you think can be done? The other platoons will lend you help if they finish their suits ahead of time. Which I doubt. Don’t ask to borrow help from the Wolverines; we’re more likely to lend them help.”
“Uh… Captain, I don’t know what you’ll think of this, since you told me to stay out of troopers’ country. But when I was a corporal, I was assistant to the Ordnance & Armor sergeant.”
“Keep talking.”
“Well, right at the last I was the O&A sergeant. But I was just standing in another man’s shoes—I’m not a finished O&A mechanic. But I’m a pretty darn good assistant and if I was allowed to, well, I can either warm new suits, or run routine checks—and give Cunha and Navarre that much more time for trouble.”
Blackie leaned back and grinned. “Mister, I have searched the regs carefully…and I can’t find the one that says an officer mustn’t get his hands dirty.” He added, “I mention that because some ‘young gentlemen’ who have been assigned to me apparently had read such a regulation. All right, draw some dungarees—no need to get your uniform dirty along with your hands. Go aft and find your platoon sergeant, tell him about Brumby and order him to prepare recommendations to close the gaps in the T.O. in case I should decide to confirm your recommendation for Brumby. Then tell him that you are going to put in all your time on ordnance and armor—and that you want him to handle everything else. Tell him that if he has any problems to look you up in the armory. Don’t tell him you consulted me—just give him orders. Follow me?”
“Yes, s—Yes, I do.”
“Okay, get on it. As you pass through the cardroom, please give my compliments to Rusty and tell him to drag his lazy carcass in here.”
For the next two weeks I was never so busy—not even in boot camp. Working as an ordnance & armor mech about ten hours a day was not all that I did. Math, of course—and no way to duck it with the Skipper tutoring me. Meals—say an hour and a half a day. Plus the mechanics of staying alive—shaving, showering, putting buttons in uniforms and trying to chase down the Navy master-at-arms, get him to unlock the laundry to locate clean uniforms ten minutes before inspection. (It is an unwritten law of the Navy that facilities must always be locked when they are most needed. )
Guard mount, parade, inspections, a minimum of platoon routine, took another hour a day. But besides, I was “George.” Every outfit has a “George.” He’s the most junior officer and has the extra jobs—athletics officer, mail censor, referee for competitions, school officer, correspondence courses officer, prosecutor courts-martial, treasurer of the welfare mutual loan fund, custodian of registered publications, stores officer, troopers’ mess officer, et cetera ad endless nauseam.
Rusty Graham had been “George” until he happily turned it over to me. He wasn’t so happy when I insisted on a sight inventory on everything for which I had to sign. He suggested that if I didn’t have sense enough to accept a commissioned officer’s signed inventory then perhaps a direct order would change my tune. So I got sullen and told him to put his orders in writing—with a certified copy so that I could keep
the original and endorse the copy over to the team commander.
Rusty angrily backed down—even a second lieutenant isn’t stupid enough to put such orders in writing. I wasn’t happy either as Rusty was my roommate and was then still my tutor in math, but we held the sight inventory. I got chewed out by Lieutenant Warren for being stupidly officious but he opened his safe and let me check his registered publications. Captain Blackstone opened his with no comment and I couldn’t tell whether he approved of my sight inventory or not.
Publications were okay but accountable property was not. Poor Rusty! He had accepted his predecessor’s count and now the count was short—and the other officer was not merely gone, he was dead. Rusty spent a restless night (and so did I!), then went to Blackie and told him the truth.
Blackie chewed him out, then went over the missing items, found ways to expend most of them as “lost in combat.” It reduced Rusty’s shortages to a few days’ pay—but Blackie had him keep the job, thereby postponing the cash reckoning indefinitely.
Not all “George” jobs caused that much headache. There were no courts-martial; good combat teams don’t have them. There was no mail to censor as the ship was in Cherenkov drive. Same for welfare loans for similar reasons. Athletics I delegated to Brumby; referee was “if and when.” The troopers’ mess was excellent; I initialed menus and sometimes inspected the galley, i.e., I scrounged a sandwich without getting out of dungarees when working late in the armory. Correspondence courses meant a lot of paperwork since quite a few were continuing their educations, war or no war—but I delegated my platoon sergeant and the records were kept by the PFC who was his clerk.
Nevertheless “George” jobs soaked up about two hours every day—there were so many.
You see where this left me—ten hours O&A, three hours math, meals an hour and a half, personal one hour, military fiddlework one hour, “George” two hours, sleep eight hours; total, twenty-six and a half hours. The ship wasn’t even on the twenty-five-hour Sanctuary day; once we left we went on Greenwich standard and the universal calendar.
The only slack was in my sleeping time.
I was sitting in the cardroom about one o’clock one morning, plugging away at math, when Captain Blackstone came in. I said, “Good evening, Captain.”
“Morning, you mean. What the deuce ails you, son? Insomnia?”
“Uh, not exactly.”
He picked up a stack of sheets, remarking, “Can’t your sergeant handle your paperwork? Oh, I see. Go to bed.”
“But, Captain—”
“Sit back down. Johnnie, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. I never see you here in the cardroom, evenings. I walk past your room, you’re at your desk. When your bunkie goes to bed, you move out here. What’s the trouble?”
“Well… I just never seem to get caught up.”
“Nobody ever does. How’s the work going in the armory?”
“Pretty well. I think we’ll make it.”
“I think so, too. Look, son, you’ve got to keep a sense of proportion. You have two prime duties. First is to see that your platoon’s equipment is ready—you’re doing that. You don’t have to worry about the platoon itself, I told you that. The second—and just as important—you’ve got to be ready to fight. You’re muffing that.”
“I’ll be ready, Captain.”
“Nonsense and other comments. You’re getting no exercise and losing sleep. Is that how to train for a drop? When you lead a platoon, son, you’ve got to be on the bounce. From here on you will exercise from sixteen-thirty to eighteen hundred each day. You will be in your sack with lights out at twenty-three hundred—and if you lie awake fifteen minutes two nights in a row, you will report to the Surgeon for treatment. Orders.”
“Yes, sir.” I felt the bulkheads closing in on me and added desperately, “Captain, I don’t see how I can get to bed by twenty-three—and still get everything done.”
“Then you won’t. As I said, son, you must have a sense of proportion. Tell me how you spend your time.”
So I did. He nodded. “Just as I thought.” He picked up my math “homework,” tossed it in front of me. “Take this. Sure, you want to work on it. But why work so hard before we go into action?”
“Well, I thought—”
“‘Think’ is what you didn’t do. There are four possibilities, and only one calls for finishing these assignments. First, you might buy a farm. Second, you might buy a small piece and be retired with an honorary commission. Third, you might come through all right…but get a downcheck on your Form Thirty-One from your examiner, namely me. Which is just what you’re aching for at the present time—why, son, I won’t even let you drop if you show up with eyes red from no sleep and muscles flabby from too much chair parade. The fourth possibility is that you take a grip on yourself…in which case I might let you take a swing at leading a platoon. So let’s assume that you do and put on the finest show since Achilles slew Hector and I pass you. In that case only—you’ll need to finish these math assignments. So do them on the trip back.
“That takes care of that—I’ll tell the Skipper. The rest of those jobs you are relieved of, right now. On our way home you can spend your time on math. If we get home. But you’ll never get anywhere if you don’t learn to keep first things first. Go to bed!”
A week later we made rendezvous, coming out of drive and coasting short of the speed of light while the fleet exchanged signals. We were sent Briefing, Battle Plan, our Mission & Orders—a stack of words as long as a novel—and were told not to drop.
Oh, we were to be in the operation but we would ride down like gentlemen, cushioned in retrieval boats. This we could do because the Federation already held the surface; Second, Third, and Fifth M.I. Divisions had taken it—and paid cash.
The described real estate didn’t seem worth the price. Planet P is smaller than Terra, with a surface gravity of 0.7, is mostly arctic-cold ocean and rock, with lichenous flora and no fauna of interest. Its air is not breathable for long, being contaminated with nitrous oxide and too much ozone. Its one continent is about half the size of Australia, plus many worthless islands; it would probably require as much terra-forming as Venus before we could use it.
However, we were not buying real estate to live on; we went there because Bugs were there—and they were there on our account, so Staff thought. Staff told us that Planet P was an uncompleted advance base (prob. 87 ± 6 per cent) to be used against us.
Since the planet was no prize, the routine way to get rid of this Bug base would be for the Navy to stand off at a safe distance and render this ugly spheroid uninhabitable by Man or Bug. But the C-in-C had other ideas.
The operation was a raid. It sounds incredible to call a battle involving hundreds of ships and thousands of casualties a “raid,” especially as, in the meantime, the Navy and a lot of other cap troopers were keeping things stirred up many light-years into Bug space in order to divert them from reinforcing Planet P.
But the C-in-C was not wasting men; this giant raid could determine who won the war, whether next year or thirty years hence. We needed to learn more about Bug psychology. Must we wipe out every Bug in the Galaxy? Or was it possible to trounce them and impose a peace? We did not know; we understood them as little as we understand termites.
To learn their psychology we had to communicate with them, learn their motivations, find out why they fought and under what conditions they would stop; for these, the Psychological Warfare Corps needed prisoners.
Workers are easy to capture. But a Bug worker is hardly more than animate machinery. Warriors can be captured by burning off enough limbs to make them helpless—but they are almost as stupid without a director as workers. From such prisoners our own professor types had learned important matters—the development of that oily gas that killed them but not us came from analyzing the biochemistries of workers and warriors, and we had had other new weapons from such research even in the short time I had been a cap trooper. But to discover why Bugs fight we needed
to study members of their brain caste. Also, we hoped to exchange prisoners.
So far, we had never taken a brain Bug alive. We had either cleaned out colonies from the surface, as on Sheol, or (as had too often been the case) raiders had gone down their holes and not come back. A lot of brave men had been lost this way.
Still more had been lost through retrieval failure. Sometimes a team on the ground had its ship or ships knocked out of the sky. What happens to such a team? Possibly it dies to the last man. More probably it fights until power and ammo are gone, then survivors are captured as easily as so many beetles on their backs.
From our co-belligerents the Skinnies we knew that many missing troopers were alive as prisoners—thousands we hoped, hundreds we were sure. Intelligence believed that prisoners were always taken to Klendathu; the Bugs are as curious about us as we are about them—a race of individuals able to build cities, starships, armies, may be even more mysterious to a hive entity than a hive entity is to us.
As may be, we wanted those prisoners back!
In the grim logic of the universe this may be a weakness. Perhaps some race that never bothers to rescue an individual may exploit this human trait to wipe us out. The Skinnies have such a trait only slightly and the Bugs don’t seem to have it at all—nobody ever saw a Bug come to the aid of another because he was wounded; they co-operate perfectly in fighting but units are abandoned the instant they are no longer useful.
Our behavior is different. How often have you seen a headline like this?—TWO DIE ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF DROWNING CHILD. If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost just as many volunteers turn out.
Poor arithmetic…but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature—a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price.