III
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 mustache, 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 spacecafard; record clerks issued themselves pay books; and the loadmasters kicked each other up the ramps and into the waiting shuttleships. 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, toward 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 space-suit 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 dreadnaught of space and dropped his bags iii 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 Fuse Tender Sixth Class, unskilled. Bunk down in compartment 34J-89T-ooi. 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 shut-eye. 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 toward 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 ironjawed. He had lovely, purplish-black skin that made Bill a little jealous, because his was only a sort of grayish 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.