Old Man's War Boxed Set 1 (5 page)

“We can be retained for up to ten years,” I said. “It’s in the fine print. That would seem to argue that they have the technology to keep us working for that period of time.”

“And they’ve got our DNA on file,” Harry said. “Maybe they’ve cloned replacement parts or something like that.”

“True,” Thomas admitted. “But it’s a lot of work to transplant every single organ, bone, muscle and nerve from a cloned body to ours. And they’d still have to contend with our brains, which can’t be transplanted.”

Thomas looked around and finally realized he was depressing the whole table. “I’m not saying that we
won’t
be made young again,” he said. “Just what we’ve seen on this ship convinces me that the Colonial Union has much better technology than we ever had back home. But speaking as a medical doctor, I’m having a hard time seeing how they’ll reverse the aging process as dramatically as we all think they will.”

“Entropy is a bitch,” Alan said. “We’ve got theories to back
that
one up.”

“There is one piece of evidence that suggests that they’ll improve us no matter what,” I said.

“Tell me quickly,” Harry said. “Tom’s theory of the galaxy’s oldest army is ruining my appetite.”

“That’s just it,” I said. “If they couldn’t
fix
our bodies, they wouldn’t be giving us food with a fat content that could kill most of us within the month.”

“That’s very true,” Susan said. “You make an excellent point, there, John. I feel better already.”

“Thank you,” I said. “And based on this evidence, I have such faith in the Colonial Defense Forces to cure me of all my ills, that now I’m going back for seconds.”

“Get me some pancakes while you’re up,” Thomas said.

“Hey, Leon,” I said, giving his flabby bulk a push. “Get up. Sleepy time is over. You’ve got an eight o’clock appointment.”

Leon lay on his bed like a lump. I rolled my eyes, sighed and bent down to give him a harder push. And noticed his lips were blue.

Oh, shit,
I thought, and shook him. Nothing. I grabbed his torso and pulled him off his bunk to the floor. It was like moving dead weight.

I grabbed my PDA and called for medical help. Then I kneeled over him, blew into his mouth, and pumped on his chest until a pair of Colonial medical staffers arrived and pulled me off of him.

By this time a small crowd had gathered around the open door; I saw Jesse and reached out to bring her in. She saw Leon on the floor and her hand flew to her mouth. I gave her a quick hug.

“How is he?” I asked one of the Colonials, who was consulting his PDA.

“He’s dead,” he said. “He’s been dead for about an hour. Looks like a heart attack.” He put the PDA down and stood up, glancing back down at Leon. “Poor bastard. Made it this far just to have his ticker crap out.”

“A last-minute volunteer for the Ghost Brigades,” the other Colonial said.

I shot a hard stare at him. I thought a joke at this moment was in terribly bad taste.

“Okay, let’s see,” the doctor said, glancing at his rather large PDA as I entered the office. “You’re John Perry, correct?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“I’m Dr. Russell,” he said, and then looked me over.

“You look like your dog just died,” he said.

“Actually,” I said, “it was my roommate.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, glancing down at his PDA again. “Leon Deak. I would have been working on him right after you. Bad timing, that. Well, let’s get that off the schedule, then.” He tapped the PDA screen for a few seconds, smiled tightly when he was through. Dr. Russell’s bedside manner left something to be desired.

“Now,” he said, turning his attention back to me, “let’s get you looked at.”

The office consisted of Dr. Russell, me, a chair for the doctor, a small table and two crèches. The crèches were shaped for human contours, and each had a curving transparent door that arched over the contoured area. At the top of each crèche was an arm apparatus, with a cuplike attachment at the end. The “cup” looked just about large enough to fit on a human head. It was, quite frankly, making me a little nervous.

“Please go ahead and make yourself comfortable, and then we’ll get started,” Dr. Russell said, opening the door to the crèche nearest to me.

“Do you need me to take anything off?” I said. As far as I remembered, a physical examination required being looked at physically.

“No,” he said. “But if it makes you feel more comfortable, go right ahead.”

“Does anyone actually strip if they don’t have to?” I asked.

“Actually, yes,” he said. “If you’ve been told to do something one way for so long, it’s a hard habit to break.”

I kept my togs on. I set my PDA on the table, stepped up to the crèche, turned around, leaned back and settled in. Dr. Russell closed the door and stepped back. “Hold on one second while I adjust the crèche,” he said, and tapped his PDA. I felt the human-shaped depression in the crèche shift, and then conform to my dimensions.

“That was creepy,” I said.

Dr. Russell smiled. “You’re going to notice some vibration here,” he said, and he was right.

“Say,” I said while the crèche was thrumming gently underneath me, “those other fellows who were in the waiting room with me. Where did they go after they came in here?”

“Through the door over there.” He waved a hand behind him without looking up from his PDA. “That’s the recovery area.”

“
Recovery
area?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve just made the examination sound much worse than it is. In fact, we’re just about done with your scan.” He tapped his PDA again and the vibration stopped.

“What do I do now?” I asked.

“Just hold tight,” Dr. Russell said. “We’ve got a little more to do, and we need to go over the results of your examination.”

“You mean it’s done?” I said.

“Modern medicine is wonderful, isn’t it,” he said. He showed me the PDA screen, which was downloading a summary of my scan. “You don’t even have to say, ‘Aaahhhh.’”

“Yeah, but how detailed can it be?”

“Detailed enough,” he said. “Mr. Perry, when was your last physical examination?”

“About six months ago,” I said.

“What was the prognosis from your physician?”

“He said I was in fine shape, other than my blood pressure being a little higher than normal. Why?”

“Well, he’s basically right,” said Dr. Russell, “although he seems to have missed the testicular cancer.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

Dr. Russell flipped the PDA screen around again; this time it was showing a false-color representation of my genitals. It was the first time I’d ever had my own package waved in front of my face. “Here,” he said, pointing to a dark spot on my left testicle. “There’s the nodule. Pretty big sucker, too. It’s cancer, all right.”

I glared at the man. “You know, Dr. Russell, most doctors would have found a more tactful way to break the news.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Perry,” Dr. Russell said. “I don’t want to seem unconcerned. But it’s really not a problem. Even on Earth, testicular cancer is easily treatable, particularly in the early stages, which is the case here. At the very worst, you’d lose the testicle, but that’s not a significant setback.”

“Unless you happen to own the testicle,” I growled.

“That’s more of a psychological issue,” Dr. Russell said. “In any event, right here and right now, I don’t want you to worry about it. In a couple of days you’ll be getting a comprehensive physical overhaul, and we’ll deal with your testicle then. In the meantime, there should be no problems. The cancer is still local to the testicle. It hasn’t spread to the lungs or the lymph nodes. You’re fine.”

“Am I going to drop the ball?” I said.

Dr. Russell smiled. “I think you can hold on to the ball for now,” he said. “Should you ever drop it, I suspect it will be the least of your concerns. Now, other than the cancer, which as I say isn’t really problematic, you’re in as good a shape as any man of your physical age could be. That’s good news; we don’t have to do anything else to you at this point.”

“What would you do if you’d found something really wrong?” I asked. “I mean, what if the cancer had been terminal?”

“‘Terminal’ is a pretty imprecise term, Mr. Perry,” Dr. Russell said. “In the long run, we’re all terminal cases. In the case of this examination, what we’re really looking to do is to stabilize any recruits who are in imminent danger, so we know they’ll make it through the next few days. The case of your unfortunate roommate Mr. Deak isn’t all that unusual. We have a lot of recruits who make it to this point just to die before assessment. That’s not good for any of us.”

Dr. Russell consulted his PDA. “Now, in the case of Mr. Deak, who died of a heart attack, what we probably would have done would be to remove the plaque buildup from his arteries and provide him with an arterial wall-strengthening compound to prevent ruptures. That’s our most common treatment. Most seventy-five-year-old arteries can use some propping up. In your case, if you had had advanced stage cancer, we would have trimmed back the tumors to a point where they didn’t pose an imminent threat to your vital functions, and shored up the affected regions to make sure you wouldn’t have any problems over the next few days.”

“Why wouldn’t you cure it?” I asked. “If you can ‘shore up’ an affected region, it sounds like you could probably fix it completely if you wanted to.”

“We can, but it’s not necessary,” Dr. Russell said. “You’ll be getting a more comprehensive overhaul in a couple of days. We just need to keep you going until then.”

“What does ‘comprehensive overhaul’ mean, anyway?” I said.

“It means that when it’s done, you’ll wonder why you ever worried about a spot of cancer on your testicle,” he said. “That’s a promise. Now, there’s one more thing we need to do here. Bring your head forward, please.”

I did. Dr. Russell reached up and brought the feared arm cup down directly on the top of my head. “During the next couple of days, it’s going to be important for us to get a good picture of your brain activity,” he said, moving back. “So to do this, I’m going to implant a sensor array into your skull.” As he said this, he tapped the screen on his PDA, an action I was learning to mistrust. There was a slight sucking noise as the cup adhered to my skull.

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“Well, right now, you can probably feel a little tickle on your scalp and down the back of your neck,” Dr. Russell said, and I could. “Those are the injectors positioning themselves. They’re like little hypodermic needles that will insert the sensors. The sensors themselves are very small, but there’s a lot of them. About twenty thousand, more or less. Don’t worry, they’re self-sterilizing.”

“Is this going to hurt?” I asked.

“Not so much,” he said, and tapped his PDA screen. Twenty thousand microsensors
slammed
themselves into my skull like four ax handles simultaneously whacking my skull.

“God
damn
it!” I grabbed my head, banging my hands against the crèche door as I did so. “You son of a bitch,” I yelled at Dr. Russell. “You said it wouldn’t
hurt!
”

“I said ‘not so much,’” Dr. Russell said.

“Not so much as what? Having your head stepped on by an elephant?”

“Not so much as when the sensors connect to each other,” Dr. Russell said. “The good news is that as soon as they’re connected, the pain stops. Now hold still, this will only take a minute.” He tapped the PDA again. Eighty thousand needles shot out in every direction in my skull.

I have never wanted to punch a doctor so much in my life.

“I don’t know,” Harry was saying. “I think it’s an interesting look.” And with this, Harry rubbed his head, which like all our heads was now a dusty speckled gray where twenty thousand subcutaneous sensors sat, measuring brain activity.

The breakfast crew had reconvened again at lunchtime, this time with Jesse and her roommate Maggie joining the crowd. Harry had declared that we now constituted an official clique, branded us the “Old Farts,” and demanded we begin a food fight with the next table over. He was voted down, in no small part due to Thomas noting that any food we threw we wouldn’t get to eat, and lunch was even better than breakfast, if that was possible.

“And a damned good thing, too,” Thomas said. “After this morning’s little brain injection, I was almost too pissed off to eat.”

“I can’t imagine that,” Susan said.

“Notice how I said ‘almost,’” Thomas said. “But I’ll tell you what. I wish I’d had one of those crèches back home. Would have cut my appointment times by eighty percent. More time for golfing.”

“Your devotion to your patients is overwhelming,” Jesse said.

“Fah,” Thomas said. “I played golf with most of them. They would have been all for it. And as much as it pains me to say it, it helped my doctor make a much better assessment than I ever could have. That thing is a diagnostician’s dream. It caught a microscopic tumor on my pancreas. There’s no way I could have caught that back home until it was a hell of a lot larger or a patient started showing symptoms. Did anyone else have anything surprising?”

“Lung cancer,” Harry said. “Little spots.”

“Ovarian cysts,” Jesse said. Maggie seconded.

“Incipient rheumatoid arthritis,” said Alan.

“Testicular cancer,” I said.

Every man at the table winced. “Ouch,” said Thomas.

“They tell me I’ll live,” I said.

“You’ll just be lopsided when you walk,” said Susan.

“That’s enough of
that,
” I said.

“What I don’t understand is why they didn’t
fix
the problems,” Jesse said. “My doctor showed me a cyst the size of a gumball, but told me not to concern myself with it. I don’t think I’m cut out
not
to worry about something like that.”

“Thomas, you’re alleged to be a doctor,” Susan said, and tapped her gray-shaded brow. “What’s with these little bastards? Why not just give us a brain scan?”

“If I had to guess, which I do, since I really have no clue,” Thomas said, “I’d say that they want to see our brains in action while we go through our training. But they can’t do that with us strapped to a machine, so they’re strapping the machines to us instead.”

“Thanks for the cogent explanation of what I already figured out,” Susan said. “What I’m asking is, what purpose does that sort of measurement serve?”

“I dunno,” Thomas said. “Maybe they’re fitting us for new brains after all. Or maybe they’ve got some way of adding new brain material, and they need to see what parts of our brains need a boost. I just hope they don’t need to put in another set of the damned things. The first set nearly killed me from the pain.”

“Speaking of which,” Alan said, turning to me, “I hear you lost your roommate this morning. Are you okay?”

“I’m all right,” I said. “Though it’s depressing. My doctor said that if he had managed to make it to his appointment this morning, they probably could have kept him from dying. Given him a plaque remover or something. I feel like I should have made him get up for breakfast. That might have kept him moving long enough to make it to his appointment.”

“Don’t kick yourself about it,” Thomas said. “There’s no way you could have known. People just die.”

“Sure, but not days from getting a ‘comprehensive overhaul,’ as my doctor was putting it.”

Harry piped in. “Not to be too crass about this—”

“You just know
this
is going to be bad,” Susan said.

“—but when I went to college,” Harry continued, throwing a piece of bread at Susan, “if your roommate died, you were usually allowed to skip your finals for that semester. You know, because of the trauma.”

“And oddly enough, your roommate got to skip them, too,” Susan said. “For much the same reason.”

“I never thought of it that way,” Harry said. “Anyway, think they might let you sit out the evaluations they have planned for today?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “Even if they did, I wouldn’t take up the offer. What else would I do, sit in my stateroom all day? Talk about depressing. Someone died there, you know.”

“You could always move,” Jesse said. “Maybe someone else’s roommate died, too.”

“There’s a morbid thought,” I said. “And anyway, I don’t want to move. I’m sorry Leon’s dead, of course. But now I have a room to myself.”

“Looks like the healing process has begun,” Alan said.

“I’m just trying to move past the pain,” I said.

“You don’t talk much, do you,” Susan said to Maggie, rather suddenly.

“No,” Maggie said.

“Hey, what does everyone have next on their schedule?” Jesse asked.

Everyone reached for their PDA, then stopped, guiltily.

“Let’s think about just how high school that last moment really was,” Susan said.

“Well, hell,” Harry said, and pulled out his PDA anyway. “We’ve already joined a lunchroom clique. Might as well go all the way.”

It turned out Harry and I had our first evaluation session together. We were directed to a conference room where chairs with desks had been set up.

“Holy crap,” Harry said as we took our seats. “We really
are
back in high school.”