Down Among the Dead Men Read online

  Down Among the Dead Men

  William Tenn

  Down Among the Dead Men

  by William Tenn

  I stood in front of the junkyard’s outer gate and felt my stomach turn over slowly, grindingly, the way it had when I saw a whole terrestrial subfleet—close to 20,000 men—blown to bits in the Second Battle of Saturn more than eleven years ago. But then there had been shattered fragments of ships in my visiplate and imagined screams of men in my mind; there had been the expanding images of the Eoti’s box-like craft surging through the awful, drifting wreckage they had created, to account for the icy sweat that wound itself like a flat serpent around my forehead and my neck.

  Now there was nothing but a large, plain building, very much like the hundreds of other factories in the busy suburbs of Old Chicago, a manufacturing establishment surrounded by a locked gate and spacious proving grounds—the Junkyard. Yet the sweat on my skin was colder and the heave of my bowels more spastic than it had ever been in any of those countless, ruinous battles that had created this place.

  All of which was very understandable, I told myself. What I was feeling was the great-grandmother hag of all fears, the most basic rejection and reluctance of which my flesh was capable. It was understandable, but that didn’t help any. I still couldn’t walk up to the sentry at the gate.

  I’d been almost all right until I’d seen the huge square can against the fence, the can with the slight stink coming out of it and the big colorful sign on top:

  Don’t Waste Waste

  Place All Waste Here

  Remember—

  Whatever is Worn Can Be Shorn

  Whatever is Maimed Can Be Reclaimed

  Whatever is Used Can Be Reused

  Place All Waste Here

  —Conservation Police

  I’d seen those square, compartmented cans and those signs in every barracks, every hospital, every recreation center, between here and the asteroids. But seeing them, now, in this place, gave them a different meaning. I wondered if they had those other posters inside, the shorter ones. You know: “We need all our resources to defeat the enemy—and garbage is our biggest natural resource.” Decorating the walls of this particular building with those posters would be downright ingenious.

  Whatever is maimed can be reclaimed…I flexed my right arm inside my blue jumper sleeve. It felt like a part of me, always would feel like a part of me. And in a couple of years, assuming that I lived that long, the thin white scar that circled the elbow joint would be completely invisible. Sure. Whatever is maimed can be reclaimed. All except one thing. The most important thing.

  And I felt less like going in than ever.

  And then I saw this kid. The one from Arizona Base.

  He was standing right in front of the sentry box, paralyzed just like me. In the center of his uniform cap was a brand-new, gold-shiny Y with a dot in the center: the insignia of a sling-shot commander. He hadn’t been wearing it the day before at the briefing; that could only mean the commission had just come through. He looked real young and real scared.

  I remembered him from the briefing session. He was the one whose hand had gone up timidly during the question period, the one who, when he was recognized, had half risen, worked his mouth a couple of times and finally blurted out: “Excuse me, sir, but they don’t—they don’t smell at all bad, do they?”

  There had been a cyclone of laughter, the yelping laughter of men who’ve felt themselves close to the torn edge of hysteria all afternoon and who are damn glad that someone has at last said something that they can make believe is funny.

  And the white-haired briefing officer, who hadn’t so much as smiled, waited for the hysteria to work itself out, before saying gravely: “No, they don’t smell bad at all. Unless, that is, they don’t bathe. The same as you gentlemen.”

  That shut us up. Even the kid, blushing his way back into his seat, set his jaw stiffly at the reminder. And it wasn’t until twenty minutes later, when we’d been dismissed, that I began to feel the ache in my own face from the unrelaxed muscles there.

  The same as you gentlemen…

  I shook myself hard and walked over to the kid. “Hello, Commander,” I said. “Been here long?”

  He managed a grin. “Over an hour, Commander. I caught the eight-fifteen out of Arizona Base. Most of the other fellows were still sleeping off last night’s party, I’d gone to bed early; I wanted to give myself as much time to get the feel of this thing as I could. Only it doesn’t seem to do much good.”

  “I know. Some things you can’t get used to. Some things you’re not supposed to get used to.”

  He looked at my chest. “I guess this isn’t your first sling-shot command?”

  My first? More like my twenty-first, son! But then I remembered that everyone tells me I look young for my medals, and what the hell, the kid looked so pale—“No, not exactly my first. But I’ve never had a blob crew before. This is exactly as new to me as it is to you. Hey, listen, Commander: I’m having a hard time, too. What say we bust through that gate together? Then the worst’ll be over.”

  The kid nodded violently. We linked arms and marched up to the sentry. We showed him our orders. He opened the gate and said: “Straight ahead. Any elevator on your left to the fifteenth floor.”

  So, still arm in arm, we walked into the main entrance of the large building, up a long flight of steps and under the sign that said in red and black:

  Human Protoplasm Reclamation Center

  Third District Finishing Plant

  There were some old-looking but very erect men walking along the main lobby and a lot of uniformed, fairly pretty girls. I was pleased to note that most of the girls were pregnant. The first pleasing sight I had seen in almost a week.

  We turned into an elevator and told the girl, “Fifteen.” She punched a button and waited for it to fill up. She didn’t seem to be pregnant. I wondered what was the matter with her.

  I’d managed to get a good grip on my heaving imagination, when I got a look at the shoulder patches the other passengers were wearing. That almost did for me right there. It was a circular red patch with the black letters TAF superimposed on a white G-4. TAF for Terrestrial Armed Forces, of course: the letters were the basic insignia of all rear-echelon outfits. But why didn’t they use G-1, which represented Personnel? G-4 stood for the Supply Division. Supply!

  You can always trust the TAF. Thousands of morale specialists in all kinds of ranks, working their educated heads off to keep up the spirits of the men in the fighting perimeters—but every damn time, when it comes down to scratch, the good old dependable TAF will pick the ugliest name, the one in the worst possible taste.

  Oh, sure, I told myself, you can’t fight a shattering, no-quarter interstellar war for twenty-five years and keep every pretty thought dewy-damp and intact, But not Supply, gentlemen. Not this place—not the Junkyard. Let’s at least try to keep up appearances.

  Then we began going up and the elevator girl began announcing floors and I had lots of other things to think about.

  “Third floor—Corpse Reception and Classification,” the operator sang out.

  “Fifth floor—Preliminary Organ Processing.”

  “Seventh floor—Brain Reconstitution and Neural Alignment.”

  “Ninth floor—Cosmetics, Elementary Reflexes, and Muscular Control.”

  At this point, I forced myself to stop listening, the way you do when you’re on a heavy cruiser, say, and the rear engine room gets flicked by a bolt from an Eoti scrambler. After you’ve been around a couple of times when it’s happened, you learn to sort of close your ears and say to yourself, “I don’t know anybody in that damned engine room, not anybody, and in a few minutes everything will b
e nice and quiet again.” And in a few minutes it is. Only trouble is that then, like as not, you’ll be part of the detail that’s ordered into the steaming place to scrape the guck off the walls and get the jets firing again.

  Same way now. Just as soon as I had that girl’s voice blocked out, there we were on the fifteenth floor (“Final Interviews and Shipping”) and the kid and I had to get out.

  He was real green. A definite sag around the knees, shoulders sloping forward like his clavicle had curled. Again I was grateful to him. Nothing like having somebody to take care of.

  “Come on, Commander,” I whispered. “Up and at ’em. Look at it this way: for characters like us, this is practically a family reunion.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. He looked at me as if I’d punched his face. “No thanks to you for the reminder, Mister,” he said. “Even if we are in the same boat.” Then he walked stiffly up to the receptionist.

  I could have bitten my tongue off. I hurried after him. “I’m sorry, kid,” I told him earnestly. “The words just slid out of my big mouth. But don’t get sore at me; hell, I had to listen to myself say it too.”

  He stopped, thought about it, and nodded. Then he gave me a smile. “OK. No hard feelings. It’s a rough war, isn’t it?”

  I smiled back. “Rough? Why, if you’re not careful, they tell me, you can get killed in it.”

  The receptionist was a soft little blonde with two wedding rings on one hand, and one wedding ring on the other. From what I knew of current planet-side customs, that meant she’d been widowed twice.

  She took our orders and read jauntily into her desk mike: “Attention Final Conditioning. Attention Final Conditioning. Alert for immediate shipment the following serial numbers: 70623152, 70623109, 70623166, and 70623123. Also 70538966, 70538923, 70538980, and 70538937. Please route through the correct numbered sections and check all data on TAF AGO forms 362 as per TAF Regulation 7896, of 15 June, 2145. Advise when available for Final Interviews.”

  I was impressed. Almost exactly the same procedure as when you go to Ordnance for a replacement set of stern exhaust tubes.

  She looked up and favored us with a lovely smile. “Your crews will be ready in a moment. Would you have a seat, gentlemen?”

  We had a seat gentlemen.

  After a while, she got up to take something out of a file cabinet set in the wall. As she came back to her desk, I noticed she was pregnant—only about the third or fourth month—and, naturally, I gave a little, satisfied nod. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the kid make the same kind of nod. We looked at each other and chuckled. “It’s a rough, rough war,” he said.

  “Where are you from anyway?” I asked. “That doesn’t sound like a Third District accent to me.”

  “It isn’t. I was born in Scandinavia—Eleventh Military District. My home town is Goteborg, Sweden. But after I got my—my promotion, naturally I didn’t care to see the folks any more. So I requested a transfer to the Third, and from now on, until I hit a scrambler, this is where I’ll be spending my furloughs and Earth-side hospitalizations.”

  I’d heard that a lot of the younger sling-shotters felt that way. Personally, I never had a chance to find out how I’d feel about visiting the old folks at home. My father was knocked off in the suicidal attempt to retake Neptune way back when I was still in high school learning elementary combat, and my mother was Admiral Raguzzi’s staff secretary when the flagship Thermopylae took a direct hit two years later in the famous defense of Ganymede. That was before the Breeding Regulations, of course, and women were still serving in administrative positions on the fighting perimeters.

  On the other hand, I realized, at least two of my brothers might still be alive. But I’d made no attempt to contact them since getting my dotted Y. So I guessed I felt the same way as the kid—which was hardly surprising.

  “Are you from Sweden?” the blonde girl was asking. “My second husband was born in Sweden. Maybe you knew him—Sven Nossen? He had a lot of relatives in Stockholm.”

  The kid screwed up his eyes as if he was thinking real hard. You know, running down a list of all the Swedes in Stockholm. Finally, he shook his head. “No, can’t say that I do. But I wasn’t out of Goteborg very much before I was called up.”

  She clucked sympathetically at his provincialism. The baby-faced blonde of classic anecdote. A real dumb kid. And yet—there were lots of very clever, high-pressure cuties around the inner planets these days who had to content themselves with a one-fifth interest in some abysmal slob who boasted the barest modicum of maleness. Or a certificate from the local sperm bank. Blondie here was on her third full husband.

  Maybe, I thought, if I were looking for a wife myself, this is what I’d pick to take the stink of scrambler rays out of my nose and the yammer-yammer-yammer of Irvingles out of my ears. Maybe I’d want somebody nice and simple to come home to from one of those complicated skirmishes with the Eoti where you spend most of your conscious thoughts trying to figure out just what battle rhythm the filthy insects are using this time. Maybe, if I were going to get married, I’d find a pretty fluffhead like this more generally desirable than—oh, well. Maybe. Considered as a problem in psychology it was interesting.

  I noticed she was talking to me. “You’ve never had a crew of this type before either, have you, Commander?”

  “Zombies, you mean? No, not yet, I’m happy to say.”

  She made a disapproving pout with her mouth. It was fully as cute as her approving pouts. “We do not like that word.”

  “All right, blobs then.”

  “We don’t like bl—that word either. You are talking about human beings like yourself, Commander. Very much like yourself.”

  I began to get sore fast, just the way the kid had out in the hall. Then I realized she didn’t mean anything by it. She didn’t know. What the hell—it wasn’t on our orders. I relaxed. “You tell me. What do you call them here?”

  The blonde sat up stiffly. “We refer to them as soldier surrogates. The epithet ‘zombie’ was used to describe the obsolete Model 21 which went out of production over five years ago. You will be supplied with individuals based on Models 705 and 706, which are practically perfect. In fact, in some respects—”

  “No bluish skin? No slow-motion sleepwalking?”

  She shook her head violently, Her eyes were lit up. Evidently she’d digested all the promotional literature. Not such a fluffhead, after all; no great mind, but her husbands had evidently had someone to talk to in between times. She rattled on enthusiastically: “The cyanosis was the result of bad blood oxygenation; blood was our second most difficult tissue reconstruction problem, The nervous system was the hardest. Even though the blood cells are usually in the poorest shape of all by the time the bodies arrive, we can now turn out a very serviceable rebuilt heart. But, let there be the teeniest battle damage to the brain or spine and you have to start right from scratch. And then the troubles in reconstitution! My cousin Lorna works in Neural Alignment and she tells me all you need to make is just one wrong connection—you know how it is, Commander, at the end of the day your eyes are tired and you’re kind of watching the clock—just one wrong connection, and the reflexes in the finished individual turn out to be so bad that they just have to send him down to the third floor and begin all over again. But you don’t have to worry about that. Since Model 663, we’ve been using the two-team inspection system in Neural Alignment. And the 700 series—oh, they’ve just been wonderful.”

  “That good, eh? Better than the old-fashioned mother’s son type?”

  “Well-1-1,” she considered. “You’d really be amazed, Commander, if you could see the very latest performance charts. Of course, there is always that big deficiency, the one activity we’ve never been able to—”

  “One thing I can’t understand,” the kid broke in, “why do they have to use corpses! A body’s lived its life, fought its war—why not leave it alone? I know the Eoti can outbreed us merely by increasing the number of queens in thei
r flagships; I know that manpower is the biggest single TAF problem—but we’ve been synthesizing protoplasm for a long, long time now. Why not synthesize the whole damn body, from toenails to frontal lobe, and turn out real, honest-to-God androids that don’t wallop you with the stink of death when you meet them?”

  The little blonde got mad. “Our product does not stink! Cosmetics can now guarantee that the new models have even less of a body odor than you, young man! And we do not reactivate or revitalize corpses, I’ll have you know; what we do is reclaim human protoplasm, we reuse worn-out and damaged human cellular material in the area where the greatest shortages currently occur, military personnel. You wouldn’t talk about corpses, I assure you, if you saw the condition that some of those bodies are in when they arrive. Why, sometimes in a whole baling package—a baling package contains twenty casualties—we don’t find enough to make one good, whole kidney. Then we have to take a little intestinal tissue here and a bit of spleen there, alter them, unite them carefully, activa—”

  “That’s what I mean. If you go to all that trouble, why not start with real raw material?”

  “Like what, for example?” she asked him.

  The kid gestured with his black-gloved hands. “Basic elements like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and so on. It would make the whole process a lot cleaner.”

  “Basic elements have to come from somewhere,” I pointed out gently. “You might take your hydrogen and oxygen from air and water. But where would you get your carbon from?”

  “From the same place where the other synthetics manufacturers get it—coal, oil, cellulose.”

  The receptionist sat back and relaxed, “Those are organic substances,” she reminded him. “If you’re going to use raw material that was once alive, why not use the kind that comes as close as possible to the end-product you have in mind? It’s simple industrial economics, Commander, believe me. The best and cheapest raw material for the manufacture of soldier surrogates is soldier bodies.”