Down Among the Dead Men

by William Tenn

  “When you talk about us, Commander, or when you think about us, do you call us zombies? Or do you call us blobs? That’s what I’d like to know, Commander.”

  He’d spoken in such a polite, even tone that I was a long time in getting the full significance of it.

  “Personally,” said Roger Grey in a voice that was just a little less polite, a little less even, “personally, I think the Commander is the kind who refers to us as canned meat. Right, Commander?”

  Yussuf Lamehd folded his arms across his chest and seemed to consider the issue very thoughtfully. “I think you’re right, Rog. He’s the canned-meat type. Definitely the canned-meat type.”

  “No,” said Wang Hsi. “He doesn’t use that kind of language. Zombies, yes; canned meat, no. You can observe from the way he talks that he wouldn’t ever get mad enough to tell us to get back in the can. And I don’t think he’d call us blobs very often. He’s the kind of guy who’d buttonhole another sling-shot commander and tell him, ‘Man, have I got the sweetest zombie crew you ever saw!’ That’s the way I figure him. Zombies.”

  And then they were sitting quietly staring at me again. And it wasn’t mockery in their eyes. It was hatred.

  I went back to the desk and sat down. The room was very still. From the yard, fifteen floors down, the marching commands drifted up. Where did they latch on to this, zombie-blob-canned meat stuff? They were none of them more than six months old; none of them had been outside the precincts of the Junkyard yet. Their conditioning, while mechanical and intensive, was supposed to be absolutely foolproof, producing hard, resilient, and entirely human minds, highly skilled in their various specialties and as far from any kind of imbalance as the latest psychiatric knowledge could push them. I knew they wouldn’t have got it in their conditioning. Then where—

  And then I heard it clearly for a moment. The word. The word that was being used down in the drill field instead of Hup! That strange, new word I hadn’t been able to make out. Whoever was calling the cadence downstairs wasn’t saying, “Hup, two, three, four.”

  He was saying, “Blob, two, three, four. Blob, two, three, four.”

  Wasn’t that just like the TAF? I asked myself. For that matter, like any army anywhere anytime? Expending fortunes and the best minds producing a highly necessary product to exact specifications, and then, on the very first level of military use, doing something that might invalidate it completely. I was certain that the same officials who had been responsible for the attitude of the receptionist outside could have had nothing to do with the old, superannuated TAF drill-hacks putting their squads through their paces down below. I could imagine those narrow, nasty minds, as jealously proud of their prejudices as of their limited and painfully acquired military knowledge, giving these youngsters before me their first taste of barracks life, their first glimpse of the “outside.” It was so stupid!

  But was it? There was another way of looking at it, beyond the fact that only soldiers too old physically and too ossified mentally for any other duty could be spared for this place. And that was the simple pragmatism of army thinking. The fighting perimeters were places of abiding horror and agony, the forward combat zones in which sling-shots operated were even worse. If men or materiel were going to collapse out there, it could be very costly. Let the collapses occur as close to the rear echelons as possible.

  Maybe it made sense, I thought. Maybe it was logical to make live men out of dead men’s flesh (God knows humanity had reached the point where we had to have reinforcements from somewhere!) at enormous expense and with the kind of care usually associated with things like cotton wool and the most delicate watchmakers’ tools; and then to turn around and subject them to the coarsest, ugliest environment possible, an environment that perverted their carefully instilled loyalty into hatred and their finely balanced psychological adjustment into neurotic sensitivity.

  I didn’t know if it was basically smart or dumb, or even if the problem had ever been really weighed as such by the upper, policy-making brass. All I could see was my own problem, and it looked awfully big to me. I thought of my attitude toward these men before getting them, and I felt pretty sick. But the memory gave me an idea.

  “Hey, tell me something,” I suggested. “What would you call me?”

  They looked puzzled.

  “You want to know what I call you,” I explained. “Tell me first what you call people like me, people who are—who are born. You must have your own epithets.”

  Lamehd grinned so that his teeth showed a bright, mirthless white against his dark skin. “Realos,” he said. “We call you people realos. Sometimes, realo trulos.”

  Then the rest spoke up. There were other names, lots of other names. They wanted me to hear them all. They interrupted each other; they spat the words out as if they were so many missiles; they glared at my face, as they spat them out, to see how much impact they had. Some of the nicknames were funny, some of them were rather nasty. I was particularly charmed by utie and wombat.

  “All right,” I said after a while. “Feel better?”

  They were all breathing hard, but they felt better. I could tell it, and they knew it. The air in the room felt softer now.

  “First off,” I said, “I want you to notice that you are all big boys and as such, can take care of yourselves. From here on out, if we walk into a bar or a rec camp together and someone of approximately your rank says something that sounds like zombie to your acute ears, you are at liberty to walk up to him and start taking him apart—if you can. If he’s of approximately my rank, in all probability, I’ll do the taking apart, simply because I’m a very sensitive commander and don’t like having my men deprecated. And any time you feel that I’m not treating you as human beings, one hundred percent, full solar citizenship and all that, I give you permission to come up to me and say, ‘Now look here, you dirty utie, sir—’ ”

  The four of them grinned. Warm grins. Then the grins faded away, very slowly, and the eyes grew cold again. They were looking at a man who was, after all, an outsider. I cursed.

  “It’s not as simple as that, Commander,” Wang Hsi said, “unfortunately. You can call us hundred-percent human beings, but we’re not. And anyone who wants to call us blobs or canned meat has a certain amount of right. Because we’re not as good as—as you mother’s sons, and we know it. And we’ll never be that good. Never.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I blustered. “Why, some of your performance charts—”

  “Performance charts, Commander,” Wang Hsi said softly, “do not a human being make.”

  On his right, Weinstein gave a nod, thought a bit, and added: “Nor groups of men a race.”

  I knew where we were going now. And I wanted to smash my way out of that room, down the elevator, and out of the building before anybody said another word. This is it, I told myself: here we are, boy, here we are. I found myself squirming from corner to corner of the desk; I gave up, got off it, and began walking again.

  Wang Hsi wouldn’t let go. I should have known he wouldn’t. “Soldier surrogates,” he went on, squinting as if he were taking a close look at the phrase for the first time. “Soldier surrogates, but not soldiers. We’re not soldiers, because soldiers are men. And we, Commander, are not men.”

  There was silence for a moment, then a tremendous blast of sound boiled out of my mouth. “And what makes you think that you’re not men?”

  Wang Hsi was looking at me with astonishment, but his reply was still soft and calm. “You know why. You’ve seen our specifications, Commander. We’re not men, real men, because we can’t reproduce ourselves.”

  I forced myself to sit down again and carefully placed my shaking hands over my knees.

  “We’re as sterile,” I heard Yussuf Lamehd say, “as boiling water.”

  “There have been lots of men,” I began, “who have been—”

  “This isn’t a matter of lots of men,” Weinstein broke in. “This is a matter of all—all of us.”

  �
��Blobs thou art,” Wang Hsi murmured. “And to blobs returneth. They might have given at least a few of us a chance. The kids mightn’t have turned out so bad.”

  Roger Grey slammed his huge hand down on the arm of his chair. “That’s just the point, Wang,” he said savagely. “The kids might have turned out good—too good. Our kids might have turned out to be better than their kids—and where would that leave the proud and cocky, the goddam name-calling, the realo trulo human race?”

  I sat staring at them once more, but now I was seeing a different picture. I wasn’t seeing conveyor belts moving along slowly covered with human tissues and organs on which earnest biotechs performed their individual tasks. I wasn’t seeing a room filled with dozens of adult male bodies suspended in nutrient solution, each body connected to a conditioning machine which day and night clacked out whatever minimum information was necessary for the body to take the place of a man in the bloodiest part of the fighting perimeter.

  This time, I saw a barracks filled with heroes, many of them in duplicate and triplicate. And they were sitting around griping, as men will in any barracks on any planet, whether they look like heroes or no. But their gripes concerned humiliations deeper than any soldiers had hitherto known—humiliations as basic as the fabric of human personality.

  “You believe, then,” and despite the sweat on my face, my voice was gentle, “that the reproductive power was deliberately withheld?”

  Weinstein scowled. “Now, Commander. Please. No bedtime stories.”

  “Doesn’t it occur to you at all that the whole problem of our species at the moment is reproduction? Believe me, men, that’s all you hear about on the outside. Grammar-school debating teams kick current reproductive issues back and forth in the district medal competitions; every month scholars in archaeology and the botany of fungi come out with books about it from their own special angle. Everyone knows that if we don’t lick the reproduction problem, the Eoti are going to lick us. Do you seriously think under such circumstances, the reproductive powers of anyone would be intentionally impaired?”

  “What do a few male blobs matter, more or less?” Grey demanded. “According to the latest news bulletins, sperm bank deposits are at their highest point in five years. They don’t need us.”

  “Commander,” Wang Hsi pointed his triangular chin at me. “Let me ask you a few questions in your turn. Do you honestly expect us to believe that a science capable of reconstructing a living, highly effective human body with a complex digestive system and a most delicate nervous system, all this out of dead and decaying bits of protoplasm, is incapable of reconstructing the germ plasm in one single, solitary case?”

  “You have to believe it,” I told him. “Because it’s so.”

  Wang sat back, and so did the other three. They stopped looking at me.

  “Haven’t you ever heard it said,” I pleaded with them, “that the germ plasm is more essentially the individual than any other part of him? That some whimsical biologists take the attitude that our human bodies and all bodies are merely vehicles, or hosts, by means of which our germ plasm reproduces itself? It’s the most complex biotechnical riddle we have! Believe me, men,” I added passionately, “when I say that biology has not yet solved the germ-plasm problem, I’m telling the truth. I know.”

  That got them.

  “Look,” I said. “We have one thing in common with the Eoti whom we’re fighting. Insects and warm-blooded animals differ prodigiously. But only among the community-building insects and the community-building men are there individuals who, while taking no part personally in the reproductive chain, are of fundamental importance to their species. For example, you might have a female nursery school teacher who is barren but who is of unquestionable value in shaping the personalities and even physiques of children in her care.”

  “Fourth Orientation Lecture for Soldier Surrogates,” Weinstein said in a dry voice. “He got it right out of the book.”

  “I’ve been wounded,” I said, “I’ve been seriously wounded fifteen times.” I stood before them and began rolling up my right sleeve. It was soaked with my perspiration.

  “We can tell you’ve been wounded, Commander,” Lamehd pointed out uncertainly. “We can tell from your medals. You don’t have to—”

  “And every time I was wounded, they repaired me good as new. Better. Look at that arm.” I flexed it for them. “Before it was burned off in a small razzle six years ago, I could never build up a muscle that big. It’s a better arm they built on the stump, and, believe me, my reflexes never had it so good.”

  “What did you mean,” Wang Hsi started to ask me, “when you said before—”

  “Fifteen times I was wounded,” my voice drowned him out, “and fourteen times the wound was repaired. The fifteenth time—The fifteenth time—Well, the fifteenth time it wasn’t a wound they could repair. They couldn’t help me one little bit the fifteenth time.”

  Roger Grey opened his mouth.

  “Fortunately,” I whispered, “it wasn’t a wound that showed.”

  Weinstein started to ask me something, decided against it and sat back. But I told him what he wanted to know.

  “A nucleonic howitzer. The way it was figured later, it had been a defective shell. Bad enough to kill half the men on our second-class cruiser. I wasn’t killed, but I was in range of the back-blast.”

  “That back-blast,” Lamehd was figuring it out quickly in his mind. “That back-blast will sterilize anybody for two hundred feet. Unless you’re wearing—”

  “And I wasn’t.” I had stopped sweating. It was over. My crazy little precious secret was out. I took a deep breath. “So you see—well, anyway, I know they haven’t solved that problem yet.”

  Roger Grey stood up and said, “Hey.” He held out his hand. I shook it. It felt like any normal guy’s hand. Stronger maybe.

  “Sling-shot personnel,” I went on, “are all volunteers. Except for two categories: the commanders and soldier surrogates.”

  “Figuring, I guess,” Weinstein asked, “that the human race can spare them most easily?”

  “Right,” I said. “Figuring that the human race can spare them most easily.” He nodded.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Yussuf Lamehd laughed as he got up and shook my hand, too. “Welcome to our city.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Son.”

  He seemed puzzled at the emphasis.

  “That’s the rest of it,” I explained. “Never got married and was too busy getting drunk and tearing up the pavement on my leaves to visit a sperm bank.”

  “Oho,” Weinstein said, and gestured at the walls with a thick thumb. “So this is it.”

  “That’s right: this is it. The Family. The only one I’ll ever have. I’ve got almost enough of these—” I tapped my medals “—to rate replacement. As a sling-shot commander, I’m sure of it.”

  “All you don’t know yet,” Lamehd pointed out, “is how high a percentage of replacement will be apportioned to your memory. That depends on how many more of these chest decorations you collect before you become an—ah, should I say raw material?”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling crazily light and easy and relaxed. I’d got it all out and I didn’t feel whipped any more by a billion years of reproduction and evolution. And I’d been going to do a morale job on them! “Say raw material, Lamehd.”

  “Well, boys,” he went on, “it seems to me we want the commander to get a lot more fruit salad. He’s a nice guy and there should be more of him in the club.”

  They were all standing around me now, Weinstein, Lamehd, Grey, Wang Hsi. They looked real friendly and real capable. I began to feel we were going to have one of the best sling-shots in—What did I mean one of the best? The best, mister, the best.

  “Okay,” said Grey. “Wherever and whenever you want to, you start leading us—Pop.”

  Afterword

  There’s not much I have to say about “Down Among the Dead Men.” Horace L. Gold said he needed a novelette almost imm
ediately for Galaxy, and most of all he wanted a space opera.

  “You’ve never written a space opera, a real bangety-bang space opera,” he said. “Why not?”

  “I don’t like them,” I told him. “I don’t like to read them, and I don’t like to write them. Science-fiction westerns: they’re kill-’em-on-Mercury-instead-of-Montana.”

  Well, he explained, if—in spite of my bullshit fastidiousness—I managed to write one in the next week, he would give me a large bonus on the word rate and voucher the check through immediately.

  As always, in those days, I could very much use the money; so I agreed to think about it. To my surprise, by the time I got home, I had an idea. I began writing.

  It went fast. I completed the piece in a weekend.

  Horace loved it, bought it. “It’s a real space opera,” he marveled, “but all the important action takes place completely offstage. A tour deforce!”

  I rarely agreed with Horace, but I told him I was thoroughly with him on his last sentence.

  The point being that, despite its disreputable origin, I have grown to be very fond of this story. I’m almost astonished to say that now I would rank it among my best.

  And it is a space opera. Of a kind, anyway.

  Written 1954 / Published 1954

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