It was a crumby leave. Father stormed at me, then quit speaking to me;
Mother took to her bed. When I finally left, an hour earlier than I had to, nobody saw me off but the morning cook and the houseboys.
I stopped in front of the recruiting sergeant's desk, thought about saluting and decided I didn't know how. He looked up. "Oh. Here are your papers. Take them up to room 201; they'll start you through the mill. Knock and walk in."
Two days later I knew I was not going to be a pilot. Some of the things the examiners wrote about me were: insufficient intuitive grasp of spatial relationships... insufficient mathematical talent... deficient mathematical preparation... reaction time adequate... eyesight good. I'm glad they put in those last two; I was beginning to feel that counting on my fingers was my speed.
The placement officer let me list my lesser preferences, in order, and I caught four more days of the wildest aptitude tests I've ever heard of. I mean to say, what do they find out when a stenographer jumps on her chair and screams, "Snakes!" There was no snake, just a harmless piece of plastic hose.
The written and oral tests were mostly just as silly, but they seemed happy with them, so I took them. The thing I did most carefully was to list my preferences. Naturally I listed all of the Space Navy jobs (other than pilot) at the top; whether I went as power-room technician or as cook, I knew that I preferred any Navy job to any Army job—I wanted to travel.
Next I listed Intelligence -- a spy gets around, too, and I figured that it couldn't possibly be dull. (I was wrong, but never mind.) After that came a long list: psychological warfare, chemical warfare, biological warfare, combat ecology (I didn't know what it was, but it sounded interesting), logistics corps (a simple mistake; I had studied logic for the debate team and "logistics" turns out to have two entirely separate meanings), and a dozen others. Clear at the bottom, with some hesitation, I put K-9 Corps, and Infantry.
I didn't bother to list the various non-combatant auxiliary corps because, if I wasn't picked for a combat corps, I didn't care whether they used me as an experimental animal or sent me as a laborer in the Terranizing of Venus—either one was a booby prize.
Mr. Weiss, the placement officer, sent for me a week after I was sworn in. He was actually a retired psychological-warfare major, on active duty for procurement, but he wore mufti and insisted on being called just "Mister" and you could relax and take it easy with him. He had my list of preferences and the reports on all my tests and I saw that he was holding my high school transcript -- which pleased me, for I had done all right in school; I had stood high enough without standing so high as to be marked as a greasy grind, having never flunked any courses and dropped only one, and I had been rather a big man around school otherwise: swimming team, debate team, track squad, class treasurer, silver medal in the annual literary contest, chairman of the homecoming committee, stuff like that. A well-rounded record and it's all down in the transcript.
He looked up as I came in, said, "Sit down, Johnnie," and looked back at the transcript, then put it down. "You like dogs?"
"Huh? Yes, sir"
"How well do you like them? Did your dog sleep on your bed? By the way, where is your dog now?"
"Why, I don't happen to have a dog just at present. But when I did— well, no, he didn't sleep on my bed. You see, Mother didn't allow dogs in the house."
"But didn't you sneak him in?"
"Uh -- " I thought of trying to explain Mother's not-angry-but-terribly-terribly-hurt routine when you tried to buck her on something she had her mind made up about. But I gave up. "No, sir."
"Mmm... have you ever seen a neodog?"
"Uh, once, sir. They exhibited one at the Macarthur Theater two years ago. But the S. P. C. A. made trouble for them."
"Let me tell you how it is with a K-9 team. A neodog is not just a dog that talks."
"I couldn't understand that neo at the Macarthur. Do they really talk?"
"They talk. You simply have to train your ear to their accent. Their mouths can't shape ‘b,' ‘m,' ‘p,' or ‘v' and you have to get used to their equivalents -- something like the handicap of a split palate but with different letters. No matter, their speech is as clear as any human speech.
But a neodog is not a talking dog; he is not a dog at all, he is an artificially mutated symbiote derived from dog stock. A neo, a trained Caleb, is about six times as bright as a dog, say about as intelligent as a human moron—except that the comparison is not fair to the neo; a moron is a defective, whereas a neo is a stable genius in his own line of work."
Mr. Weiss scowled. "Provided, that is, that he has his symbiote. That's the rub. Mmm... you're too young ever to have been married but you've seen marriage, your own parents at least. Can you imagine being married to a Caleb?"
"Huh? No. No, I can't."
"The emotional relationship between the dog-man and the man-dog in a K-9 team is a great deal closer and much more important than is the emotional relationship in most marriages. If the master is killed, we kill the neodog—at once! It is all that we can do for the poor thing. A mercy killing. If the neodog is killed... well, we can't kill the man even though it would be the simplest solution. Instead we restrain him and hospitalize him and slowly put him back together." He picked up a pen, made a mark. "I don't think we can risk assigning a boy to K-9 who didn't outwit his mother to have his dog sleep with him. So let's consider something else."
It was not until then that I realized that I must have already flunked every choice on my list above K-9 Corps—and now I had just flunked it, too. I was so startled that I almost missed his next remark. Major Weiss said meditatively, with no expression and as if he were talking about someone else, long dead and far away: "I was once half of a K-9 team. When my Caleb became a casualty, they kept me under sedation for six weeks, then rehabilitated me for other work. Johnnie, these courses you've taken -- why didn't you study something useful?"
"Sir?"
"Too late now. Forget it. Mmm... your instructor in History and Moral Philosophy seems to think well of you."
"He does?" I was surprised. "What did he say?"
Weiss smiled. "He says that you are not stupid, merely ignorant and prejudiced by your environment. From him that is high praise—I know him."
It didn't sound like praise to me! That stuck-up stiff-necked old—
"And," Weiss went on, "a boy who gets a ‘C-minus' in Appreciation of Television can't be all bad. I think we'll accept Mr. Dubois' recommendation. How would you like to be an infantryman?"
I came out of the Federal Building feeling subdued yet not really unhappy. At least I was a soldier; I had papers in my pocket to prove it. I hadn't been classed as too dumb and useless for anything but make-work.
It was a few minutes after the end of the working day and the building was empty save for a skeleton night staff and a few stragglers. I ran into a man in the rotunda who was just leaving; his face looked familiar but I couldn't place him.
But he caught my eye and recognized me. "Evening!" he said briskly.
"You haven't shipped out yet?"
And then I recognized him—the Fleet Sergeant who had sworn us in. I guess my chin dropped; this man was in civilian clothes, was walking around on two legs and had two arms. "Uh, good evening, Sergeant," I mumbled.
He understood my expression perfectly, glanced down at himself and smiled easily. "Relax, lad. I don't have to put on my horror show after working hours—and I don't. You haven't been placed yet?"
"I just got my orders."
"For what?"
"Mobile Infantry."