“Oh yes. But no clearer way to say ‘stay with your family and friends’.”
Gerry rose stiffly to his feet. “I’m sorry, Arthur,” he said. “I hoped you’d realise my mind was made up and it was too late to try and argue me out of it.”
“Oh, I concede that. I’m only trying to show you what you’re doing. Does that make you want to sit down and go on talking?”
“I’m afraid not. I only called to say goodbye. And there are other people I ought to visit before I go to bed.”
“As you like. But do me a favour.” Arthur began rummaging in a pile of books. “Take this along with you and read it in your spare time—if they allow you any. Don’t bother giving it back. I know it more or less by heart.”
“Thanks,” Gerry took the book he was given and thrust it distractedly into his pocket, not even looking to see what it was called.
“Know something?” Arthur went on. “I have a feeling you need this experience in the army, after all. I only wish the odds against you coming back alive were a bit better.”
“The way things are set up now, casualties are very low! Why, they haven’t lost more than—”
“There are some people,” Arthur interrupted, “more likely than others to do everything, including succeed and fail. You’re the type to refuse disillusionment. You’re likely to go on looking for the—the glory, whatever—that accounts for men wanting to risk their lives in battle, and you won’t have found it so you’ll volunteer for some idiotic mission and kick those odds up to a thousand to one against you, and…” He turned over his hand as though spilling a pile of sand from the palm.
Gerry stood rock-still for a long moment; then, abruptly, he tugged open the door and went out.
As he passed Bennie Noakes’s room, he heard faint noises: a creak, a sigh, a chuckle.
Rotting himself to death with all that dreck he takes! And he’s got that shiggy, that beautiful shiggy, and I’ve got …
In that instant he knew he could not disbelieve Arthur’s prophecy about his fate.
It couldn’t be Boot Camp. It had to be Boat Camp. It was on pontoons isolated from the shore by a mile of water. That hadn’t stopped desertions, but it did mean that only the strongest swimmers reached the beach.
There, at long tables, the new recruits had to strip naked and turn out their pockets. A captain accompanied by a top sergeant walked slowly down the far side of each table examining everything, while another sergeant made certain the trembling draftees stood still or else. The captain stopped opposite Gerry and turned around the book Arthur had given him so that he could read the title.
“The Hipcrime Vocab,” the captain said. “Put him under arrest, sergeant—possession of subversive literature.”
“But—!” Gerry exploded.
“Fasten it, soldier, or there’ll be another charge along with that.”
Gerry bit back his fury. “Permission to speak, sir,” he said formally.
“Granted.”
“I’ve never even opened the book, sir. Somebody gave it to me last night and I just left it in my pocket and—”
“It’s been read and re-read until the pages are practically falling out,” the captain said. “Add one, sergeant—lying to an officer.”
They let him off lightly with twenty-four hours’ punishment drill.
As the captain deigned to remark, it was, after all, a first offence.
continuity (8)
THE CAMEL’S BACK
It was almost a shock to Donald to discover how normal the night-time city appeared. It was less crowded than by day because of the phobia he himself had fallen victim to, but that was actively pleasant and made him feel he had gone back in time to the days when he was fresh from college and there had been a million fewer bodies to jostle against on the sidewalk.
Did I not expect the same stores to be in the same places as by day?
He wanted to laugh aloud at his own forebodings. Nonetheless, something was strange. By degrees his mind edged towards recognition of it; it was the kind of problem he was good at, working from hint to clue without having to give the matter his entire attention.
The night was loud. Music came from everywhere, mostly hits from the current popparade in which two or even three disparate rhythms clashed randomly on semitonal discords but sometimes classical—in a hundred yards he identified Beethoven, Berg, Oyaka. That, however, was true of the day as well, especially since the makers of radio-dresslets had begun to fit speakers to their garments instead of phones.
What did strike him as unusual was the sound of talking. Everywhere he heard people gossiping, a luxury for which the day allowed no time.
Hint: these people know each other, say hullo.
Anonymous to him but acquainted among themselves, they grouped in little knots of four or five all over the sidewalks. He had half-assumed they were street-sleepers, until he realised that even by modern standards there were too many of them and began to spot the genuine article: sad-eyed men and women—and children too—clinging to their bags of belongings, waiting for midnight and the legal chance to lie down wherever space presented itself.
“Are you weary, are you heavy-laden? Come to Jesus, come and rest in his bosom!” A woman minister on the steps of a store-front church, addressing the passers-by through a hand shouter.
“No thanks, madam, I fly a straight-type orbit!” yelled a passing yonderboy, and his sparewheels screeched laughter and clapped him on the back. The yonderboy was Afram and so was the minister. The proportion of Aframs in view was five or six times higher than by day.
They look at me with curiosity. Is colour a clue?
But that was a false lead. Bit by bit he pinned down the true reason. He was dressed in the conservative, slightly behind-the-style clothes he generally wore. Most of the people he passed either were shabby, like the street-sleepers, who often as not wore disposables meant for one wearing, kept on for ten, or had taken the fall of darkness as a signal to let their imaginations run riot. Not only the yonderboys with their fantastical puffed shirjacks designed to give the impression of enormous muscles, but the older folk too were gaudy as peacocks in scarlet and turquoise, ebony and chrome. They strutted in everything from RUNG-type robes to a coat of paint and a few strategic feathers.
Answer: it feels like a foreign country.
He gave a thoughtful nod. There was a Caribbean mood in these people’s casual employment of the street as an extension of their homes. It must have been triggered by the erection of the dome, building on and amplifying the high-summer tradition and extending it throughout the year.
* * *
The character of the neighbourhood began to change. He found himself being accosted by shills.
“White noise concert in progress, codder! Only a fin!”
“Excerpts from the Koran in English, live reading, sure to be of interest to an intelligent person such as yourself!”
“Hear the truth which the government screens from you! Recording direct from Peking giving all the facts!”
When he had gone a mile or more the grins and gestures of people he passed led him to discover a small luminescent poster attached unfelt to his back. Annoyed, he removed and read it.
This codder doesn’t know where to. On Triptine he’d be there before he had time to worry.
A GT promotion? Hardly. It was notorious that the government discouraged excessive zeal by the Nark Force, because psychedelics drained away so much potential subversion, but there were still—officially—laws in most states. He balled it up and threw it at a trashcan.
A lean, rather scholarly-looking Afram fell in beside him and kept tossing him sidelong glances. When they had gone a score of paces together he cleared his throat.