A Boy and His Tank (26 page)

"Good enough."

I got in the coffin, and fitted the catheter, which was for a man this time.

It wasn't easy, since I couldn't help thinking about the way the silicone rubber fitting had just been pulled out of a cadaver, but I did it, convinced that somebody owed me a medal or some such for my actions.

Then I plugged in, put on my helmet, and laid myself down. Before the coffin finished filling, I was sitting behind a large desk in a small classroom with a white-haired professor standing in front of a blackboard. Like everyone else in the room, including myself, he was wearing rather stodgy academic-looking Harris tweeds.

I glanced about, and the woman sitting next to me was Kasia!

"Mickolai!"

We were on our feet and embracing as our chairs fell to the floor around us.

"I take it that you two have met?" the professor said, but we ignored him.

"Well then, there appears to be nothing for it, I'm afraid. He
is
the general, after all. Class is dismissed for an hour."

The others filed out, leaving us alone. After a while, we unclenched to catch our breaths and look earnestly into each other's eyes.

"Kasia, can it really be you? How could you possibly be here?"

"It's really me, and getting here didn't take much planning. Lech got shot up and I had to eject behind the enemy lines. I was captured and given the choice of being shot or enlisting in the Serbian Army. Then when they put me in a new tank, she told me that I was back in the Croatian Army, and before too long I was selected to be a colonel. I was the only one promoted out of the five Kashubian POWs who were enlisted here. But why are we standing here talking? Eva! Take us to my cottage!"

And we were there.

"Eva? Well, that explains why I didn't know you were here sooner. The other half of the tanks are Agnieshkas, and she would have recognized you right off." I said as Kasia was busily taking off my clothes and I fumbled with hers.

"So
you
are the hero that everyone has been talking about! I should have known!"

"I'm a hero all right. Hero first class, with thunderbolts and an oak leaf cluster!"

"That's wonderful," she said, kissing me while shoving me into bed. "Now, shut up."

I shut up, and it was a few hours before we got back to the classroom.

"Now that we're
finally
all back together, we can begin the orientation lecture," the professor said. "You may call me Professor Cee. It will be at least two months before the division that we command will be even partly trained, and we will be using that time to train you, the division's officers, as well. Your course of training will be quite extensive and will take eight years to complete. Upon satisfactory completion of the course, you will each be granted a Ph.D. in Military Science.

"The time difference between two months and eight years will cause us no difficulty because the computational abilities of a Combat Control Computer are such that I can keep you all in Dream World at Combat Speed, which subjectively is approximately fifty times as fast as normal time. We shall have time enough to complete the course while only two months go by in the real world. You may look on this as being one of the fringe benefits of your currently exalted positions, for as of the moment that this class first started, your life spans each became fifty times longer. At least subjectively they will seem to be that much longer, and what else is there?

"You are all hearing me in your native language, and from this time on, language barriers will no longer exist for you, at least while you are physically in the Combat Control Computer.

"The personas of your previous tanks have been brought along, to function as your personal servants, and do whatever you wish during your free time. Due to the special conditions of our rescue, all of these have one of two feminine personalities, but they will soon be adapting themselves to your personal requirements.

"Another slight anomaly is that you are all ex-tankers, since those inserted into the artillery have not yet had the chance to be attuned to their computers, and due to time constraints had to be unfortunately eliminated from the selection process. However, as only two of you have any experience at actually fighting in a tank, the imbalance should have no great effect.

"With regards to your training, there will be a lecture and demonstration period five days a week from seven in the morning until noon, with ten-minute coffee breaks at eight and ten. You each will have a private tutorial session with me from three until five in the afternoon. You are encouraged to spend lunch together in the dining room here, and to get to know one another well. Saturdays will be spent on military maneuvers and battle simulations.

"Your Sundays are your own. There will be considerable homework and private study, but the rest of your time will be yours to organize as you wish, except that you are required to spend at least a half hour a day in some sort of physical activity. A sound mind in a sound body, and all that. It needn't be as rigorous as the PT program for enlisted personnel, however, and almost any sport will do. I'm partial to fencing, myself, and you are all invited to join the school team, if you are so minded. Beginner's classes are held at two in the afternoon in the gym, starting tomorrow.

"I am available at any time to help you with any problems that you might have. Even during the lecture periods, you can always have me stop and go over anything that you're unsure of, and while we're doing that, the others in the class won't even notice it, since the lectures themselves are rather like recordings that I've done up the night before, while you students are sleeping.

"That's about it, except to say that since we will be operating on a different time scale than the rest of the world, it will be convenient for us to adopt our own separate calendar. For our own purposes, I therefore declare this to be Monday, January second, Year One. It is now local noon, and I suggest that we retire to our dining room."

We filed out of the small classroom and into a spacious hallway with vaulted Gothic ceilings and decorative armorial crests on the walls.

"Quite a place," one of my fellow students said.

"I rather like it," the professor said. "The University and the surrounding area is modeled after the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Not as they actually are, of course, but as they should have been. We call it Oxbridge. Ah, here we are."

We were ushered into a venerable dining room with a single large table and seven chairs. The decor had an early Renaissance feel to it, but it looked lived in and comfortable.

A pair of young waitresses in conservative black-and-white outfits took our individual orders, and served us soup and salads.

The professor stood and said, "We will be working quite closely together for the next few years, so I imagine that it is time for us to become acquainted on a social level. Mickolai, since you are our general and leader, why don't you stand and tell us something about yourself."

"I hope that you don't mind if I stay seated," I said. "I'm just not used to being very formal. About me? Well, my name is Mickolai Derdowski. I'm twenty four years old, I'm a Kashubian, and am part of the forces that were hired by the Croatians to defend them from the Serbians. I was born on Earth, and was an engineering student until I was evicted and sent to New Kashubia against my will. I was doing engineering work there before I joined the expeditionary forces. I guess that that's about all that I can say."

"Except that you would have graduated
cum laude
had you been permitted to attend school for three weeks more, and that you are solely responsible for rescuing all of us, and our entire division besides, from the enemy," the professor said.

"Well, we're not out of the woods yet," I said.

"Nonetheless, my boy, we all owe you our heartfelt thanks." He applauded me and the rest joined in. I felt embarrassed, but there was nothing I could do about it.

"And now you, young lady. From the scene you made in the classroom, we gather that you know our fine young general here. Please tell us something more about yourself," he continued.

"Well, I'm Katarzyna Garczegoz, but everybody just calls me Kasia. Mickolai and I plan to get married as soon as we can find a Catholic priest. I don't suppose that any of you . . ."

"I'm afraid not, my dear, nor is there one in the entire division. The Serbians, of course, are Greek Orthodox, and I regret to say that they did not offer any members of the Catholic clergy the option of joining their military."

"Another thing we can love them for," Kasia said. "To get back to the introductions, I'm twenty-three, and I hold a degree in Sociology from the University of Warsaw. I was working as an electrician in New Kashubia before I joined the army."

The professor then invited the other lady at the table to speak, a voluptuous, long-legged blond who looked like she belonged in a good quality men's magazine with a staple in her navel.

"My name is Maria Buich . . ." she started out.

"Maria Buich! I used to know a Maria Buich. She was my son's third grade teacher. But she was middle-aged and very overweight," a big man said from across the table.

"And I know you, Mirko Jubec! You were loud-mouthed and rude five years ago and you are louder mouthed and ruder now! All right! So I'm forty-eight and fat! But we can look however we want to here, and I ask you men, do you want me to look this way or the way I really am?"

"My dear lady, I assure you that we all appreciate the way you have worked to lighten our day with your loveliness," said a big blond young man with an Arnold Schwarzenegger body. "You ladies are not the only ones with a bit of healthy vanity. It happens that I am seventy-two years old and I have a bad back. But if I can be young and healthy, why shouldn't I do it?"

"Thank you, sir," she said with a wink that suggested a later meeting. "As I was saying, I'm forty-eight and I was a schoolteacher before those horrible Serbians invaded our homeland. I was also the school's bandmaster and the coach of the girl's field hockey team."

Schwarzenegger's name turned out to be Semo Birach, but everybody else seemed to notice his resemblance to the old movie star, since later that day someone called him "Conan," in honor of Schwarzenegger's greatest role, and the name stuck. He'd been a fisherman for over fifty years, both on the original Adriatic Sea on Earth and on the one here on New Yugoslavia.

Neto Kondo was a small, wiry sort, with startling red hair and a very quiet disposition. He was thirty one, and before the war, he'd been an agricultural implement repairman. He seemed to see everything and say nothing, and I soon picked him as being one of the brightest of the bunch.

The big boorish fellow, Mirko Jubec, was a farmer, and he looked the part. Thick, solid, and slow moving except when he was in a hurry, he was slow talking on those rare occasions when he opened his mouth without putting food into it. But when he did talk, I found that it was wise to listen, and when he was in a hurry, it was best to not be in his way.

All told, my schoolmates seemed to be a very mixed bag, and I couldn't help wondering at first why the Combat Control Computer had picked this particular bunch of diverse individuals out of the ten thousand that he had to choose from. It was weeks before I finally realized that they were all remarkably intelligent, they each had a deep-seated moral integrity, and what is more, they all had a very strong killer instinct. These were people who were willing to do whatever was necessary to get the job done, clean and fast, or fast and dirty.

Lunch went pleasantly by, except for the way that Maria kept glaring at Mirko. He'd certainly found the quickest way to rub her in the wrong direction. I had the feeling that something had gone on between them long before the war, but I never found out what it was.

The professor then suggested that we take a walk so that he could show us the campus.

"You'll find that things here aren't as changeable as they usually are in Dream World," he said. "It's simply that with so many of us using the same environment, it would become entirely too confusing if it tried to adapt itself to each one of us. Your own homes are a different matter, of course. There are about four thousand other students on campus, as well as about eight hundred instructors of one classification or another. You'll find that our small group is something of an elite, though."

It was a brisk spring day, just the sort of weather to make our academic tweeds really appropriate. The buildings of the campus were all venerable structures, the youngest of them being about five hundred years old. They seemed to form a veritable forest of Gothic towers and halls, but the solidity of it all was somehow comforting.

The professor pointed out the Office of the Registrar, which we didn't have to bother with. The attempt at reality wasn't taken to ridiculous extremes. Here was the student union and the library. There was the gymnasium, which was normally well used by all the other students on the campus, but where each of us always had a reservation to use anything, anytime we wanted it. It was really more of a major sports complex, with Olympic-sized swimming pools, track and field arenas, and dozens of huge rooms specializing in every sport imaginable.

"It's a lot bigger on the inside than out," Mirko said.

"True, my boy, but then we don't have to be doctrinaire about anything in Dream World, do we?"

"You can do anything in Dream World, can't you, Professor Cee?" Maria asked.

"Well, almost anything, my dear girl."

"Almost?" I said. "I thought the possibilities were infinite!"

"They are, old man, but there are still some things that are not possible. Don't worry about it. We'll get into a discussion of infinities in the course of our class work in a few months."

"Yes, sir. But please tell me, what is it that one could not do in Dream World?"

"Independent physical research for one thing, my boy. If you were to construct an apparatus to determine the existence of a previously unknown subatomic particle, I assure you that you could not possibly learn anything that was not already in my memory modules."