Space Cadet (15 page)

“I don’t know. I don’t know!”

“Are you going to resign?”

“I can’t. My father had to put up a bond to cover my passage both ways—if I leave voluntarily he’s stuck for it.”

Tex came in, yawning and scratching. “What’s the matter with you guys? Can’t you sleep? Don’t you want anybody else to sleep?”

“Sorry, Tex.”

Jarman looked them over. “You both look like your pet dog had died. What’s the trouble?”

Matt bit his lip. “Nothing much. I’m homesick, that’s all.”

Pete spoke up at once. “That’s not quite straight. I was the one that was pulling the baby act—Matt was trying to cheer me up.”

Tex looked puzzled. “I don’t get it. What difference does it make where you are so long as you aren’t in Texas?”

“Oh, Tex, for heaven’s sake!” Matt exploded.

“What’s the matter? Did I say something wrong?” Tex looked from Matt to Pete. “Pete, you certainly are a mighty far piece away from your folks, I’ve got to admit. Tell you what—comes time we get some leave, you come home with me. I’ll let you count the legs on a horse.”

Pete grinned feebly. “And meet your Uncle Bodie?”

“Sho’, sho’! Uncle Bodie’ll tell you about the time he rode the twister, bareback. Is it a deal?”

“If you’ll come to visit at my home someday. You, too, Matt.”

“It’s a deal.” They shook hands all around.

The effects of the nostalgic binge with Pete might have worn off if another incident had not happened soon after. Matt went across the passage to Arensa’s room, intending to ask the oldster for some help in a tricky problem in astrogation. He found the oldster packing. “Come in, Senator,” said Arensa. “Don’t clutter up the doorway. What’s on your mind, son?”

“Uh, nothing, I guess. You got your ship, sir?” Arensa had been passed for outer duty the month before; he was now technically a “passed cadet” as well as an “oldster.”

“No.” He picked up a sheaf of papers, glanced at them, and tore them across. “But I’m leaving.”

“Oh.”

“No need to be delicate about it—I wasn’t fired. I’ve resigned.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t stare at me and say ‘oh’! What’s so odd about resigning?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“You were wondering why, weren’t you? Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve had it, that’s why. I’ve had it and I’m sick of it. Because, sonny, I have no wish to be a superman. My halo is too tight and I’m chucking it. Can you understand that?”

“Oh, I wasn’t criticizing!”

“No, but you were thinking it. You stick with it, Senator. You’re just the sort of serious-minded young squirt they want and need. But not for me—I’m not going to be an archangel, charging around the sky and brandishing a flaming sword. Did you ever stop to think what it would feel like to atom-bomb a city? Have you ever really
thought about it?
”

“Why, I don’t know. It hasn’t been necessary for the Patrol actually to
use
a bomb since they got it rolling right. I don’t suppose it ever will be.”

“But that’s what you signed up for, just the same. It’s your reason for being, my boy.” He stopped and picked up his guitar. “Forget it. Now what can I do with this? I’ll sell it to you cheap, Earth-side price.”

“I couldn’t even pay Earth-side prices right now.”

“Take it as a gift.” Arensa chucked it at him. “The Hog Alley band ought to have a gitter and I can get another. In thirty minutes I shall be in Terra Station, Senator, and six hours later I shall be back with the ground crawlers, the little people who don’t know how to play God—and wouldn’t want to!”

Matt couldn’t think of anything to say.

It seemed odd thereafter not to have Arensa’s bellowing voice across the passageway, but Matt did not have time to think about it. Matt’s drill section in piloting was ordered to the Moon for airless-landing.

The section had progressed from scooters to drill in an A-6 utility rocket rigged for instruction. The cargo space of this ship—P.R.S.
Shakysides
to the cadets; drill craft #106 on the rolls of the
Randolph
—had been fitted as a dozen duplicate control rooms, similar in every visible detail to the real control rooms, to the last switch, dial, scope and key. The instruments in the duplicate rooms showed the same data as their twins in the master room but when a cadet touched a control in one of the instruction rooms, it had no effect on the ship; instead the operation was recorded on tape.

The pilot’s operations were recorded, too, so that each student pilot could compare what he did with what he should have done, after having practiced under conditions identical with those experienced by the actual pilot.

The section had completed all it could learn from practice contacts at the
Randolph
and at Terra Station. They needed the hazard of a planet. The two-day trip to Moon Base was made in the
Shakysides
herself, under conditions only a little worse than those encountered by an emigrant.

Matt and his companions saw nothing of the Lunar colonies. There was no liberty; they lived for two weeks in pressurized underground barracks at the Base and went up to the field each day for landing drill, first in the dummy control rooms of the
Shakysides
, then in dual-controlled A-6 rockets for actual piloting.

Matt soloed at the end of the first week. He had the “feel” for piloting; given a pre-calculated flight plan he could make his craft respond. It was as natural to him as mathematical astrogation was difficult.

Soloing left him with time on his hands. He explored the Base and took a space-suited walk on the burned and airless Lunar plain. The student pilots were quartered in a corner of the marine barracks. Matt killed time by watching the space marines and chinning with the non-coms.

He liked the spit-and-polish style with which the space marines did things, the strutting self-confidence with which they handled themselves. There is no more resplendent sight in the solar system than an old space-marine sergeant in full dress, covered with stripes, hash marks, and ribbons, the silver at his temples matching the blazing sunburst on his chest. Matt began to feel dowdy in the one plain, insignialess uniform he had brought in his jump bag.

He enjoyed their frequent ceremonials. At first it startled him to hear a unit mustered without the ghostly repetition of the names of the Four—“Dahlquist! Martin! Rivera! Wheeler!”—but the marines had traditional rites of their own and more of them.

Faithful to his intention of swotting astrogation as hard as possible, Matt had brought some typical problems along. Reluctantly he tackled them one day. “Given: Departure from the orbit of Deimos, Mars, not earlier than 1200 Greenwich, 15 May 2087; chemical fuel, exhaust velocity 10,000 meters per second; destination, suprastratospheric orbit around Venus. Required: Most economical orbit to destination and quickest orbit, mass-ratios and times of departure and arrival for each. Prepare flight plan and designate check points, with pre-calculation for each point, using stars of 2nd magnitude or brighter. Questions: Is it possible to save time or fuel by tacking on the Terra-Luna pair? What known meteor drifts will be encountered and what evasive plans, if any, should be made? All answers must conform to space regulations as well as to ballistic principles.”

The problem could not be solved in any reasonable length of time without machine calculation. However, Matt could set it up and then, with luck, sweet-talk the officer in charge of the Base’s computation room into letting him use a ballistic integrator. He got to work.

The sweet voice of a bugle reached him, first call for changing the guard. He ignored it.

He was sweating over his preliminary standard approximation when the bugle again interrupted him with call-to-muster. It completely disrupted his chain of reasoning. Confounded problem!—why would they assign such a silly problem anyhow? The Patrol didn’t fiddle around with chemical fuels and most economical orbits—that was merchant service stuff.

Two minutes later he was watching guard mount, down in the main hall under the barracks. When the band sounded off with “
Till the Suns are cold and the heavens dark
—” Matt found himself choking up.

He stopped by the guard office, reluctant to get back to the fussy complexities of mathematics. The new sergeant of the guard was an acquaintance, Master Sergeant Macleod. “Come in, young fellow, and rest yourself. Did you see the guard mount?”

“Thanks. Yes, I did. It’s pretty wonderful to see.”

“Know what you mean. Been doing it twenty years and I get more of a bang out of it than I did when I was a recruit. How’s tricks? They keeping you busy?”

Matt grinned sheepishly. “I’m playing hooky. I should be studying astrogation, but I get so darned sick of it.”

“Don’t blame you a bit. Figures make my head ache.”

Matt found himself telling the older man his troubles. Sergeant Macleod eyed him with sympathetic interest. “See here, Mr. Dodson—you don’t like that long-haired stuff. Why don’t you chuck it?”

“Huh?”

“You like the space marines, don’t you?”

“Why, yes.”

“Why not switch over and join a man’s outfit? You’re a likely lad and educated—in a year I’d be saluting you. Ever thought about it?”

“Why, no, I can’t say that I have.”

“Then do so. You don’t belong with the Professors—you didn’t know that was what we call the Patrol, did you?—the ‘Professors.’”

“I’d heard it.”

“You had? Well, we work for the Professors, but we aren’t of them. We’re…well, you’ve seen. Think it over.”

Matt did think it over, so much so that he took the Mars-to-Venus problem back with him, still unsolved.

It was no easier to solve for the delay, nor were other and more complicated problems made any simpler by virtue of the idea, buzzing in the back of his mind, that he need not belabor himself with higher mathematics in order to be a spaceman. He began to see himself decked out in the gaudy, cock-pheasant colors of the space marines.

At last he took it up with Lieutenant Wong. “You want to transfer to the marines?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Why?”

Matt explained his increasing feeling of frustration in dealing with both atomic physics and astrogation.

Wong nodded. “I thought so. But we knew that you would have tough sledding since you came here insufficiently prepared. I don’t like the sloppy work you’ve been doing since you came back from Luna.”

“I’ve done the best I could, sir.”

“No, you haven’t. But you
can
master these two subjects and I will see to it that you do.”

Matt explained, almost inaudibly, that he was not sure he wanted to. Wong, for the first time, looked vexed.

“Still on that? If you turn in a request for transfer, I won’t okay it and I can tell you ahead of time that the Commandant will turn it down.”

Matt’s jaw muscles twitched. “That’s your privilege, sir.”

“Damn it, Dodson, it’s not my privilege; it’s my duty. You would never make a marine and I say so because I know you, your record, and your capabilities. You have a good chance of making a Patrol officer.”

Matt looked startled. “Why couldn’t I become a marine?”

“Because it’s too easy for you—so easy that you would fail.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t say ‘huh.’ The spread in I.Q. between leader and follower should not be more than thirty points. You are considerably more than thirty points ahead of those old sergeants—don’t get me wrong; they are fine men. But your mind doesn’t work like theirs.” Wong went on, “Have you ever wondered why the Patrol consists of nothing but officers—and student officers, cadets?”

“Mmm, no, sir.”

“Naturally you wouldn’t. We never wonder at what we grow up with. Strictly speaking, the Patrol is not a military organization at all.”

“Sir?”

“I know, I know—you are trained to use weapons, you are under orders, you wear a uniform. But your purpose is not to fight, but to prevent fighting, by every possible means. The Patrol is not a fighting organization; it is the repository of weapons too dangerous to entrust to military men.

“With the development last century of mass-destruction weapons, warfare became all offense and no defense, speaking broadly. A nation could launch a horrific attack but it could not even protect its own rocket bases. Then space travel came along.

“The spaceship is the perfect answer in a military sense to the atom bomb, and to germ warfare and weather warfare. It can deliver an attack that can’t be stopped—and it is utterly impossible to attack that spaceship from the surface of a planet.”

Matt nodded. “The gravity gauge.”

“Yes, the gravity gauge. Men on the surface of a planet are as helpless against men in spaceships as a man would be trying to conduct a rock-throwing fight from the bottom of a well. The man at the top of the well has gravity working for him.

“We might have ended up with the tightest, most nearly unbreakable tyranny the world has ever seen. But the human race got a couple of lucky breaks and it didn’t work out that way. It’s the business of the Patrol to see that it stays lucky.

“But the Patrol can’t drop an atom bomb simply because some pipsqueak Hitler has made a power grab and might some day, when he has time enough, build spaceships and mass-destruction weapons. The power is too great, too awkward—it’s like trying to keep order in a nursery with a loaded gun instead of a switch.

“The space marines are the Patrol’s switch. They are the finest—”

“Excuse me, sir—”

“Yes?”

“I know how the marines work. They do the active policing in the System—but that’s why I want to transfer. They’re a more active outfit. They are—”

“—more daring, more adventurous, more colorful, more glamorous—and they don’t have to study things that Matthew Dodson is tired of studying. Now shut up and listen; there is a lot you don’t know about the setup, or you wouldn’t be trying to transfer.”

Matt shut up.

“People tend to fall into three psychological types, all differently motivated. There is the type, motivated by economic factors, money…and there is the type motivated by ‘face,’ or pride. This type is a spender, fighter, boaster, lover, sportsman, gambler; he has a will to power and an itch for glory. And there is the professional type, which claims to follow a code of ethics rather than simply seeking money or glory—priests and ministers, teachers, scientists, medical men, some artists and writers. The idea is that such a man believes that he is devoting his life to some purpose more important than his individual self. You follow me?”