Then I shook myself back to reality. These weren’t the original heroes, probably didn’t have even a particle of Roger Grey’s blood or Wang Hsi’s flesh upon their reconstructed bones. They were just excellent and very faithful copies, made to minute physical specifications that had been in the TAF medical files since Wang had been a cadet and Grey a mere recruit.
There were anywhere from a hundred to a thousand Yussuf Lamehds and Stanley Weinsteins, I had to remind myself—and they had all come off an assembly line a few floors down. “Only the brave deserve the future,” was the Junkyard’s motto, and it was currently trying to assure that future for them by duplicating in quantity any TAF man who went out with especial heroism. As I happened to know, there were one or two other categories who could expect similar honors, but the basic reasons behind the hero-models had little to do with morale.
First, there was that little gimmick of industrial efficiency again. If you’re using mass-production methods, and the Junkyard was doing just that, it’s plain common sense to turn out a few standardized models, rather than have everyone different—like the stuff an individual creative craftsman might come up with. Well, if you’re using standardized models, why not use those that have positive and relatively pleasant associations bound up with their appearance rather than anonymous characters from the designers’ drawing boards?
The second reason was almost more important and harder to define. According to the briefing officer, yesterday, there was a peculiar feeling—a superstitious feeling, you might almost say—that if you copied a hero’s features, musculature, metabolism, and even his cortex wrinkles carefully enough, well, you might build yourself another hero. Of course, the original personality would never reappear—that had been produced by long years of a specific environment and dozens of other very slippery factors—but it was distinctly possible, the biotechs felt, that a modicum of clever courage resided in the body structure alone…
Well, at least these zombies didn’t look like zombies!
On an impulse, I plucked the rolled sheaf of papers containing our travel orders out of my pocket, pretended to study it and let it slip suddenly through my fingers. As the outspread sheaf spiraled to the floor in front of me, Roger Grey reached out and caught it. He handed it back to me with the same kind of easy yet snappy grace. I took it, feeling good. It was the way he moved. I like to see a co-pilot move that way.
“Thanks,” I said.
He just nodded.
I studied Yussuf Lamehd next. Yes, he had it too. Whatever it is that makes a first-class gunner, he had it. It’s almost impossible to describe, but you walk into a bar in some rest area on Eros, say, and out of the five sling-shotters hunched over the blow-top table, you know right off which is the gunner. It’s a sort of carefully bottled nervousness or a dead calm with a hair-trigger attachment. Whatever it is, it’s what you need sitting over a firing button when you’ve completed the dodge, curve, and twist that’s a sling-shot’s attacking dash and you’re barely within range of the target, already beginning your dodge, curve, and twist back to safety. Lamehd had it so strong that I’d have put money on him against any other gunner in the TAF I’d ever seen in action.
Astrogators and engineers are different. You’ve just got to see them work under pressure before you can rate them. But, even so, I liked the calm and confident manner with which Wang Hsi and Weinstein sat under my examination. And I liked them.