William Tenn: Down Among the Dead Men

But was it? There was another way of looking at it, beyond the fact that only soldiers too old physically and too ossified mentally for any other duty could be spared for this place. And that was the simple pragmatism of army thinking. The fighting perimeters were places of abiding horror and agony, the forward combat zones in which sling-shots operated were even worse. If men or materiel were going to collapse out there, it could be very costly. Let the collapses occur as close to the rear echelons as possible.

Maybe it made sense, I thought. Maybe it was logical to make live men out of dead men’s flesh (God knows humanity had reached the point where we had to have reinforcements from somewhere!) at enormous expense and with the kind of care usually associated with things like cotton wool and the most delicate watchmakers’ tools; and then to turn around and subject them to the coarsest, ugliest environment possible, an environment that perverted their carefully instilled loyalty into hatred and their finely balanced psychological adjustment into neurotic sensitivity.

I didn’t know if it was basically smart or dumb, or even if the problem had ever been really weighed as such by the upper, policy-making brass. All I could see was my own problem, and it looked awfully big to me. I thought of my attitude toward these men before getting them, and I felt pretty sick. But the memory gave me an idea.

“Hey, tell me something,” I suggested. “What would you call me?”

They looked puzzled.

“You want to know what I call you,” I explained. “Tell me first what you call people like me, people who are—who are born. You must have your own epithets.”

Lamehd grinned so that his teeth showed a bright, mirthless white against his dark skin. “Realos,” he said. “We call you people realos. Sometimes, realo trulos.”

Then the rest spoke up. There were other names, lots of other names. They wanted me to hear them all. They interrupted each other; they spat the words out as if they were so many missiles; they glared at my face, as they spat them out, to see how much impact they had. Some of the nicknames were funny, some of them were rather nasty. I was particularly charmed by utie and wombat.

“All right,” I said after a while. “Feel better?”

They were all breathing hard, but they felt better. I could tell it, and they knew it. The air in the room felt softer now.

“First off,” I said, “I want you to notice that you are all big boys and as such, can take care of yourselves. From here on out, if we walk into a bar or a rec camp together and someone of approximately your rank says something that sounds like zombie to your acute ears, you are at liberty to walk up to him and start taking him apart—if you can. If he’s of approximately my rank, in all probability, I’ll do the taking apart, simply because I’m a very sensitive commander and don’t like having my men deprecated. And any time you feel that I’m not treating you as human beings, one hundred percent, full solar citizenship and all that, I give you permission to come up to me and say, ‘Now look here, you dirty utie, sir—’ ”

The four of them grinned. Warm grins. Then the grins faded away, very slowly, and the eyes grew cold again. They were looking at a man who was, after all, an outsider. I cursed.

“It’s not as simple as that, Commander,” Wang Hsi said, “unfortunately. You can call us hundred-percent human beings, but we’re not. And anyone who wants to call us blobs or canned meat has a certain amount of right. Because we’re not as good as—as you mother’s sons, and we know it. And we’ll never be that good. Never.”

“I don’t know about that,” I blustered. “Why, some of your performance charts—”

“Performance charts, Commander,” Wang Hsi said softly, “do not a human being make.”

On his right, Weinstein gave a nod, thought a bit, and added: “Nor groups of men a race.”

I knew where we were going now. And I wanted to smash my way out of that room, down the elevator, and out of the building before anybody said another word. This is it, I told myself: here we are, boy, here we are. I found myself squirming from corner to corner of the desk; I gave up, got off it, and began walking again.

Wang Hsi wouldn’t let go. I should have known he wouldn’t. “Soldier surrogates,” he went on, squinting as if he were taking a close look at the phrase for the first time. “Soldier surrogates, but not soldiers. We’re not soldiers, because soldiers are men. And we, Commander, are not men.”

There was silence for a moment, then a tremendous blast of sound boiled out of my mouth. “And what makes you think that you’re not men?”

Wang Hsi was looking at me with astonishment, but his reply was still soft and calm. “You know why. You’ve seen our specifications, Commander. We’re not men, real men, because we can’t reproduce ourselves.”

I forced myself to sit down again and carefully placed my shaking hands over my knees.

“We’re as sterile,” I heard Yussuf Lamehd say, “as boiling water.”

“There have been lots of men,” I began, “who have been—”

“This isn’t a matter of lots of men,” Weinstein broke in. “This is a matter of all —all of us.”

“Blobs thou art,” Wang Hsi murmured. “And to blobs returneth. They might have given at least a few of us a chance. The kids mightn’t have turned out so bad.”

Roger Grey slammed his huge hand down on the arm of his chair. “That’s just the point, Wang,” he said savagely. “The kids might have turned out good—too good. Our kids might have turned out to be better than their kids—and where would that leave the proud and cocky, the goddam name-calling, the realo trulo human race?”

I sat staring at them once more, but now I was seeing a different picture. I wasn’t seeing conveyor belts moving along slowly covered with human tissues and organs on which earnest biotechs performed their individual tasks. I wasn’t seeing a room filled with dozens of adult male bodies suspended in nutrient solution, each body connected to a conditioning machine which day and night clacked out whatever minimum information was necessary for the body to take the place of a man in the bloodiest part of the fighting perimeter.

This time, I saw a barracks filled with heroes, many of them in duplicate and triplicate. And they were sitting around griping, as men will in any barracks on any planet, whether they look like heroes or no. But their gripes concerned humiliations deeper than any soldiers had hitherto known—humiliations as basic as the fabric of human personality.

“You believe, then,” and despite the sweat on my face, my voice was gentle, “that the reproductive power was deliberately withheld?”

Weinstein scowled. “Now, Commander. Please. No bedtime stories.”

“Doesn’t it occur to you at all that the whole problem of our species at the moment is reproduction? Believe me, men, that’s all you hear about on the outside. Grammar-school debating teams kick current reproductive issues back and forth in the district medal competitions; every month scholars in archaeology and the botany of fungi come out with books about it from their own special angle. Everyone knows that if we don’t lick the reproduction problem, the Eoti are going to lick us. Do you seriously think under such circumstances, the reproductive powers of anyone would be intentionally impaired?”

“What do a few male blobs matter, more or less?” Grey demanded. “According to the latest news bulletins, sperm bank deposits are at their highest point in five years. They don’t need us.”

“Commander,” Wang Hsi pointed his triangular chin at me. “Let me ask you a few questions in your turn. Do you honestly expect us to believe that a science capable of reconstructing a living, highly effective human body with a complex digestive system and a most delicate nervous system, all this out of dead and decaying bits of protoplasm, is incapable of reconstructing the germ plasm in one single, solitary case?”