Beachhead
Joe Haldeman
It was too nice a day for this. The morning sun was friendly warm, still early, not yet hot in the tropical sky. Salt air, sound of the gentle breakers ahead; if you closed your eyes you could picture girls and picnics. Riding waves, playing. The girls in their wet clinging suits, hinting mysteries, that’s the kind of day it should have been.
Curious sea birds creaked and cawed, begging, as they followed the craft wallowing its way toward shore. Its motor was silent, as was its cargo of boys. Quiet tick and clack as bits of metal swung and tapped in the swaying craft.
The salt tang not quite as strong as the smell of lubricant. Duncan opened his eyes and for the hundredth time rubbed the treated cloth along the exposed metal parts of his weapon. Take care of this weapon, boy, the sergeant had said, over and over; take care of it and it will take care of you. This weapon’s all that’s between you and dying.
The readout by the sight said 125. Ten dozen people he could fry before recharging.
A soft triple snick of metal as the boy next to him clicked his bayonet into place over the muzzle of the weapon. Others looked at him but nobody said anything. You weren’t supposed to put the bayonet on until you were on the beach. Someone might get hurt in the charge. That was almost funny.
“You’re not supposed to do that,” Duncan said, just above a whisper.
“I know,” the boy said. “I’ll be careful.” They really hadn’t had that much training. Three years before, they’d been pulled out of school and sent to the military academy. But until the last month it had been just like regular school, except that you lived in a dorm instead of at home. Then some quick instruction in guns and knives and they were on their way to the Zone.
The surf grew louder and the pitching of the boat more pronounced as they surged in through the breakers. Someone spattered vomit inside the craft, not daring to raise his head above the heavy metal shielding of the sides, and then two more did the same; so much for the fragrance of the sea. Duncan’s breakfast was sour in his throat and he swallowed it back. Someone cried softly, sobbing like a girl. A boy tried to quiet him with a silly harsh insult. Someone admonished him, with no conviction, to save it for the enemy. It was all so absurd. Like dying on a day like this. Even for real soldiers, dying on a day like this would be absurd.
The bow of the craft ground to a halt on coral sand. Duncan lurched to his feet, weapon at port arms, ready to rush out. Warm air from the beach wafted in with a new smell, a horrible smelclass="underline" burning flesh.
He didn’t think he could kill anyone. It was all a dread-fill mistake. He was sixteen years old and at the top of his class in calculus and Latin. Now he was going to step off this boat into a firestorm of lasers and die.
“This is crazy.” The large boy loomed over the counselor’s desk, nearly as tall as the adult and outbulking him by ten kilograms of muscle. “It has to be the tests. They screwed up on my brother three years ago and now they screwed up on me.”
“Please watch your language.” The boy glared at him and then blushed and nodded. “Do you have any idea how often this happens, Eric? You think that because Duncan didn’t want to go to the Zone and you did, the tests would necessarily reflect your wishes. Your own evaluation of yourselves. But people at thirteen don’t really know themselves very well. That’s no crime. It’s just a fact of life.”
“Look, Professor. It ain’t just my opinion. Ask anybody! Anybody who knows us both.” He counted out points on his fingers. “Duncan never wanted to play soldier when he was a kid. I always did. He never went out for sports; I’m captain of the two teams. He used to read books, I mean all the time, and I don’t unless it’s for school. He never once got into a fight in school, and I—”
“And you took the tests. And the tests don’t lie.”
“Maybe they don’t. But they make mistakes in the office all the time. That’s gotta be what happened. They took the test results and got Duncan’s and mine switched.”
“You weren’t even ten when Duncan took his last one.”
“Yeah, but I’d took ’em twice by the time I was ten. They could of gotten mixed up.”
The man shrugged. “All right; I’ll show you.” He unfolded himself out of the chair and stepped over to a bank of filing cabinets. He took out two adjacent folders and threw them on the desk. Sitting down, he typed something on his keyboard and turned the monitor around to face Eric.
The boy’s brow was furrowed as he looked from one test to another. “So it’s these red numbers. Duncan got a 68 and I got a 92.” He looked up with a skeptical expression. “Usually it’s the other way around.”
“It’s not an intelligence test. It’s a test for antisocial aggressive potential. How easy it would be for you to kill somebody.” He pointed at the monitor. “You know what a bell-shaped curve is.”
“Yeah, like for grades.”. Red lines showed where he and his brother stood in relation to the average, Eric well to the right of the graph’s shoulder and Duncan on the extreme left.
“For grades and for a lot of things. You can chart a bunch of people’s height or weight and they come out this way. Or ask them on a scale of one to ten ‘Do you like cheddar cheese?’—and this is what you get.”
“So?”
“So the attitude test you took didn’t come right out and say ‘How would you like to get the enemy in your sights and fry him?’ Most people in their right mind would say—”
“But I would-” His eyes actually glittered. “I mean I’ve really thought about it a lot! What it would look like and all.”
“What it would feel like.”
He smiled. “Yeah.”
The counselor tapped three times on the test packet. “That’s in here, all right. But it’s just boyish enthusiasm. Playing soldier. You’re going to be a solid citizen. A peaceable, well-adjusted man who makes a real contribution to society. You’re the lucky one.”
He shook his head slowly. “But Duncan—”
“Duncan was a true psychopath, a born killer who hid it so well he fooled even his brother. That 68 is about as low as I’ve ever seen. Don’t envy him. He’s probably dead by now. If he’s not dead, he’s going through hell.”
Eric kept shaking his head and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “He was a nice guy, though.”
“Jack the Ripper was probably a nice guy.”
“Well ... thanks. Better get to class.” He paused at the door. “But I might see him again. I mean, like, you came back.”
“That’s right. Counselors are all people who’ve been sent to the Zone. People who lived long enough to change.”
“Well. Maybe.”
“We can hope.” He watched the boy trudge away, deep in thought, and suppressed a grin. Sometimes the satisfactions of this job were not at all subtle.
The front of the landing craft unhooked and slapped forward with a blinding spray of foam. The boys charged out, terrified, frantic, into the smell of roasting flesh—
The first ones on the beach stopped dead. The next ones piled up behind them, and the boy who had fixed his bayonet just missed skewering Duncan.
Twenty meters up the beach, under a red and white striped awning, four pretty girls in brief bathing suits tended a suckling pig that turned over coals, roasting. Tubs of ice with cold drinks.
An older man in a bathing suit held up a drink, toasting them. Duncan didn’t recognize him at first, without coat and tie. It was Ian Johnson, the counselor who had condemned him to this place. “Welcome to the Zone,” he called out. “War’s hell.”
Like a number of the others, Duncan pointed his weapon at the sky and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.