“I sheeting well hope you behave yourself better outside than in, Lindt!”
“Yes, sergeant,” Gerry said, woodenly at attention in spite of having reclaimed his civilian clothes, eyes fixed on a point in space above the sergeant’s shoulder. He had lost five pounds during recruit training and had had to draw in the belt of his slax.
“Shouldn’t wonder,” the sergeant said with contempt. “You’re a softass at heart, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sergeant.”
“You’ve learned something in the army, at least, hm? Well, don’t take it for everlasting gospel. Before you’re through here we’ll have had that heart out of you and made it over in a different design. All right, shift the scene.”
“Permission to dismiss, sergeant?”
“Dis-miss!”
* * *
He was a week later going into Ellay on pass than the rest of his intake. Last time he had been on thirty-six hours’ punishment drill. He was beginning to get an insight into the technique now: any recruit who wet his boots, as the current phrase went, immediately on reporting was marked as a scapegoat. It saved the noncoms the trouble of choosing one by their own judgment. The rest of the squad saw the treatment meted out to him and were supposed to quake in their boots and behave themselves.
He had done rather better than average in every instruction session so far, being brighter than average and also in better physical condition. Most of the other men in his squad were brown-noses from states where they were still at an economic disadvantage and had neither the funds nor the imagination to dodge the draft; there was a sprinkling of whites from the same states and not a few Puerto Ricans had also been grabbed by the computers. Underlying the singling out he had experienced, he suspected, there might possibly be a lean-over-backwards official directive aimed at encouraging his companions: pick out the tall good-looking blue-eyed fair-haired one and hit him because he can’t complain it’s prejudice.
He was the only blond in the whole squad.
Being better than others hadn’t saved him from worse treatment.
Thesis, antithesis—synthesis.
Along with everyone else he climbed aboard the hoverboat running shore-pass parties from Boat Camp to the mainland. He felt no particular enthusiasm about being turned loose. He felt no particular enthusiasm about anything except keeping his nose clean. But for the risk of appearing odd, he would probably have preferred to sit in the barrack-room and write home.
* * *
At the point where the hoverboat ran up the concrete slip and on to the road, someone had managed to stretch a single strand of GT-manufactured monofilament wire between two posts. The driver was in a hurry—he had seven more runs to make this evening before he could use his own pass—and hit the wire at nearly forty miles an hour. It sliced through the cab with hardly any drag at all, breaking inter-crystalline and not the tougher molecular bonds, barely leaving a mark on metal and plastic because they re-welded themselves on the Johanssen principle before air could get at the interfaces and cancel out their natural adhesion.
A force that tended to separate the parts, however, was capable of opposing the reunion.
Gerry Lindt happened to be turning to look at someone who had put a question to him. The twisting force was adequate to prevent his neck from bonding back together when the wire sliced through. Perhaps it was as well; he could have been paralysed from the neck down by the damage it did to his spinal cord. But the last horrible sight of his own torso as his eyes rolled along with his head towards the floor of the vehicle was nearer to eternal torment than even his sergeant would have wished on him.
It was obviously partisan work, not random sabotage. There was a grand roundup of suspected partisans organised immediately, and out of the two hundred and some they arrested they actually caught no fewer than four people in direct Chinese pay.
It was no special comfort to Gerry Lindt.
continuity (35)
TO AWAIT COLLECTION
For a fearful moment after he had brought Sugaiguntung to the boat, Donald thought the scientist was going to balk. There were so many things he did not know about this man whose life he had altered like an act of God. Was he afraid of the sea, was he a claustrophobe who could not be hidden in the hold?
But the reason for Sugaiguntung’s hesitation became apparent with his next utterance.
“You did say—Jogajong?”
“Right!” Donald snapped. “Who else in this country could be trusted to keep you away from the gang in power?”
“I—I hadn’t realised.” Sugaiguntung licked his lips. “I don’t involve myself much in things like this. It’s all so strange and such a shock … Captain!”
The skipper looked attentive.
“Do you truly have faith in that man?”
Christ, we’re going to have a political debate now! Donald sharpened his ears for the drone of a police helicopter or the chug of a reaction-powered patrol-boat.
“Yes, sir,” the skipper said.
“Why?”
“Look at me, sir, and my friends here—half in rags. Look at my boat, which needs painting and a new engine. Marshal Solukarta tells us fisherfolk that we are the bedrock of our country, bringing in the precious food that keeps us healthy and improves our brains. Then he fixes the price of fish at twenty talas a basket and when we complain he tells us we are committing treason. I am not even allowed to leave my work and try and make more money on land. Saving your presence, sir—you are Dr. Sugaiguntung, aren’t you?—what this country needs is not better children but better adults, who could raise their children better anyway.”
Sugaiguntung gave a shrug and approached the side of the boat. He looked for a way to clamber over the gunwale, but there was no ladder or step. Donald, giving a final nervous glance behind him, put away his gun and helped the skipper hoist the scientist aboard.
“You will have to hide in the fish-hold,” the skipper said. “It is stinking and dark. But the patrols are certain to stop us at least once if we approach the far shore. We shall have to make the trip very slowly, and before we can risk being searched there must be plenty of fish in the hold to deceive them.”
They must have done this kind of thing before, Donald realised, as with quick efficiency the two crewmen brought old tarpaulins and wrapped him and Sugaiguntung in them to protect their clothes. They were instructed to lie at the furthest end of the hold where there was a vent bringing in fresh air. Then they were left to themselves while the boat was put out to sea. Shortly, its whole fabric was shuddering with the irregular chug of the reaction-pumps.
In darkness alleviated only by a grey patch where light from the mast-head lamp soaked through the slats over the air-vent, Sugaiguntung uttered a whimper.
“Don’t worry,” Donald said, unable to prevent it sounding like a forlorn hope.
“Mr. Hogan, I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing. I—I may have fallen into a pattern of habit instead of taking a decision.”
“I don’t understand.” The scrap of anthropological information read years ago leaked back to consciousness. “Oh—yes, I think I do. You mean there’s a custom. Someone who saves your life buys a lease on it.”
“It is what I was taught as a child, and there is a great deal of irrationality left in us moderns. I have never been near to death before except once from a virus I caught. And that was while I was still a boy. One was supposed to buy back one’s right to free will by doing something at the—oh!—the behest of the one who saved you, is that right?”
“Yes, that’s good English for it. A bit antique but good English.” Donald spoke absently; he had just caught the sound of seine-nets splashing into the water. Any minute now the filling of the hold with fish would begin, and would have to be repeated heaven knew how often before the boat could head for the far shore of the Strait.