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Ebook has 418 lines and 26320 words, and 9 pages

THE CHEMICALLY PURE WARRIORS

BY ALLEN KIM LANG

They conquered the planet and they owned it outright. The trouble was--they didn't dare set foot on it!

"ONE, TWO," boomed the voice of the Terrible Third, sounding from the bitchers at the chests of thirty-six safety-suits. Dust slapped up from marching-boots. A flock of scarlet blabrigars settled on the road ahead, chattering and watching like small boys.

"THREE, FOUR!" The road led uphill toward Stinkerville; they were some three miles from First Regiment Barracks. Three miles from now these troopers could shed their safety-suits and helmets, shower off three weeks of sweat, drink a beer and leer at the short-skirted, taut-haltered girls of the Service Companies.

"COMPANY C," the troopers blatted back.

"THIRD PLATOON," the men bellowed back, singing against the percussion of their boots. "'Toon, click, click, click; 'toon, click, third platoon, click," mocked the blabrigars in ragged chorus, reflecting both the words and the marching feet.

"THIRD PLATOON!" the men shouted. They'd turned up their bitchers to a volume the blabrigars couldn't match. Disgusted, the birds flapped their scarlet wings and flew off across the sunflower fields. "'Toon," one rear-flier chanted, "'toon, 'toon, 'toon."

"FIRST PLATOON!" That was for the benefit of Lieutenant Piacentelli, commanding the tail-end of the Regiment, the platoon marching on either side of the lumbering Decontamination Vehicle, their safety-suit filters clogging with the dust.

"ONE, TWO!"

"THREE, FOUR!"

"ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR; ONE, TWO, THREEP--FURP!" The men of The Terrible Third were grinning through the face-plates of their helmets, rejoicing in their reputation as the loudest bunch in the Regiment, happy to help Hartford in waging his mock-feud with Lieutenant Piacentelli. They'd been classmates at the Axenite Academy; they'd been room-mates in the Barracks until Pia's recent marriage to a Service Company officer.

Hartford lowered his bitcher to a confidential tone. "Square up, men; march tall; look rough and dirty. Show the Stinker girls what they're missing. HUP, HUP, HUP. Sling those rifles square. Mondrian, you march like you're wearing skis: HUP, twop, threep, furp!" Up and down the column came the commands of sergeants and platoon-commanders, getting their troopers in parade-trim for the march through Kansannamura: "Stinkerville." Somewhere up front a company was singing the anthem of the Axenite troopers, "Oh, Pioneers!" The chorus of twelve dozen men, their bitchers full-up, filled the Kansan air and echoed from the walls ahead.

Stinkerville, all white-washed, with flakes of mica glittering in the sunlight, sprawled across the road that led to the Barracks. The village wall, designed to keep wild camelopards from roaming the streets and to keep the tame beasts out of the sunflower-fields, was some eight feet tall. Some Indigenous Hominid had heard the Regiment's clatter and song, for the gates of Kansannamura were open, the brick streets were clear of Stinker commerce. The village seemed deserted. A few blabrigars perched on the tiled eaves of the rammed-earth houses, making echoic comments on the sounds of the troopers, singing fleeting snatches of "Oh, Pioneers!" A camelopard stretched its ridiculous, three-horned head at the end of its fathom of neck to peer, big-brown-eyed, at the caravan of fishbowl-headed men. Up at the head of the column the Regiment's flags were unfurled and the Regimental Band was skirling the Anthem; men were counting cadence as their boots clicked over the scrubbed bricks of Stinkerville's streets.

But no Kansan, Stinker, Indigenous Hominid, Gook or Native watched. No cowboy youngsters stared at the gunned-and-holstered men from another planet. No elders looked down their noses at the brash invaders. No mothers wiped their hands on their aprons as they thought of their sons, and the fleshly price they'd pay for freedom. No teenage girls, those patrons of parades, watched with lips half-open with apprehension and audacious thoughts about the hundreds of gift-wrapped young man marching past. This planet could have as well been named Coventry as Kansas, Hartford thought. Out the far gate of Kansannamura marched Third Platoon, Company "C," then First Platoon, flanking the Decontamination Vehicle. A villager came from the house nearest the gate and closed it. He did not look after the two columns of men winding up through the fields of sunflowers to the high plateau where they lived.

The sight of the Barracks gave the men's steps a new swing and spring. After three weeks of sleeping in safety-suits; of breathing, sweating, drinking, eating and excreting through germ-barrier valves and tubing, the prospect of stripping off the plastic battle-dress was seductive. Inside that eight stories of windowless, doorless stone were gardens where the troopers could walk barefoot on the grass, pools whose water could splash their naked skin. In the Barracks were the three hundred Service Company women who made the big stone box home to their three thousand men.

The men of First Regiment massed on the parade-ground. While they stood At Ease, their plastic-sleeved rifles and packs growing heavier by the minute, their safety-suits staler, four of the five Service Companies marched out from the Syphon to join them. The women were suited in yellow plastic, giving rise to the gags about fool's gold. The four golden companies took up position at the center of the Regiment.

Colonel Benjamin Nef, Commander-in-Chief, Kansas, CINCK, climbed to the reviewing-stand in his command safety-suit of scarlet. Facing into the sun, the Colonel had the polarizing shield dropped over his eyes, and seemed to be wearing a black bandage. His lower jaw beetled to give him a truculent look generally ratified by his actions. His hair glinted through the helmet like spun copper. Nef turned to his second-in-command, a lieutenant-colonel in ordinary officer's blues, and murmured instructions. The light colonel saluted, turned the controls of his bitcher to Full Loud, and addressed the troopers assembled: "Regiment...."

Down the chain-of-command came the ripple of warning:

"Battaaalion...."

"Commmpaneee...."

"'Toooon...."

"Tain-HUT!" Fifteen hundred pairs of boots smacked together. The Adjutant held up his clipboard and read precisely: "Attention to orders:

"One. Officer of the Guard, Lieutenant Lee Hartford.

"Two. CINCK commends troopers involved in the just-completed three-week Field Exercise on not having had a single incident of compromise of sterility. Household, Maintenance and Security troopers are complimented on having maintained the integrity of the Barracks with a much-reduced force.

"Three. All male and female troopers are again cautioned that fraternization with Indigenous Hominids is an offense punishable by General Court-Martial, and that any unauthorized intercourse with the natives is prohibited."

There was of course a murmur of automatic laughter at this last bit of official double-entendre. The idea of bedding-down a Stinker wench was a favorite bit of pornographic fantasy. An air-tight safety-suit, though fit with valves as functional as the drop-seat in long-johns, was no garment for romance. To undress, to appear in outdoor Kansas outside that head-to-foot sausage-casing, appealed to none of the troopers. Healthy young men and women don't entertain the thought of painful suicide.

The reporting officer about-faced, saluted Colonel Nef, about-faced again. "Present...."

"Preezent...."

"Preeezent...."

"Preeeezent...."

"HAHMS!" Fifteen hundred Dardick-rifles, sheathed in plastic, slapped perpendicular. The blue-clad officers, armed with pistols, touched their index fingers to their helmet-temples. The bandsmen's drums growled, the electronic horns sobbed against their mutes, and the flutes in lonely purity played the theme of "Oh, Pioneers!" For all his har-de-har-hardness, Hartford felt a sting in his eyes at this moment, as he did whenever the splendidly stage-managed ceremony of Retreat was performed. After the Anthem, much louder, the band played Retreat. The colors crept down the flagstaff, into the reverent arms of a pair of Service Policemen.

"At ease," Hartford told the Terrible Third. "Rest. Smoke if you've got 'em."

The men chuckled dutifully at the oldest joke in the service. An Axenite trooper, sealed in his germ-free safety-suit and helmet, is by definition a non-smoker outside his Barracks. It would be another hour they'd be outside, since the Third was next to the last of the fifty platoons to swim home through the Syphon. While the companies on the far left flank of the Regiment were ballooning-up and peeling-off in columns-of-squads to enter the Barracks, Hartford went back to talk with Piacentelli, C.O. of First Platoon.

Getting inside the Barracks was a production. The safety-suits worn outside presumably bore on their outer surfaces all the dust-borne bugs native to Kansas. To carry these bacteria into the Barracks, to be inspired and ingested by Axenites--humans who'd never before had a bacterium inside their bodies--would wipe out the Regiment. Axenites are chemically pure people. They have no immuniological experience. Their gamma-globulin is low, their intestinal walls are thin. They may be killed by a light salting of staphyllococci, a soupcon of strep, or just a pinch of B. subtilis, a buglet as innocuous to "normal" humans as the dust-motes it inhabits.

The Syphon was the only entrance to the Barracks. It opened as the "Wet Gut," a ramp leading downward into liquid disinfectant which finally filled a tunnel, which ran the length of the Barracks. Each trooper, as he walked down into the disinfectant, grabbed the hand-holds at either side to pull himself along. Half-swimming through a turbulent portion that tugged at his suit with cavitations designed to loose the gummiest particle of bug-dirt, he came to a quieter section where he wormed along in silence, watching the man ahead of him, his stay in the antiseptic gauged to make the outside of his safety-suit as germ-free as the inside.

The Wet Gut ended in an upslope. The troopers walked out, dripping, into a hallway returning in the direction from which they'd just swum. This upper arm of the Syphon was a hallway so brilliantly lighted that the trooper had to drop his polarizing shields over his eyes. The air here in the Hot Gut was spiced with ozone from the ultra-violet sources. As each man strode down the Hot Gut at a set pace, his suit was bathed in u-v light from lamps in the ceiling, floor and walls. Just as he was washed sufficiently in the Wet Gut to kill the sturdiest-shelled spore of anthrax, the most insistently cysted protozooan, in the Hot Gut he was laved in actinic radiation powerful enough to afford a one hundred per cent safety factor against his bringing viable bug-dirt into the Barracks. At the very end of the Syphon, so that his safety-suit wouldn't stink of disinfectant or crack from ozone-rot, the trooper was blasted from all sides by a needle-shower of sterile water. Then he was home.

The platoon to the left of the Terrible Third had ballooned and was column-of-squadding toward the entrance to the Syphon. "At ease, men," Hartford said. "Increase suit-pressure one pound. Open and check reserve air-tanks. Close off filters." The men blimped a bit. Their suits sausaged out around their arms and legs. Should some trooper have a pinhole in his safety-suit, the positive pressure within would keep the deadly antiseptic solution from seeping in. "Okay, men. First squad off to the sheep-dip. Check the man ahead of you for bubbles. This is Save-Your-Buddy Week," Hartford said.

Fat-legged and stiff, the men of Third Platoon waddled through the doorway and down the ramp into the bug-juice. One by one they went under, tugging themselves along through the turbulent area, past that; then turning over in three planes so that the man behind them could spot bubbles coming from any part of their safety-suit. A leak, of course, meant Decontamination. Decontamination meant an all-over shave, a load of antibiotics and quarantine. But it was better that one man should suffer this from time to time than that the Barracks should be sullied with a single bit of germ-laden dust.

The pale-green murk of the Wet Gut and the desert brightness of the Hot Gut were the gates of home, and welcome.

Hartford saw the Terrible Third off to their quarters, then got together with Piacentelli to go up to Officers' Country. It was good to un-clam helmets and breathe the inside air, smelling faintly green from having swept across the gardens on Level Eight. Hartford shucked off his blue suit and draped it over a refreshing unit. The device buzzed into action, washing, drying and recharging the safety-suit with fresh filters and reserve air and water. The moment the refresher had grunted an okay to his safety-suit, Hartford carried it, clean and sweet as the day it had left the Goodyear plant on Titan, to hang it up in his locker, ready for his next foray onto bug-dirt.

Piacentelli was already under a shower. "Come on, jay-bird," he shouted. "Last one out buys the beers."

"No contest," Hartford said, setting the shower-dial. "I'm gonna stay under water for three weeks." He revolved blissfully beneath cold and angry needles.

Piacentelli, snowed in with suds and steam, yelled through the blasting water. "How'd you rate O.G. the night we get in?" he asked. "I thought you were Nasty Nef's fairhaired boy."

Hartford turned off his shower. "I got nothing better to do," he said. He stood on the drier for a minute. "I don't mind being Officer of the Guard, so long as I can eat supper off a plate instead of through a tube." He stepped into his shorts, pulled on sneakers and tugged on a tee-shirt that had stenciled over its shoulders the two half-inch gold stripes of his rank.

Pia dressed in a similar uniform. "It isn't the Messhall I miss," he said. "It's this. No number of ingenious engines, valves and relief-tubes can still my nostalgia for the simple dignity of our Barracks latrines."

Junior Officers' Mess was set in what looked like a park, except that the bushes were tomato-plants and the trees grew apples. The tables were mostly full. "All the subalterns getting in a quick sundowner," Pia remarked, finding a two-place table yet untaken. A Service Company K.P. in the brief skirt-and-halter Class B's the women wore informally in the Barracks came to take their order. "Big cold beer for me, honey," Pia said. "The other gentleman is tonight's O.G., so he'll have a black, black coffee."

Hartford stared after the girl. "You're right, Pia," he said. "No matter how comfy Goodyear makes those safety-suits, home is best."

"You bachelors are a threat to the Table of Organization," Piacentelli said. "You'd breed us right out of house and home if you had a chance."

"Damned right," Hartford said.

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