He was late when he reached his barracks to punch that total into the group computer. He was late again, half a minute late, for the calisthenics formation—a crime against the Machine which earned him two extra laps of double time in the track tunnel. The last man in the chow line, he was too tired to eat his ration when at last he reached the table with it; the wasted food cost him two yellow demerit points. When he got to his bunk at last, he felt too tired to sleep.
"Candidate Gann!"
He had not seen the dark forms approach his cot. He gasped and sat up trembling. A pale needle of light picked out his uniform, his boots, and kit and gear. A harsh whisper directed him. In a moment he was shuffling down the shadowy aisle between the heavy-breathing trainees, his kit on his back.
So this was it? For a moment his knees wobbled; then he began to feel illogically relieved.
He was almost yearning for the anesthesia of the Body Bank; he was almost hungry for oblivion. Because there wouldn't be any linkboxes in the Body Bank. He wouldn't have to practice any more impossible scales, or learn any more tables of semantic variation.
He was out of it all.
His black-uniformed escorts let him sit with them at a table in a nearly deserted mess hall. A sleepy Togetherness girl yawned as she served them. He ate no food. He drank two cups of black coffee that left a lingering bitterness in his mouth.
He joined five other stunned and sleepy trainees who must have come from another barracks. They carried their gear into a military subtrain, and carried it off again. They marched past a scowling sentry into another cavernous training center.
Gann left his gear in a tiny tile-walled cell and reported to a cadaverous Machine Major who wore the piebald scars of a Venusian anaerobic parasite. The major returned his salute stiffly, with a black-gloved hand.
"Congratulations, Major Gann."
Staring at the gaunt major who was shuffling through papers on his desk, Gann saw that the neat black glove was no glove, but the black skin of a salvaged hand.
"You have successfully completed Phase Two of your service training in Mechanese." Peering at that black, borrowed hand, Gann scarcely heard the words. "You have been assigned here for Phase Three, which consists of mechanized instruction."
A faint smile twisted the major's yellow patched face.
"Your test scores were unusual, Major Gann," he added. "The Machine has commended you. You ought to be a proud and happy man."
Gann had swayed backward when that cold fact struck him. He was not a proud and happy man. He stood speechless, breathless, shuddering with a secret horror.
"You have come a long way, Major Gann." The yellow scars turned the major's smile into a rictus of agony. "You have escaped the danger of salvage. You have moved far toward the highest reward." Wistfully his black fingers touched his own seamed and mottled forehead, where he had no communion receptacle of his own. "You are very fortunate, Major Gann!"
Gann stood swaying. Suddenly the harsh-lit room and the gray-cased computers and the piebald major seemed unreal. Terribly real, in his own spinning mind, the cold, bright scalpels and saws of the surgeons were carving out space for the socket in his own forehead. They were drilling into the crown and the temples and the base of his shaven head. They were probing with thin, cruel needles for the centers of sensation. They were coldly violating the most secret privacy of all his being. . . .
He wanted to scream.
"Is something wrong, Major Gann?" The gaunt major rose anxiously. "You look ill."
"Nothing, sir." Groping for himself, he grinned faintly. "You see, I didn't know that I had passed Phase Two. I thought we were in a salvage center."
"You'll soon get over that." The major's rictus grew more hideous.
"With your record, you're as good as already wired for communion. I wish I were in your place."
"Thank—" He tried to wet the sandpaper dryness in his mouth and throat. "Thank you, sir!"
The Mechanese trainer was a ten-foot pear shape, fabricated out of bright aluminum. Swung in massive gimbals of gray-painted steel, it stood in a windy, gloomy cavern, under a water-stained concrete vault. Thick black cables and hoses snaked from it to the gray-cased control console at the tunnel moiith.
"There she is, sir!" The instructor was a plump young Techtenant with a pink baby face, wide blue eyes, and a bright communion plate set in his forehead. "The perfect teaching machine!"
Gann was queerly unsure of that. Smeared all over with a sticky jelly, wearing only loose gray coveralls, he hesitated at the tunnel mouth, staring uncomfortably up at that huge metal pear.
"Step right up, sir." The Techtenant gave him an innocent grin. "Strip off your robe and slip right in." The round blue eyes flickered at him inquiringly. "All ready, sir?"
He was wet and clammy with the jelly, and the coveralls were thin. Suddenly he shivered in the cold steady wind that blew out of the tunnel. He didn't really want to learn Mechanese. He didn't want to be rewarded with electrodes in his brain. But he gulped and said that he was ready.
The Techtenant touched something on the console. Air valves wheezed. That great metal pear tipped in the gimbals, opening like a sliced fruit. He stared at it, frozen, tingling, fascinated.
"Move ahead, sir." The Techtenant touched his shoulder respectfully. "Up the ladder. Strip off. Just lie down on the sensor-effector sheath." He chuckled easily. "Most students are a bit uneasy at first, but you'll find it fits you, sir."
Gann caught his breath and climbed the metal ladder. The rungs felt cold and sticky to his naked feet. The wind blew cold on his shaven head, and a sudden bitter taste of stale coffee came back from his stomach into his throat.
He stripped off the coveralls and crept uneasily out upon the bright pink membrane that lined the pear. It rippled beneath him, warm and slimy and almost alive, propelling his naked body into its central cavity.
"All set, sir?"
He attempted no answer to that cheery hail, but he heard another hiss of escaping air. The hinged upper half of the pear closed down. Warm constrictions of that pliant membrane caressed him into place. Total darkness seized him, in a hot and suffocating grip.
He tried to scream, and had no breath. . .
But then there was air for his lungs. He saw a pink glow of light through his closed eyelids.
He opened them, and saw Sister Delta Four.
Really, he supposed, it must have been only a projected image of her, but she looked alive enough. He knew this had to be an image because she wasn't in the buried training center. But she seemed to be. Robed and hooded and carrying her black linkbox, she was walking down a palm-fringed coral beach that looked queerly like the Togetherness center at Playa Blanca.
And he was walking with her.
The clinging effectors of the trainer duplicated every sensation: the hard, cold, yielding firmness of the wet sand, the tingling heat of the high sun, a cool puff of ocean breeze. He heard the dull boom of surf against the breakwater, and caught a sharp whiff of rotting seaweed and then a hint of Julie's perfume—for she was speaking to him now, in the warm, remembered tones of Julie Martinet.
"Here we are," she was saying, "for your first lesson in the Mechanese Learning Device, Mark Eight. This instrument is very nearly the last possible word in educational efficiency. If you co-operate, I'm sure you'll find the experience exciting and profitable." Her bright face smiled at him, tempting under the hood.
"Now," she said, "we are ready to begin your introduction to the technical vocabulary of Mechanese. It is built upon a principle of economy already familiar to you: one syllable for one sentence. Obviously, that requires a large number of syllables. The total vocabulary of Mechanese, as we compute it, is more than a billion monosyllables—more than a billion one-sound sentences."