After passing through the white-painted, World War II era barracks building, they left young and fit and full of energy. Even the heart attack victim left as young and alive as any, albeit a bit more surprised than most.
They came from such diverse places as Tulsa, Boston, New York and Los Angeles, in the United States. Many came from outside the United States altogether.
Yet they had one thing in common: each one of them had at least one tour in the old 193rd Infantry Brigade (Canal Zone), soon to be reformed as the 193rd Infantry Division (Panama). Many other commonalities flowed from this.
Juan Rivera, Colonel (retired), looked up at his old comrades awaiting rejuvenation. He had to look up; Rivera was a scant five feet five inches in stature. He couldn’t help but notice their proud bearing. His own shoulders squared off, automatically. How different from the gutter scrapings of draftees I saw from the bus on the way in. Ah, well. I had thought to live out my life in peace and quiet. If I must go back to youth and turmoil I would rather do so with proven soldiers. Besides, it would be nice to have a hyper-functional pecker again. And better to die with a bang than a whimper.
As if he could read minds, a soon-to-be rejuvenee said aloud, “Man, I can hardly wait to get back to Panama with a working dick.”
Rivera wasn’t the only one to join in; the laughter was general. He also suspected he wasn’t the only one who had had the very same thought at the very same time. There was an awful lot to be said for a second man-, if not child-, hood. There was even more to be said for having that second manhood in Panama.
There were a surprising number of rejuvs for what was, Rivera suspected, an important but still secondary mission. He had no knowledge of the algorithm that had set aside such a large number of potential rejuvs — nearly three thousand — for a division that would be no more than fourteen or fifteen thousand at full strength. He suspected that Panama had so charmed that troops assigned there in bygone days that an unusually large number had reenlisted and gone career in the hope of someday returning. Thus, there had been a great many more than usual jungle-trained and experienced troops to rejuvenate.
Maybe that was it, he thought. Or maybe we are just plain screwed.
The Darhel would have fumed if fuming had not been inherently dangerous to its health and continued existence. He might still have fumed, despite the dangers, over the potential lost profit implicit in the barbarous American-humans going their own way. But the thing which threatened to push him over into lintatai was the sickening, unaccountable smile on the face of the human sitting opposite him.
The Undersecretary for Extraterrestrial Affairs did smile, but with an altogether grim and even regretful satisfaction. He had — he believed — thoroughly screwed the defense of Panama, and done so with a subtlety worthy of the United States Department of State. Thus, there was a certain satisfaction at a job well done. But he had screwed the United States and humanity as well, and that was no cause for even the mildest mirth. The fact was that the undersecretary loathed the Darhel but had no choice but to cooperate with them and support them if his own family was to survive the coming annihilation. The fact was also that, however they might couch it, the Darhel’s purpose was inimical to humanity.
The alien twisted uncomfortably in his ill-fitting chair. The undersecretary had been around the elflike Darhel enough to recognize the signs of discomfiture. In truth, he enjoyed them.
“I am at a losss to underssstand your current sssatisssfaction,” complained the Darhel. “You have failed completely. The losss to our interessstsss and, need I add, your own isss incalculable. We asssked you to stop thisss wassste of resssourcccesss on a sssecondary theater. Inssstead you have arranged to commit your polity to a much larger defensssive allianccce. Inssstead you have exssspanded the wassste beyond all boundsss of logic.”
“Didn’t I just?” observed the undersecretary cryptically.
The inspector had gathered a half a dozen of the rejuvs in a conference room, once an operating room, on the western side of the hospital, facing the Canal. Like all the rest of the building, the room stank of disinfectant. The walls were painted the same light green as half the hospitals in the world. The mostly empty conference table was good wood, and Hector wondered where it had come from, or if it had been here continuously since the gringos left… or perhaps since they’d first arrived.
Hector sat now — like his mother — looking for all the world like a seventeen-year-old. Opposite Hector was an Indian in a loin cloth fashioned from a white towel. The Indian also looked like a near child despite the many faint scars on his body. To Hector’s left was Digna and beside her another man unknown to either, though Digna seemed to be almost flirting with him. Handsome, Rabiblanco, Hector thought. Two more men, seated to either side of the Indian, completed the complement. The conference room was not crowded.
Hector was initially terribly upset that his mother should be flirting, period, and more so because it was with such a youngster. And then he saw the youngster’s eyes and realized that he, too, was one of the old ones who had seen the elephant.
“William Boyd,” announced the “youngster,” reaching out an open hand to Hector. “Call me Bill. And I can’t imagine why I am here and why I am seventeen again. God knows, I didn’t like it much the last time.”
The inspector then spoke, “You are here, Mr. Boyd, because you, like these others, were once a soldier.”
Boyd looked at Digna and incredulously asked, “You were a soldier, miss?”
“The Thousand Day War,” Digna answered, “but I was more of a baby than a real soldier. I helped Mama do the cooking and the dishes. Certainly I didn’t fight or carry a gun. I was too little to so much as pick up a gun.”
“You are, nonetheless,” corrected the inspector, “listed on the public records as a veteran of that war, Mrs. Miranda. You are a veteran. Your son, Hector, served when a boy as a volunteer rifleman in the Coto River War. Mr. Boyd here volunteered for service as an infantry private in the United States Army during the Second World War, fighting in some of the closing battles in Belgium, France and Germany.”
“I didn’t exactly volunteer,” Boyd corrected. “I went to school in the United States and was drafted upon graduation. I made sergeant before I was discharged,” he added proudly.
“A minor distinction,” the inspector countered. “You could have left the United States. Your family certainly had the money and the connections.”
Boyd shrugged. He could have, he supposed, but it wouldn’t have felt right. Maybe he had been drafted by his own sense of obligation rather than by law.
The inspector turned to the other side of the conference table, pointing at the small, brown, scarred — and now that one looked closely, rather ferocious seeming — Indian. “Chief Ruiz, there, was taken from Coiba,” Panama’s prison island, “where he was serving time for murder. The fact is, though, that the murder was more in the nature of an action of war… despite his having taken and shrunk the heads of the men he killed. He has been pardoned on condition of volunteering to return to his tribe of the Chocoes Indians to lead them in this war.”