Bob Shaw - Who Goes Here?

“You feel better now, don’t you?” The pretty technician-nurse smiled at Peace as she leaned across and removed the terminals from his forehead. She had coppery hair and her fingernails were manicured to the perfection of rose petals. “Tell me how you feel.”

“I’m fine,” Peace said unthinkingly, then realized it was true. He was aware of tensions fleeing from his body, being driven out by the warm sense of ease which was spreading downwards from his brain. Relaxing into the skilfully contoured chair, he looked around the gleaming surgery with benign approval. “I feel great. ”

“I’m so glad.” The girl placed the medallion-like terminals and associated leads on top of a squat machine and pushed it away on noiseless casters.” You know, I get a lot of personal satisfaction through helping people like you.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“It’s a kind of—” She smiled again, shyly. “I guess the word is fulfilment.”

“I’ll bet it is.” Peace gazed happily at her for a moment, then a stray thought obtruded. “By the way,” he said, “what exactly have you done for me?”

“Well, damn you!” she snapped, her face growing pale with anger. “Thirty seconds you waited before you started asking your bloody stupid questions. Thirty seconds! How much personal satisfaction and fulfilment is a girl expected to cram into thirty seconds?”

“I… Wait a mo…” Peace was so shocked by her abrupt change of attitude that he found difficulty in speaking. “I only asked…”

“That’s right—you only asked. You couldn’t simply accept my gift of happiness and be grateful, could you? You had to start checking up on things.”

“I don’t understand,” Peace pleaded. “What’s going on here?”

“Come on, buster— out!” The girl marched to the door of the surgery, flung it open and spoke to somebody in the next room. “Private Peace is ready for you now, sir.”

“There must be some mistake,” Peace said, getting to his feet. “I’m not a private. I’m not in the—”

“You want to bet?” the girl said nastily as she pushed him into the adjoining room and slammed the door. His bewildered eyes took in the details of a square office whose walls were decorated with militaria and a large banner of midnight blue on which were embroidered, in silver, the words: SPACE LEGION—203 Regiment. There was a single desk, behind which was seated a pudgy man wearing the uniform of a Space Legion captain. The blue carpet featured the Space Legion crest, and the various items of office equipment around the room, including the tubs which held ornamental plants, were similarly stencilled or engraved.

Nodding a silent greeting, the captain waved Peace into a chair which had “Space Legion” woven into the fabric of the back and cushion.

“What is this place?” Peace demanded.

“Would you believe,” the officer’s gaze flicked around the room, “the headquarters of the YWCA?”

The sarcasm missed Peace by several light years. “That woman in the next room called me a private,” he said anxiously.

“Pay no attention to Florence—she gets a bit edgy. The frustrations of the job, you know.”

Peace sighed with relief. “For a moment I thought I’d done something stupid.”

“No, you haven’t done anything stupid. Not in the slightest.” The pudgy man began to scrutinize his fingers with great care, as though taking inventory. “I’m Captain Widget—the local induction officer for the Space Legion.”

“When I said I thought I had done something stupid,” Peace said, alarm bells clamoring in his mind, “I meant something like joining the Space Legion.”

Widget lowered his face into his hands, and his shoulders quivered slightly. He remained that way for perhaps a minute, during which Peace stared at the top of his head with growing concern, then he straightened up, apparently making a great effort to bring himself under control.

“Warren,” he said, “may I call you Warren?”

“That’s my name,” Peace said noncommitally.

“Thank you. Warren, doesn’t the idea of being in the Legion appeal to you?”

Peace gave a hoot of derision. “Are you kidding? I’ve heard all about that—getting shipped all over the galaxy, getting shot at, getting burned up, getting frozen up, getting ate up by monsters, getting…” Peace stopped speaking as his suspicions crystallized into certainty that something awful had happened. “Why should I do anything as crazy as joining the Legion?”

“You’ve no idea?”

“Of course not.”

“There you are, then!” Widget said triumphantly. “There you are!”

“Captain, what are you talking about?”

“Let me put it this way, Warren.’” Widget leaned across his desk and, unaware that he had placed one of his elbows in a well-used ashtray, fixed Peace with an intense stare. “Back in the old days—three or four hundred years ago—why did men join the French Foreign Legion?”

“I don’t want to play games with you, Captain.”

“Why did they join, Warren?”

“To forget,” Peace said peevishly. “Everybody knows that, but I…”

“And today, Warren, why do men join the Space Legion?”

“To forget—but I haven’t got anything I want to forget.”

“Not any more you haven’t.” Widget leaned back in his chair, satisfied he had made his point.

“You’ve forgotten it.”

Peace’s jaw sagged. “This is stupid. What have I forgotten?”

“If I told you that it would spoil everything,” Widget said reasonably. “Besides, I don’t even know what was on your mind when you came in here thirty minutes ago. The Legion respects a man’s privacy. We don’t ask embarrassing questions—we just hook you up to the machine, and … bleep! … it’s all gone.”

“Bleep?”

“Yes. Bleep! The crushing burden of guilt and shame is lifted from your soul.”

“I…” Peace delved into his memory and found he had no recollection of having walked into the recruiting office. A smothering sense of panic developed within him as he discovered he had no memories at all of a previous life. It was as if he had been created, conjured up out of thin air, a few minutes earlier in the surgery next door.

“What have you done to me?” he mumbled, tentatively pressing his head with his fingertips as though it was a puffball which could cave in at the slightest touch. “I can’t remember anything! No past life! No childhood! No nothing!”

Widget raised his eyebrows. “That’s unusual. The machine usually blanks out the previous day or two in their entirety—because of neuro surge—then it becomes selective to take out specific memories. If you can’t remember anything at all you must have been a hard case, Warren. Everything you ever did must have been rotten.”

“This is terrible.” Peace was unable to keep a quaver out of his voice. “I can’t even remember what’s-her-name—my mother.”

“That makes me feel a lot better,” Widget said. He sat upright and the curvatures of his well-padded face firmed out and became shiny as he smiled. “It really churns me up when I have to reorientate nice young men—clean-cut boys who perhaps made only one mistake in their whole lives—but you’re different. You must have been evil, Warren.

“It’s a good thing for you that you didn’t have to spend years of hard soldiering trying to wipe out the memories of your guilty past, because you’d probably have never made it. It’s a good thing for you we’ve reached the stage where memories can be electronically erased, and that the Legion is prepared to accept you and…”