Starship Troopers

“Sir?”

“Mmm … it will not be easy to explain. Certainly, losing your mother had a great deal to do with it. But I didn’t enroll to avenge her — even though I had that in mind, too. You had more to do with it—”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Son, I always understood what you were doing better than your mother did — don’t blame her; she never had a chance to know, any more than a bird can understand swimming. And perhaps I knew why you did it, even though I beg to doubt that you knew yourself, at the time. At least half of my anger at you was sheer resentment … that you had actually done something that I knew, buried deep in my heart, I should have done. But you weren’t the cause of my joining up, either … you merely helped trigger it and you did control the service I chose.”

He paused. “I wasn’t in good shape at the time you enrolled. I was seeing my hypnotherapist pretty regularly — you never suspected that, did you?—but we had gotten no farther than a clear recognition that I was enormously dissatisfied. After you left, I took it out on you — but it was not you, and I knew it and my therapist knew it. I suppose I knew that there was real trouble brewing earlier than most; we were invited to bid on military components fully a month before the state of emergency was announced. We had converted almost entirely to war production while you were still in training.

“I felt better during that period, worked to death and too busy to see my therapist. Then I became more troubled than ever.” He smiled. “Son, do you know about civilians?”

“Well … we don’t talk the same language. I know that.”

“Clearly enough put. Do you remember Madame Ruitman? I was on a few days leave after I finished Basic and I went home. I saw some of our friends, said goodby — she among them. She chattered away and said, ‘So you’re really going out? Well, if you reach Faraway, you really must look up my dear friends the Regatos.’

“I told her, as gently as I could, that it seemed unlikely, since the Arachnids had occupied Faraway.

“It didn’t faze her in the least. She said, ‘Oh, that’s all right — they’re civilians!’” Father smiled cynically.

“Yes, I know.”

“But I’m getting ahead of my story. I told you that I was getting still more upset. Your mother’s death released me for what I had to do … even though she and I were closer than most, nevertheless it set me free to do it. I turned the business over to Morales—”

“Old man Morales? Can he handle it?”

“Yes. Because he has to. A lot of us are doing things we didn’t know we could. I gave him a nice chunk of stock — you know the old saying about the kine that tread the grain — and the rest I split two ways, in a trust: half to the Daughters of Charity, half to you whenever you want to go back and take it. If you do. Never mind. I had at last found out what was wrong with me.” He stopped, then said very softly, “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal … but a man.”

At that moment, before I could answer anything, the wall speakers around us sang: “—shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young!” and a girl’s voice added, “Personnel for F.C.T. Rodger Young, stand to boat. Berth H. Nine minutes.”

Father bounced to his feet, grabbed his kit roll. “That’s mine! Take care of yourself, Son — and hit those exams. Or you’ll find you’re still not too big to paddle.”

“I will, Father.”

He embraced me hastily. “See you when we get back!” And he was gone, on the bounce.

In the Commandant’s outer office I reported to a fleet sergeant who looked remarkably like Sergeant Ho, even to lacking an arm. However, he lacked Sergeant Ho’s smile as well. I said, “Career Sergeant Juan Rico, to report to the Commandant pursuant to orders.”

He glanced at the clock. “Your boat was down seventy-three minutes ago. Well?”

So I told him. He pulled his lip and looked at me meditatively. “I’ve heard every excuse in the book. But you’ve just added a new page. Your father, your own father, really was reporting to your old ship just as you were detached?”

“The bare truth, Sergeant. You can check it — Corporal Emilio Rico.”

“We don’t check the statements of the ‘young gentlemen’ around here. We simply cashier them if it ever turns out that they have not told the truth. Okay, a boy who wouldn’t be late in order to see his old man off wouldn’t be worth much in any case. Forget it.”

“Thanks, Sergeant. Do I report to the Commandant now?”

“You’ve reported to him.” He made a check mark on a list. “Maybe a month from now he’ll send for you along with a couple of dozen others. Here’s your room assignment, here’s a checkoff list you start with — and you can start by cutting off those chevrons. But save them; you may need them later. But as of this moment you are ‘Mister,’ not ‘Sergeant.’”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ I call you ‘sir.’ But you won’t like it.”

I am not going to describe Officer Candidates School. It’s like Basic, but squared and cubed with books added. In the mornings we behaved like privates, doing the same old things we had done in Basic and in combat and being chewed out for the way we did them — by sergeants. In the afternoons we were cadets and “gentlemen,” and recited on and were lectured concerning an endless list of subjects: math, science, galactography, xenology, hypnopedia, logistics, strategy and tactics, communications, military law, terrain reading, special weapons, psychology of leadership, anything from the care and feeding of privates to why Xerxes lost the big one. Most especially how to be a one-man catastrophe yourself while keeping track of fifty other men, nursing them, loving them, leading them, saving them — but never babying them.

We had beds, which we used all too little; we had rooms and showers and inside plumbing; and each four candidates had a civilian servant, to make our beds and clean our rooms and shine our shoes and lay out our uniforms and run errands. This service was not intended as a luxury and was not; its purpose was to give the student more time to accomplish the plainly impossible by relieving him of things any graduate of Basic can already do perfectly.

Six days shalt thou work and do all thou art able,

The seventh the same and pound on the cable.

Or the Army version ends:—and clean out the stable, which shows you how many centuries this sort of thing has been going on. I wish I could catch just one of those civilians who think we loaf and put them through one month of O.C.S.

In the evenings and all day Sundays we studied until our eyes burned and our ears ached — then slept (if we slept) with a hypnopedic speaker droning away under the pillow.

Our marching songs were appropriately downbeat: “No Army for mine, no Army for mine! I’d rather be behind the plow any old time!” and “Don’t wanta study war no more,” and “Don’t make my boy a soldier, the weeping mother cried,” and — favorite of all — the old classic “Gentlemen Rankers” with its chorus about the Little Lost Sheep: “—God ha’ pity on such as we. Baa! Yah! Bah!”

Yet somehow I don’t remember being unhappy. Too busy, I guess. There was never that psychological “hump” to get over, the one everybody hits in Basic; there was simply the ever-present fear of flunking out. My poor preparation in math bothered me especially. My roommate, a colonial from Hesperus with the oddly appropriate name of “Angel,” sat up night after night, tutoring me.

Most of the instructors, especially the officers, were disabled. The only ones I can remember who had a full complement of arms, legs, eyesight, hearing, etc., were some of the non-commissioned combat instructors — and not all of those. Our coach in dirty fighting sat in a powered chair, wearing a plastic collar, and was completely paralyzed from the neck down. But his tongue wasn’t paralyzed, his eye was photographic, and the savage way in which he could analyze and criticize what he had seen made up for his minor impediment.

At first I wondered why those obvious candidates for physical retirement and full-pay pension didn’t take it and go home. Then I quit wondering.

I guess the high point in my whole cadet course was a visit from Ensign Ibanez, she of the dark eyes, junior watch officer and pilot-under-instruction of the Corvette Transport Mannerheim.