“Why are we penned up like sheep?” Peace demanded. He moved one of the lightweight stanchions aside and walked out of the enclosure.
“You shouldn’t have done that, soldier,” another man said. “Sergeant Cleet told us to stay put.”
Peace stamped his feet to ward off the encroaching numbness. “I’m not worried about any sergeant.”
“You would be if you’d seen him,” Ryan put in. “He’s just about the biggest, ugliest, scariest brute I’ve ever seen. He’s got arms like my legs, his mouth’s so big that even when it’s shut it’s half open, and when he…” Ryan’s voice died away and some of the colour fled from his cheeks as his eyes focused on a point above Peace’s head.
Peace turned and found himself confronted by a vision of dread which, despite the incompleteness of Ryan’s description, he immediately identified as Sergeant Cleet. The sergeant was a good two metres tall. He was a pyramid of muscle and bone which began with a skull pointed like a howitzer shell and steadily widened downwards through massive, sloping shoulders, a barrellike torso and legs which were easily as thick as Peace’s waist. The power of these limbs was so great that, regardless of the enormous weight they supported, the whole assemblage moved with a silent, springy gait, appearing to bounce a short distance clear of the floor with every step.
“Wadja say, Peace?” Cleet’s voice was a subterranean rumble emerging from the cavern of his mouth, which was every bit as large as Ryan had indicated. It appeared to stretch from ear to ear, and for one horrified moment Peace got the impression that it extended around the back of the sergeant’s head, a circular band of lips and teeth on the artillery shell of his cranium.
“I … I didn’t say anything, Sergeant,” Peace mumbled.
“I’m real glad about that.” Cleet came closer, darkening Peace’s field of view with his blue uniform. “And whyja move my stanchion?”
The fear which arose within Peace joined forces with the shock and despair he was already feeling to produce the sudden realization that he could not go on like this for thirty, forty or fifty years, that he would prefer to die at once and get it over with. And, mercifully, the means for a swift and spectacular suicide had placed themselves before him.
“I didn’t move it,” he said. “I kicked it, because it was in my way. Anything gets in my way, I kick it.” He demonstrated his brand-new approach to life’s problems by lashing out at the stanchion with his foot and toppling it over. His shoes were thinner than he had realised and the contact with the corner of the square post sent waves of pain racing up his leg, but he stood his ground without flinching and waited for annihilation. Cleet’s mouth sagged open with amazement, a process which occurred in stages, like the gradual collapse of a suspension bridge. He took a deep breath, a huge machine fuelling up for some monstrous feat of destruction, then sank to his knees and cradled the fallen stanchion in his arms.
“Wadja do that for?” he whimpered. “You’ve scuffed the paint. What’s Lieutenant Toogood gonna say?”
“I don’t care,” Peace said, taken aback.
“It’s all right for you—but I’m responsible for these stanchions.” Cleet raised his eyes in reproach. “I know your type, Peace. You’re nothin’ but a bully.”
“Listen…” Peace shuffled his feet, partly in embarrassment, partly to ease the throbbing in his injured toe.
“Don’t kick me!” Cleet cringed back to what he considered a safe distance before speaking again. “I’m gonna report you to Lieutenant Toogood, Peace. The Lieutenant will fix you, all right. You’ll see. You’re gonna be tweakin’ yourself from now till Christmas. You’ll see. By the time the Lieutenant’s finished with you your tits are gonna be upside down. You’ll see.”
He spun around and hurried off down the hall. His conical form was trembling with agitation and he was visibly springing clear of the floor with every step. The group of recruits watched his departure in silence, then— as if responding to a signal—crowded around Peace, overturning the rest of Cleet’s stanchions as they did so.
“I never saw anything like that,” one man said, grabbing Peace’s hand and shaking it. “I thought that big gorilla would eat you, but you had him sized up right from the start. How did you do it?”
“It’s a knack,” Peace said weakly. His self-destructive impulse had faded and he was beginning to fear that the moment of recklessness had made the outlook for his future even bleaker than before. “I wonder what this Lieutenant Toogood’s like? If somebody like Cleet is afraid of him…”
Ryan eyed the door through which Cleet had vanished. “I don’t like the way things are going, men. I think I’ll only stay in the Legion long enough to do the basic training and get a free trip to some other world.” Those near him, still recovering from the mental stress of having looked at Cleet, gave murmurs which indicated they had similar plans.
The realization that he was the only man present who had not had the foresight to prepare an escape route from the Legion depressed Peace even further. In a bid to make some reparation for his bad conduct he began uprighting the fallen stanchions and adjusting the linking rope.
He had almost completed the task when there was the sound of approaching footsteps.
Looking up he saw a spruce, handsome young officer who had a cigarette in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. His red-brown hair was worn in the traditional military style—full in the front and long enough to touch his collar at the back.
“I’m Lieutenant Toogood,” he announced. He paused while the group of recruits—Peace among them—produced an assortment of ragged salutes, bows, curtsies and heel-clicks in their eagerness to show respect, then shook his head.
“You can forget all your preconceived notions about saluting officers,” Toogood said. “We don’t bother with that sort of thing in the 203rd. That’s all part of an ancient disciplinary system which was designed to inculcate the habit of complete obedience, and as such it’s no longer required. The old time-consuming square-bashing and spit-and polish nonsense has all been done away with, too—that’s good to know, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.” Sheepish smiles broke out among the recruits.
Toogood tapped the lump of the command enforcer in his throat. “After all, why should we waste all that time and money when you’re already conditioned to the point where if I told you to go and cut your throats you’d dash right out and do it?”
The recruits’ smiles abruptly vanished.
“The present system, while greatly superior to the old methods, places a crushing load of responsibility on your officers. Suppose, for example, that one of you behaved in such a way as to make me lose my temper, and I—unthinkingly, of course—shouted the sort of thing that people sometimes say when they are angry … the results could be catastrophic.” Toogood puffed luxuriously on his cigarette for a moment while the imaginations of his audience ran riot. “Think how awful I’d feel afterwards. Think how awful you’d feel.”
The recruits nodded glumly, thinking along the lines Toogood had suggested.
“But I’m not going to burden you with my worries,” Toogood continued magnanimously. “It’s my job to look after you while you undergo basic training here at Fort Eccles, and I want you to think of me as your friend. Will you do that?”
Peace nodded vigorously, along with the others. He made a conscientious effort to see the debonair young lieutenant as a friend, but a not-so-still, not-so-small voice in the back of his mind kept telling him otherwise.