“You want to stay here?” said Unk.
“I’m all right here,” said Chrono. “Can I go out and play batball now?”
Unk wept.
His weeping appalled the boy. He had never seen a man weep before. He never wept himself. “I’m going out to play!” he cried wildly, and he ran out of the office.
Unk went to the window of the office. He looked out at the iron playground. Young Chrono’s team was in the field now. Young Chrono joined his teammates, faced a batter whose back was to Unk.
Chrono kissed his good-luck piece, put it in his pocket. “Easy out, you guys,” he yelled hoarsely. “Come on, you guys — let’s kill him!”
Unk’s mate, the mother of young Chrono, was an instructress in the Schliemann Breathing School for Recruits. Schliemann breathing, of course, is a technique that enables human beings to survive in a vacuum or in an inhospitable atmosphere without the use of helmets or other cumbersome respiratory gear.
It consists, essentially, of taking a pill rich in oxygen. The bloodstream takes on this oxygen through the wall of the small intestine rather than through the lungs. On Mars, the pills were known officially as Combat Respiratory Rations, in popular parlance as goofballs.
Schliemann Breathing is at its simplest in a benign but useless atmosphere like that of Mars. The breather goes on breathing and talking in a normal manner, though there is no oxygen for his lungs to take in from the atmosphere. All he has to remember is to take his goofballs regularly.
The school in which Unk’s mate was an instructress taught recruits the more difficult techniques necessary in a vacuum or in a harmful atmosphere. This involves not only pill-taking, but plugging one’s ears and nostrils, and keeping one’s mouth shut as well. Any effort to speak or to breathe would result in hemorrhages and probably death.
Unk’s mate was one of six instructresses at the Schliemann Breathing School for Recruits. Her classroom was a bare, windowless, whitewashed room, thirty feet square. Ranged around the walls were benches.
On a table in the middle was a bowl of goofballs, a bowl of nose and ear plugs, a roll of adhesive plaster, scissors, and a small tape recorder. Purpose of the tape recorder was to play music during the long periods in which there was nothing to do but sit and wait patiently for nature to take its course.
Such a period had been reached now. The class had just been dosed with goofballs. Now the students had to sit quietly on the benches and listen to music and wait for the goofballs to reach their small intestines.
The tune being played had been pirated recently from an Earthling broadcast. It was a big hit on Earth — a trio composed for a boy, a girl, and cathedral bells. It was called “God Is Our Interior Decorator.” The boy and girl sang alternate lines of the verses, and joined in close harmony on the choruses.
The cathedral bells whanged and clanged whenever anything of a religious nature was mentioned.
There were seventeen recruits. They were all in their newly issued lichen-green undershorts. The purpose of having them strip was to permit the instructress to see at a glance their external bodily reactions to Schliemann breathing.
The recruits were fresh from amnesia treatments and antenna installations at the Reception Center Hospital. Their hair had been shaved off, and each recruit had a strip of adhesive plaster running from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck.
The adhesive plaster showed where the antenna had been put in.
The recruits’ eyes were as empty as the windows of abandoned textile mills.
So were the eyes of the instructress, since she, too, had recently had her memory cleaned out.
When they released her from the hospital, they told her what her name was, and where she lived, and how to teach Schliemann breathing — and that was about all the factual information they gave her. There was one other item: they told her she had an eight-year-old son named Chrono, and that she could visit him at his school on Tuesday evenings, if she liked.