The Stainless Steel Rat eBook Collection (37 page)

At first it did not seem too bad. The lines of youths crept forward toward desks manned by plump maternal types who might have been our moms or teachers. All of them had gray hair and wore spectacles, which they looked over the tops of when they weren’t two-fingeredly hammering their typewriters.
I finally reached mine and she smiled up at me.

“Your papers please, young man.”

I passed them over and she copied dates and names and incorrect facts into a number of forms. I saw the cable leading from her typewriter to a central computer and knew that everything was being recorded and ingested there as well. I was happy to see the false identity entered; when I un-volunteered I wanted to
drop from sight.

“Here you are,” she said, and smiled, and passed over a buff file of papers. “You just take these up to the fourth floor. And good luck in your military career.”

I thanked her, it would be churlish not to, and started back toward the front doors. A solid line of unsmiling military police blocked any chance of exit.

“Fourth floor,” I said as the nearest one eyed me coldly and
smacked his club into his palm.

The elevator cars were immense, big enough to take forty of us at a time. Nor did they leave until they were full. Jammed and miserable we rose to the fourth floor where a little taste of what awaited us awaited us. As the doors sighed open a military figure, all stripes and decorations, medals and red face came roaring toward us.

“Get out! Get out! Don’t stand
around like a bunch of poofters! Move it! Snap cagal or you’ll be in the cagal. Take a box and a small transparent bag from the counter on the right as you pass. Then go to the far end of this room where you will
UNDRESS
. That means take all of your clothes off.
AND I MEAN ALL OF YOUR CLOTHES
! Your personal effects will go into the plastic bag which you will keep in your left hand at all times.
All of your clothing will go into the box which you will take to the counter at the far end where it will be sealed and addressed and sent to your home. Where you will retrieve it after the war, or it will be buried with you, whichever comes first. Now
MOVE!
”

We moved. Unenthusiastically and reluctantly—but we had no choice. There must be a nudity taboo in this society because the youths spread
out, trying to get close to the walls, huddled over as they stripped off their clothes. I found myself alone in the center of the room enjoying the scowled attention of the stripe-bearing monster: I quickly joined the others. So reluctant
were they to reveal their shrinking flesh that dawdle as I might I was still first to the counter. Where a bored soldier seized my box and quickly sealed it,
slammed it down before me and pointed to thick pens hung from the ceiling on elastic cords.

“Name-address-postcode-nearest-relative.”

The words, empty of meaning through endless repetition, rolled out as he turned to seize up the next box. I scrawled the address of the police station where we had been held and when I released the pen the countertop opened and the box vanished. Very efficient.
Plastic bag in left hand, folder in my right I joined the shivering group of pallid, naked young men who hung their heads as they waited their next orders. With their clothes gone all differences of identity seemed to have fled as well.

“You will now proceed to the eighteenth floor!” was the bellowed command. We proceeded. Into the elevator, forty at a time, doors closed, doors opened—into a
vision of a sort of medical hell.

A babble of sound, shouts for attention, screamed orders. Doctors and medical orderlies garbed in white, many with cloth masks over their faces, poked and prodded in a mad mirror-image of medical practice. Senses blurred as event ran into event.

A physician—that is I assume he was a physician since he wore a stethoscope around his neck—seized my folder, threw
it to an orderly, then clutched me by the throat. Before I could seize him by the throat in return he shouted at the orderly.

“Thyroid, normal.” The orderly made an entry as he squeezed my stomach wall.

“Hernias, negative. Cough.”

This last was an order to me and I coughed as his rubber-clad fingers probed deep.

There was more, but only the highlights stand out.

The urine-analysis section
where we stood in shivering ranks, each holding a recently-filled paper cup. Our file slowly wending forward, on tiptoe for the floor was aslosh, to the white-clad, white-masked, booted and rubber-gloved orderly who dipped a disposable dropper into each cup, dropped a drop into a section of a large, sectioned chemical tray. Discarded the dropper into
an overflowing container, eyed the chemical
reaction. Shouted “Negative, next!” and carried on.

Or the hemorrhoidal examination. Good taste forbids too graphic a description, but it did involve rows of youths bent over and clutching their ankles while a demonic physician crouched over as well and ran along behind the rows with a pointed flashlight.

Or the injections, ahh, yes the injections. As this particular line crept forward I became
aware that the youth in front of me was a bodybuilder of some sort. Among the pipestem arms and knocking knees his bronzed biceps and polished pects stood out as a monument to masculinity. He turned to me with a worried expression on the knotted muscles of his face.

“I don’t like needles,” he said.

“Who does,” I agreed.

Not nice at any time, positively threatening in mass attack. I watched,
horrified, as I approached the point of no return. As each shivering body came into position an orderly on each side injected each upper arm. No sooner were the needles hurled aside than the victim was pushed in the back by the uniformed supervising brute. After tottering a few paces forward two more injections were made. Arms curled with pain the subject leaned on the nearby counter. Where he was
vaccinated. Very efficient.

Too efficient for the weightlifter. As he stepped into position his eyes rolled up and he slumped unconscious to the floor. This, however, was no obstacle to military efficiency. Two needles flashed, two injections were made. The sergeant seized him by the feet and dragged him forward where, after receiving the rest of his injections, he was rolled aside to recover.
I gritted my teeth, tried stoically to accept the puncturing barrage, and sighed.

At some point the mass medical examination ended with a final assault on whatever shards of personal dignity the victims might still have left. Still nude, still clutching our plastic bags in our left hands, our thickening folders in our right, we shuffled forward in yet one more line. A row of numbered desks stretched
across the width of the room, very much like the reception hall of an airport. Behind each desk sat a dark-suited gent. When it
was my turn the sergeant-herdsman glanced over his shoulder and stabbed a stumpy figure at me.

“You, haul it to number thirteen.”

The man behind the desk wore thick-framed glasses, as did all of the others I noticed. Perhaps our eyes were going to be examined and this
was what we would be like if we failed. My folder was seized yet one more time, another printed sheet inserted—and I found tiny red eyes glaring at me through the thick lenses.

“Do you like girls, Jak?”

The question was completly unexpected. Yet it prompted a sweet vision of Bibs that obscured the medical mockery around me.

“You bet I like girls,” was my instant response. An entry was made.
“Do you like boys?”

“Some of my best friends are boys.” I began to have a glimmering of what this simpleton was up to.

“Are they?” Slash of pencil. Then, “Tell me about your first homosexual experience.”

My jaw fell with disbelief. “I can’t believe that I’m hearing this. You are doing a psychiatric examination from a
checklist?

“Don’t give me any cagal, kid,” he snarled. “Just answer the question.”

“Your medical degree should be taken away for incompetence—if you ever had one. You’re probably not a shrink at all, just a time-server dressed like one.”

“Sergeant!” he shouted in a cracked voice, his skin flushing. There was a thunder of feet behind me. “This draftee is refusing to cooperate.”

Sharp pain slashed the backs of my bare legs and I Yowed! and jumped aside. The sergeant raised the
thin cane again and licked his lips.

“That will do for the moment,” my examiner said. “If my questions are answered correctly.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, snapping to attention. “No need to repeat the question. My first experience of that kind was at the age
of twelve when, with the aid of large rubber bands, I and fourteen other boys …”

I continued on in this vein while he scribbled happily and the
sergeant muttered with frustration and waddled away. When the form had been completed with the last work of fiction, I was released and ordered on to join the others. It was back to the elevators again, jammed inside in nude groups of forty. The doors closed for the descent. The doors opened.

At what was obviously the wrong floor. Before our horrified eyes there was displayed a vista of desks
and typewriters. With a young lady laboring away at each of them. There was a fluttering sound as all of the folders were swung forward over the vitals. The air temperture rose as everyone turned bright red. All we could do was stand there in carmined embarrassment, listening to the endless rattle of typewriter keys, waiting for heads to turn, gentle female eyes to peer our way. After about fourteen
and a half years the doors slowly closed again.

There were no females present when the doors opened this time, just the now-familiar form of another brutish sergeant. I wondered what twisted gene in the population had produced so many thick-necked, narrow-browed, pot-bellied sado-masochists.

“Out,” this one bellowed. “Out, out, groups of ten, first ten through that door. Next ten next door.
Not eleven! Can’t you count, cagal-head!” Followed by a yipe of pain as discipline was enforced yet again. My ten victims shuffled into a brightly lit room and were ordered into line. We faced a white wall that was hung with a repulsive puce-green flag distastefully decorated with a black hammer. An officer with little golden bars on his shoulder strutted in and stood before the flag.

“This is
a very important occasion,” he said in a voice heavy with importance. And occasion. “You young men, the fittest in the land, have been chosen as volunteers by your local draft boards to defend this country we love against the evil powers abroad that seek to strip away our freedoms. Now the solemn moment that you all have been waiting for has arrived. You entered this room as fun-loving youths. You
will leave it as
dedicated soldiers. You will now be sworn in as loyal members of the army. Raise your right hands and repeat after me …”

“I don’t want to!”

“You have that choice,” the officer said grimly. “This is a free country and you are all volunteers. You may take the oath. Or if you chose not to, which is your right, you may leave by the small door behind me which leads to the federal
prison where you will begin your thirty-year sentence for neglect of democratic duties.”

“My hand’s up,” the same voice wailed.

“You will all repeat after me. I, insert your own name, of my own free will …”

“I, insert your own name, of my own free will.”

“We will do it again, and we will do it correctly, and if we don’t get it right next time, there is going to be
trouble.”

We did it again,
and correctly. Repeating what he said and trying not to hear what we were saying.

“To serve loyally … to show respect to all of the senior officers … death if I show disloyalty … death if I should desert … death if I sleep on duty …” and so on to the very end, which was “I do swear this in the name of my mother and father and the deity of my choice.”

“Hands down, congratulations, you are all
now soldiers and subject to military law. Your first order is that each of you will volunteer voluntarily a liter of blood since there has been a sudden call for transfusions. Dismissed.”

Weak with hunger and fatigue, dizzy from loss of blood, cold noodle soup still sitting leadenly in the stomach, we reached the end of the line. We hoped.

“Fall in. Move it along. You will each be issued with
a disposable uniform which you will not dispose of until ordered. You will don the uniforms and proceed up these stairs to the roof of this building where transportation is waiting to take you to Camp Slimmarco where your training will begin. You will turn in your folders before you receive your uniforms. You will each receive an identity disc with your name and service number on it. These discs
are grooved across the center so they may
be broken in half. Do not break them in half because that is a military crime and will be punished.”

“Why make them to break in half if you don’t break them in half?” I muttered aloud. The youth beside me rolled his eyes and whispered.

“Because when you’re dead they break them in half and send one half to death registrations and put the other half in
your mouth.”

Why was it that as I shuffled forward to get my uniform I had a very strong metallic taste in my mouth?

Under any other circumstances I would have enjoyed the ride in this unusual airship. It was shaped like a large cigar and undoubtedly contained light gas of some kind. Slung beneath the lifting body was a metal cabin tastefully decorated outside with a frieze of skulls and bones. Ducted fans on the cabin were angled to force it aloft and forward: the view from the window must have been
fascinating. But the windows that we had glimpsed from the outside were all forward in the pilot’s compartment, while we draftees were jammed into a windowless metal chamber. The seats were made from molded plastic surfaced with uneven bumps and hideously uncomfortable—but at least they were seats. I dropped into one and sighed with relief. In all the hours at the reception center the only time
we had been off our feet was during the bloodletting. The plastic was cool through the thin paper fabric of the purple disposable uniform, the deck hard through the cardboard soles fastened at the end of its legs. The only pocket in this hideous garment was a pouch at the front into which we had shoved our bags of personal possessions so that we all resembled demented purple marsupials. I felt depressed.
But at least I had company. We were all depressed.