A Company of Heroes Book Five: The Space Cadet

by Ron Miller

  The rest of the watch had finished stowing the clabbing-gear and the two went forward, Judikha observing in the chilly, flickering light that Wopple was a tall, grizzled, loose-jointed man with a nose like a carpenter’s triangle and an expression that was rather inappropriately bemused. She couldn’t begin to imagine what could be amusing. Perhaps he’s a little simple-minded. He was rough enough that he might be sixty years old, but his chest was broad and his arms corded with muscles that might have been twenty years younger. The “doctor” was up and the cold greasy odor of food was wafting from the galley. Her deckwatch were grouped together, waiting for the early coffee served on all Rastabranaplanian ships at “turn-to”. The other watch had retired to its quarters, but as Judikha joined the line outside the galley, Lieutenant Birdwhistle appeared at the corridor junction and beckoned to her. Looking around to be certain no one was paying her defection any attention, she followed the officer to a cluster of pumps just behind the turbine housings and there, in an open space which precluded eavesdropping, Birdwhistle said in a low voice—

  “Know anything about the Rastabranaplanian hellship, Judikha?”

  “No, sir—only what I’ve heard.”

  “I told you to drop the ‘sir’ while we’re here! Make that a habit or you’ll get us both in trouble. All right, then. This is a hellship and the hellship is the blackest shame against Rastabranaplan and I’ve had enough of it. When I was first awakened, at midnight, I went straight to the control room and protested to the captain. I told them I was a Patrol officer. Did they believe me? Hardly! All they did was laugh and kick me down the companionway. Thought I was drunk—and to tell the truth, I suppose my speech at the time would bear out such an offensive conclusion. And I was in rags, besides. I’ve got a bagful more of them, now, and I suppose you have, too, unless someone has stolen them. Now, this much I know, from what I have seen and heard: the mere presence among the crew of an educated man or woman is a continual menace to the brutes who command and officer ships such as this, and is warrant enough for murder; for they know that he or she is bound to make trouble at planetfall. As the law now stands they can punish an insolent spaceman with a blow and if he returns it they may kill him with impunity: the law won’t touch the murderer. Therefore, I dare not convince them of my identity—and neither should you. I’ll just have to bear up under their insults until I’m able to act; and as for you, do as you’re told, keep out of trouble—for I may want you in a hurry—keep your mouth shut, call me only by my last name and don’t let them see us together too often.”

  Before Judikha could reply to this astonishing speech, the lieutenant was gone; she went back to the galley where she secured another man’s tin pot while his back was turned and filled it with her own share of the coffee. Following her shipmates, she carried it back to the crew’s quarters to drink. It was vile stuff to begin with, and had been rendered viler by the saccharine added in a misguided attempt at sweetening. But it was hot and it warmed Judikha’s chilled and aching body, and cleared much of the residual fog from her brain. She was glad for the warmth because little energy was wasted in keeping the crew’s quarters heated—in contrast to the tropical heat of the engine room. The cubicle was evidently hard against the poorly insulated outside hull of the ship and the bare metal walls, floor and furniture greedily sucked the heat from the overabundance of bare skin; Judikha had no personal ambition to raise the ambient temperature of the universe so she sat on a wooden crate with her feet tucked beneath her thighs.

  She leaned her back against a stanchion and closed her eyes...

  VII.

  The girl who had made the solemn oath before the roaring blue furnaces of the Transmoltus, like a penitent presenting a bribe to her primordial god, had at first no clear idea how she was going to implement that promise. She knew that all entrances to the Space Patrol Academy but one were closed to her. Without position, status, friends, influence, without any substantial amount of money, without even an officially recognized existence, there was left to her only Education. The Patrol, while as elitist as the most antique guild or religious cult, was not so stupid as to not recognize the value of intelligence and education. Therefore, if she went to school and if she excelled, excelled above all others, than she would surely win at least consideration from the Academy. And she was certain that if she were considered she would be accepted.

  Though even by the age of ten she had not yet been exposed to anything like formal learning, she could read, write and cipher—indeed, she enjoyed reading to an inordinate degree and devoured anything printed she could get her hands on, even if she did not understand half of what she read. Which might perhaps have been just as well as most of her early reading material was by necessity those books collected by Pilnipott in aid of his monumental encyclopedia. By the time she was twelve or thirteen years old, her cramped garret was crowded with heaped piles of books, magazines, pamphlets, brochures, tabloids and newspapers. She collected them from a hundred sources: scraps rescued from ashcans, plucked from windblown litter, snatched from the racks of inattentive newsdealers, lifted from the five-for-a-pfennig tables outside the used-book dealers. She never bothered to preexamine what she gathered; her tastes were indiscriminate and catholic; all that mattered were printed words on paper. Consequently, her little hovel was packed with lurid tabloids with their tales of graphically illustrated murder and accident; political advertisements; polemic pamphlets hysterically exorting every esoteric concern from the advantages of communism to the question of whether Musrum was right-handed or left-handed; handbills announcing new plays, vaudevilles, circuses, music hall acts, new products, patent medicines, magnetic cures, cures for arthritis, syphilis and drunkenness, offers of jobs, railroad schedules and announcements of the departure of spaceships and their need for crews; cheap novels printed on paper so soft and porous the letters had spread into furry blobs, like squashed insects, paper bound novels printed on brittle, splintery pulp that crackled like old leaves when she turned their pages, fat novels printed in tiny, meticulous letters on onionskin that felt as she imagined silk must; there were magazines, filled with stories and articles and colored rotogravure pictures; best of all were the nonfiction books, the school books and the occasional encyclopedia volume. Some of these were as incomprehensible as theology, philosophy, economics and mathematics—whose dense tangles of formulae, graphs and diagrams may as well have been some indecipherable hieroglyphic—her eyes glided over them as they would the meaningless pattern of a wallpaper, but others were about science and history and biography—especially her treasured biographies of Princess Bronwyn—and geography. They filled her with more joy and wonder and longing and discontent and ideas and questions than could have any hundred books of religious propaganda.

  So Judikha enrolled in a public school. She was only required to take a simple test, which she completed perfectly, if laboriously and self-consciously, being unused to writing. The school was the only one maintained in the Transmoltus, and then only because the law required its presence. But the law did not require the school to do anything more than exist; it did not require either efficiency or effectiveness; its instructors were those either too old, too incompetent or too sadistic to be tolerated in the City’s schools. Worse, however, than any of these was the instructor who was there because he or she was possessed by an overweening missionary spirit. Mr. Grun was such a circumspect man, pacing off the dingy halls in a frigid, dry odor of sanctity, as though he were measuring the depths of transgression with his stiff, caliper-like legs. He took himself and his position seriously, as he took everything, and his manner fitted his calling. He looked upon himself as the keeper of a sacred charge. These young, ill-formed, rude Citizens of the Future were under his care, and it behooved him to walk warily and so comport himself as to bring no faint suggestion of the indecorous before the notice of the young minds among whom he spent his days. He was, as should now be obvious, to a large extent severed from the realities of life and there were many subj
ects and aspects of subjects upon which the younger minds could better have enlightened him than he them. But, by training, nature and calling, he was incapable of crediting children with personality, let alone knowledge of good and evil. More’s the pity.

  Mr. Grun certainly did not recognize the native intelligence of the rangy young girl with the lank, tangled hair. He thought that intelligence in girls was unnecessary and perhaps even sinful in an ill-defined way. For years he had paid little attention to her curiosity, ignored her questions, barely glanced at her neatly-written papers; instead he shook his head slowly and compressed his bloodless lips whenever he saw her. He disapproved of the way she carried herself, with neither modesty nor demureness. She strode the dingy halls with a masculine assurance, looking neither left nor right, her dark level eyes fixed like a surveyor’s transit on some distant point on the invisible horizon, as though she could see through the dark wall at the end of the corridor. She refused—shunned—the company of the other girls; she looked down upon them from her great height—she was already nearly a head taller than any other girl her age—down the length of her wonderful nose as though she were sighting rats along the barrel of a gun. She laughed and joked with the boys, raucously and honestly, not bothering to cover her open mouth, throwing her head back and haw-hawing shamelessly. He did not like the sight of her teeth or her throat or her tongue or the roof of her mouth. The former were too white and the latter three too wet and pink. He was scandalized by some of the jokes he overheard her telling, though he really grasped little more than the gist of but few of them—he sustained his disapproval by tacitly assuming that nothing that caused that sort of laughter could be entirely decent. He had been forced to reprimand her repeatedly about her dress; in spite of his stern admonitions she insisted on wearing shirts and trousers and where the other girls would sit primly, with their knees together and their ankles decently covered, Judikha would sprawl in her seat, one long leg thrown across the knee of the other. Mr. Grun was disturbed by that precocious and insouciant reminder that females were indeed bipedal and, reacting like most prudes, held the girl to blame for his own prurience.

  Judikha kept apart from her fellow students—or was kept apart. The students who considered themselves from poor but decent families would have nothing to do with her. The students with rougher pedigrees snubbed her as a defector from the ranks of the outlaw. She did not consider this as leaving any sort of void in her life. She already had few friends and was, quite frankly, even happier with fewer.

  Judikha had abandoned her old ways, as best she could—at least within the delimitations of self-perpetuation. Not that she suddenly felt any sort of new-found morality—hardly; she found nothing amiss with her past career—she took some pride in it, in fact—nor did she begin passing lofty judgments upon her colleagues. No; she simply wanted to divert neither any more time nor energy than she could spare from her studies. She had fixed upon her goal with the single-minded, inevitable purposefulness that a loosed arrow has for a bull’s-eye. Any other endeavors or interests, other than those directly required for bodily sustenance and physical survival, were extraneous; they were wasted time and energy. Such a lofty, if practical, motive was entirely beyond the comprehension of her associates—had they bothered to consider it, which they didn’t, of course. They merely—and, admittedly, with some justification—drew their ill-founded and erroneous conclusions from the evidence of the ex-hellion who now hurried home after classes, books and papers clutched to her chest, her eyes fixed somewhere far beyond their flat, stupid faces and mean eyes. She was deaf as well as blind. At first she ignored their well-meant invitations to drink, carouse or cause mayhem, to make an evening of it, to have something on; later she was just as oblivious to their taunts. She slipped through them and away, as slickly as a needle through burlap. There was only one logical reply to the gibes and she was unaware she that she made it: an exasperating smile of self-sufficiency.

  Her life assumed, for the first time, a Routine. Home from school—a quick wash—a meal of some tinned food and bread and tea and perhaps some fruit (whatever she had managed to lift that morning or the day before)—a domestic chore or two, if necessary—then long hours with a book until it fell from her long, lax fingers and she slept.

  She ignored the insults of her colleagues and the ostracization of the others with bland, Olympian indifference; she tolerated Mr. Grun’s attempts to civilize her. Though he had singled her out for particular attention, scrutinizing her work for the least imperfection upon which he could hang a punishment or reprimand, she knew he could do her little real harm so long as she did her work and was careful not to be overly contemptuous of his rules or puritanism; besides, Grun’s rigorous attention to her performance really had the beneficial result of only improving her work.

  She would have been perfectly happy with this program and had it been allowed to run its course would have assuredly and inexorably led her to her goal. Her marks were excellent—even the parsimonious Mr. Grun could not begrudge her that—and she kept her behavior, at least during school hours, safely within tolerable limits. She had no reason to believe she would not do equally well when the annual Space Patrol entrance exams were held. If her marks were high enough she would be considered for the Academy—as it was bound to do by law—which was the one thing she wanted more than anything else she could imagine. Unfortunately, two things happened instead.

  The first, upon which the second was more or less dependant, was that she fell in love.

  The boy’s name was Rhys, and, like Judikha, he was fifteen and a half years old and not a native-born inhabitant of the Transmoltus. He, too, had come from the country. Unlike the girl, however, he had arrived only recently and with a mother, a father and a brother younger by one year: a dreadful little brat named Pomfret. The family had lost home and farm to an unexpected expansion of the Strabane lava lake and had come to the city because the father had luckily gotten a job, through his brother-in-law, running a heckling machine.

  Rhys was a tall, almost willowy lad with fine-boned features, dreamy, intelligent eyes and delicate hands. His hair was as black and thick and glossy as molten tar. He was invariably courteous, friendly, well-groomed, as neatly dressed as his circumstances allowed and he took his studies seriously, a quality so unusual among Judikha’s classmates that it alone was sufficient to attract her to him. He wrote fine stories and well-reasoned essays and turgidly earnest poems that Judikha thought equaled anything in her library; he excelled in the art classes, at which Judikha was hopeless. Although he smiled often, exposing gleaming teeth, and enjoyed games, he shunned the roughhousing in which the other boys indulged—she never once saw him fight. Indeed, she often—with a kind of awe—observed him turn away an opponent with a few well-spoken words. In only a moment he would be laughing and joking with a boy who but a heartbeat before had insulted him cruelly or who had promised him a bloodied nose, if not worse. In a word, he was much of what Judikha herself wanted to be.

  Pomfret, on the other hand, was a weasel.

  While few of the boys particularly cared for the fastidious and rather self-righteous Rhys, they at least respected him to the degree that they treated him with indifference. Pomfret was immediately accepted if for no other reason than that he gave them little other choice. An accomplished sycophant, Pomfret’s obsequious, fawning nature found him ready friends among the several gangs, between which he wandered with unaligned impunity. But Pomfret’s unctuous personality did not at all reflect a weak psyche.

  Unlike his older brother, Pomfret was physically unprepossessing. Short, thin to the point of emaciation, with a disproportionately large head that was always cocked to one side or the other as though it were too heavy for his long, flexible neck. His hair was fine and dust-colored, his sore-looking eyes were small and wet, with pink sclera. His nasal voice was whining as he snuffled back the glutinous products of a perpetually running nose. However, and this was not at all obvious, he was by far the more intelligent of
the two brothers.

  His small size and wheedling hero-worship found ready acceptance among boys who were too unsophisticated to recognize the patent insincerity. It was not long at all before they were eagerly listening to his suggestions and ideas with slack jawed admiration. The seesaw of hero worship had tipped and they’d never realized it.

  However infatuated she might have been with Rhys, Judikha was realistic—or at least believed she was. There was a large number of female students in all the grades, almost any of whom would be more desirable to a boy than she. Judikha, the pragmatist, had carefully established three categories into which she divided the school’s females: the physically attractive, the physically repulsive, and herself. She did not think herself ugly by any means, but she also believed that she was not pretty. She had observed what sort of girls the boys found most interesting and which sort they avoided. It was easy to see that there was a catalog of characteristics the members of the former category shared in common—all of them of the most blatantly physical type, which surprised her not. Taking their average, Judikha decided that a small girl, with pronounced curves, soft to the verge of pudginess; breasts as large as adolescent hormones could generate; a round, smooth, dimpled face capable only of expressing a kind of dumb admiration; fat, pouting lips; no nose to speak of; preternatuarally large eyes so clearly blue that they may as well have been holes bored through the empty head and as much blonde hair as she could carry and still stand erect stood about as much chance of remaining a virgin as Judikha, who possessed not one of these qualities, did not. On the other hand, boys had always treated Judikha with a kind of neutral indifference, with neither the deference shown the attractive girls, the evasion shown the ugly ones nor the complete acceptance she would have enjoyed had she been a fellow male. She was effectively sexless. Those of her own station recognized and even respected her as an accomplished thief, while some others appreciated her earthy sense of humor and her formidable athletic abilities. Certainly none of the other girls were ever invited or expected to take part in the rougher games and escapades, where Judikha’s strength, endurance, quick wits and inventiveness were very much appreciated. But afterwards the boys went their own way—usually with another girl altogether attached: there was a distinct line Judikha was not allowed to cross.