Prisoners of Tomorrow (73 page)

“This is private,” he murmured in a voice that was low but menacing. “Beat it.”

“Hey, guys, Goldilocks has got a new girlfriend! Take a look. Is there something you wanna tell us, Colman? I’ve always had my doubts about you.” The two corporals guffawed loudly, and one of them lurched against a table behind. The man sitting at it excused himself and left hurriedly. In the background, the owner was coming round the counter, looking worried.

Jay had turned pale and was sitting motionless. Colman’s eyes blazed up at Padawski. Padawski’s leer broadened. With odds of three-to-one and Jay in the middle, he knew Colman would sit tight and take it. Padawski peered more closely at Jay and blew a stream of beery breath across the table.

“Hey, kid, how do you like—”

“Cut it,” Colman grated. “You leave him out of it. If it’s me you want, I’ll take the three of you, but some other place. He’s got nothing to do with this.”

The owner bustled forward, twisting a cloth nervously in his hands. “Look, I don’t want any trouble. I just wanna sell food to the people, okay? They don’t want no trouble either. Now why don’t—”

“Oh, so it’s trouble them fellas is looking for, is it?” a voice with just a hint of an Irish brogue asked softly from the doorway. Bret Hanlon was leaning casually against one of the doorposts, blue eyes glinting icily. His huge shoulders seeming almost to reach the other side of the door. He looked completely relaxed and at ease, but Colman registered his weight carried well forward on the balls of his feet and his fingers flexing inconspicuously down by his hip. The two corporals glanced at each other apprehensively. Hanlon’s appearance altered the odds a bit. Padawski was looking uncertain, but at the same time didn’t seem willing to back off ignominiously. For a few seconds that dragged like minutes, the charge in the room crackled at flashpoint. Nobody moved.

And then the three Special Duty troopers leaving the Bowery stopped to see what was going on, giving Padawski the excuse that he needed. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. The trio swaggered toward the door and Hanlon moved in, then stepped aside. Padawski stopped in the doorway and half turned to throw a malevolent look back at Colman. “Some other time. Next time you won’t be so lucky.” They left. Outside, the three SD troopers turned away and moved slowly off.

Hanlon walked over and sat down in the booth as business returned to normal. “They knew you were here, Steve. I heard them talking in the back of Rockefeller’s. So I thought I’d come back down and hang around.”

“I’ve always said you’ve got a good sense of timing, Bret.”

“So, is this fine young fella the Jay you were telling me about?” Hanlon asked.

“That’s Jay. Jay, this is Bret—Bret Hanlon. He runs one of the other platoons and teaches unarmed combat. Don’t mess with him.”

“Was that why those guys took off?” Jay asked, by now having regained most of his color.

“It probably had something to do with it,” Colman said, grinning. “That’s the kind of trash you have to deal with. Still interested?”

“I guess I’ll have to think about it,” Jay conceded.

Hanlon ordered three hamburger dinners, and the two sergeants spent a half hour talking with Jay about Army life, football, and how Stanislau could crash the protected sector of the public databank. Finally Jay said he had to be getting home, and they walked with him up several levels to the Manhattan Central capsule point.

“Shall we be getting back to the party then?” Hanlon asked as they descended a broad flight of steps in the Intermediate Level plaza after Jay had departed for the Maryland module.

Colman slowed and rubbed his chin. He wasn’t in the mood. “You go on, Bret,” he said. “I think I’m just gonna wander around. I guess I’d rather be on my own for a while.”

Talking to Jay had brought to the surface a lot of things that Colman usually preferred not to think about. Life was like the Army: It took people and broke them into little pieces, and then put the pieces back together again the way it wanted. Except it did it with their minds. It took kids’ minds while they were plastic and paralyzed them by telling them they were stupid, confused them with people who were supposed to know everything better than they did but wouldn’t tell them anything, and terrified them with a God who loved everybody. Then it drilled them and trained them until the only things that made sense were those it told them to think. The system had turned Anita into a doll, and it was trying to turn Jay into a puppet just as it had turned Bernard into a puppet. It turned people into recording machines that words went into and came out of again and made them think they knew everything about a planetful of people they’d never seen, just as it blew black guys’ brains out because they wanted to run their farms and didn’t want their kids nailed to walls, and then told the civilians in Cape Town it was okay. And what had it done to Colman? He didn’t know because he didn’t know how else it might have been.

“Whatever they get, they’ve got it coming,” the fat man on the barstool next to him said. “Kids running around wild, breeding like rabbits—It’s disgusting. And making bombs! Savages is what they are—no better than the Chinese. Kalens has got the right idea. He’ll teach ’em some decency and respect.” Colman drank up and left.

Jesus, he thought, he was sick of the system. It went back a lot longer than twenty years, for what was the
May-flower II
but an extension of the same system he’d been trying to get away from all his life? Jay was beginning to feel the trap closing around him already. And none of it was going to change—ever. Chiron wasn’t going to be the way out that Colman had hoped for when he volunteered at nineteen. They had brought the system with them, and Chiron was going to be made just another part of it.

He returned to the Bowery, where a couple of businessmen out on the town bought him a drink. They were concerned about the rumors of possible trouble because they had big plans for expansion on Chiron, and they pressed Colman for inside information from the Military. Colman said he didn’t have any. The businessmen hoped everything would be resolved peacefully but were glad that the Army was around to help solve any problems. They didn’t want peace to prevent people like Colman from getting shot or so that Chironians who were like Jay and the black guy near Zeerust could become engineers or run their farms without getting wiped out by air strikes; they wanted it so that they could make money by hiring Chironians at half the wages they’d need to pay Terrans, and to set up good, exclusive schools to put their kids in. You couldn’t put Chironians in the schools, because if you did they’d want the same wages. And in any case they’d never be able to afford it. The Chironians weren’t really people, after all.

“What does a Chironian computer print when you attempt illegal access?” one of them asked Colman when they had got into their joke repertoires.

“What?”

“help! rape! Ha-ha, hah-hah!”

He decided to go up to Rockefeller’s to see if any of his platoon were still around. On the way his pace slowed abruptly. Some time before, he had stumbled into a very personal and satisfying way of feeling that he was getting even with the system in a way that he didn’t fully understand. Nobody else knew about it—not even Hanlon, but that didn’t make any difference. He hadn’t seen her for a while now, and he was in just the right mood.

To avoid using a compad in not-too-private surroundings, he went to a public booth in the lobby at Rockefeller’s to call the number programmed to accept calls only if she was alone. While Colman waited for a response, his mind flashed back six months. He had been standing stiffly at attention in dress uniform alongside a display of a remote-fire artillery control post that was part of the Army’s contribution to the Fourth of July celebrations, when she wandered away from a group of VIPs sipping cocktails and stood beside him to gaze admiringly at the screens carrying simulated battlefield displays. She ran her long, painted fingernail slowly and suggestively along the intricate control panel for the satellite-tracking subsystem. “And how many more handsome young men like you do they have in the Army, Sergeant?” she murmured at the displays before her.

“Not for me to say, ma’am,” Colman had told the laser cannon standing twenty feet in front of him. “I’m not an expert on handsome men.”

“An expert on ladies in need of stimulating entertainment, perhaps?”

“That depends, ma’am. They can lead to a heap of trouble.”

“Very wise, Sergeant. But then, some of them can be very discreet. Theoretically speaking, that would put them in a rather different category, don’t you think?”

“Theoretically, I guess, yes, it would,” Colman had agreed.

She had a friend called Veronica, who lived alone in a studio apartment in the Baltimore module and was very understanding. Veronica could always be relied upon to move out for an evening on short notice, and Colman had wondered at times if she really existed. Acquiring exclusive access to a studio wouldn’t have been all that difficult for a VIP’s wife, even with the accommodation limitations of the
Mayflower II.
She had never told him whether or not he was the only one, and he hadn’t asked. It was that kind of a relationship.

The screen before him suddenly came to life to show her face. A flicker of surprise danced in her eyes for the merest fraction of a second, and then gave way to a smoldering twinkle of anticipation mixed with a dash of amusement, “Well, hello, Sergeant,” she said huskily. “I was beginning to wonder if I had a deserter. Now, I wonder what could be on your mind at this time of night.”

“It depends. What’s the situation, company-wise?”

“Oh, very boring for a Saturday night.”

“He’s not—”

“Wining, dining, and conspiring—no doubt until the early hours.”

Colman hesitated for a split second to let the question ask itself. “So . . . ?”

“Well now, I’m sure Veronica could be persuaded if I were to call her and talk to her nicely.”

“Say, half an hour?”

“Half an hour.” She smiled a promise and winked. Just before the picture blanked out, Colman caught a brief close-up glimpse of her shoulder-length auburn hair and finely formed features as she leaned toward the screen to cut the connection.

Colman’s top-echelon, part-time mistress was Celia Kalens.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“
On
this, the eve of the last Christmas that we shall be celebrating together before our journey ends, I have chosen as the subject of my seasonal message to you the passage which begins, ‘Suffer little children to come unto me.’” The voice of the Mission’s presiding bishop floated serenely down from the loudspeakers around the Texas Bowl to the congregation of ten thousand listening solemnly from the terraces. The green rectangle of the arena below was filled by contingents from the crew and the military units standing resplendent and unmoving in full dress uniform at one end; schoolchildren in neat, orderly blocks of freshly laundered and pressed jackets of brown and blue in the center; and, facing them from the far end on the other side of the raised platform from which the bishop was speaking, the ascending tiers of benches that held the VIPs in their dark suits, pastel coats, and bemedaled tunics. The voice continued. “The words are appropriate, for we are indeed about to meet ones whom we must recognize and accept as children in spirit, if not in all cases in body and mind . . .”

Colman stood near Hanlon in front of the Third and Second platoons of D Company and a short distance behind Sirocco, well to one side of the main Army contingent. Only a few of the Company were absent for one reason or another, conspicuous among them Corporal Swyley, who was in Brigade sick bay and looking forward to a turkey dinner; the standing order for a spinach-and-fish diet had mysteriously erased itself from the administration computer’s records. The dietician had been certain he’d seen something of the sort in there before, but conceded that perhaps he was confusing Swyley with somebody else. Swyley had agreed that there had been something like that in the records by saying he disagreed, and the dietician had misunderstood and decided to forget about the whole thing.

“. . . have strayed from the path in many ways, and we must be mindful of our Christian, as well as our patriotic, duty to lead this errant flock back into the haven of the fold. Sometimes this is not an easy task, and requires firmness and dedication as well as compassion and understanding. . . .”

Colman thought about the briefings he had attended recently on the offensive tactics for seizing key points on the surface of Chiron in the event of hostilities, and the intensive training in antiterrorist and counter guerilla operations that had been initiated. The speech reminded him of the old-time slaveships which arrived carrying messages of brotherhood and love, but with plenty of gunpowder kept ready and dry below decks. Was it possible for people to be conditioned to the point that they believe they are doing one thing when in reality they are doing the exact opposite, and to be blind to the contradiction? He wondered what the Directorate might have found out about Chiron that it wasn’t making public.

“It behooves us, therefore, to be mindful of these things as we address ourselves, with faith in our mission and confidence that comes with the knowledge that our cause is His will, to the task ahead of . . .”

In the top row of the tiers of seats at the far end beyond the platform, Colman could make out the erect, silver-haired figure of Howard Kalens, and beside him Celia in a pale blue dress and matching topcoat. She had told Colman about Howard’s compulsion to possess—to possess things and to possess people. He felt threatened by anything or anyone that he couldn’t command. Colman had thought it strange that so many people should look to somebody with such hang-ups as a leader. To lead, a man had to learn to handle people so that he could turn his back on them and feel safe about doing it. Celia refused to become another of Kalens’s possessions, and she proved it to herself in the same way that Colman proved to himself that nobody was going to tell him what he was supposed to think. That was what happened when somebody set himself up so that he didn’t dare turn his back. Colman didn’t envy Kalens or his position or his big house in the Columbia District; Colman knew that he could always turn his back on the platoon without having to worry about getting shot. They should issue all the VIPs up in the benches M32s, Colman thought. Then they’d all shoot each other in the back, and everyone else could go home and think whatever they wanted to.