Prisoners of Tomorrow (72 page)

“I’ve talked to shrinks. They’re all crazy. How do they know whether I know me or not? Do you know how your head works inside?” Anita shook it in a way that said she didn’t care all that much either. Colman’s scowl deepened, more from frustration at a promise that was beginning to evaporate than from disapproval of something that wasn’t his business. “Then how do you expect a pill to figure it out?”

“You should try to find yourself, Steve. It’s healthy.”

“I never lost myself.”

“Zangreni needs stimulants to catalyze her psychic currents. That’s how she makes predictions.”

“For Christ’s sake, that’s TV fiction. She doesn’t exist. It’s not real life. There isn’t anything like that in real life.”

“Who cares? It’s more fun. Why be a drag?” Colman looked away in exasperation. She could have been a unique, thinking person. Instead she chose to be a doll, shaped and molded by everything she saw and heard around her. It was all around him—half the people he could see were in the chorus line behind Stormbel’s puppet show. They could be told what to think because they didn’t want to think. Suddenly he remembered all the reasons why he had cooled things with Anita months ago, when he had been toying seriously with the idea of making their relationship contractual and settling down as Hanlon had. He had tried to tune into her wavelength and found nothing but static. But what had infuriated him more was that her attitude had been unnecessary—she had a head but wouldn’t use it.

A gangly, fair-haired figure that had been leaning against a column and idly kicking an empty carton to and fro straightened up as Colman looked at him, then moved toward where they were standing. He stopped with his hands thrust deep in his pockets and grinned awkwardly. Colman stared at the boy in surprise. It was Jay Fallows. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Oh, I figured you’d be around here somewhere.”

“Is this the guy who makes trains?” Anita asked.

“Yeah. This is Jay. He’s okay . . . and smart.”

“Smart . . . brains.” A faraway look was coming into Anita’s eyes. “Brains and trains. I like it. It’s lyrical. Don’t you think it’s lyrical?” She smiled at Jay and winked saucily. “Hi, Jay.” The pill was mixing with the drinks and getting to her already. Jay grinned but looked uncomfortable.

“Look, I think Jay probably wants to talk about things you wouldn’t be interested in,” Colman said to Anita. “Why don’t you go on after the others. I’ll catch up later.”

“You don’t want me around?”

Colman sighed. “It’s not anything like that. It’s just—”

Anita waved a hand in front of her face. “It’s okay. You don’t want me around . . . you don’t want me around. It’s okay.” Her voice was starting to rise and fall singsong fashion. “Who says I need anybody to have a good time, anyhow? I’m fine, see. It’s okay. . . . You and Jay can go talk about brains and trains.” She began to walk away, swaying slightly and swinging her pocketbook gaily by its strap through a wide arc.

“Look, I-I didn’t mean to bust into anything,” Jay stammered. “I mean, if you and her are . . .”

Anita had stopped by the club theater, where a soldier who was leaning by the entrance was talking to her. She slipped an arm through his and laughed something in reply. “About as much as that.” Colman said, nodding his head. “Forget it. Maybe you did me a favor.” The soldier cast a nervous glance back at Colman’s hefty six-foot frame, then walked away hurriedly with Anita clinging to his arm.

Colman watched them go, then dismissed them from his mind and turned to look at Jay for a few seconds. “Can’t figure life out, huh?” he said gruffly. It saved a lot of pointless questions.

Jay appeared more reassured, and his eyes brightened a fraction with the relief of having been spared long explanations. “It’s all screwed up,” he replied simply.

“Would you feel better if I said I haven’t figured it out yet either?”

Jay shook his head. “It’d just mean we’ve got the same problem. It wouldn’t solve anything.”

“I didn’t think it would, so I won’t say it.”

“So does that mean you’ve got it figured?” Jay asked.

“Would it make any difference to your problem if I had?”

“No. It’d be your solution, not mine.”

“Then that’s the answer.”

Jay nodded, straightened his arms into his pockets with his shoulders bunched high near his ears, held the posture for a few seconds, and then relaxed abruptly with a sigh. “Can I ask you something?” he said, looking up.

“Do I have to answer it?”

“Not if you don’t want to, I guess.”

“Go ahead.”

“Why is it the way it is? How does what you and I do in Jersey have anything to do with my dad’s job? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And?”

Jay squinted into the distance and scratched his head. “Pretty much what I expected. Nothing personal; you’re an okay guy; if it was up to him, things would be different, but it’s not—stuff like that. But he was only saying that so as not to sound mean—I could tell. It goes deeper than that. It’s not a case of it being up to him or not. He really believes in it. How do people get like that?”

Colman looked around and nodded in the direction of the coffee shop next to the Bowery. “Let’s not stand around here all night,” he said. “Come on inside. Could you use a coffee?”

“Sure . . . thanks.” They began walking toward the door. “And thanks for the valves,” Jay said. “They fit perfectly.”

“How’s it coming along?”

“Pretty good. The axle assembly’s finished. You’ll have to come and take a look.”

“I sure will.”

Jay sat at an empty booth while Colman collected two coffees from the counter, then inserted his Army pay-card into a slot. In a lot of ways Jay reminded Colman of himself when he was a lot younger. Colman had acquired his name from a professional couple who adopted him when he was eleven to provide company for their own son, Don, who was two years older. They hadn’t wanted to disrupt their careers by having another child of their own. Colman’s stepfather was a thermodynamics engineer involved with heat exchangers in magnetohydrodynamic systems, which accounted for Colman’s early interest in technology. Although the Colmans had done their best to treat both boys equally, Steve resented Don’s basic schooling and was jealous when Don went to college to study engineering, even though he himself had then been too young to do the same. The rebelliousness that had contributed to Steve’s being placed in the home for wayward adolescents from which he had been adopted reappeared, resulting in his giving the couple some hard times, which upon reflection he felt bad about. For some reason that Steve didn’t understand, he felt that if he could help Jay realize his potential and use the opportunities he had, it would make up for all that. Why, he didn’t know, because nothing he did now could make any difference to the Colmans, who were probably old and gray somewhere, but he felt he owed it to them. People’s minds worked like that. Minds could be very strange.

He set the coffees down and slid into the seat opposite Jay. “Ever been thirsty?” he asked as he stirred sugar into his cup.

Jay looked surprised. “Why . . . sure. I guess so. Hasn’t everybody?”

“Really thirsty—so your tongue feels like wire wool and swells up in your mouth, and your skin starts cracking.”

“Well. . . no. Why?”

“I have. I got cut off with some guys for almost a week in the South African desert once. All you think about is water. You can’t describe the craving. You’d cut off your arm for a cup.” He paused, and Jay waited with a puzzled expression on his face. “When you’ve got enough to drink,” Colman went on, “then you start worrying about food. That takes longer to build up, but it gets as bad. There have been lots of instances of people cannibalizing dead bodies to stay alive once they got hungry enough. They’ve killed each other over potato peels.”

“So-o-o-o?”

“When you’ve got enough to eat and drink, then you worry about keeping warm. And when you’re warm enough, you start thinking about staying safe.” Colman opened his hands briefly. “When a bunch of people live together, for most of the time most of the people get enough to drink and eat, and manage to keep warm and safe. What do you think they start worrying about then?”

Jay frowned and looked mildly uncomfortable. “Sex?” he hazarded.

Colman grinned. “You’re right, but you’re supposed to pretend you don’t know about that. I was thinking of something else—recognition. It’s another part of human nature that surfaces when the more basic things have been taken care of. And when it does, it gets to be just as powerful as the rest. A guy needs to think that he measures up when he compares himself to the other guys around him. He needs to be recognized for what’s good about him and to stand out. Like you said, it’s probably sex, because he thinks the girls are taking notice, but whatever the reason, it’s real.”

Jay was beginning to see the connection. “Measures up with respect to what?” he asked. “What’s the standard?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Colman told him. “It’s different in different places. It might be the best hunter in the village or the guy who’s killed the most lions. It might be the way you paint your face. Through most of history it’s been money. What you buy with it isn’t important. What’s important is that the things you buy say to all the other guys, ‘I’ve got what it takes to earn what you have to, to buy all this stuff, and you haven’t. Therefore I’m better than you.’ That’s what it’s all about.”

“Why’s it so important to be better than somebody?”

“I told you, it’s an instinct. You can’t fight it. It’s like being thirsty.”

“Am I supposed to feel that way?”

“You do. Don’t you like it when your team wins in the Bowl? Why do you work hard at school? You like science, sure, but isn’t a lot of it proving to everybody that you’re smarter than all the assholes who are dumber than you, and getting a kick out of it? Be honest. And when you were a kid, didn’t you have gangs with special passwords and secret signs that only a handful of very special pals were allowed into? I bet you did.”

Jay nodded and smiled. “You’re right. We did.”

“We all did. And it doesn’t change when you get older. It gets worse. Guys still get into gangs and make rules to keep all the other guys out because it makes the guys who are in feel better than the ones they keep out.”

“But the rules are so dumb,” Jay protested. “They don’t make sense. Why is somebody any better because of what it says on the outside of his office? It’s what he does inside that matters.”

“They don’t have to make sense. All they have to do is say you’re different. Now do you get it? Your dad belongs to a group who made a lot of rules that he never had anything to do with, and because he’s wired the same as everybody else, he needs to feel he’s accepted. To be accepted, he has to be seen to go by the rules. If he didn’t he’d become a threat to the group, and they’d reject him. And nobody can take that. Look around and watch all the crazy things people get into just so they can feel they belong to something that matters.”

“Even you?”

“Sure. What could be crazier than the Army?”

“You’re not crazy,” Jay said. “So what made you join?”

“It was a group, just like I’ve been saying—something to belong to. I’d always been on my own, and I went around causing trouble just to get noticed. People are like that. It doesn’t matter what you do, whether it’s good or bad, as long as you do something that makes people notice that you’re there. Nothing’s worse than not making any difference to anything.” Colman shrugged. “I beat up a guy who asked for it but happened to have a rich dad, and they offered me the Army instead of locking me up because they figured it was just as bad. I jumped at it.”

Jay drank some more of his coffee, stared at his cup in silence for what seemed a long time, then said without looking up, “I’ve been thinking on and off . . . you know, I think I’d like to get into the Army. What would be the best way of going about it?”

Colman stared hard at him for a few seconds. “What do you think you’d get out of it?” he asked.

“Oh, I dunno—some of the things you said, maybe.”

“Get away from being caged in at home, be your real self, break out of the straitjacket, and all the rest, huh?”

“Maybe.”

Colman nodded to himself and wiped his mouth with a napkin from the dispenser on the table while he tried to form the right answer. He was stuck in the Army but wanted to become a professional engineer; Jay could walk into being an engineer but thought he wanted to be in the Army. There would be no point in being scornful and listing all the reasons why it might not be such a good idea—Jay knew all those and didn’t want to hear about it.

Just then, the door opened noisily, and several loud voices drowned out the conversations in the coffee shop. Colman recognized three faces from B Company, Padawski—a tall, wiry sergeant with harsh, thin lips and hard, black eyes set in a long, swarthy face—and two corporals whose names didn’t come immediately to mind. They had been drinking, and Padawski could be mean at the best of times. Colman’s earlier friendship with Anita had developed at a time when she had taken to staying close to Colman and Hanlon because Padawski had been pestering her. Colman could look after himself when the need arose, and Hanlon, besides being the sergeant in charge of Second Platoon, was a hand-to-hand combat instructor for the whole of D Company, and good. The combination had proved an effective deterrent, and Padawski had nursed a personal grudge ever since.

“Who are they?” Jay asked as he sensed Colman’s tensing up.

“Bad news,” Colman hissed through his teeth. “Just keep talking. Don’t look round.”

“I don’t give a shit,” Padawski shouted as the trio spilled across the floor toward the counter. “I don’t give a goddamn shit, I tell ya. If that asshole wants to—” His voice broke off suddenly. “Say, who’ve we got over here? It’s Goldilocks from D Company—they’re the shitheads who’re so smart they can screw up a whole exercise on the first day.” Colman felt the floor vibrate as heavy footfalls approached the booth. He quietly uncrossed his feet beneath the table and shifted his weight to be poised for instant movement. His fingers curled more snugly around the half-full cup of hot coffee. He looked up to find Padawski leering down from about three feet away.