Down Among the Dead Men

I stood in front of the junkyard’s outer gate and felt my stomach turn over slowly, grindingly, the way it had when I saw a whole terrestrial subfleet—close to 20,000 men—blown to bits in the Second Battle of Saturn more than eleven years ago. But then there had been shattered fragments of ships in my visiplate and imagined screams of men in my mind; there had been the expanding images of the Eoti’s box-like craft surging through the awful, drifting wreckage they had created, to account for the icy sweat that wound itself like a flat serpent around my forehead and my neck.
Now there was nothing but a large, plain building, very much like the hundreds of other factories in the busy suburbs of Old Chicago, a manufacturing establishment surrounded by a locked gate and spacious proving grounds—the Junkyard. Yet the sweat on my skin was colder and the heave of my bowels more spastic than it had ever been in any of those countless, ruinous battles that had created this place.
All of which was very understandable, I told myself. What I was feeling was the great-grandmother hag of all fears, the most basic rejection and reluctance of which my flesh was capable. It was understandable, but that didn’t help any. I still couldn’t walk up to the sentry at the gate.
I’d been almost all right until I’d seen the huge square can against the fence, the can with the slight stink coming out of it and the big colorful sign on top:
Don’t Waste Waste Place All Waste Here Remember— Whatever is Worn Can Be Shorn Whatever is Maimed Can Be Reclaimed Whatever is Used Can Be Reused Place All Waste Here —Conservation Police
I’d seen those square, compartmented cans and those signs in every barracks, every hospital, every recreation center, between here and the asteroids. But seeing them, now, in this place, gave them a different meaning. I wondered if they had those other posters inside, the shorter ones. You know: “ We need all our resources to defeat the enemy — and garbage is our biggest natural resource.” Decorating the walls of this particular building with those posters would be downright ingenious.