Bill, the Galactic Hero Read online

  "I haven't got a sister," he grumbled peevishly. "And if I did why should she want to marry a lizard anyway?" It was a rhetorical question but it brought an answer from the far end of the room, from the last shot tower in the second row.

  "It doesn't mean exactly what it says — it's just there to make us hate the dirty enemy more."

  Bill jumped, he had thought he was alone in the latrine, and the razor buzzed spitefully and gouged a bit of flesh from his lip.

  "Who's there? Why are you hiding?" he snarled, then recognized the huddled dark figure and the many pairs of boots. "Oh, it's only you Eager." His anger drained away and he turned back to the mirror.

  Eager Beager was so much a part of the latrine that you forgot he was there. A moon-faced, eternally smiling youth whose apple red cheeks never lost their glow, and whose smile looked so much out of place here in Camp Leon Trotsky that everyone wanted to kill him until they remembered that he was mad. He had to be mad because he was always eager to help his buddies and had volunteered as permanent latrine orderly. Not only that, but he liked to polish boots and had offered to do those of one after another of his buddies until now he did the boots for every man in the squad every night. Whenever they were in the barracks Eager Beager could be found crouched at the end of the thrones that were his personal domain, surrounded by the heaps of shoes and polishing industriously, his face wreathed in smiles. He would still be there after lights out, working by the light of a burning wick stuck in a can of polish, and was usually up before the others in the morning, finishing his voluntary job and still smiling. Sometimes, when the boots were very dirty, he worked right through the night. The kid was obviously insane but no one turned him in because he did such a good job on the boots and they all prayed that he wouldn't die of exhaustion until recruit training was finished.

  "Well if that's what they want to say, why don't they just say, 'Hate the dirty enemy more'?" Bill complained. He jerked his thumb at the far wall where there was a poster labelled KNOW THE ENEMY. It featured a life-size illustration of a Chinger, a seven-foot high saurian that looked very much like a scale-covered, four-armed, green kangaroo with an alligator's head. "Whose sister would want to marry a thing like that anyway? And what would a thing like that want to do with a sister, except maybe eat her?"

  Eager put a last buff on a purple toe and picked up another boot. He frowned for a brief instant to show what a serious thought this was. "Well you see, gee — It doesn't mean a real sister. It's just part of psychological warfare. We have to win the war. To win the war we have to fight hard. In order to fight hard we have to have good soldiers. Good soldiers have to hate the enemy. That's the way it goes. The Chingers are the only non-human race that has been discovered in the galaxy that has gone beyond the aboriginal level, so naturally we have to wipe them out."

  "What the hell do you mean naturally? I don't want to wipe anyone out. I just want to go home and be a Technical Fertilizer Operator."

  "Well I don't mean you personally, of course — gee!" Eager opened a fresh can of polish with purple-stained hands and dug his fingers into it. "I mean the human race, that's just the way we do things. If we don't wipe them out they'll wipe us out. Of course they say that war is against their religion and they will only fight in defence, and they have never made any attacks yet. But we can't believe them even though it is true. They might change their religion or their minds some day and then where would we be? The best answer is to wipe them out now."

  Bill unplugged his razor and washed his face in the tepid, rusty water. "It still doesn't seem to make sense. All right, so the sister I don't have doesn't marry one of them. But how about that —" he pointed to the stencilling on the duckboards, KEEP THIS SHOWER CLEAR — THE ENEMY CAN HEAR. "Or that —" The sign above the urinal that read BUTTON FLIES — BEWARE SPIES. "Forgetting for the moment that we don't have any secrets here worth travelling a mile to hear, much less twenty-five light years — how could a Chinger possibly be a spy? What kind of make-up would disguise a seven-foot lizard as a recruit? You couldn't even disguise one to look like Deathwish Drang, though you could get pretty close —"

  The lights went out and, as though using his name had summoned him like a devil from the pit, the voice of Deathwish blasted through the barracks.

  "Into your sacks! Into your sacks! Don't you lousy bowbs know there's a war on!"

  Bill stumbled away through the darkness of the barracks where the only illumination was the red glow from Deathwish's eyes. He fell asleep the instant his head touched his carborundum pillow and it seemed that only a moment had elapsed before reveille sent him hurtling from his bunk. At breakfast, while he was painfully cutting his coffee-substitute into chunks small enough to swallow, the telenews reported heavy fighting in the Beta Lyra sector with mounting losses. A groan rippled through the mess hall when this was announced, not because of any excess of patriotism, but because any bad news would only make things worse for them. They did not know how this would be arranged, but they were positive it would be. They were right. Since the morning was a bit cooler than usual the Monday parade was postponed until noon when the ferro-concrete drill ground would have warmed up nicely and there would be the maximum number of heat prostration cases. But this was just the beginning. From where Bill stood at attention near the rear he could see that the air-conditioned canopy was up on the reviewing stand. That meant brass. The trigger guard of his atomic rifle dug a hole into his shoulder and a drop of sweat collected then dripped from the tip of his nose. Out of the corners of his eyes he could see the steady ripple of motion as men collapsed here and there, among the massed ranks of thousands, and were dragged to the waiting ambulances by alert corpsmen. Here they were laid in the shade of the vehicles until they revived and could be urged back to their positions in the formation.

  Then the band burst into SPACEMEN HO AND CHINGERS VANQUISHED! and the broadcast signal to each boot heel snapped the ranks to attention at the same instant and the thousands of rifles flashed in the sun. The commanding general's staff car — this was obvious from the two stars painted on it — pulled up beside the reviewing stand and a tiny, round figure moved quickly through the furnacelike air to the comfort of the enclosure. Bill had never seen him any closer than this, at least from the front, though once while he was returning from late KP he had spotted the general getting into his car near the camp theatre. At least Bill thought it was he, but all he had seen was a brief rear view. Therefore, if he had a mental picture of the general, it was of a large backside superimposed on a teeny ant-like figure. He thought of most officers in these general terms, since the men of course had nothing to do with officers during their recruit training. Bill had had a good glimpse of a second lieutenant once, near the orderly room, and he knew he had a face. And there had been a medical officer who hadn't been more than thirty yards away, who had lectured them on venereal disease, but Bill had been lucky enough to sit behind a post and had promptly fallen asleep.

  After the band shut up, the anti-G loudspeakers floated out over the troops and the general addressed them. He had nothing to say that anyone cared to listen to and he closed with the announcement that because of losses in the field their training programme would be accelerated, which was just what they had expected. Then the band played some more and they marched back to the barracks, changed into their haircloth fatigues and marched — double time now — to the range where they fired their atomic rifles at plastic replicas of Chingers that popped up out of holes in the ground. Their aim was very bad until Deathwish Drang popped out of a hole and every trooper switched to full automatic and hit with every charge fired from every gun, which is a very hard thing to do. Then the smoke cleared and they stopped cheering and started sobbing when they saw that it was only a plastic replica of Deathwish, now torn to tiny pieces, and the original appeared behind them and gnashed its tusks and gave them all a full month's KP.

  "The human body is a wonderful thing," Bowb Brown said a month later when they were sitting around
a table in the Lowest Ranks Klub eating plastic skinned sausages stuffed with road sweepings and drinking watery warm beer. Bowb Brown was a thoat herder from the plains, which is why they called him Bowb since everyone knows just what thoat-herders do with their thoats. He was tall, thin and bowlegged, his skin burnt to the colour of ancient leather. He rarely talked, being more used to the eternal silence of the plains broken only by the eerie cry of the restless thoat, but he was a great thinker since the one thing he had plenty of was time to think in. He could worry a thought for days, even weeks, before he mentioned it aloud, and while he was thinking about it nothing could disturb him. He even let them call him Bowb without protesting: call any other trooper Bowb and he would hit you in the face. Bill and Eager and the other troopers from X squad sitting around the table all clapped and cheered, as they always did when Bowb said something.

  "Tell us more, Bowb!"

  "It can still talk — I thought it was dead!"

  "Go on — why is the body a wonderful thing?"

  They waited in expectant silence while Bowb managed to tear a bite from his sausage and, after ineffectual chewing, swallowed it with an effort that brought tears to his eyes. He eased the pain with a mouthful of beer and spoke.

  "The human body is a wonderful thing because if it doesn't die it lives."

  They waited for more until they realized that he was finished, then they sneered.

  "Boy, are you full of bowb!"

  "Sign up for OCS!"

  "Yeah — but what does it mean?"

  Bill knew what it meant, but didn't tell them. There were only half as many men in the squad as there had been the first day. One man had been transferred, but all the others were in the hospital, or in the mental hospital, or discharged for the convenience of the government as being too crippled for active service. Or dead. The survivors, after losing every ounce of weight not made up of bone or essential connective tissue, had put back the lost weight in the form of muscle and were now completely adapted to the rigours of Camp Leon Trotsky, though they still loathed it. Bill marvelled at the efficiency of the system. Civilians had to fool around with examinations, grades, retirement benefits, seniority and a thousand other factors that limited the efficiency of the workers. But how easily the troopers did it! They simply killed off the weaker ones and used the survivors. He respected the system. Though he still loathed it.

  "You know what I need, I need a woman," Ugly Ugglesway said.

  "Don't talk dirty," Bill told him promptly, since he had been correctly brought up.

  "I'm not talking dirty!" Ugly whined. "It's not like I said I wanted to re-enlist or that I thought Deathwish was human or anything like that. I just said I need a woman. Don't we all?"

  "I need a drink," Bowb Brown said as he took a long swig from his glass of dehydrated reconstituted beer, shuddered, then squirted it out through his teeth in a long stream on to the concrete, where it instantly evaporated.

  "Affirm, affirm," Ugly agreed, bobbing his mat-haired warty head up and down. "I need a woman and a drink." His whine became almost plaintive. "After all, what else is there to want in the troopers outside of out?"

  They thought about that a long time, but could think of nothing else that anyone really wanted. Eager Beager looked out from under the table where he was surreptitiously polishing a boot and said that he wanted more polish, but they ignored him. Even Bill, now that he put his mind to it, could think of nothing he really wanted other than this inextricably linked pair. He tried hard to think of something else, since he had vague memories of wanting other things when he had been a civilian, but nothing else came to mind.

  "Gee, it's only seven weeks more until we get our first pass," Eager said from under the table, then screamed a little as everyone kicked him at once.

  But slow as subjective time crawled by, the objective clocks were still operating and the seven weeks did pass by and eliminate themselves one by one. Busy weeks filled with all the essential recruit training courses: bayonet drill, small arms training, short arm inspection, greypfing, orientation lectures, drill, communal singing and the Articles of War. These last were read with dreadful regularity twice a week and were absolute torture because of the intense somnolence they brought on. At the first rustle of the scratchy, monotonous voice from the tape player, heads would begin to nod. But every seat in the auditorium was wired with an EEG that monitored the brain waves of the captive troopers. As soon as the shape of the Alpha wave indicated transition from consciousness to slumber a powerful jolt of current would be shot into the dozing buttocks, jabbing the owner painfully awake. The musty auditorium was a dimly lit torture chamber, filled with the droning dull voice punctuated by the sharp screams of the electrified, the sea of nodding heads abob here and there with painfully leaping figures.

  No one ever listened to the terrible executions and sentences announced in the Articles for the most innocent of crimes. Everyone knew that they had signed away all human rights when they enlisted, and the itemizing of what they had lost interested them not in the slightest. What they really were interested in was counting the hours until they would receive their first pass. The ritual by which this reward was begrudgingly given was unusually humiliating, but they expected this and merely lowered their eyes and shuffled forward in the line, ready to sacrifice any remaining shards of their self-respect in exchange for the crimpled scrap of plastic. This rite finished, there was a scramble for the monorail train whose track ran on electrically charged pillars, soaring over the thirty-foot high barbed wire, crossing the quicksand beds, then dropping into the little farming town of Leyville.

  At least it had been an agricultural town before Camp Leon Trotsky had been built and sporadically, in the hours when the troopers weren't on leave, it followed its original agrarian bent. The rest of the time the grain and feed stores shut down and the drink and knocking shops opened. Many times the same premises were used for both functions. A lever would be pulled when the first of the leave party thundered out of the station and the grain bins became beds, sales clerks pimps, cashiers retained their same function — though the prices went up — while counters would be racked with glasses to serve as bars. It was to one of these establishments, a mortuary-cum-saloon, that Bill and his friends went.

  "What'll it be, boys?" the ever-smiling owner of the Final Resting Bar and Grill asked.

  "Double shot of Embalming Fluid," Bowb Brown told him.

  "No jokes," the landlord said, the smile vanishing for a second as he took down a bottle on which the garish label REAL WHISKY had been pasted over the etched in EMBALMING FLUID. "Any trouble I call the MPs." The smile returned as money struck the counter. "Name your poison, gents."

  They sat around a long, narrow table as thick as it was wide with brass handles on both sides, and let the blessed relief of ethyl alcohol trickle a path down their dust-lined throats.

  "I never drank before I came into the service," Bill said, draining four fingers neat of Old Kidney Killer, and held his glass out for more.

  "You never had to," Ugly said, pouring.

  "That's for sure," Bowb Brown said, smacking his lips with relish and raising a bottle to his lips again.

  "Gee," Eager Beager said, sipping hesitantly at the edge of his glass, "It tastes like a tincture of sugar, wood chips, various esters and a number of higher alcohols."

  "Drink up," Bowb said incoherently around the neck of the bottle. "All them things is good for you."

  "Now I want a woman," Ugly said and there was a rush as they all jammed in the door trying to get out at the same time, until someone shouted, "Look!" and they turned to see Eager still sitting at the table.

  "Woman!" Ugly said enthusiastically, in the tone of voice you say Dinner! when you are calling a dog. The knot of men stirred in the doorway and stamped their feet. Eager didn't move.

  "Gee — I think I'll stay right here," he said, his smile simpler than ever. "But you guys run along."

  "Don't you feel well, Eager?"

 
"Feel fine."

  "Ain't you reached puberty?"

  "Gee..."

  "What you gonna do here?"

  Eager reached under the table and dragged out a canvas grip. He opened it to show them that it was packed with great, purple boots. "I thought I'd catch up on my polishing."