“Forget it.”
“Not interested?”
“Dumb.”
“Too bad. How come?”
“Astrology and cosmic forces. She wanted to know what sign I was born under. I told her MATERNITY WARD.” Colman made a sour face. “Hell, why should I have to humor people all the time?”
Sirocco wrinkled his lip, showing a glimpse of his moustache. “You can’t fool me, Steve. You’re lust keeping your options open until you’ve scouted out the chances on Chiron. Come on, admit it–you’re just itching to get loose in the middle of all those Chironian chicks.” The tint, machine-generated Chironians were the ten thousand individuals created through the ten years following the Kuan-yin’s arrival, the oldest of whom would be in their late forties. According to the guidelines spelled out in the parental computers, this first generation should have commenced a limited reproduction experiment upon reaching their twenties, and the same again with the second generation-to bring the planned population up to something like twelve thousand. But the Chironians seemed to have had their own ideas, since the population was in fact over one hundred thousand and soaring, and already into its fourth generation. The possible implications were intriguing.
“I’m not that hung up about it,” Colman insisted, not for the first time. “Maybe it is like some of the guys think, and maybe it’s not. Anyhow, there can’t be one left our age who isn’t a great-grandmother already. Look at the statistics .”
“Who said anything about them? Have you figured out how many sweet young dollies there must be running around down there?” Sirocco chuckled lasciviously over the intercom. “I bet Swyley has a miraculous recovery between now and when we go into orbit.” Color-blind or not, Corporal Swyley had seen the present situation coming in time to report sick with stomach cramps just twenty-four hours before D Company was assigned two weeks of Bomb Factory guard ‘duty. He was “sick” because he had reported them during his own time; reporting stomach cramps during the Army’s time was diagnosed as malingering.
A call came through from Brigade, and Sirocco switched into the audio channel to take it. Colman sat back and looked around. The indicators and alarms on the console in front of him had nothing to report. Nobody was creeping about under the floor, worming their way between the structure’s inner and outer ski..~, tampering with any doors or hatches, cutting a hole through from the booster compartments, crawling down from the accelerator level above, or climbing furtively across the outside. Nobody, it seemed, wanted any thermonuclear warheads today. He rose and moved round behind the chair. “Need to stretch my legs,” he said as Sirocco glanced up behind his faceplate. ‘,’It’s time to do a round anyhow.” Sirocco nodded and carried on talking inside his helmet. Colman shouldered his M32 and left the guardroom.
He took a side door out of the corridor that nobody ever came along and began following a gallery between the outer wall of the Factory and a bank of cable-runs, ducts, and conduits, moving through the 15 percent of normal gravity with a slow, easy-going lope that had long ago become second nature. Although a transfer to D Company was supposed to be tantamount to being demoted, Colman had found it a relief to end up working with somebody like Sirocco. Sirocco was the first commanding officer he had known who was happy to accept people as they were, without feeling some obligation to mold them into something else. He wasn’t meddling and interfering all the time. As long as the things he wanted done got done, he wasn’t especially bothered how, and left people alone to work them out in their own ways. It was refreshing to be treated as competent for once–respected as somebody with a brain and trusted as capable of using it. Most of the other men in the unit felt the same way. They were generally not the kind to put such sentiments into. words with great alacrity ú .. but it showed.
Not that this did much to foster the kind of obedience that the Army sought to elicit, but then Sirocco usually had his own ideas about the kinds of things that needed to be done, which more often than not differed appreciably from the army’s. Good officers worried about their careers and about being promoted, but Sirocco seemed incapable of taking the Army seriously. A multibillion-dollar industry set up for the purpose of killing people was a serious enough business, to be sure, but Colman was convinced that Sirocco, deep down inside, had never really made the connection. It was a game that he enjoyed playing. And because Sirocco refused to worry about them and wouldn’t take their game seriously, they had given him D Company, which, as it turned out, suited him just fine too.