“ — and to obey all lawful orders of the Commander-in-Chief of the Terran Service and of all officers or delegated persons placed over me — “
“ — and to require such obedience from all members of the Service or other persons or non-human beings lawfully placed under my orders — “
“ — and, on being honorably discharged at the completion of my full term of active service or upon being placed on inactive retired status after having completed such full term, to carry out all duties and obligations and to enjoy all privileges of Federation citizenship including but not limited to the duty, obligation and privilege of exercising sovereign franchise for the rest of my natural life unless stripped of honor by verdict, finally sustained, of court of my sovereign peers.”
(Whew!) Mr. Dubois had analyzed the Service oath for us in History and Moral Philosophy and had made us study it phrase by phrase — but you don’t really feel the size of the thing until it comes rolling over you, all in one ungainly piece, as heavy and unstoppable as Juggernaut’s carriage.
At least it made me realize that I was no longer a civilian, with my shirttail out and nothing on my mind. I didn’t know yet what I was, but I knew what I wasn’t.
“So help me God!” we both ended and Carl crossed himself and so did the cute one.
After that there were more signatures and fingerprints, all five of us, and flat colorgraphs of Carl and me were snapped then and there and embossed into our papers. The Fleet Sergeant finally looked up. “Why, it’s ‘way past the break for lunch. Time for chow, lads.”
I swallowed hard. Uh…Sergeant?”
“Eh? Speak up.”
“Could I flash my folks from here? Tell them what I — Tell them how it came out?”
“We can do better than that.”
“Sir?”
“You go on forty-eight hours leave now.” He grinned coldly. “Do you know what happens if you don’t come back?”
“Uhcourt-martial?”
“Not a thing. Not a blessed thing. Except that your papers get marked, Term not completed satisfactorily, and you never, never, never get a second chance. This is our cooling-off period, during which we shake out the overgrown babies who didn’t really mean it and should never have taken the oath. It saves the government money and it saves a power of grief for such kids and their parents — the neighbors needn’t guess. You don’t even have to tell your parents.” He shoved his chair away from his desk. “So I’ll see you at noon day after tomorrow. If I see you. Fetch your personal effects.”
It was a crumby leave. Father stormed at me, then quit speaking to me; Mother took to her bed. When I finally left, an hour earlier than I had to, nobody saw me off but the morning cook and the houseboys.
I stopped in front of the recruiting sergeant’s desk, thought about saluting and decided I didn’t know how. He looked up. “Oh. Here are your papers. Take them up to room 201; they’ll start you through the mill. Knock and walk in.”
Two days later I knew I was not going to be a pilot. Some of the things the examiners wrote about me were: insufficient intuitive grasp of spatial relationshipsinsufficient mathematical talentdeficient mathematical preparationreaction time adequateeyesight good. I’m glad they put in those last two; I was beginning to feel that counting on my fingers was my speed.
The placement officer let me list my lesser preferences, in order, and I caught four more days of the wildest aptitude tests I’ve ever heard of. I mean to say, what do they find out when a stenographer jumps on her chair and screams, “Snakes!” There was no snake, just a harmless piece of plastic hose.
The written and oral tests were mostly just as silly, but they seemed happy with them, so I took them. The thing I did most carefully was to list my preferences. Naturally I listed all of the Space Navy jobs (other than pilot) at the top; whether I went as power-room technician or as cook, I knew
that I preferred any Navy job to any Army job — I wanted to travel.