“I am here to break your spirit,” a voice rich with menace told them, and they looked up and shivered even more as they faced the chief demon in this particular hell.
Petty Chief Officer Deathwish Drang was a specialist from the tips of the angry spikes of his hair to the corrugated stamping-soles of his mirrorlike boots. He was wide-shouldered and lean-kipped, while his long arms hung, curved like those of some horrible anthropoid, the knuckles of his immense fists scarred from the breaking of thousands of teeth. It was impossible to look at this detestable form and imagine that it issued from the tender womb of a woman. He could never have been born; he must have been built to order by the government. Most terrible of all was the head. The face! The hairline was scarcely a finger’s-width above the black tangle of the brows that were set like a rank growth of foliage at the rim of the black pits that concealed the eyes-visible only as baleful red gleams in the Stygian darkness. A nose, broken and crushed, squatted above the mouth that was like a knife slash in the taut belly of a corpse, while from between the lips issued the great, white fangs of the canine teeth, at least two inches long, that rested in grooves on the lower lip.
“I am Petty Chief Officer Deathwish Drang, and you will call me ‘sir’ or ‘m’lord.’” He began to pace grimly before the row of terrified recruits. “I am your father and your mother and your whole universe and your dedicated enemy, and very soon I will have you regretting the day you were born. I will crush your will. When I say frog, you will jump. My job is to turn you into troopers, and troopers have discipline. Discipline means simply unthinking subservience,. loss of free will, absolute obedience. That is all I ask …”
He stopped before Bill, who was not shaking quite as much as the others, and scowled.
“I don’t like your face. One month of Sunday KP.”
“Sir…”
“And a second month – for talking back.”
He waited, but Bill was silent. He had already learned his first lesson on how to be a good trooper. Keep your mouth shut. Deathwish paced on.
“Right now you are nothing but horrible, sordid, flabby pieces of debased civilian flesh. I shall turn that flesh to muscle, your wills to jelly, your minds to machines. You will become good troopers, or I will kill you. Very soon you will be hearing stories about me, vicious stories, about how I lulled and ate a recruit who disobeyed me.”
He hatred and stared at them, and slowly the coffin-lid lips parted in an evil travesty of a grin, while a drop of saliva formed at the tip of each whitened tusk.
“That story is true.”
A moan broke from the row of recruits, and they shook as though a chill wind had passed over them. The smile vanished.
“We will run to breakfast now as soon as I have some volunteers for an easy assignment. Can any of you drive a helicar?”
Two recruits hopefully raised their hands, and he beckoned them forward. “All right, both of you, mops and buckets behind that door. Clean out the latrine while the rest are eating. You’ll have a better appetite for lunch.”
That was Bill’s second lesson on how to be a good trooper: never volunteer.
The days of recruit training passed with a horribly lethargic speed. With each day conditions became worse and Bill’s exhaustion greater. This seemed impossible, but it was nevertheless true. A large number of gifted and sadistic minds had designed it to be that way. The recruits’ heads were shaved for uniformity. The food was theoretically nourishing but incredibly vile and when, by mistake, one batch of meat was served in an edible state it was caught at the last moment and thrown out and the cook reduced two grades. Their sleep was broken by mock gas attacks and their free time filled with caring for their equipment. The seventh day was designated as a day of rest, but they all had received punishments, like Bill’s KP, and it was as any other day. On this, the third Sunday of their imprisonment, they were stumbling through the last hour of the day before the lights were extinguished and they were finally permitted to crawl into their casehardened bunks. Bill pushed against the weak force field that blocked the door, cunningly designed to allow the desert flies to enter but not leave the barracks, and dragged himself in. After fourteen hours of KP his legs vibrated with exhaustion, and his arms were wrinkled and pallid as a corpse’s from the soapy water. He dropped his jacket to the floor, where it stood stiffly supported by its burden of sweat, grease, and dust, and dragged his shaver from his footlocker. In the latrine he bobbed his head around trying to find a clear space on one of the mirrors. All of them had been heavily stenciled in large letters with such inspiring messages as KEEP YOUR WUG SHUT-THE CHINGERS ARE LISTENING and IF YOU TALK THIS MAN MAY DIE. He finally plugged the shaver in next to WOULD YOU WANT YOUR SISTER TO MARRY ONE? and centered his face in the o in ONE. Black-rimmed and bloodshot eyes stared back at him as he ran the buzzing machine over the underweight planes of his jaw. It took more than a minute for the meaning of the question to penetrate his fatiguedrugged brain.