They tried to lionize Captain Leyton, as head of the transport side of it; but his remarks were even more unprintable.
They never got down far enough through the echelons of status to reach me. I was Chief of Communications, which is just another way of saying I was a television repair man with headaches. Not that it would have done them any good.
There isn't one thing about me that fits the sentimental notions of what a hero should be. I'm not even a colorful character. If I'm expert in my job it's only because I learned early what any lazy man with an ounce of brains also learns—that life goes easier for the expert than for the ignorant. Which is not exactly the hero attitude the public likes to hear, but true all the same.
I did have an advantage which qualifies me to tell this tale.
Supervision, nowadays, sits on its duff in an office surrounded by television monitors showing them every phase of their responsibilities, and punches buttons when some guy tries to goof-off or starts lousing up the operation.
Somebody has to maintain the system and check the same monitors. I saw everything of importance that happened.
That's the only way I come into the yarn at all. I didn't start out a hero type. I didn't turn into one. I just watched what happened; and I got sick at my stomach along with everybody else. And now I slink away, sick and ashamed, and not understanding even that, along with the rest. Not heroes—no—none of us.
From the first this was intended and conducted as a genuine scientific project, a group effort, with each man's ego subdued and blended in to serve the needs of the whole. No special heroes emerging to show up the rest of the dopes. None of the usual stuff of romantic fiction was supposed to happen—those unusual dangers, horrible accidents, sudden frightful emergencies so dear to the little sadistic hearts of readers and viewers.
So far as I know, nobody beat up anybody with their fists, nor gunned them down; which is the usual, almost the only, fictional way yet found among the humanists for coping with life problems.