“That good, eh? Better than the old-fashioned mother’s son type?”
“Well-1-1,” she considered. “You’d really be amazed, Commander, if you could see the very latest performance charts. Of course, there is always that big deficiency, the one activity we’ve never been able to—”
“One thing I can’t understand,” the kid broke in, “why do they have to use corpses! A body’s lived its life, fought its war—why not leave it alone? I know the Eoti can outbreed us merely by increasing the number of queens in their flagships; I know that manpower is the biggest single TAF problem—but we’ve been synthesizing protoplasm for a long, long time now. Why not synthesize the whole damn body, from toenails to frontal lobe, and turn out real, honest-to-God androids that don’t wallop you with the stink of death when you meet them?”
The little blonde got mad. “Our product does not stink! Cosmetics can now guarantee that the new models have even less of a body odor than you, young man! And we do not reactivate or revitalize corpses, I’ll have you know; what we do is reclaim human protoplasm, we reuse worn-out and damaged human cellular material in the area where the greatest shortages currently occur, military personnel. You wouldn’t talk about corpses, I assure you, if you saw the condition that some of those bodies are in when they arrive. Why, sometimes in a whole baling package—a baling package contains twenty casualties—we don’t find enough to make one good, whole kidney. Then we have to take a little intestinal tissue here and a bit of spleen there, alter them, unite them carefully, activa—”
“That’s what I mean. If you go to all that trouble, why not start with real raw material?”
“Like what, for example?” she asked him.
The kid gestured with his black-gloved hands. “Basic elements like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and so on. It would make the whole process a lot cleaner.”
“Basic elements have to come from somewhere,” I pointed out gently. “You might take your hydrogen and oxygen from air and water. But where would you get your carbon from?”
“From the same place where the other synthetics manufacturers get it—coal, oil, cellulose.”
The receptionist sat back and relaxed, “Those are organic substances,” she reminded him. “If you’re going to use raw material that was once alive, why not use the kind that comes as close as possible to the end-product you have in mind? It’s simple industrial economics, Commander, believe me. The best and cheapest raw material for the manufacture of soldier surrogates is soldier bodies.”
“Sure,” the kid said. “Makes sense. There’s no other use for dead, old, beaten-up soldier bodies. Better’n shoving them in the ground where they’d be just waste, pure waste.”
Our little blonde chum started to smile in agreement, then shot him an intense look and changed her mind. She looked very uncertain all of a sudden. When the communicator on her desk buzzed, she bent over it eagerly.
I watched her with approval. Definitely no fluffhead. Just feminine. I sighed. You see, I figure lots of civilian things out the wrong way, but only with women is my wrongness an all-the-time proposition. Proving again that a hell of a lot of peculiar things turn out to have happened for the best.
“Commander,” she was saying to the kid. “Would you go to Room 1591? Your crew will be there in a moment.” She turned to me. “And Room 1524 for you, Commander, if you please.”
The kid nodded and walked off, very stiff and erect. I waited until the door had closed behind him, then I leaned over the receptionist. “Wish they’d change the Breeding Regulations again,” I told her. “You’d make a damn fine rear-echelon orientation officer. Got more of the feel of the Junkyard from you than in ten briefing sessions.”
She examined my face anxiously, “I hope you mean that, Commander. You see, we’re all very deeply involved in this project. We’re extremely proud of the progress the Third District Finishing Plant has made. We talk about the new developments all the time, everywhere—even in the cafeteria. It didn’t occur to me until too late that you gentlemen might—” she blushed deep, rich red, the way only a blonde can blush “—might take what I said personally. I’m sorry if I—”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” I assured her. “All you did was talk what they call shop. Like when I was in the hospital last month and heard two surgeons discussing how to repair a man’s arm and making it sound as if they were going to nail a new arm on an expensive chair. Real interesting, and I learned a lot.”
I left her looking grateful, which is absolutely the only way to leave a woman, and barged on to Room 1524.
It was evidently used as a classroom when reconverted human junk wasn’t being picked up. A bunch of chairs, a long blackboard, a couple of charts. One of the charts was on the Eoti, the basic information list, that contains all the limited information we have been able to assemble on the bugs in the bloody quarter-century since they came busting in past Pluto to take over the solar system. It hadn’t been changed much since the one I had to memorize in high schooclass="underline" the only difference was a slightly longer section on intelligence and motivation. Just theory, of course, but more carefully thought-out theory than the stuff I’d learned. The big brains had now concluded that the reason all attempts at communicating with them had failed was not because they were a conquest-crazy species, but because they suffered from the same extreme xenophobia as their smaller, less intelligent communal insect cousins here on Earth. That is, an ant wanders up to a strange anthill—zok! No discussion, he’s chopped down at the entrance. And the sentry ants react even faster if it’s a creature of another genus. So despite the Eoti science, which in too many respects was more advanced than ours, they were psychologically incapable of the kind of mental projection, or empathy, necessary if one is to realize that a completely alien-looking individual has intelligence, feelings—and rights!—to substantially the same extent as oneself.
Well, it might be so. Meanwhile, we were locked in a murderous stalemate with them on a perimeter of never-ending battle that sometimes expanded as far as Saturn and occasionally contracted as close as Jupiter. Barring the invention of a new weapon of such unimaginable power that we could wreck their fleet before they could duplicate the weapon, as they’d been managing to up to now, our only hope was to discover somehow the stellar system from which they came, somehow build ourselves not one starship but a fleet of them—and somehow wreck their home base or throw enough of a scare into it so that they’d pull back their expedition for defensive purposes. A lot of somehows.
But if we wanted to maintain our present position until the somehows started to roll, our birth announcements had to take longer to read than the casualty lists. For the last decade, this hadn’t been so, despite the more and more stringent Breeding Regulations which were steadily pulverizing every one of our moral codes and sociological advances. Then there was the day that someone in the Conservation Police noticed that almost half our ships of the line had been fabricated from the metallic junk of previous battles. Where was the personnel that had manned those salvage derelicts, he wondered…
And thus what Blondie outside and her co-workers were pleased to call soldier surrogates.
I’d been a computer’s mate, second class, on the old Jenghiz Khan when the first batch had come aboard as battle replacements. Let me tell you, friends, we had real good reason for calling them zombies! Most of them were as blue as the uniforms they wore, their breathing was so noisy it made you think of asthmatics with built-in public address systems, their eyes shone with all the intelligence of petroleum jelly—and the way they walked!