Yussuf Lamehd folded his arms across his chest and seemed to consider the issue very thoughtfully. “I think you’re right, Rog. He’s the canned-meat type. Definitely the canned-meat type.”
“No,” said Wang Hsi. “He doesn’t use that kind of language. Zombies, yes; canned meat, no. You can observe from the way he talks that he wouldn’t ever get mad enough to tell us to get back in the can. And I don’t think he’d call us blobs very often. He’s the kind of guy who’d buttonhole another sling-shot commander and tell him, ‘Man, have I got the sweetest zombie crew you ever saw!’ That’s the way I figure him. Zombies.”
And then they were sitting quietly staring at me again. And it wasn’t mockery in their eyes. It was hatred.
I went back to the desk and sat down. The room was very still. From the yard, fifteen floors down, the marching commands drifted up. Where did they latch on to this, zombie-blob-canned meat stuff? They were none of them more than six months old; none of them had been outside the precincts of the Junkyard yet. Their conditioning, while mechanical and intensive, was supposed to be absolutely foolproof, producing hard, resilient, and entirely human minds, highly skilled in their various specialties and as far from any kind of imbalance as the latest psychiatric knowledge could push them. I knew they wouldn’t have got it in their conditioning. Then where —
And then I heard it clearly for a moment. The word. The word that was being used down in the drill field instead of Hup! That strange, new word I hadn’t been able to make out. Whoever was calling the cadence downstairs wasn’t saying, “ Hup, two, three, four.”
He was saying, “ Blob, two, three, four. Blob, two, three, four.”
Wasn’t that just like the TAF? I asked myself. For that matter, like any army anywhere anytime? Expending fortunes and the best minds producing a highly necessary product to exact specifications, and then, on the very first level of military use, doing something that might invalidate it completely. I was certain that the same officials who had been responsible for the attitude of the receptionist outside could have had nothing to do with the old, superannuated TAF drill-hacks putting their squads through their paces down below. I could imagine those narrow, nasty minds, as jealously proud of their prejudices as of their limited and painfully acquired military knowledge, giving these youngsters before me their first taste of barracks life, their first glimpse of the “outside.” It was so stupid!
But was it? There was another way of looking at it, beyond the fact that only soldiers too old physically and too ossified mentally for any other duty could be spared for this place. And that was the simple pragmatism of army thinking. The fighting perimeters were places of abiding horror and agony, the forward combat zones in which sling-shots operated were even worse. If men or materiel were going to collapse out there, it could be very costly. Let the collapses occur as close to the rear echelons as possible.
Maybe it made sense, I thought. Maybe it was logical to make live men out of dead men’s flesh (God knows humanity had reached the point where we had to have reinforcements from somewhere!) at enormous expense and with the kind of care usually associated with things like cotton wool and the most delicate watchmakers’ tools; and then to turn around and subject them to the coarsest, ugliest environment possible, an environment that perverted their carefully instilled loyalty into hatred and their finely balanced psychological adjustment into neurotic sensitivity.
I didn’t know if it was basically smart or dumb, or even if the problem had ever been really weighed as such by the upper, policy-making brass. All I could see was my own problem, and it looked awfully big to me. I thought of my attitude toward these men before getting them, and I felt pretty sick. But the memory gave me an idea.