Down Among the Dead Men
by William Tenn
I stood in front of the junkyard’s outer gate and felt my stomach turn over slowly, grindingly, the way it had when I saw a whole terrestrial subfleet—close to 20,000 men—blown to bits in the Second Battle of Saturn more than eleven years ago. But then there had been shattered fragments of ships in my visiplate and imagined screams of men in my mind; there had been the expanding images of the Eoti’s box-like craft surging through the awful, drifting wreckage they had created, to account for the icy sweat that wound itself like a flat serpent around my forehead and my neck.
Now there was nothing but a large, plain building, very much like the hundreds of other factories in the busy suburbs of Old Chicago, a manufacturing establishment surrounded by a locked gate and spacious proving grounds—the Junkyard. Yet the sweat on my skin was colder and the heave of my bowels more spastic than it had ever been in any of those countless, ruinous battles that had created this place.
All of which was very understandable, I told myself. What I was feeling was the great-grandmother hag of all fears, the most basic rejection and reluctance of which my flesh was capable. It was understandable, but that didn’t help any. I still couldn’t walk up to the sentry at the gate.
I’d been almost all right until I’d seen the huge square can against the fence, the can with the slight stink coming out of it and the big colorful sign on top:
Don’t Waste Waste
Place All Waste Here
Remember—
Whatever is Worn Can Be Shorn
Whatever is Maimed Can Be Reclaimed
Whatever is Used Can Be Reused
Place All Waste Here
I’d seen those square, compartmented cans and those signs in every barracks, every hospital, every recreation center, between here and the asteroids. But seeing them, now, in this place, gave them a different meaning. I wondered if they had those other posters inside, the shorter ones. You know: “We need all our resources to defeat the enemy—and garbage is our biggest natural resource.” Decorating the walls of this particular building with those posters would be downright ingenious.
Whatever is maimed can be reclaimed…I flexed my right arm inside my blue jumper sleeve. It felt like a part of me, always would feel like a part of me. And in a couple of years, assuming that I lived that long, the thin white scar that circled the elbow joint would be completely invisible. Sure. Whatever is maimed can be reclaimed. All except one thing. The most important thing.
And I felt less like going in than ever.
And then I saw this kid. The one from Arizona Base.
He was standing right in front of the sentry box, paralyzed just like me. In the center of his uniform cap was a brand-new, gold-shiny Y with a dot in the center: the insignia of a sling-shot commander. He hadn’t been wearing it the day before at the briefing; that could only mean the commission had just come through. He looked real young and real scared.
I remembered him from the briefing session. He was the one whose hand had gone up timidly during the question period, the one who, when he was recognized, had half risen, worked his mouth a couple of times and finally blurted out: “Excuse me, sir, but they don’t—they don’t smell at all bad, do they?”
There had been a cyclone of laughter, the yelping laughter of men who’ve felt themselves close to the torn edge of hysteria all afternoon and who are damn glad that someone has at last said something that they can make believe is funny.
And the white-haired briefing officer, who hadn’t so much as smiled, waited for the hysteria to work itself out, before saying gravely: “No, they don’t smell bad at all. Unless, that is, they don’t bathe. The same as you gentlemen.”
That shut us up. Even the kid, blushing his way back into his seat, set his jaw stiffly at the reminder. And it wasn’t until twenty minutes later, when we’d been dismissed, that I began to feel the ache in my own face from the unrelaxed muscles there.
The same as you gentlemen…
I shook myself hard and walked over to the kid. “Hello, Commander,” I said. “Been here long?”
He managed a grin. “Over an hour, Commander. I caught the eight-fifteen out of Arizona Base. Most of the other fellows were still sleeping off last night’s party, I’d gone to bed early; I wanted to give myself as much time to get the feel of this thing as I could. Only it doesn’t seem to do much good.”
“I know. Some things you can’t get used to. Some things you’re not supposed to get used to.”
He looked at my chest. “I guess this isn’t your first sling-shot command?”
My first? More like my twenty-first, son! But then I remembered that everyone tells me I look young for my medals, and what the hell, the kid looked so pale—“No, not exactly my first. But I’ve never had a blob crew before. This is exactly as new to me as it is to you. Hey, listen, Commander: I’m having a hard time, too. What say we bust through that gate together? Then the worst’ll be over.”
The kid nodded violently. We linked arms and marched up to the sentry. We showed him our orders. He opened the gate and said: “Straight ahead. Any elevator on your left to the fifteenth floor.”
So, still arm in arm, we walked into the main entrance of the large building, up a long flight of steps and under the sign that said in red and black:
There were some old-looking but very erect men walking along the main lobby and a lot of uniformed, fairly pretty girls. I was pleased to note that most of the girls were pregnant. The first pleasing sight I had seen in almost a week.
We turned into an elevator and told the girl, “Fifteen.” She punched a button and waited for it to fill up. She didn’t seem to be pregnant. I wondered what was the matter with her.
I’d managed to get a good grip on my heaving imagination, when I got a look at the shoulder patches the other passengers were wearing. That almost did for me right there. It was a circular red patch with the black letters TAF superimposed on a white G-4. TAF for Terrestrial Armed Forces, of course: the letters were the basic insignia of all rear-echelon outfits. But why didn’t they use G-1, which represented Personnel? G-4 stood for the Supply Division. Supply!
You can always trust the TAF. Thousands of morale specialists in all kinds of ranks, working their educated heads off to keep up the spirits of the men in the fighting perimeters—but every damn time, when it comes down to scratch, the good old dependable TAF will pick the ugliest name, the one in the worst possible taste.
Oh, sure, I told myself, you can’t fight a shattering, no-quarter interstellar war for twenty-five years and keep every pretty thought dewy-damp and intact, But not Supply, gentlemen. Not this place—not the Junkyard. Let’s at least try to keep up appearances.
Then we began going up and the elevator girl began announcing floors and I had lots of other things to think about.
“Third floor—Corpse Reception and Classification,” the operator sang out.
“Fifth floor—Preliminary Organ Processing.”
“Seventh floor—Brain Reconstitution and Neural Alignment.”
“Ninth floor—Cosmetics, Elementary Reflexes, and Muscular Control.”
At this point, I forced myself to stop listening, the way you do when you’re on a heavy cruiser, say, and the rear engine room gets flicked by a bolt from an Eoti scrambler. After you’ve been around a couple of times when it’s happened, you learn to sort of close your ears and say to yourself, “I don’t know anybody in that damned engine room, not anybody, and in a few minutes everything will be nice and quiet again.” And in a few minutes it is. Only trouble is that then, like as not, you’ll be part of the detail that’s ordered into the steaming place to scrape the guck off the walls and get the jets firing again.