A Company of Heroes Book Five: The Space Cadet (7 page)

“Blavek,” she replied. “The Transmoltus.”

“Earth-girl, eh? Least we hail from th’ same planet, more or less. Leastways I’m from a dead loyal colony. Rastabranaplan, just th’ same what this sorry barge calls home, I’m ashamed to say, though I was born in Udskaya.”

“But then,” she mused, “every planet’s called ‘earth”, isn’t it? just like the native name of every race usually translates into ‘people’. So it doesn’t really mean much if I tell someone the name of the planet I’m from.”

“True enough, youngster. ‘Rastabranaplan’ did just mean ‘place’ in the tongue of th’ late natives, now that ye mention it. Might behoove us t’ use earth’s Galactic Standard name.”

“Might as well get used to it. What ship is this?” she asked, “and where’s she bound?”

“
Rasputin
, of Rastabranaplanian registry, as I said, Captain Krill, of Schlarnbarro, master. Ever hear of ‘im? Surprised ye ain’t. First mate’s another Schlarnbarro bully, an’ th’ second mate’s a brand new bucko just out o’ kindergarten, I take it—not used t’ bossin’ crew an’ not more’n half a spaceman, but a jim-hickey with his fists. From your neck o’ th’ woods, I heard. Guess you an’ me an’ your chum are th’ only Terrians forrard. We’re goin’ out t’ Quongslacken-Oop XI. My handle’s Wopple, of Udskaya, an’ I go t’ space only t’ keep out o’ Ironhouse. How’d you come t’ b’ shanghaied?”

“Beats me. Drugged, I guess, judging from the headache I’ve got.”

“That’s bad. Stick t’ your own boardin’-house, that’s my advice. You’ll get robbed all right, anywhere, but ye won’t be doped in your own place. The doctor’s turned out so I guess we’ll get some coffee soon—what they call coffee anyway. It ain’t good, but it’ll sure give your system th’ wallopin’ it needs.”

The rest of the watch had finished stowing the clabbing-gear and the two went forward, Judikha observing in the chilly, flickering light that Wopple was a tall, grizzled, loose-jointed man with a nose like a carpenter’s triangle and an expression that was rather inappropriately bemused. She couldn’t begin to imagine what could be amusing.
Perhaps he’s a little simple-minded.
He was rough enough that he might be sixty years old, but his chest was broad and his arms corded with muscles that might have been twenty years younger. The “doctor” was up and the cold greasy odor of food was wafting from the galley. Her deckwatch were grouped together, waiting for the early coffee served on all Rastabranaplanian ships at “turn-to”. The other watch had retired to its quarters, but as Judikha joined the line outside the galley, Lieutenant Birdwhistle appeared at the corridor junction and beckoned to her. Looking around to be certain no one was paying her defection any attention, she followed the officer to a cluster of pumps just behind the turbine housings and there, in an open space which precluded eavesdropping, Birdwhistle said in a low voice—

“Know anything about the Rastabranaplanian hellship, Judikha?”

“No, sir—only what I’ve heard.”

“I told you to drop the ‘sir’ while we’re here! Make that a habit or you’ll get us both in trouble. All right, then.
This
is a hellship and the hellship is the blackest shame against Rastabranaplan and I’ve had enough of it. When I was first awakened, at midnight, I went straight to the control room and protested to the captain. I told them I was a Patrol officer. Did they believe me? Hardly! All they did was laugh and kick me down the companionway. Thought I was drunk—and to tell the truth, I suppose my speech at the time would bear out such an offensive conclusion. And I was in rags, besides. I’ve got a bagful more of them, now, and I suppose you have, too, unless someone has stolen them. Now, this much I know, from what I have seen and heard: the mere presence among the crew of an educated man or woman is a continual menace to the brutes who command and officer ships such as this, and is warrant enough for murder; for they know that he or she is bound to make trouble at planetfall. As the law now stands they can punish an insolent spaceman with a blow and if he returns it they may kill him with impunity: the law won’t touch the murderer. Therefore, I dare not convince them of my identity—and neither should you. I’ll just have to bear up under their insults until I’m able to act; and as for you, do as you’re told, keep out of trouble—for I may want you in a hurry—keep your mouth shut, call me only by my last name and don’t let them see us together too often.”

Before Judikha could reply to this astonishing speech, the lieutenant was gone; she went back to the galley where she secured another man’s tin pot while his back was turned and filled it with her own share of the coffee. Following her shipmates, she carried it back to the crew’s quarters to drink. It was vile stuff to begin with, and had been rendered viler by the saccharine added in a misguided attempt at sweetening. But it was hot and it warmed Judikha’s chilled and aching body, and cleared much of the residual fog from her brain. She was glad for the warmth because little energy was wasted in keeping the crew’s quarters heated—in contrast to the tropical heat of the engine room. The cubicle was evidently hard against the poorly insulated outside hull of the ship and the bare metal walls, floor and furniture greedily sucked the heat from the overabundance of bare skin; Judikha had no personal ambition to raise the ambient temperature of the universe so she sat on a wooden crate with her feet tucked beneath her thighs.

She leaned her back against a stanchion and closed her eyes...

VII.

The girl who had made the solemn oath before the roaring blue furnaces of the Transmoltus, like a penitent presenting a bribe to her primordial god, had at first no clear idea how she was going to implement that promise. She knew that all entrances to the Space Patrol Academy but one were closed to her. Without position, status, friends, influence, without any substantial amount of money, without even an officially recognized existence, there was left to her only Education. The Patrol, while as elitist as the most antique guild or religious cult, was not so stupid as to not recognize the value of intelligence and education. Therefore, if she went to school and if she excelled, excelled above all others, than she would surely win at least
consideration
from the Academy. And she was certain that if she were considered she would be accepted.

Though even by the age of ten she had not yet been exposed to anything like formal learning, she could read, write and cipher—indeed, she enjoyed reading to an inordinate degree and devoured anything printed she could get her hands on, even if she did not understand half of what she read. Which might perhaps have been just as well as most of her early reading material was by necessity those books collected by Pilnipott in aid of his monumental encyclopedia. By the time she was twelve or thirteen years old, her cramped garret was crowded with heaped piles of books, magazines, pamphlets, brochures, tabloids and newspapers. She collected them from a hundred sources: scraps rescued from ashcans, plucked from windblown litter, snatched from the racks of inattentive newsdealers, lifted from the five-for-a-pfennig tables outside the used-book dealers. She never bothered to preexamine what she gathered; her tastes were indiscriminate and catholic; all that mattered were printed words on paper. Consequently, her little hovel was packed with lurid tabloids with their tales of graphically illustrated murder and accident; political advertisements; polemic pamphlets hysterically exorting every esoteric concern from the advantages of communism to the question of whether Musrum was right-handed or left-handed; handbills announcing new plays, vaudevilles, circuses, music hall acts, new products, patent medicines, magnetic cures, cures for arthritis, syphilis and drunkenness, offers of jobs, railroad schedules and announcements of the departure of spaceships and their need for crews; cheap novels printed on paper so soft and porous the letters had spread into furry blobs, like squashed insects, paper bound novels printed on brittle, splintery pulp that crackled like old leaves when she turned their pages, fat novels printed in tiny, meticulous letters on onionskin that felt as she imagined silk must; there were magazines, filled with stories and articles and colored rotogravure pictures; best of all were the nonfiction books, the school books and the occasional encyclopedia volume. Some of these were as incomprehensible as theology, philosophy, economics and mathematics—whose dense tangles of formulae, graphs and diagrams may as well have been some indecipherable hieroglyphic—her eyes glided over them as they would the meaningless pattern of a wallpaper, but others were about science and history and biography—especially her treasured biographies of Princess Bronwyn—and geography. They filled her with more joy and wonder and longing and discontent and ideas and questions than could have any hundred books of religious propaganda.

So Judikha enrolled in a public school. She was only required to take a simple test, which she completed perfectly, if laboriously and self-consciously, being unused to writing. The school was the only one maintained in the Transmoltus, and then only because the law required its presence. But the law did not require the school to do anything more than exist; it did not require either efficiency or effectiveness; its instructors were those either too old, too incompetent or too sadistic to be tolerated in the City’s schools. Worse, however, than any of these was the instructor who was there because he or she was possessed by an overweening missionary spirit. Mr. Grun was such a circumspect man, pacing off the dingy halls in a frigid, dry odor of sanctity, as though he were measuring the depths of transgression with his stiff, caliper-like legs. He took himself and his position seriously, as he took everything, and his manner fitted his calling. He looked upon himself as the keeper of a sacred charge. These young, ill-formed, rude Citizens of the Future were under his care, and it behooved him to walk warily and so comport himself as to bring no faint suggestion of the indecorous before the notice of the young minds among whom he spent his days. He was, as should now be obvious, to a large extent severed from the realities of life and there were many subjects and aspects of subjects upon which the younger minds could better have enlightened him than he them. But, by training, nature and calling, he was incapable of crediting children with personality, let alone knowledge of good and evil. More’s the pity.

Mr. Grun certainly did not recognize the native intelligence of the rangy young girl with the lank, tangled hair. He thought that intelligence in girls was unnecessary and perhaps even sinful in an ill-defined way. For years he had paid little attention to her curiosity, ignored her questions, barely glanced at her neatly-written papers; instead he shook his head slowly and compressed his bloodless lips whenever he saw her. He disapproved of the way she carried herself, with neither modesty nor demureness. She strode the dingy halls with a masculine assurance, looking neither left nor right, her dark level eyes fixed like a surveyor’s transit on some distant point on the invisible horizon, as though she could see through the dark wall at the end of the corridor. She refused—shunned—the company of the other girls; she looked down upon them from her great height—she was already nearly a head taller than any other girl her age—down the length of her wonderful nose as though she were sighting rats along the barrel of a gun. She laughed and joked with the boys, raucously and honestly, not bothering to cover her open mouth, throwing her head back and haw-hawing shamelessly. He did not like the sight of her teeth or her throat or her tongue or the roof of her mouth. The former were too white and the latter three too wet and pink. He was scandalized by some of the jokes he overheard her telling, though he really grasped little more than the gist of but few of them—he sustained his disapproval by tacitly assuming that nothing that caused
that
sort of laughter could be entirely decent. He had been forced to reprimand her repeatedly about her dress; in spite of his stern admonitions she insisted on wearing shirts and trousers and where the other girls would sit primly, with their knees together and their ankles decently covered, Judikha would sprawl in her seat, one long leg thrown across the knee of the other. Mr. Grun was disturbed by that precocious and insouciant reminder that females were indeed bipedal and, reacting like most prudes, held the girl to blame for his own prurience.

Judikha kept apart from her fellow students—or was kept apart. The students who considered themselves from poor but decent families would have nothing to do with her. The students with rougher pedigrees snubbed her as a defector from the ranks of the outlaw. She did not consider this as leaving any sort of void in her life. She already had few friends and was, quite frankly, even happier with fewer.

Judikha had abandoned her old ways, as best she could—at least within the delimitations of self-perpetuation. Not that she suddenly felt any sort of new-found morality—hardly; she found nothing amiss with her past career—she took some pride in it, in fact—nor did she begin passing lofty judgments upon her colleagues. No; she simply wanted to divert neither any more time nor energy than she could spare from her studies. She had fixed upon her goal with the single-minded, inevitable purposefulness that a loosed arrow has for a bull’s-eye. Any other endeavors or interests, other than those directly required for bodily sustenance and physical survival, were extraneous; they were wasted time and energy. Such a lofty, if practical, motive was entirely beyond the comprehension of her associates—had they bothered to consider it, which they didn’t, of course. They merely—and, admittedly, with some justification—drew their ill-founded and erroneous conclusions from the evidence of the ex-hellion who now hurried home after classes, books and papers clutched to her chest, her eyes fixed somewhere far beyond their flat, stupid faces and mean eyes. She was deaf as well as blind. At first she ignored their well-meant invitations to drink, carouse or cause mayhem, to make an evening of it, to have something on; later she was just as oblivious to their taunts. She slipped through them and away, as slickly as a needle through burlap. There was only one logical reply to the gibes and she was unaware she that she made it: an exasperating smile of self-sufficiency.