2001, and Julian Bahr had been rounded up with a lot of other drifters, young and old, and hauled to the Indianapolis Processing Center for testing and relocation in line with the personnel policies of the Department of Exploitation in the fledgling Vanner-Elling Stability government. He had been fingerprinted, photographed, weighed, measured, and run through the maze—the personality and intelligence tests that, unrealized by him, were going to mark off the sharp limits of his future for him.
After a year of shiftlessness, hunger, ration lines, pilfering, and completely unlimited freedom of movement, Bahr was hostile and suspicious of the newly-designated authority figures.
“How old are you, kid?”
“Thirteen.”
“You’re too big for thirteen. You’re fifteen.”
“Go to hell.”
They found the ID card he hadn’t bothered to show them, and sent him into the testing center. The testing procedures were routine, the operators bored and indifferent. They paid no attention to Bahr’s resentfulness and hostility; when he scored a sloppy dull-normal on the initial tests, the test teams looked no further, assumed the worst, and hustled him through the Rorschach, thematic apperception and Vornay without ever getting far enough behind the shell to even glimpse what the big, belligerent youth’s mind was really like. He looked big, tough and stupid. They sent him to Riley to let the military knock the rough comers off.
Fort Riley Infantry Tech School, the new kind of military academy, where boys in their early teens were molded into the toughest guerrilla troops in the world. Just as they reached the beginning of their peak years in stamina and physique, they were offered the option (which they all accepted) of a ten year enlistment in the 801st. The weeding-out was enormous; screened before they entered, only twenty percent survived as guerrilla fodder, while the rest were sloughed off into the normal backwaters of Army administration and logistics. The Hitler youth groups in its most fanatic hour had never approached the tremendous group pressure techniques that drove, goaded, and quite often crushed the raw material into the proper shape.
In the first few days at Riley, Bahr moved mechanically at the furious bellowing of the non-coms, still too stunned to realize what was happening to him. Then came the initiation, the inevitable judgment of his fellows—could he take it?
A framed-up infraction, which Bahr knew was a frame, and a kangaroo court of second-year supervisors in a locked barracks squad room.
“Ten belts,” the second-year “judge” said. “If the prisoner flinches he will be restrained and the sentence doubled. Assume the position.” The mocking, overbearing authority drove the blood from Bahr’s face and made his fists clench, but he had made up his mind that they were not going to break him, and he bent over, mute and burning with anger. The belts were delivered with a flat paddle longer than a baseball bat and swung with two hands so it struck like a mule-kick and left welts and black-and-blue marks for a week.
He took nine blows impassively. Then a voice was raised. “The prisoner flinched. Any witnesses?”
“Yes, I saw it. The prisoner moved evasively.” There was a clamoring of assent in the excited circle of men. Bahr mentally estimated twenty more blows. “The prisoner will be restrained. Rope. Double him over the railing and tie . . . .”
Bahr straightened up, turned slowly. “Nobody ties me up,” he said.
“No? You’ll get twenty more for insubordina—” But the new threat was too late. Bahr grabbed the paddle out of the executioner’s hand and swung it sidewise against the fish-sergeant’s head with a loud thunk, knocking him sprawling and unconscious to the floor.
In the stunned silence Bahr leaned on the paddle and looked into the circle of shocked white faces.
“Next?”
They tried. For two weeks, gangs of upperclassmen tried to gang up on him, beat him up, break him. But when they crept into his barracks at night they found him gone, and returned to discover their own bedding soaked and knotted with far more imagination than they could achieve. One day five of them cornered him, beat him up and broke his nose; one by one they suffered return engagements and were beaten and mauled with systematic ferocity. The dispensary medics became experts at setting broken noses.
The silent cure, ostracism, fell flat because to his own classmen, in spite of indoctrination lectures, Bahr was a hero. In a grimly silent mess-hall Bahr could tell a dirty joke and the whole first year class would laugh on cue.
Halfway through the first year, the training officers at Riley consulted the BRINT people who were responsible for the 801st.
“He’s a misfit,” they explained. “He has too much drive, too much intelligence. We can’t see why DEPEX sent him here in the first place.”
“But a natural leader, you say,” the BRINT contact man said.
“Highest morale a first-year group ever had. But a maverick is dangerous if he can’t be controlled. Question is, should we weed him out now, or keep him and hope he falls in line?”
The BRINT man thought it over. “Your field maneuvers are coming up, am I right? Which is your weakest platoon, poorest in training and discipline?”
“Third, Baker Company.”
“Put this Bahr chap in charge of it during maneuvers.”
The Riley people didn’t like it. “They’re fourth-year men. They’ll never take orders from a first-year man. The platoon will fall apart the first day out.”
“Let’s try it anyway,” the BRINT man said with a note of finality. “We’ll prepare his orders.”
Baker Three was still legendary at Riley years after the maneuvers of ’02. Bahr’s mission was given to him by BRINT, and by the time he reported to their field unit in Ontario three weeks later with sixty percent of his platoon still intact and uncaptured, and with four prisoners, the Army, the police and the DIA were weary of the fruitless search and were posting imposing rewards for any of his troops who would turn themselves in.
BRINT spent a week interrogating Bahr, his troops and prisoners, on the tactics, techniques and devices they had used to avoid capture, then swore them to absolute secrecy on the methods; but enough fragments had crept out so that when Bahr and his men got back to Riley it was almost a victory parade.
The next three years were almost anticlimactic. Bahr was a made man. All work, play and friendship groups led to him. But while he built his little encysted empire in power relationships at Riley, getting ready for a hitch in the 801st, the same psych-testing machinery that had misplaced him before had been growing, spreading and self-fertilizing. The powerful DEPCO had begun to emerge in the government as the great peg-placer. They were feared, admired, hated, worshipped, but unquestioningly recognized except at Riley and a few other similar sociological eddies.
Bahr’s first contact with DEPCO came when he applied for Commissioned Officer’s School, and he ran headlong into a stone wall.
After two days of testing, with polygraph, Brontok symbols and Vargian analysis, Bahr returned to Riley baffled and angry by the continual procession of impassive young men and women who didn’t seem to listen to what he said, but only to how he said it.
DEPCO’s report to Riley was uncompromising. Bahr had too much drive to fit into a leadership position in a government that was fighting, at all costs, for stability. He was too ambitious for the new Army of administration and logistics that DEPCO was planning. What the Army needed was administrators, not executives. The decisions were to be made elsewhere, many of them by computors working against the VE equations.