Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (26 page)

So Hobie was tagged as some kind of an underachiever, but nobody knew what
kind because of those grades. And something about that smile bothered
them; it seemed to stop sound.

The girls liked him, though, and he went through the usual phases rather
fast. There was the week he and various birds went to thirty-five drive-in
movies. And the month he went around humming "Mrs. Robinson" in a
meaningful way. And the warm, comfortable summer when he and his then-girl
and two other couples went up to Stratford, Ontario, with sleeping bags to
see the Czech multimedia thing.

Girls regarded him as different, although he never knew why. "You look at
me like it's always good-bye," one of them told him. Actually, he treated
girls with an odd detached gentleness, as though he knew a secret that
might make them all disappear. Some of them hung around because of his
quick brown hands or his really great looks, some because they hoped to
share the secret. In this they were disappointed. Hobie talked and he
listened carefully, but it wasn't the mutual talk-talk-talk of total
catharsis that most couples went through. But how could Hobie know that?

Like most of his peer group, Hobie stayed away from heavies and agreed
that pot was preferable to getting juiced. His friends never crowded him
too much after the beach party where he spooked everybody by talking
excitedly for hours to people who weren't there. They decided he might
have a vulnerable ego-structure.

The official high school view was that Hobie had no real problems. In this
they were supported by a test battery profile that could have qualified
him as the ideal normal control. Certainly there was nothing to get hold
of in his routine interviews with the high school psychologist.

Hobie came in after lunch, a time when Dr. Morehouse knew he was not at
his most intuitive. They went through the usual openers, Hobie sitting
easily, patient and interested, with an air of listening to some sound
back of the acoustical ceiling tiles.

"I meet a number of young people involved in discovering who they really
are. Searching for their own identities," Morehouse offered. He was idly
trueing up a stack of typing headed
Sex Differences in the Adolescent
Identity Crisis.

"Do you?" Hobie asked politely.

Morehouse frowned at himself and belched disarmingly.

"Sometimes I wonder who
I
am," he smiled.

"Do you?" inquired Hobie.

"Don't you?"

"No," said Hobie.

Morehouse reached for the hostility that should have been there, found it
wasn't. Not passive aggression. What? His intuition awoke briefly. He
looked into Hobie's light hazel eyes and suddenly found himself slipping
toward some very large uninhabited dimension. A real pubescent preschiz,
he wondered hopefully? No again, he decided, and found himself thinking,
What if a person is sure of his identity, but it isn't his identity? He
often wondered that; perhaps it could be worked up into a creative
insight.

"Maybe it's the other way around," Hobie was saying before the pause grew
awkward.

"How do you mean?"

"Well, maybe you're all wondering who you are." Hobie's lips quirked; it
was clear he was just making conversation.

"I asked for that," Morehouse chuckled. They chatted about sibling rivalry
and psychological statistics and wound up in plenty of time for
Morehouse's next boy, who turned out to be a satisfying High Anx.
Morehouse forgot about the empty place he had slid into. He often did that
too.

It was a girl who got part of it out of Hobie, at three in the morning.
"Dog" she was called then, although her name was Jane. A tender, bouncy
little bird who cocked her head to listen up at him in a way Hobie liked.
Dog would listen with the same soft intensity to the supermarket clerk and
the pediatrician later on, but neither of them knew that.

They had been talking about the state of the world, which was then quite
prosperous and peaceful. That is to say, about seventy million people were
starving to death, a number of advanced nations were maintaining
themselves on police terror tactics, four or five borders were being
fought over, Hobie's family's maid had just been cut up by the suburban
peacekeeper squad, and the school had added a charged wire and two dogs to
its patrol. But none of the big nations were waving fissionables, and the
U.S.-Sino-Soviet détente was a twenty-year reality.

Dog was holding Hobie's head over the side of her car because he had been
the one who found the maid crawling on her handbones among the azaleas.

"If you feel like that, why don't you do something?" Dog asked him between
spasms. "Do you want some Slurp? It's all we've got."

"Do what?" Hobie quavered.

"Politics?" guessed Dog. She really didn't know. The Protest Decade was
long over, along with the New Politics and Ralph Nader. There was a school
legend about a senior who had come back from Miami with a busted
collarbone. Sometime after that the kids had discovered that flowers
weren't really very powerful and that movement organizers had their own
bag. Why go on the street when you could really do more in one of the good
jobs available Inside? So Dog could offer only a vague image of Hobie
running for something, a sincere face on TV.

"You could join the Young Statesmen."

"Not to interfere," gasped Hobie. He wiped his mouth. Then he pulled
himself together and tried some of the Slurp. In the dashlight his
seventeen-year-old sideburns struck Dog as tremendously mature and
beautiful.

"Oh, it's not so bad," said Hobie. "I mean, it's not
unusually
bad.
It's just a stage. This world is going through a primitive stage. There's
a lot of stages. It takes a long time. They're just very, very backward,
that's all."

"They," said Dog, listening to every word.

"I mean," he said.

"You're alienated," she told him. "Rinse your mouth out with that. You
don't relate to people."

"I think you're people," he said, rinsing. He'd heard his before. "I
relate to you," he said. He leaned out to spit. Then he twisted his head
to look up at the sky and stayed that way awhile, like an animal's head
sticking out of a crate. Dog could feel him trembling the car.

"Are you going to barf again?" she asked.

"No."

But then suddenly he did, roaringly. She clutched at his shoulders while
he heaved. After a while he sagged down, his head lolling limply out at
one arm.

"It's such a mess," she heard him whispering. "It's such a s——ting
miserable mess mess mess MESS MESS—"

He was pounding his hand on the car side.

"I'll hose it," said Dog, but then she saw he didn't mean the car.

"Why does it have to go on and on?" he croaked. "Why don't they just
stop
it? I can't bear it much longer, please, please, I can't—"

Dog was scared now.

"Honey, it's not that bad. Hobie, honey, it's not that bad," she told him,
patting at him, pressing her soft front against his back.

Suddenly he came back into the car on top of her, spent.

"It's unbearable," he muttered.

"What's unbearable?" she snapped, mad at him for scaring her. "What's
unbearable for you and not for me? I mean, I know it's a mess, but why is
it so bad for
you?
I have to live here too."

"It's your world," he told her absently, lost in some private desolation.

Dog yawned.

"I better drive you home now," she said.

He had nothing more to say and sat quietly. When Dog glanced at his
profile, she decided he looked calm. Almost stupid, in fact; his mouth
hung open a little. She didn't recognize the expression, because she had
never seen people looking out of cattle cars.

Hobie's class graduated that June. His grades were well up, and everybody
understood that he was acting a little unrelated because of the traumatic
business with the maid. He got a lot of sympathy.

It was after the graduation exercises that Hobie surprised his parents for
the first and last time. They had been congratulating themselves on having
steered their fifth offspring safely through the college crisis and into a
high-status Eastern. Hobie announced that he had applied for the United
States Air Force Academy.

This was a bomb, because Hobie had never shown the slightest interest in
things military. Just the opposite, really. Hobie's parents took it for
granted that the educated classes viewed the military with tolerant
distaste. Why did their son want this? Was it another of his unstable
motivational orientations?

But Hobie persisted. He didn't have any reasons, he had just thought
carefully and felt that this was for him. Finally they recalled that early
model rocket collection; his father decided he was serious and began
sorting out the generals his research firm did business with. In September
Hobie disappeared into Colorado Springs. He reappeared for Christmas in
the form of an exotically hairless, erect, and polite stranger in uniform.

During the next four years, Hobie the person became effectively invisible
behind a growing pile of excellent evaluation reports. There seemed to be
no doubt that he was working very hard, and his motivation gave no sign of
flagging. Like any cadet, he bitched about many of the Academy's little
ways and told some funny stories. But he never seemed discouraged. When he
elected to spend his summers in special aviation skills training, his
parents realized that Hobie had found himself.

Enlightenment—of a sort—came in his senior year when he told
them he had applied for and been accepted into the new astronaut training
program. The U.S. space program was just then starting up again after the
revulsion caused by the tragic loss of the manned satellite lab ten years
before.

"I bet that's what he had in mind all along," Hobie's father chuckled. "He
didn't want to say so before he made it." They were all relieved. A son in
the space program was a lot easier to live with, statuswise.

When she heard the news, Dog, who was now married and called herself Jane,
sent him a card with a picture of the Man in the Moon. Another girl, more
percipient, sent him a card showing some stars.

But Hobie never made it to the space program.

It was the summer when several not-very-serious events happened all
together. The British devalued their wobbly pound again, just when it was
found that far too many dollars were going out of the States. North and
South Korea moved a step closer to reunion, which generated a call for
strengthening the U.S. contribution to the remains of SEATO. Next there
was an expensive, though luckily nonlethal, fire at Kennedy, and the
Egyptians announced a new Soviet aid pact. And in August it was discovered
that the Guévarrista rebels in Venezuela were getting some very
unpleasant-looking hardware from their Arab allies.

Contrary to the old saying that nations never learn from history, the U.S.
showed that it had learned from its long agony in Vietnam. What it had
learned was not to waste time messing around with popular elections and
military advisory and training programs, but to ball right in. Hard.

When the dust cleared, the space program and astronaut training were dead
on the pad and a third of Hobie's graduating class was staging through
Caracas. Technically, he had volunteered.

He found this out from the task force medico.

"Look at it this way, Lieutenant. By entering the Academy, you volunteered
for the Air Force, right?"

"Yes. But I opted for the astronaut program. The Air Force is the only way
you can get in. And I've been accepted."

"But the astronaut program has been suspended. Temporarily, of course.
Meanwhile, the Air Force—for which you volunteered—has an
active requirement for your training. You can't expect them just to let
you sit around until the program resumes, can you? Moreover, you have been
given the very best option available. Good God, man, the Volunteer
Airpeace Corps is considered a superelite. You should see the fugal
depressions we have to cope with among men who have been rejected for the
VAC."

"Mercenaries," said Hobie. "Regressive."

"Try 'professional,' it's a better word. Now—about those headaches."

The headaches eased up some when Hobie was assigned to long-range sensor
recon support. He enjoyed the work of flying, and the long, calm, lonely
sensor missions were soothing. They were also quite safe. The Guévarristas
had no air strength to waste on recon planes and the U.A.R. SAM sites were
not yet operational. Hobie flew the pattern, and waited zombielike for the
weather, and flew again. Mostly he waited, because the fighting was
developing in a steamy jungle province where clear sensing was a sometimes
thing. It was poorly mapped. The ground troops could never be sure about
the little brown square men who gave them so much trouble; on one side of
an unknown line they were Guévarristas who should be obliterated, and
on the other side they were legitimate national troops warning the blancos
away. Hobie's recon tapes were urgently needed, and for several weeks he
was left alone.

Then he began to get pulled up to a forward strip for one-day chopper duty
when their tactical duty roster was disrupted by gee-gee. But this was
relatively peaceful too, being mostly defoliant spray missions. Hobie, in
fact, put in several months without seeing, hearing, smelling, or feeling
the war at all. He would have been grateful for this if he had realized
it. As it was, he seemed to be trying not to realize anything much. He
spoke very little, did his work, and moved like a man whose head might
fall off if he jostled anything.

Naturally he was one of the last to hear the rumors about gee-gee when
they filtered back to the coastal base where Hobie was quartered with the
long-range stuff. Gee-gee's proper name was Guairas Grippe. It was
developing into a severe problem in the combat zone. More and more
replacements and relief crews were being called forward for temporary
tactical duty. On Hobie's next trip in, he couldn't help but notice that
people were acting pretty haggard and the roster was all scrawled up with
changes. When they were on course, he asked about it.