He sighed. “Another year, another class — and, for me, another failure. One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think.” Suddenly he pointed his stump at me. “You. What is the moral difference, if any, between the soldier and the civilian?”
“The difference,” I answered carefully, “lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.”
“The exact words of the book,” he said scornfully. “But do you understand it? Do you believe it?”
“Uh, I don’t know, sir.”
“Of course you don’t! I doubt if any of you here would recognize ‘civic virtue’ if it came up and barked in your face!” He glanced at his watch. “And that is all, a final all. Perhaps we shall meet again under happier circumstances. Dismissed.”
Graduation right after that and three days later my birthday, followed in less than a week by Carl’s birthday — and I still hadn’t told Carl that I wasn’t joining up. I’m sure he assumed that I would not, but we didn’t discuss it out loud — embarrassing. I simply arranged to meet him the day after his birthday and we went down to the recruiting office together.
On the steps of the Federal Building we ran into Carmencita Ibañez, a classmate of ours and one of the nice things about being a member of a race with two sexes. Carmen wasn’t my girl — she wasn’t anybody’s girl; she never made two dates in a row with the same boy and treated all of us with equal sweetness and rather impersonally. But I knew her pretty well, as she often came over and used our swimming pool, because it was Olympic length — sometimes with one boy, sometimes with another. Or alone, as Mother urged her to — Mother considered her “a good influence.” For once she was right.
She saw us and waited, dimpling. “Hi, fellows!”
“Hello, Ochee Chyornya,” I answered. “What brings you here?”
“Can’t you guess? Today is my birthday.”
“Huh? Happy returns!”
“So I’m joining up.”
“Oh …” I think Carl was as surprised as I was. But Carmencita was like that. She never gossiped and she kept her own affairs to herself. “No foolin’?” I added, brilliantly.
“Why should I be fooling? I’m going to be a spaceship pilot — at least I’m going to try for it.”
“No reason why you shouldn’t make it,” Carl said quickly. He was right — I know now just how right he was. Carmen was small and neat, perfect health and perfect reflexes — she could make competitive diving routine look easy and she was quick at mathematics. Me, I tapered off with a “C” in algebra and a “B” in business arithmetic; she took all the math our school offered and a tutored advance course on the side. But it had never occurred to me to wonder why. Fact was, little Carmen was so ornamental that you just never thought about her being useful.
“We — uh, I,” said Carl, “am here to join up, too.”
“And me,” I agreed. “Both of us.” No, I hadn’t made any decision; my mouth was leading its own life.
“Oh, wonderful!”
“And I’m going to buck for space pilot, too,” I added firmly.
She didn’t laugh. She answered very seriously, “Oh, how grand! Perhaps in training we’ll run into each other. I hope so.”
“Collision courses?” asked Carl. “That’s a no-good way to pilot.”
“Don’t be silly, Carl. On the ground, of course. Are you going to be a pilot, too?”
“Me? ” Carl answered. “I’m no truck driver. You know me — Starside R&D, if they’ll have me. Electronics.”
“‘Truck driver’ indeed! I hope they stick you out on Pluto and let you freeze. No, I don’t — good luck! Let’s go in, shall we?”
The recruiting station was inside a railing in the rotunda. A fleet sergeant sat at a desk there, in dress uniform, gaudy as a circus. His chest was loaded with ribbons I couldn’t read. But his right arm was off so short that his tunic had been tailored without any sleeve at all … and, when you came up to the rail, you could see that he had no legs.
It didn’t seem to bother him. Carl said, “Good morning. I want to join up.”
“Me, too,” I added.
He ignored us. He managed to bow while sitting down and said, “Good morning, young lady. What can I do for you?”
“I want to join up, too.”
He smiled. “Good girl! If you’ll just scoot up to room 201 and ask for Major Rojas, she’ll take care of you.” He looked her up and down. “Pilot?”
“If possible.”
“You look like one. Well, see Miss Rojas.”
She left, with thanks to him and a see-you-later to us; he turned his attention to us, sized us up with a total absence of the pleasure he had shown in little Carmen. “So?” he said. “For what? Labor battalions?”
“Oh, no!” I said. “I’m going to be a pilot.”
He stared at me and simply turned his eyes away. “You?”
“I’m interested in the Research and Development Corps,” Carl said soberly, “especially electronics. I understand the chances are pretty good.”
“They are if you can cut it,” the Fleet Sergeant said grimly, “and not if you don’t have what it takes, both in preparation and ability. Look, boys, have you any idea why they have me out here in front?”
I didn’t understand him. Carl said, “Why?”
“Because the government doesn’t care one bucket of swill whether you join or not! Because it has become stylish, with some people — too many people — to serve a term and earn a franchise and be able to wear a ribbon in your lapel which says that you’re a vet’ran … whether you’ve ever seen combat or not. But if you want to serve and I can’t talk you out of it, then we have to take you, because that’s your constitutional right. It says that everybody, male or female, shall have his born right to pay his service and assume full citizenship — but the facts are that we are getting hard pushed to find things for all the volunteers to do that aren’t just glorified K.P. You can’t all be real military men; we don’t need that many and most of the volunteers aren’t number-one soldier material anyhow. Got any idea what it takes to make a soldier?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Most people think that all it takes is two hands and two feet and a stupid mind. Maybe so, for cannon fodder. Possibly that was all that Julius Caesar required. But a private soldier today is a specialist so highly skilled that he would rate ‘master’ in any other trade; we can’t afford stupid ones. So for those who insist on serving their term — but haven’t got what we want and must have — we’ve had to think up a whole list of dirty, nasty, dangerous jobs that will either run ’em home with their tails between their legs and their terms uncompleted … or at the very least make them remember for the rest of their lives that their citizenship is valuable to them because they’ve paid a high price for it. Take that young lady who was here — wants to be a pilot. I hope she makes it; we always need good pilots, not enough of ’em. Maybe she will. But if she misses, she may wind up in Antarctica, her pretty eyes red from never seeing anything but artificial light and her knuckles callused from hard, dirty work.”