William Tenn: Down Among the Dead Men

Well, at least these zombies didn’t look like zombies!

On an impulse, I plucked the rolled sheaf of papers containing our travel orders out of my pocket, pretended to study it and let it slip suddenly through my fingers. As the outspread sheaf spiraled to the floor in front of me, Roger Grey reached out and caught it. He handed it back to me with the same kind of easy yet snappy grace. I took it, feeling good. It was the way he moved. I like to see a co-pilot move that way.

“Thanks,” I said.

He just nodded.

I studied Yussuf Lamehd next. Yes, he had it too. Whatever it is that makes a first-class gunner, he had it. It’s almost impossible to describe, but you walk into a bar in some rest area on Eros, say, and out of the five sling-shotters hunched over the blow-top table, you know right off which is the gunner. It’s a sort of carefully bottled nervousness or a dead calm with a hair-trigger attachment. Whatever it is, it’s what you need sitting over a firing button when you’ve completed the dodge, curve, and twist that’s a sling-shot’s attacking dash and you’re barely within range of the target, already beginning your dodge, curve, and twist back to safety. Lamehd had it so strong that I’d have put money on him against any other gunner in the TAF I’d ever seen in action.

Astrogators and engineers are different. You’ve just got to see them work under pressure before you can rate them. But, even so, I liked the calm and confident manner with which Wang Hsi and Weinstein sat under my examination. And I liked them.

Right there I felt a hundred pounds slide off my chest. I felt relaxed for the first time in days. I really liked my crew, zombies or no. We’d make it.

I decided to tell them. “Men,” I said, “I think we’ll really get along. I think we’ve got the makings of a sweet, smooth sling-shot. You’ll find me—”

And I stopped. That cold, slightly mocking look in their eyes. They way they had glanced at each other when I told them I thought we’d get along, glanced at each other and blown slightly through distended nostrils. I realized that none of them had said anything since they’d come in; they’d just been watching me, and their eyes weren’t exactly warm.

I stopped and let myself take a long, deep breath. For the first time, it was occurring to me that I’d been worrying about just one end of the problem, and maybe the least important end. I’d been worrying about how I’d react to them and how much I’d be able to accept them as shipmates. They were zombies, after all. It had never occurred to me to wonder how they’d feel about me.

And there was evidently something very wrong in how they felt about me.

“What is it, men?” I asked. They all looked at me inquiringly. “What’s on your minds?”

They kept looking at me. Weinstein pursed his lips and tilted his chair back and forth. It creaked. Nobody said anything.

I got off the desk and walked up and down in front of the classroom. They kept following me with their eyes.

“Grey,” I said. “You look as if you’ve got a great big knot inside you. Want to tell me about it?”

“No, Commander,” he said deliberately. “I don’t want to tell you about it.”

I grimaced. “If anyone wants to say anything—anything at all—it’ll be off the record and completely off the record. Also for the moment we’ll forget about such matters as rank and TAF regulations.” I waited. “Wang? Lamehd? How about you, Weinstein?” They stared at me quietly. Weinstein’s chair creaked back and forth.

It had me baffled. What kind of gripe could they have against me? They’d never met me before. But I knew one thing: I wasn’t going to haul a crew nursing a subsurface grudge as unanimous as this aboard a sling-shot. I wasn’t going to chop space with those eyes at my back. It would be more efficient for me to shove my head against an Irvingle lens and push the button.

“Listen,” I told them. “I meant what I said about forgetting rank and TAF regulations. I want to run a happy ship and I have to know what’s up. We’ll be living, the five of us, in the tightest, most cramped conditions the mind of man has yet been able to devise; we’ll be operating a tiny ship whose only purpose is to dodge at tremendous speed through the fire-power and screening devices of the larger enemy craft and deliver a single, crippling blast from a single oversize Irvingle. We’ve got to get along whether we like each other or not. If we don’t get along, if there’s any unspoken hostility getting in our way, the ship won’t operate at maximum efficiency. And that way, we’re through before we—”

“Commander,” Weinstein said suddenly, his chair coming down upon the floor with a solid whack, “I’d like to ask you a question.”

“Sure,” I said and let out a gust of relief that was the size of a small hurricane. “Ask me anything.”

“When you think about us, Commander, or when you talk about us, which word do you use?”

I looked at him and shook my head. “Eh?”

“When you talk about us, Commander, or when you think about us, do you call us zombies? Or do you call us blobs? That’s what I’d like to know, Commander.”

He’d spoken in such a polite, even tone that I was a long time in getting the full significance of it.

“Personally,” said Roger Grey in a voice that was just a little less polite, a little less even, “personally, I think the Commander is the kind who refers to us as canned meat. Right, Commander?”

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!