“In that case you can sit down again while I explain the basic terms of service.” Widget stared at the ceiling until Peace had resumed his seat. “Cigarette?”
Peace nodded gratefully. “I’d love one.”
“I’m talking about your cigarettes, Warren. Get them out.”
Peace took a pack of Selfigs from his jacket pocket and offered them across the desk.
“I’ll get rid of these for you,” Widget said, snatching the whole pack. “Rankers aren’t permitted to smoke during basic training.” He took out a cigarette for himself, puffed it into life, and dropped the others into a drawer.
“Thanks.” Peace stared wistfully at the ascending smoke and wondered how long he had been a tobacco addict. The strength of his craving suggested it had been some time, but his memory held no details. It was disconcerting to find a complete blank where the stored experience of a lifetime ought to be, but—assuming Captain Widget had been right in what he said earlier—he could be better off not knowing what sort of person he really was. His best plan might be to write off the past and accept whatever his new life in the Legion might bring. After all, there was bound to be a great deal of adventure and travel.
“… conditions of service are absolutely standard,” Widget was saying. “The pay is ten monits a day, and…”
“An hour,” Peace corrected. “You meant ten monits an hour.”
“I meant exactly what I said. Don’t argue with an officer.”
“Pardon me,” Peace said heavily. “It must be my lack of memory playing tricks—I thought slavery had been abolished ages ago.”
“You really are a hard case, aren’t you?” Widget gazed at him with growing dislike. “You know, if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s totally impossible, I’d give you back your memory and leave you to the mercy of the police. You don’t deserve the Legion.”
“All I said was…”
“Private Peace!” Widget’s mouth twitched with anger. “I see I’m going to be forced to sap you.”
Peace stared at him in alarm. “Are you allowed to strike a private soldier?”
“SAP stands for Self Administered Punishment,” Widget explained with a vindictive glint in his eyes. “And I think we’ll begin with the good old Bilateral Mamillary Compression and Torsion, otherwise known as the tweak.”
“Wait a minute,” Peace said apprehensively. “Perhaps I was a little out of line just now.
Perhaps…”
“Grasp your nipples between forefingers and thumbs,” Widget ordered.
“Look, can’t we behave like sensible adults?”
As he spoke, Peace opened his jacket and gripped his nipples through the thin material of his shirt.
“On the command of ‘tweak’ squeeze as hard as you can, at the same time contra-rotating nipples through an angle of approximately two radians,” Widget said, his face stern. “If you’re not familiar with circular measurement, ninety degrees will do.”
“Captain, I’m sure you don’t really want to degrade both of us in this…”
“Tweak!”
Peace gave a yowl of agony as his hands, obeying his electropsycho conditioning, carried out the order with what seemed to him an unnecessary vigour. “You’ve done it,” he reproached as soon as he could trust his vocal chords. “You’ve degraded both of us.”
“I can live with it,” Widget said comfortably. “Now, I think we were discussing money—how much have you got?”
Peace put his hand in his pocket and produced a slim wad of notes. “Looks like about two hundred monits.”
“Lend it to me, Warren.” Widget held out his hand. “I’ll pay you back next time I see you.”
Unable to refuse, Peace surrendered the thin sheaf. “Please don’t think I’m implying anything Captain, but is there any chance of your ever seeing me again?”
“Very little, but you never know your luck. It’s a small galaxy, after all.”
Peace considered making a wry comment, but was dissuaded by the painful tingling he could still feel on each side of his chest. He listened in silence to the rest of a brief induction lecture, and then—shorn of cigarettes, money, dignity, and all knowledge of his previous life—he obediently marched out of Captain Widget’s office to begin his thirty, forty or fifty years as a ranker in the Space Legion.
2
Peace found himself standing with six other youngish men in a corner of a large hall. All were wearing plastic name badges, and they were gathered in a tight apprehensive group within a small enclosure somebody had set up using portable stanchions linked by rope. Peace examined his surroundings with some curiosity.
The hall was divided into two equal parts by a long counter surmounted by a mesh screen reaching up to the bare, sloping rafters. Lighting strips near the apex glowed a dismal green amidst the tendrils of November fog which had crept in from outside. The more distant tubes were so dimmed by vapour that they resembled rods of luminous ice. Beyond the screen were rows of storage shelves, and at intervals along the counter sat uniformed clerks. They were as motionless as if they had been petrified by the currents of chill air which swirled on the concrete floor.
“What the hell was the hold-up in there?” The speaker was one of the men closest to Peace, a moody-looking individual whose face would have been blue with beard shadow had it not been for the putty-coloured mottling induced in it by the intense cold. His name badge identified him as Pvt.
Copgrove Fair.
“Sergeant Cleet told us you’d only be a couple of minutes in there, but you’ve kept us waiting half an hour,” Fair continued. “What was going on?”
Peace blinked at him. “They took away my memory.”
“We all had things to forget. That’s no reason to—”
“But you don’t understand. I’ve no memory left—it’s all gone.”
“All of it?” Fair took a step back and a look of wary respect came into his brown eyes. “You must have been a real monster.”
“Might have been,” Peace said gloomily. “The trouble is I’ll never be able to know.”
“You should have done what I did.” A plump, round-shouldered youth—labelled Pvt. Vernon A. Ryan—in a green twinkle-suit nudged Peace in the ribs. “I wrote my problem down, and I’ve got it hidden away.”
“What’s the point of that?”
“Covers me each way,” Ryan gloated. “I can’t be hauled up for whatever it was I did, and while the heat’s dying down I get a lot of free travel, and…”
“Wait a minute,” Peace said. “Is that right? I didn’t know you can’t be tried for something if your memory of it has been erased.”
“Where’ve you been all your life? Oh, I forgot …you don’t know.”
“Do you mean … you weren’t being tortured by your conscience?”
“I doubt it, but then I’m not like you—there seems to be only one strike against me.” Ryan’s button-nosed face radiated a smug happiness. “I’m only going to stay in this outfit for a month or two—see how it goes—then, when I think the time is right, I’ll just peep at my bit of paper and I’ll be out. Free and clear. Laughing.”
Ryan’s ebullience began to irritate Peace. “Have you looked at your contract?”
“Of course I’ve looked at it! That’s the whole point, my friend. It binds me to serve the Legion in exchange for memory erasure, but if my memory happens to come back the deal’s off.”
Ryan elbowed the swarthy man who had first spoken to Peace. “Just ask old Coppy, here—he’s the one who thought the idea up.”
“Keep your voice down,” Farr said, scowling. “You want the whole world to know?”
“It doesn’t matter if you have to give your memory a quiet boost,” Ryan whispered, winking with one eye and then the other, “the contract will still be nullified. I tell you, this is going to be more like a paid holiday for me.” He gazed all about him with evident satisfaction, further increasing Peace’s annoyance. Several of the men near him nodded in furtive agreement.