“The human body is a wonderful thing,” Bowb Brown said a month later, when they were sitting around a table in the Lowest Ranks Klub eating plastic-skinned sausages stuffed with road sweepings and drinking watery warm beer. Bowb Brown was a throat-herder from the plains, which is why they called him Bowb, since everyone knows just what thoatherders do with their thoats. He was tall, thin, and bowlegged, his skin burnt to the color of ancient leather. He rarely talked, being more used to the eternal silence of the plains broken only by the eerie cry of the restless thoat, but he was a great thinker, since the one thing he had plenty of was time to think in. He could worry a thought for days, even weeks, before he mentioned it aloud, and while he was thinking about it nothing could disturb him. He even let them call him Bowb without protesting: call any other trooper bow b and he would hit you in the face. Bill and Eager and the other troopers from X squad sitting around the table all clapped and cheered, as they always did when Bowb said something.
“Tell, us more, Bowb!”
“It can still talk-I thought it was dead!”
“Go on-why is the body a wonderful thing?”
They waited in expectant silence, while Bowb managed to tear a bite from his sausage and, after ineffectual chewing, swallowed it with an effort that brought tears to his eyes. He eased the pain with a mouthful of beer and spoke.
“The human body is a wonderful thing, because if it doesn’t die it lives.”
They waited for more until they realized that he was finished, then they sneered.
“Boy, are you full of bowb!”
“Sign up for OCS!”
“Yeah-but what does it mean?”
Bill knew what it meant but didn’t tell them. There were only half as many men in the squad as there had been the first day. One man had been transferred, but all the others were in the hospital, or in the mental hospital, or discharged for the convenience of tire government as being too crippled for active service. Or dead. The survivors, after losing every ounce of weight not made up of bone or essential connective tissue, had put back the lost weight in the form of muscle and were now completely adapted to the rigors of Camp Leon Trotsky, though they still loathed it. Bill marveled at the efficiency of the system. Civilians had to fool around with examinations, grades, retirement benefits, seniority, and a thousand other factors that limited the efficiency of the workers. But how easily the troopers did it! They simply killed off the weaker ones and used the survivors. He respected the system. Though he still loathed it.
“You know what I need, I need a woman,” Ugly Ugglesway said.
“Don’t talk dirty,” Bill told him promptly, since he had been correctly brought up.
“I’m not talking dirty!-” Ugly whined. “It’s not like I said I wanted to re-enlist or that I thought Deathwish was human or anything like that. I just said I need a woman. Don’t we all?”
“I need a drink,” Bowb Brown said as he took a long swig from his glass of dehydrated reconstituted beer, shuddered, then squirted it out through his teeth in a long stream onto the concrete, where it instantly evaporated.
“Affirm, affirm,” Ugly agreed, bobbing his mat haired, warty head up and down. “I need a woman and a drink.” His whine became almost plaintive. “After all, what else is there to want in the troopers outside of out?”
They thought about that a long time, but could think of nothing else that anyone really wanted. Eager Beager looked out from under the table, where he was surreptitiously polishing a boot and said that he wanted more polish, but they ignored him. Even Bill, now that he put his mind to it, could think of nothing he really wanted other than this inextricably linked pair. He tried hard to think of something else, since he had vague memories of wanting other things when he had been a civilian, but nothing else came to mind.
“Gee, it’s only seven weeks more until we get our first pass,” Eager said from under the table, then screamed a little as everyone kicked him at once.