Starship Troopers (12 page)

I didn’t even gather around when Zim handed it out; I figured now on not speaking to him until we got in—no point in giving him reason to notice me until we were actually in reach of headquarters. So I was surprised when he called my name and held up a letter. I bounced over and took it.

And was surprised again -- it was from Mr. Dubois, my high school instructor in History and Moral Philosophy. I would sooner have expected a letter from Santa Claus

Then, when I read it, it still seemed like a mistake. I had to check the address and the return address to convince myself that he had written it and had meant it for me.

MY DEAR BOY,

I would have written to you much sooner to express my delight and my pride in learning that you had not only volunteered to serve but also had chosen my own service. But not to express surprise it is what I expected of you except, possibly, the additional and very personal bonus that you chose the M. I. This is the sort of consummation, which does not happen too often, that nevertheless makes all of a teacher’s efforts worth while. We necessarily sift a great many pebbles, much sand, for each nugget—but the nuggets are the reward.

By now the reason I did not write at once is obvious to you. Many young men, not necessarily through any reprehensible fault, are dropped during recruit training. I have waited (I have kept in touch through my own connections) until you had ‘sweated it out’ past the hump (how well we all know that hump!) and were certain, barring accidents or illness, of completing your training and your term.

You are now going through the hardest part of your service—not the hardest physically (though physical hardship will never trouble you again; you now have its measure), but the hardest spiritually . . . the deep, soul-turning readjustments and re-evaluations necessary to metamorphize a potential citizen into one in being. Or, rather I should say: you have already gone through the hardest part, despite all the tribulations you still have ahead of you and all the hurdles, each higher than the last, which you still must clear. But it is that “hump” that counts—and, knowing you, lad, I know that I have waited long enough to be sure that you are past your “hump” or you would be home now.

When you reached that spiritual mountaintop you felt something, a new something. Perhaps you haven’t words for it (I know I didn’t, when I was a boot). So perhaps you will permit an older comrade to lend you the words, since it often helps to have discrete words. Simply this: The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation. The words are not mine, of course, as you will recognize. Basic truths cannot change and once a man of insight expresses one of them it is never necessary, no matter how much the world changes, to reformulate them. This is an immutable, true everywhere, throughout all time, for all men and all nations.

Let me hear from you, please, if you can spare an old man some of your precious sack time to write an occasional letter. And if you should happen to run across any of my former mates, give them my warmest greetings.

Good luck, trooper! You’ve made me proud.

JEAN V. DUBOIS Lt.-Col., M. I., rtd.

The signature was as amazing as the letter itself. Old Sour Mouth a short colonel? Why, our regimental commander was only a major. Mr. Dubois had never used any sort of rank around school. We had supposed (if we thought about it at all) that he must have been a corporal or some such who had been let out when he lost his hand and had been fixed up with a soft job teaching a course that didn’t have to be passed, or even taught -- just audited. Of course we had known that he was a veteran since History and Moral Philosophy must be taught by a citizen. But an M. I.? He didn’t look it. Prissy, faintly scornful, a dancing-master type—not one of us apes.

But that was the way he had signed himself.

I spent the whole long hike back to camp thinking about that amazing letter. It didn’t sound in the least like anything he had ever said in class. Oh, I don’t mean it contradicted anything he had told us in class; it was just entirely different in tone. Since when does a short colonel call a recruit private “comrade”?

When he was plain “Mr. Dubois” and I was one of the kids who had to take his course he hardly seemed to see me—except once when he got me sore by implying that I had too much money and not enough sense. (So my old man could have bought the school and given it to me for Christmas—is that a crime? It was none of his business.)

He had been droning along about “value,” comparing the Marxist theory with the orthodox “use” theory. Mr. Dubois had said, “Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet.

“These kitchen illustrations demolish the Marxian theory of value— the fallacy from which the entire magnificent fraud of communism derives— and to illustrate the truth of the common-sense definition as measured in terms of use.”

Dubois had waved his stump at us. “Nevertheless—wake up, back there! nevertheless the disheveled old mystic of Das Kapital, turgid, tortured, confused, and neurotic, unscientific, illogical, this pompous fraud Karl Marx, nevertheless had a glimmering of a very important truth. If he had possessed an analytical mind, he might have formulated the first adequate definition of value . . . and this planet might have been saved endless grief.

“Or might not,” he added. “You!”

I had sat up with a jerk.

“If you can’t listen, perhaps you can tell the class whether ‘value’ is a relative, or an absolute?”

I had been listening; I just didn’t see any reason not to listen with eyes closed and spine relaxed. But his question caught me out; I hadn’t read that day’s assignment. “An absolute,” I answered, guessing.

“Wrong,” he said coldly. “ ‘Value’ has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human -- ‘market value’ is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible.” (I had wondered what Father would have said if he had heard “market value” called a “fiction” -- snort in disgust, probably.)

“This very personal relationship, ‘value,’ has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him . . . and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts that ‘the best things in life are free.’ Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted . . . and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.

“Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.” He had been still looking at me and added, “If you boys and girls had to sweat for your toys the way a newly born baby has to struggle to live you would be happier . . . and much richer. As it is, with some of you, I pity the poverty of your wealth. You! I’ve just awarded you the prize for the hundred-meter dash. Does it make you happy?”

“Uh, I suppose it would.”

“No dodging, please. You have the prize—here, I’ll write it out:

‘Grand prize for the championship, one hundred-meter sprint.’ “ He had actually come back to my seat and pinned it on my chest. “There! Are you happy? You value it—or don’t you?”

I was sore. First that dirty crack about rich kids—a typical sneer of those who haven’t got it -- and now this farce. I ripped it off and chucked it at him.

Mr. Dubois had looked surprised. “It doesn’t make you happy?”

“You know darn well I placed fourth!”

“Exactly! The prize for first place is worthless to you . . . because you haven’t earned it. But you enjoy a modest satisfaction in placing fourth; you earned it. I trust that some of the somnambulists here understood this little morality play. I fancy that the poet who wrote that song meant to imply that the best things in life must be purchased other than with money—which is true—just as the literal meaning of his words is false. The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion . . . and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself—ultimate cost for perfect value.”

I mulled over things I had heard Mr. Dubois—Colonel Dubois -- say, as well as his extraordinary letter, while we went swinging back toward camp. Then I stopped thinking because the band dropped back near our position in column and we sang for a while, a French group --

“Marseillaise,” of course, and “Madelon” and “Sons of Toil and Danger,” and then “Legion Etrangere” and “Mademoiselle from Armentieres.”

It’s nice to have the band play; it picks you right up when your tail is dragging the prairie. We hadn’t had anything but canned music at first and that only for parade and calls. But the powers-that-be had found out early who could play and who couldn’t; instruments were provided and a regimental band was organized, all our own—even the director and the drum major were boots.

It didn’t mean they got out of anything. Oh no! It just meant they were allowed and encouraged to do it on their own time, practicing evenings and Sundays and such—and that they got to strut and countermarch and show off at parade instead of being in ranks with their platoons. A lot of things that we did were run that way. Our chaplain, for example, was a boot. He was older than most of us and had been ordained in some obscure little sect I had never heard of. But he put a lot of passion into his preaching whether his theology was orthodox or not (don’t ask me) and he was certainly in a position to understand the problems of a recruit. And the singing was fun. Besides, there was nowhere else to go on Sunday morning between morning police and lunch.

The band suffered a lot of attrition but somehow they always kept it going. The camp owned four sets of pipes and some Scottish uniforms, donated by Lochiel of Cameron whose son had been killed there in training—and one of us boots turned out to be a piper; he had learned it in the Scottish Boy Scouts. Pretty soon we had four pipers, maybe not good but loud. Pipes seem very odd when you first hear them, and a tyro practicing can set your teeth on edge—it sounds and looks as if he had a cat under his arm, its tail in his mouth, and biting it.

But they grow on you. The first time our pipers kicked their heels out in front of the band, skirling away at “Alamein Dead,” my hair stood up so straight it lifted my cap. It gets you—makes tears.

We couldn’t take a parade band out on route march, of course, because no special allowances were made for the band. Tubas and bass drums had to stay behind because a boy in the band had to carry full kit, same as everybody, and could only manage an instrument small enough to add to his load. But the M. I. has band instruments which I don’t believe anybody else has, such as a little box hardly bigger than a harmonica, an electronic gadget which does an amazing job of faking a big horn and is played the same way. Comes band call when you are headed for the horizon, each bandsman sheds his kit without stopping, his squadmates split it up, and he trots to the column position of the color company and starts blasting.

It helps.

The band drifted aft, almost out of earshot, and we stopped singing because your own singing drowns out the beat when it’s too far away.

I suddenly realized I felt good.

I tried to think why I did. Because we would be in after a couple of hours and I could resign?

No. When I had decided to resign, it had indeed given me a measure of peace, quieted down my awful jitters and let me go to sleep. But this was something else—and no reason for it, that I could see.

Then I knew. I had passed my hump!

I was over the “hump” that Colonel Dubois had written about. I actually walked over it and started down, swinging easily. The prairie through there was flat as a griddle cake, but just the same I had been plodding wearily uphill all the way out and about halfway back. Then, at some point -- I think it was while we were singing—I had passed the hump and it was all downhill. My kit felt lighter and I was no longer worried.

When we got in, I didn’t speak to Sergeant Zim; I no longer needed to.

Instead he spoke to me, motioned me to him as we fell out.

“Yes, sir?”

“This is a personal question . . . so don’t answer it unless you feel like it!” He stopped, and I wondered if he suspected that I had overheard his chewing-out, and shivered.

“At mail call today,” he said, “you got a letter. I noticed—purely by accident, none of my business—the name on the return address. It’s a fairly common name, some places, but -- this is the personal question you need not answer—by any chance does the person who wrote that letter have his left hand off at the wrist?”

I guess my chin dropped. “How did you know? Sir?”

“I was nearby when it happened. It is Colonel Dubois? Right?”

“Yes, sir.” I added, “He was my high school instructor in History and Moral Philosophy.”

I think that was the only time I ever impressed Sergeant Zim, even faintly. His eyebrows went up an eighth of an inch and his eyes widened slightly. “So? You were extraordinarily fortunate.” He added, “When you answer his letter—if you don’t mind—you might say that Ship’s Sergeant Zim sends his respects.”

“Yes, sir. Oh . . . I think maybe he sent you a message, sir.”

“What?”

“Uh, I’m not certain.” I took out the letter, read just: “ ‘ -- if you should happen to run across any of my former mates, give them my warmest greetings.’ Is that for you, sir?”