Bill, the Galactic Hero

by Harry Harrison

  They walked slowly down the wooden sidewalk, silent for the moment. "I wonder if there is something wrong with Eager?" Bill asked, but no one answered him. They were looking down the rutted street, at a brilliantly illuminated sign that cast a tempting ruddy glow.

  SPACEMEN'S REST it said. CONTINUOUS STRIP SHOW and BEST DRINKS and better PRIVATE ROOMS FOR GUESTS AND THEIR FRIENDS. They walked faster. The front wall of the Spacemen's Rest was covered with shatterproof glass cases filled with tri-di pix of the fully dressed (bangle and double stars) entertainers, and further in with pix of them nude (debangled with fallen stars). Bill stayed the quick sound of panting by pointing to a small sign almost lost among the tumescent wealth of mammaries.

  OFFICERS ONLY it read.

  "Move along," an MP grated and poked at them with his electronic nightstick. They shuffled on.

  The next establishment admitted men of all classes, but the cover charge was 77 credits, more than they all had between them. After that the OFFICERS ONLY began again until the pavement ended and all the lights were behind them.

  "What's that?" Ugly asked at the sound of murmured voices from a nearby darkened street, and peering closely they saw a line of troopers that stretched out of sight around a distant corner. "What's this?" he asked the last man in the line.

  "Lower ranks cathouse. Two credits, two minutes. And don't try to buck the line, bowb. On the back, on the back."

  They joined up instantly and Bill ended up last, but not for long. They shuffled forward slowly and other troopers appeared and queued up behind him. The night was cool and he took many life-preserving slugs from his bottle. There was little conversation and what there was died as the red-lit portal loomed ever closer. It opened and closed at regular intervals and one by one Bill's buddies slipped in to partake of its satisfying, though rapid, pleasures. Then it was his turn and the door started to open and he started to step forward and the sirens started to scream and a large MP with a great fat belly jumped between Bill and the door.

  "Emergency recall. Back to the base you men!" it barked.

  Bill howled a strangled groan of frustration and leaped forward, but a light tap with the electronic nightstick sent him reeling back with the others. He was carried along, half stunned, with the shuffling wave of bodies while the sirens moaned and the artificial northern lights in the sky spelled out TO ARMS!!!! in letters of flame each a hundred miles long. Someone put his hand out, holding Bill up as he started to slide under the trampling purple boots. It was his old buddy, Ugly, carrying a satiated smirk and he hated him and tried to hit him. But before he could raise his fist they were swept into a monorail car, hurtled through the night and disgorged back in Camp Leon Trotsky. He forgot his anger when the gnarled claws of Deathwish Drang dragged him from the crowd.

  "Pack your bags," he rasped, "you're shipping out."

  "They can't do that to us — we haven't finished our training."

  "They can do whatever they want, and they usually do. A glorious space battle has just been fought to its victorious conclusion and there are over four million casualties, give or take a hundred thousand. Replacements are needed, which is you. Prepare to board the transports immediately if not sooner."

  "We can't — we have no space gear! The supply room..."

  "All of the supply personnel have already been shipped out."

  "Food...."

  "The cooks and KP pushers are already spacebound. This is an emergency. All non-essential personnel are being sent out. Probably to die." He twanged a tusk coyly and washed them with his loathsome grin. "While I remain here in peaceful security to train your replacements." The delivery tube plunked at his elbow and as he opened the message capsule and read its contents his smile slowly fell to pieces. "They're shipping me out too," he said hollowly.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A total of 89,672,899 recruits had already been shipped into space through Camp Leon Trotsky, so the process was an automatic and smoothly working one even though this time it was processing itself, like a snake swallowing its own tail. Bill and his buddies were the last group of recruits through and the snake began ingesting itself right behind them. No sooner had they been shorn of their sprouting fuzz and deloused in the ultrasonic delouser than the barbers rushed at each other and in a welter of under and over arms, gobbets of hair, shards of moustache, bits of flesh, drops of blood, they clipped and shaved each other then pulled the operator after them into the ultrasonic chamber. Medical corpsmen gave themselves injections against rocket-fever and space-cafard, record clerks issued themselves pay books and the loadmasters kicked each other up the ramps and into the waiting shuttle-ships. Rockets blasted, living columns of fire like scarlet tongues licking down at the blasting pads, burning up the ramps in a lovely pyrotechnic display since the ramp operators were also aboard. The ships echoed and thundered up into the night sky leaving Camp Leon Trotsky a dark and silent ghost town where bits of daily orders and punishment rosters rustled and blew from the bulletin boards, dancing through the deserted streets to finally plaster themselves against the noisy, bright windows of the Officers' Club where a great drinking party was in progress, although there was much complaining because the officers had to serve themselves.

  Up and up the shuttleships shot, towards the great fleet of deep-spacers that darkened the stars above, a new fleet, the most powerful the galaxy had ever seen, so new in fact that the ships were still under construction. Welding torches flared in brilliant points of light while hot rivets hurled their flat trajectories across the sky into the waiting buckets. The spots of light died away as one behemoth of the star-lanes was completed and thin screams sounded in the spacesuit radio circuit as the workers, instead of being returned to the yards, were pressed into service on the ship they had so recently built. This was total war.

  Bill staggered through the sagging plastic tube that connected the shuttleship to a dreadnought of space and dropped his bags in front of a Petty Chief Officer who sat at a desk in the hangar-sized spacelock. Or rather he tried to drop it, but since there was no gravity the bags remained in mid air and when he pushed them down he rose. (Since a body when it is falling freely is said to be in free fall, and anything with weight has no weight, and for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction or something like that.) The Petty looked up and snarled and pulled Bill back down to the deck.

  "None of your bowby spacelubber tricks, trooper. Name?"

  "Bill, spelled with two L's."

  "Bil," the Petty mumbled, licking the end of his stylo, then inscribing it in the ship's roster with round, illiterate letters. "Two 'L's' for officers only, bowb — learn your place. What's your classification?"

  "Recruit, unskilled, untrained, spacesick."

  "Well don't puke in here, that's what you have your own quarters for. You are now a Fusetender Sixth class, unskilled. Bunk down in compartment 34J-89T-001. Move. And keep that woopsy-sack over your head."

  No sooner had Bill found his quarters and thrown his bags into a bunk, where they floated five inches over the reclaimed rock-wool mattress, than Eager Beager came in, followed by Bowb Brown and a crowd of strangers, some of them carrying welding torches and angry expressions.

  "Where's Ugly and the rest of the squad?" Bill asked.

  Bowb shrugged and strapped himself into his bunk for a little shuteye. Eager opened one of the six bags he always carried and removed some boots to polish.

  "Are you saved?" a deep voice, vibrant with emotion sounded from the other end of the compartment. Bill looked up, startled, and the big trooper standing there saw the motion and stabbed towards him with an immense finger. "You, brother, are you saved?"

  "That's a little hard to say," Bill mumbled, bending over and rooting in his bag, hoping the man would go away. But he didn't, in fact he came over and sat down on Bill's bunk. Bill tried to ignore him, but this was hard to do because the trooper was over six feet high, heavily muscled and iron jawed. He had lovely, purplish black skin that made Bill a little jealo
us because his was only a sort of greyish pink. Since the trooper's shipboard uniform was almost the same shade of black he looked all of a piece, very effective with his flashing smile and piercing gaze.

  "Welcome aboard the Fanny Hill," he said and with a friendly shake splintered most of Bill's knuckle bones. "The grand old lady of this fleet, commissioned almost a week ago. I'm the Reverend Fusetender Sixth Class Tembo, and I see by the stencil on your bag that your name is Bill, and since we're shipmates, Bill, please call me Tembo, and how is the condition of your soul?"

  "I haven't had much chance to think about it lately..."

  "I should think not, just coming from recruit training, since attendance of chapel during training is a court-martial offence. But that's all behind you now and you can be saved. Might I ask if you are of the faith...?"

  "My folks were Fundamentalist Zoroastrian, so I suppose..."

  "Superstition, my boy, rank superstition. It was the hand of fate that brought us together in this ship, that your soul would have this one chance to be saved from the fiery pit. You've heard of Earth?"

  "I like plain food...."

  "It's a planet, my boy — the home of the human race. The home from whence we all sprang, see it, a green and lovely world, a jewel in space." Tembo had slipped a tiny projector from his pocket while he spoke and a coloured image appeared on the bulkhead, a planet swimming artistically through the void girdled by white clouds. Suddenly ruddy lightning shot through the clouds and they twisted and boiled while great wounds appeared on the planet below. From the pinhead speaker came the tiny sound of rolling thunder. "But wars sprang up among the sons of man and they smote each other with the atomic energies until the Earth itself groaned aloud and mighty was the holocaust. And when the final lightnings stilled there was death in the north, death in the west, death in the east, death, death, death. Do you realize what that means?" Tembo's voice was eloquent with feeling, suspended for an instant in midflight, waiting for the answer to the catechistical question.

  "I'm not quite sure," Bill said, rooting aimlessly in his bag, "I come from Phigerinadon II, it's a quieter place...."

  "There was no death in the SOUTH! And why was the south spared, I ask you, and the answer is because it was the will of Samedi that all the false prophets and false religions and false gods be wiped from the face of the Earth so that the only true faith should remain. The First Reformed Voodoo Church...."

  General Quarters sounded, a hooting alarm keyed to the resonant frequency of the human skull so that the bone vibrated as though the head were inside a mighty bell and the eyes blurred out of focus with each stroke. There was a scramble for the passageway where the hideous sound was not quite as loud and where non-coms were waiting to herd them to their stations. Bill followed Eager Beager up an oily ladder and out of the hatch in the floor of the fuse room. Great racks of fuses stretched away on all sides of them, while from the tops of the racks sprang arm-thick cables that looped upwards and vanished through the ceiling. In front of the racks, evenly spaced, were round openings a foot in diameter.

  "My opening remarks will be brief, any trouble from any of you and I will personally myself feed you head first down the nearest fuseway." A greasy forefinger pointed at one of the holes in the deck and they recognized the voice of their new master. He was shorter and wider and thicker in the gut than Deathwish, but there was a generic resemblance that was unmistakable. "I am Fusetender First Class Spleen. I will take you crumbly groundcrawling bowbs and will turn you into highly skilled and efficient fusetenders or else feed you down the nearest fuseway. This is a highly skilled and efficient technical speciality which usually takes a year to train a good man but this is war so you are going to learn to do it now or else. I will now demonstrate. Tembo front and centre. Take board 19J-9, it's out of circuit now."

  Tembo clashed his heels and stood at rigid attention in front of the board. Stretching away on both sides of him were the fuses, white ceramic cylinders capped on both ends with metal, each one a foot in diameter, five foot high and weighing ninety-pounds. There was a red band around the midriff of each fuse. First Class Spleen tapped one of these bands.

  "Every fuse has one of these red bands which is called a fuseband and is of the colour red. When the fuse burns out this band turns black. I don't expect you to remember all this now, but it's in your manual and you are going to be letter perfect before I am done with you, or else. Now I will show you what will happen when a fuse burns out. Tembo — that is a burned out fuse! Go!"

  "Unggh!" Tembo shouted and leaped at the fuse and grasped it with both hands. "Unggh!" he said again as he pulled it from the clips, and again Unggh! when he dropped it into the fuseway. Then, still Ungghing, he pulled a new fuse from the storage rack and clipped it into place and, with a final Unggh! snapped back to attention.

  "And that's the way it is done, by the count, by the numbers, the trooper way and you are going to learn it or else." A dull buzzing sounded, grumbling through the air like a stifled eructation. "There's the chow call, so I'll let you break now and while you're eating think about what you are going to have to learn. Fall out."

  Other troopers were going by in the corridor and they followed them into the bowels of the ship.

  "Gee — do you think the food might be any better than it was back in camp?" Eager asked, smacking his lips excitedly.

  "It is completely impossible that it could be any worse," Bill said as they joined a line leading to a door labelled CONSOLIDATED MESS NUMBER TWO. "Any change will have to make it better. After all — aren't we fighting troopers now? We have to go into combat fit, the manual says."

  The line moved forward with painful slowness, but within an hour they were at the door. Inside of it a tired looking KP in soap-stained, greasy fatigues handed Bill a yellow plastic cup from a rack before him. Bill moved on and when the trooper in front of him stepped away he faced a blank wall from which there emerged a single, handleless spigot. A fat cook standing next to it, wearing a large white chef's hat and a soiled undershirt, waved him forwards with the soup ladle in his hand.

  "C'mon, c'mon, ain't you never et before? Cup under the spout, dogtag in the slot, snap it up!"

  Bill held the cup as he had been advised and noticed a narrow slit in the metal wall just at eye level. His dogtags were hanging around his neck and he pushed one of them into the slot. Something went bzzzzz and a thin stream of yellow fluid gushed out, filling the cup halfway.

  "Next man!" the cook shouted and pulled Bill away so that Eager could take his place. "What is this?" Bill asked, peering into the cup.

  "What is this! What is this!" the cook raged, growing bright red. "This is your dinner you stupid bowb! This is absolutely chemically pure water in which are dissolved 18 amino acids, 16 vitamins, 11 mineral salts, a fatty acid ester and glucose. What else did you expect?"

  "Dinner...?" Bill said hopefully, then saw red as the soup ladle crashed down on his head. "Could I have it without the fatty acid ester?" he asked hopefully, but he was pushed out into the corridor where Eager joined him.

  "Gee," Eager said. "This has all the food elements necessary to sustain life indefinitely. Isn't that marvellous?"

  Bill sipped at his cup then sighed tremulously.

  "Look at that," Tembo said, and when Bill turned a projected image appeared on the corridor wall. It showed a misty firmament in which tiny figures seemed to be riding on clouds. "Hell awaits you, my boy, unless you are saved. Turn your back on your superstitious ways for The First Reformed Voodoo Church welcomes you with open arms, come unto her bosom and find your place in heaven at Samedi's right hand. Sit there with Mondongue and Bakalou and Zandor who will welcome you."

  The projected scene changed, the clouds grew closer, while from the little speaker came the tiny sound of a heavenly choir with drum accompaniment. Now the figures could be seen clearly, all with very dark skins and white robes from the back of which protruded great black wings. They smiled and waved gracefully to each other as their cloud
s passed, while singing enthusiastically and beating on the little tom-toms that each one carried. It was a lovely scene and Bill's eyes misted a bit.

  "Attention!"

  The barking tones echoed from the walls and the troopers snapped their shoulders back, heels together, eyes ahead. The heavenly choir vanished as Tembo shoved the projector back into his pocket.

  "As you was," First Class Spleen ordered, and they turned to see him leading two MPs with drawn handguns who were acting as bodyguards for an officer. Bill knew it was an officer because they had had an Officer Identification course, plus the fact that there was a KNOW YOUR OFFICERS chart on the latrine wall that he had had a great deal of opportunity to study during an anguilluliasis epidemic. His jaw gaped open as the officer went by, almost close enough to touch, and stopped in front of Tembo.

  "Fusetender Sixth Class Tembo I have good news for you. In two weeks your seven year period of enlistment will be up and because of your fine record Captain Zekial has authorized a doubling of the usual mustering-out pay, an honourable discharge with band music as well as your free transport back to Earth."

  Tembo, relaxed and firm, looked down at the runty lieutenant with his well-chewed blond moustache who stood before him. "That will be impossible, sir."

  "Impossible!" the lieutenant screeched and rocked back and forth on his high-heeled boots. "Who are you to tell me what is impossible...?!"

  "Not I, sir," Tembo answered with utmost calm. "Regulation 13-9A, paragraph 45, page 8923, volume 43 of Rules, Regulations and Articles of War. 'No man or officer shall or will receive a discharge other than dishonourable with death sentence from a vessel, post, base, camp, ship, outpost, or labour camp during time of emergency....'"

  "Are you a ship's lawyer, Tembo?"

  "No, sir. I'm a loyal trooper, sir. I just want to do my duty, sir."

  "There's something very funny about you, Tembo. I saw in your record that you enlisted voluntarily without drugs and or hypnotics being used. Now you refuse discharge. That's bad, Tembo, very bad. Gives you a bad name. Makes you look suspicious. Makes you look like a spy or something."