Down Among the Dead Men Read online

  “Sure,” the kid said. “Makes sense. There’s no other use for dead, old, beaten-up soldier bodies. Better’n shoving them in the ground where they’d be just waste, pure waste.”

  Our little blonde chum started to smile in agreement, then shot him an intense look and changed her mind. She looked very uncertain all of a sudden. When the communicator on her desk buzzed, she bent over it eagerly.

  I watched her with approval. Definitely no fluffhead. Just feminine. I sighed. You see, I figure lots of civilian things out the wrong way, but only with women is my wrongness an all-the-time proposition. Proving again that a hell of a lot of peculiar things turn out to have happened for the best.

  “Commander,” she was saying to the kid. “Would you go to Room 1591? Your crew will be there in a moment.” She turned to me. “And Room 1524 for you, Commander, if you please.”

  The kid nodded and walked off, very stiff and erect. I waited until the door had closed behind him, then I leaned over the receptionist. “Wish they’d change the Breeding Regulations again,” I told her. “You’d make a damn fine rear-echelon orientation officer. Got more of the feel of the Junkyard from you than in ten briefing sessions.”

  She examined my face anxiously, “I hope you mean that, Commander. You see, we’re all very deeply involved in this project. We’re extremely proud of the progress the Third District Finishing Plant has made. We talk about the new developments all the time, everywhere—even in the cafeteria. It didn’t occur to me until too late that you gentlemen might—” she blushed deep, rich red, the way only a blonde can blush “—might take what I said personally. I’m sorry if I—”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” I assured her. “All you did was talk what they call shop. Like when I was in the hospital last month and heard two surgeons discussing how to repair a man’s arm and making it sound as if they were going to nail a new arm on an expensive chair. Real interesting, and I learned a lot.”

  I left her looking grateful, which is absolutely the only way to leave a woman, and barged on to Room 1524.

  It was evidently used as a classroom when reconverted human junk wasn’t being picked up. A bunch of chairs, a long blackboard, a couple of charts. One of the charts was on the Eoti, the basic information list, that contains all the limited information we have been able to assemble on the bugs in the bloody quarter-century since they came busting in past Pluto to take over the solar system. It hadn’t been changed much since the one I had to memorize in high school: the only difference was a slightly longer section on intelligence and motivation. Just theory, of course, but more carefully thought-out theory than the stuff I’d learned. The big brains had now concluded that the reason all attempts at communicating with them had failed was not because they were a conquest-crazy species, but because they suffered from the same extreme xenophobia as their smaller, less intelligent communal insect cousins here on Earth. That is, an ant wanders up to a strange anthill—zok! No discussion, he’s chopped down at the entrance. And the sentry ants react even faster if it’s a creature of another genus. So despite the Eoti science, which in too many respects was more advanced than ours, they were psychologically incapable of the kind of mental projection, or empathy, necessary if one is to realize that a completely alien-looking individual has intelligence, feelings—and rights!—to substantially the same extent as oneself.

  Well, it might be so. Meanwhile, we were locked in a murderous stalemate with them on a perimeter of never-ending battle that sometimes expanded as far as Saturn and occasionally contracted as close as Jupiter. Barring the invention of a new weapon of such unimaginable power that we could wreck their fleet before they could duplicate the weapon, as they’d been managing to up to now, our only hope was to discover somehow the stellar system from which they came, somehow build ourselves not one starship but a fleet of them—and somehow wreck their home base or throw enough of a scare into it so that they’d pull back their expedition for defensive purposes. A lot of somehows.

  But if we wanted to maintain our present position until the somehows started to roll, our birth announcements had to take longer to read than the casualty lists. For the last decade, this hadn’t been so, despite the more and more stringent Breeding Regulations which were steadily pulverizing every one of our moral codes and sociological advances. Then there was the day that someone in the Conservation Police noticed that almost half our ships of the line had been fabricated from the metallic junk of previous battles. Where was the personnel that had manned those salvage derelicts, he wondered…

  And thus what Blondie outside and her co-workers were pleased to call soldier surrogates.

  I’d been a computer’s mate, second class, on the old Jenghiz Khan when the first batch had come aboard as battle replacements. Let me tell you, friends, we had real good reason for calling them zombies! Most of them were as blue as the uniforms they wore, their breathing was so noisy it made you think of asthmatics with built-in public address systems, their eyes shone with all the intelligence of petroleum jelly—and the way they walked!

  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 be
gan 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?

  The second reason was almost more important and harder to define. According to the briefing officer, yesterday, there was a peculiar feeling—a superstitious feeling, you might almost say—that if you copied a hero’s features, musculature, metabolism, and even his cortex wrinkles carefully enough, well, you might build yourself another hero. Of course, the original personality would never reappear—that had been produced by long years of a specific environment and dozens of other very slippery factors—but it was distinctly possible, the biotechs felt, that a modicum of clever courage resided in the body structure alone…

  Well, at least these zombies didn’t look like zombies!

  On an impulse, I plucked the rolled sheaf of papers containing our travel orders out of my pocket, pretended to study it and let it slip suddenly through my fingers. As the outspread sheaf spiraled to the floor in front of me, Roger Grey reached out and caught it. He handed it back to me with the same kind of easy yet snappy grace. I took it, feeling good. It was the way he moved. I like to see a co-pilot move that way.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He just nodded.

  I studied Yussuf Lamehd next. Yes, he had it too. Whatever it is that makes a first-class gunner, he had it. It’s almost impossible to describe, but you walk into a bar in some rest area on Eros, say, and out of the five sling-shotters hunched over the blow-top table, you know right off which is the gunner. It’s a sort of carefully bottled nervousness or a dead calm with a hair-trigger attachment. Whatever it is, it’s what you need sitting over a firing button when you’ve completed the dodge, curve, and twist that’s a sling-shot’s attacking dash and you’re barely within range of the target, already beginning your dodge, curve, and twist back to safety. Lamehd had it so strong that I’d have put money on him against any other gunner in the TAF I’d ever seen in action.

  Astrogators and engineers are different. You’ve just got to see them work under pressure before you can rate them. But, even so, I liked the calm and confident manner with which Wang Hsi and Weinstein sat under my examination. And I liked them.

  Right there I felt a hundred pounds slide off my chest. I felt relaxed for the first time in days. I really liked my crew, zombies or no. We’d make it.

  I decided to tell them. “Men,” I said, “I think we’ll really get along. I think we’ve got the makings of a sweet, smooth sling-shot. You’ll find me—”

  And I stopped. That cold, slightly mocking look in their eyes. They way they had glanced at each other when I told them I thought we’d get along, glanced at each other and blown slightly through distended nostrils. I realized that none of them had said anything since they’d come in; they’d just been watching me, and their eyes weren’t exactly warm.

  I stopped and let myself take a long, deep breath. For the first time, it was occurring to me that I’d been worrying about just one end of the problem, and maybe the least important end. I’d been worrying about how I’d react to them and how much I’d be able to accept them as shipmates. They were zombies, after all. It had never occurred to me to wonder how they’d feel about me.

  And there was evidently something very wrong in how they felt about me.

  “What is it, men?” I asked. They all looked at me inquiringly. “What’s on your minds?”

  They kept looking at me. Weinstein pursed his lips and tilted his chair back and forth. It creaked. Nobody said anything.

  I got off the desk and walked up and down in front of the classroom. They kept following me with their eyes.

  �
��Grey,” I said. “You look as if you’ve got a great big knot inside you. Want to tell me about it?”

  “No, Commander,” he said deliberately. “I don’t want to tell you about it.”

  I grimaced. “If anyone wants to say anything—anything at all—it’ll be off the record and completely off the record. Also for the moment we’ll forget about such matters as rank and TAF regulations.” I waited. “Wang? Lamehd? How about you, Weinstein?” They stared at me quietly. Weinstein’s chair creaked back and forth.

  It had me baffled. What kind of gripe could they have against me? They’d never met me before. But I knew one thing: I wasn’t going to haul a crew nursing a subsurface grudge as unanimous as this aboard a sling-shot. I wasn’t going to chop space with those eyes at my back. It would be more efficient for me to shove my head against an Irvingle lens and push the button.

  “Listen,” I told them. “I meant what I said about forgetting rank and TAF regulations. I want to run a happy ship and I have to know what’s up. We’ll be living, the five of us, in the tightest, most cramped conditions the mind of man has yet been able to devise; we’ll be operating a tiny ship whose only purpose is to dodge at tremendous speed through the fire-power and screening devices of the larger enemy craft and deliver a single, crippling blast from a single oversize Irvingle. We’ve got to get along whether we like each other or not. If we don’t get along, if there’s any unspoken hostility getting in our way, the ship won’t operate at maximum efficiency. And that way, we’re through before we—”

  “Commander,” Weinstein said suddenly, his chair coming down upon the floor with a solid whack, “I’d like to ask you a question.”

  “Sure,” I said and let out a gust of relief that was the size of a small hurricane. “Ask me anything.”

  “When you think about us, Commander, or when you talk about us, which word do you use?”

  I looked at him and shook my head. “Eh?”