They set off, walking at a slow but steady pace, and Connors seemed to be making a genuine effort to keep up with Hawker, who carefully watched the other man’s progress and insisted on rest breaks whenever he thought Connors was pushing too hard.
With their frequent stops and slow pace, Hawker estimated they had covered about ten kilometers when the sky began glowing in the east. They found their shelter this time in a bombed-out shed. This area had seen much fighting in the past few months, and was sparsely inhabited. Connors slept most of the day, and Hawker dozed fitfully off and on, waking abruptly, rifle in hand, at the slightest sound.
Connors relapsed that night. The pain of his wound, combined with the hunger and the strenuous activity, left him barely able to stand. He was in so much pain that he raised no objection when Hawker came over and slid Connors’s arm around his shoulder, letting the man lean on him as a crutch. Connors collapsed after they’d gone but three more klicks, and Hawker knew they could go no farther tonight. The fever had returned.
Hawker must have dozed, because he suddenly found himself roused by the light in his eyes. It wasn’t the light that had awakened him, though, but a sound—the distant sound of a car’s engine. He checked his rifle and rose slowly to a half-crouch. He was about forty meters from the road at this point, and he looked cautiously along its length in both directions. In the distance he could make out a small convoy of jeeps traveling slowly down the bumpy trail. They were coming from the direction of home base, and as they approached, Hawker could see the stars that marked U.S. government property.
Standing up fully, he started waving and yelling in an effort to attract their attention and flag them down. The driver of the front jeep spotted him and said something to his companion. The second man suddenly raised his rifle and fired at Hawker. The bullet whizzed just past his ear.
Cursing, Hawker dived headlong to the ground, his rifle flying out of his hands and landing a few meters away. There was a sharp pain in his left leg as a bullet hit his thigh, the pain compounded by the impact as his belly hit the earth and the breath was knocked from his lungs. The jeep had accelerated and left the road, and was almost upon him, but there had been no further shots. He crawled to retrieve his rifle.
“Hold it, corporal, he’s one of us,” Hawker heard the driver of the jeep say just as he managed to pick up his own rifle and fumble it around in his hands so that it was pointing in the jeep’s general direction. Then, to Hawker, the driver added, “Take it easy, soldier, we’re on your side.”
“Fucking great way to show it,” Hawker said through clenched teeth. Nevertheless, he lowered his rifle and relaxed on the ground. The two men leaped out of their vehicle and ran over to him.
“Sorry, buddy,” said the corporal who’d shot him. “I thought you were Ruchink. The area’s crawling with them, and we were told to look out for ambushes.”
Hawker looked into the corporal’s anxious face. The kid was barely older than he was. How’d he get to be a corporal? Hawker mused, despite the pain. He swallowed back the first two retorts that came to mind, and said merely, “My friend over there’s hurt pretty bad. We were in the supply convoy they overran a few days ago. Been trying to get back to base.”
Hawker remembered little of the four-hour ride. His leg was throbbing, despite the painkiller they’d given him; all the pill did was make him woozy. The fatigue from his trek and the lack of food for the past few days also contributed to his condition. He merely stared up at the sky, fading in and out of consciousness at irregular intervals.
Back at the base he was put in the hospital, where they removed the bullet from his leg and kept him in bed for a week. After that, he was permitted to walk around with a crutch for another couple of weeks while the doctors argued about when he would be fit to return to light duty. He was informed that Connors had pulled through. One of the nurses told Hawker privately that he’d been nominated for a medal for his heroic actions. Hawker wondered, cynically, whether he’d also be eligible for the Purple Heart.
The war ended the day before he was scheduled to be released from the hospital.
***
As the fighting ended, the rebel militants were left in control of the northern portions of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, which the official Chinese government ended up ceding to them as an independent state, much as Outer Mongolia had been for decades. While there was still much bitterness between the two factions, the Chinese government felt the price they’d paid had secured something of value: a hostile, but still independent country to act as a buffer between themselves and Russia. The Russian conservatives were pleased to have installed a more orthodox regime in at least part of China, but the cost in Russian lives and arms had been astronomical. Their economy would be teetering for years, leaving them prey to the capitalist opposition parties in public opinion. The United States, at comparatively small cost to itself, had regained a certain uneasy stability in Asia and set the stage for the downfall of the Russian conservatives.
In short, while no one was happy with what had been done, all parties were at least satisfied with the results—for now.
Hawker, meantime, was out of a job, and viewed the peace with mixed feelings. He was right back where he’d started at the beginning of this experiment, facing a hostile world without sufficient resources or knowledge. The situation was even worse, in fact. The world was now twelve years older—and at the rate it had been changing, who could tell how different the outside world would be?
A week after the war ended he was shipped back to the States in an enormous plane—larger than any he’d ever seen—with more than a thousand other servicemen. Everyone was tired of the fighting and glad to have survived. There was singing and swapping of stories; cigarettes and joints were passed around freely. But Hawker kept apart from the rest. He wasn’t one of them; he was a stranger out of time. He’d hoped to see Symington and Green, but neither man was on this flight. Hawker had no way of knowing whether either was still alive.
Back in the United States, the troops were housed in temporary quarters while their paperwork was processed. Hawker was in no hurry. He hoped that now, with all this experience behind him, the army would strongly consider letting him go career. They’d find some position for him—after all, there was always something that needed doing in the army.
Four days after his return, he saw a notice requesting all participants in Project Banknote to report for a special meeting at fourteen hundred the next day. His spirits rose instantly. For one thing, this would be a chance to find out whether his friends were still alive; for another, it would let him know specifically what the army expected of him now that the experiment was over. He arrived early for the meeting and took a seat near the back door of the room so he could see people as they entered.
This room was far smaller than the large auditorium where he’d first heard about Project Banknote; there was only seating for forty people, at most. Of course, that didn’t mean much; perhaps most of the sleepers were still over in China, or perhaps some of them had been shipped to other bases. But as people straggled in one or two at a time, Hawker found himself scanning their faces anyway for a sign of Green or Symington.
They showed up together, and greeted Hawker with happy shouts. In a three-way flurry of conversation, each of the friends tried to inform the others of his activities during the war. The stories were confused, at first, but Hawker learned that Symington had seen lots of action with an artillery division along the western front; Green, through some error in paperwork, had been assigned to a clerical quartermaster’s job and hadn’t seen a moment’s action the entire time. Hawker and Symington were ribbing him when the briefing officer entered the room and interrupted their reunion.
They had been expecting Major Dukakis, but the officer standing before them introduced himself as Lieutenant Dickerson and explained that he was now in charge of recruitment for the suspended-animation program. He started his speech by thanking the men once again for participating in the p
ilot program; it was their efforts that made Project Banknote such a resounding success. Although sleepers had sustained almost a fifty percent casualty rate, that was to be expected—after all, they’d been sent into the toughest assignments because of their previous experience. They’d all acquitted themselves admirably, however, and as a result the army had cut back on the “inexperience factor” that had plagued it in the African Wars.
Having proved that suspended animation could work on a limited scale, the army was now ready to initiate the process at large. If less than a hundred battle-tried veterans had made such a difference to the fighting, imagine how much better a thousand would be, or two thousand, or a hundred thousand. The army was prepared to put as many people in suspended animation as would volunteer for the duty. There would be an active recruiting drive among the returning China veterans and, as before, bonuses would be offered. The bonuses would not be as high as they were originally—after all, the process had now been successfully tried, and the risk was far less—but there was still the incentive of being paid while sleeping.
Naturally, Dickerson said, he would not dream of making a recruiting pitch to these, the original sleepers. They had already served their country well in two wars, and had earned their rest. Still, he added, if any of them chose to sign up for a second term of suspended animation, he would personally see that they received priority treatment.
Hawker felt a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, but it took him some time to work up the nerve to ask his question. “What if I wanted to go career without another term in suspended animation?” he was finally bold enough to ask.
Dickerson hesitated. “Well, that would depend, of course, on the individual case. We’d have to test you to see whether you have any of the particular skills we need. You see, one of the reasons for expanding the sleeper program is to cut back on the cost of maintaining a standing army during peacetime. We will always need specialists, men to have on hand in case of a temporary emergency—but the ordinary fighter is another matter. If we can—I hope you’ll pardon my bluntness—if we can freeze him when we don’t need him and thaw him out when we do, the savings to the taxpayers will be phenomenal.”
“Why is that?” Green asked. “It must be awfully expensive to keep those coffins maintained, and to monitor them constantly to keep the sleeper alive inside. How can you save that much money this way?”
“It’s the same as in business,” Dickerson said with a cold smile. “When you deal in large volume, the cost per subject goes down. Project Banknote was terribly expensive to start and maintain. We had to design the ‘coffins’ from scratch, build each one individually, work out the computer maintenance programs, provide surveillance to ensure that nothing went wrong—oh, a million different things, all for the sake of less than a hundred men. But the costs don’t go up that much if it were a thousand men instead. The only significant difference is the increased number of storage boxes. The same computers can check a thousand men as easily as they check a hundred. Building a facility to house a thousand coffins isn’t ten times as expensive as building one to hold a hundred. The more people we can encourage to sign up for this program, the cheaper the per capita cost becomes.
“Compare that with the cost of maintaining a nonsleeping army. Ordinary soldiers have to be fed; you could probably finance the entire sleeper program just on what the army spends for meat in a single year. Ordinary soldiers have to be clothed; I won’t bore you with statistics on how much the army pays for uniforms each year. Ordinary soldiers have to be housed; I know you all joke about how crude the barracks are, but they still have to be built and maintained, they still have to be heated, they still need the electric bill paid. Ordinary soldiers get sick and need medical attention, drugs, recreational facilities. Ordinary soldiers are constantly in motion, and the army has rivers of paperwork flowing to accommodate them.
“All those factors are minimized with an army in suspended animation—and, without fighters who need services, we can dispense with the vast proportion of the army that provides them. We can eliminate thousands of cooks and quartermasters, doctors and nurses—and especially clerks. The paperwork on a soldier who’s asleep is minuscule.
“One of the problems of a modern army is that, for each soldier who actually goes out and fights, it takes ten more behind the lines just to support him. It’s bad enough to put up with that in wartime, but why should we have to do it during peacetime? With the sleeper technology, we won’t have to. The more volunteers for suspended animation we get, the more effective the program will be. The army expects to save millions of dollars each year once the plan gets going.”
Dickerson paused and looked back at Hawker. “That’s why we can’t automatically promise career positions. We’ll still need specialists of various sorts—we can’t cut back on weapons development, for example—but we already have more than enough people in the general categories, and we’ll be phasing them out as rapidly as possible once the sleeper program is a success.”
Hawker’s heart fell. Other than fighting, he had no special skills. Unless he chose to sign up for another term of suspended animation, he’d have to go out and face the real world.
Green could tell he was depressed, and after the meeting he and Symington took Hawker out for some drinks to cheer him up. Hawker bared more of his soul to his friends that afternoon than he’d ever done before, telling them about his fears that he couldn’t compete out in the real world. Green refused to be depressed, however; he pointed out to Hawker that their salaries had been accumulating while they slept, and that among the three of them, they should have a sum in the hundreds of thousands of dollars—more than enough to invest in a business of their own. Instead of worrying about skills that would keep them going in the open market, they could become bosses and hire people with the necessary skills.
The three of them made a pact while sitting around the table drinking beer. They would pool their resources when they left the army, go into business together. Their plans were a little hazy after all the beers, but there had to be some opportunities somewhere. By the time they split up that evening, Hawker was feeling much more optimistic about his prospects for the future.
***
His optimism lasted three days before it began dissolving. He, Green and Symington all received their discharges at the same time—and along with the discharge came a statement of their accumulated earnings, less than a third of what they’d originally calculated. In checking the error with the paymaster, they were told merely that, because of ever spiraling inflation, the United States had finally revalued the dollar downward, and that the new money was worth more than the old, even though they had less of it. Green did his best to explain the economic theories behind the move, but it all sounded like double-talk to Hawker. It didn’t matter to him that the things he bought would also, in theory, cost much less than they used to; all he really cared about was that the government had promised him so much money, and had used some fancy footwork to pay him less.
Green refused to be dismayed. It was buying power that really counted, he assured the others; compared to the rest of the population, they should still be well off, and the opportunities for investment should still be good.
Shortly afterward, as they were being processed to leave the army, they learned of another change. Each had to pose for a photograph that would appear on his identification card. When they questioned this, they were told every U.S. citizen now had to have an ID card before he could get a job or qualify for any kind of government aid. So many illegal aliens had been entering the country that an unforgeable means of identification had become necessary, even over the cries of the civil libertarians. Normally, some proof of citizenship was required, but being veterans of two wars, the requirement was waived for them.
After giving the information, they were each handed a small plastic card with their picture on it and a thumbprint on the back. Green looked his over, and a shiver suddenly went up his spine. “What does yours say
under ‘Race’?” he asked Hawker.
Hawker checked. “There’s a ‘C.’ I guess that’s for ‘Caucasian.’“
Green nodded, and frowned down again at his own card. “I’ve got a ‘J.’ Three guesses what that stands for.”
He turned to the corporal who’d given him the card. “Why is my card different from theirs?”
The soldier looked at the card, then back at Green. “You are Jewish, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“It was decided that Jews are a race as well as a religion. It’s been that way for five years now. Nobody argues about it.”
“But why do you even have to list race at all?”
“It’s mostly just for, um, what’s the word?” The corporal snapped his fingers a couple of times. “Demographics, that’s it. Besides, you should consider yourself lucky. You’re listed as a minority, and you get all sorts of breaks.”
Green stood silently for a moment, staring at the card, then turned and walked out of the room. Symington and Hawker were right behind him. “What’s the matter, Dave?” Symington asked. “It’s not that big a thing to get upset over.”
“Maybe not,” Green said. “But I can’t help remembering what I heard about Nazi Germany. One of the first things they started was the internal passport, and every Jew had a big ‘J’ stamped on his papers. You know what that led to.”
“Shit, that can’t happen here,” Symington said. “This is America, for God’s sake. Anybody tries to hurt you, I’ll break his arm personally. I ain’t forgetting how you helped me in that fight in the bar.” He put a long arm around Green’s shoulders and pulled the smaller man closer to him in an affectionate hug.
They got some of their money in cash, and were told the government would send them the rest as soon as they had a permanent mailing address. Symington also picked up a small box that had been held in security for him. When his friends asked about it, he opened it reluctantly to reveal a display of fourteen medals. “My God!” was all Green could say, and Hawker stood speechless. Both men had privately been wondering whether Symington’s endless tales of heroism were true; the box of medals made it quite obvious .
The Eternity Brigade Page 9