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?