In Enemy Hands

Chapter Twenty-Six

"So what's on the schedule today?"

Horace Harkness, late of the Manticoran Navy, leaned back in the comfortable recliner, hands folded behind his head, and wiggled his bootless toes at his "escorts" as he asked the question. Citizen Corporal Heinrich Johnson and Citizen Private Hugh Candleman had been assigned as his permanent keepers when he decided to change sides. Their purpose had been plain enough, to discourage any thoughts of inappropriate activities on his part, and Harkness knew the two State Security goons had been chosen because they were big, strong, tough, and well trained in the art of dismantling their fellow man with their bare hands. It was, perhaps, unfortunate that those qualities pretty much exhausted the list of their employable skills, but no one could have everything.

"Not much, I think," Johnson replied. The corporal wasn't as broad as Harkness, but he was several centimeters taller, and he looked impressive in his black-and-red uniform as he fished in his tunic pocket for his memo pad. He found it and keyed the display, then squinted down at it. "Got another HD interview scheduled for thirteen-thirty," he a

"What's not to like?" Harkness replied with a lazy grin, and both StateSec men laughed. A prize like Horace Harkness didn't drop into Public Information's lap every day, and the fact that he was a missile tech familiar with the FTL transmitters mounted in the Manties' recon drones made him even more valuable as a source of technical data R&D would make good use of. But the larger implications of propaganda broadcasts and technological information were beyond Johnson and Candleman’s mental horizons. They had their own reasons to be happy Harkness had decided to defect, and those reasons had nothing at all to do with his value to the PRH in general.

"So, you have any luck with Parley's Crossing yet?" Candleman asked now, and Harkness' grin turned from lazy to evil.

"Oh ye of little faith," he murmured. "I told you I could, ah, enhance the odds, didn't I? Here."

He drew a data chip from his shirt pocket and sailed it across the compartment to Candleman, who caught it eagerly. The private peered down at the featureless chip as if he thought he should be able to read its data with his unassisted eye, and for all Harkness knew, Candleman did think so.

"How's it work?" Johnson asked from where he lounged against the opposite bulkhead, and Harkness shrugged.

"Its a more complicated than the others 'cause there's so many more variables," he said, "and the multiplayer versions complicate things even further. So instead of setting it up so you guys can predict the outcome, I set it up so you can force the outcome while you're playing."

"Huh?" Candleman put in, and Harkness hid a desire to sigh in exasperation behind another friendly smile.

Technically, both his watchdogs were high school graduates, and Johnson actually had two years of college on his resume. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon one's perspective, they'd both been Dolists, and their schooling had been provided courtesy of the PRH's educational system. It had been theoretically possible to acquire a worthwhile education from that source, but doing so had required an individual to use the resources available to educate himself, because after so many decades of debasing the concept of achievement in the name of "democratization" and "student validation," no one in the teaching establishment had had a clue as to how to truly educate someone else.

The problem was that genuinely self-motivated people are rare. Without someone else to explain it to them, most young people don't understand why learning is important in the first place. There are always exceptions to that broad generalization, but the majority of human beings learn from experience, not precept, and until someone experiences the consequences of being uneducated, he seldom feels a driving need to correct the situation. Creating a desire to learn in someone who hasn't already been caught in the gears requires an entire support structure, a society in which ones elders make it clear that one is expected to acquire knowledge and training in its use. And that sort of society was precisely what the prewar Dolists had lacked, for the Basic Living Stipend had been handed over like clockwork however unproductive they might have been. Besides, what had there been for a Dolist to use an education on?

Perhaps even worse, the prewar Legislaturalists had gone to some lengths to make the answer to that last question "nothing," for knowledge was a dangerous thing. They hadn't wanted the Dolists educated or involved in making the system work. They might have been an almost intolerable, parasitic drag on a moribund economy, but as long as the BLS had sufficed to support their accustomed lifestyles, they'd felt no particular urge to demand the right to participate in the making of political decisions. That, after all, had been the original bargain between their ancestors and those of the Legislaturalists. In return for being "taken care of," the citizens of the PRH had surrendered all decision-making to the people who ran the machine, and until the machine collapsed, no one had felt any need to fix the host of things wrong with it.

On the grand scale, the mutual suicide pact between the Legislaturalists and their education establishment was academic as far as Harkness was concerned, but on a personal level, its consequences had become very important indeed, for Johnson and Candleman were typical products of the system from which they came. That meant they suffered from an appalling ignorance few Manticorans would have believed was possible. People who could barely handle basic math or, like Candleman, suffered from what anything but the Peep Office of Education would have called functional illiteracy, were of strictly limited utility to a modern war machine, because maintaining or servicing any equipment more complex than a pulse rifle required at least some familiarity with the basic principles of electronics, cybernetics, gravity theory, and any of scores of other disciplines. Anyone could be trained to operate modern hardware, simply surviving in a technological society required at least a surface competence, but for people like Johnson and Candleman, that competence was like the math ability conferred by learning to make change in a shopping mall. They had no more comprehension of what went on behind the input keys and the displays than someone from preindustrial Terra would have had.

That was the main reason the majority of maintenance duties in the People’s Navy were assigned either to officers or to senior noncoms. If the prewar PN had wanted competent technicians, it had been forced to train them itself, and it simply hadn't had most of its conscripts long enough to overcome the disabilities with which they arrived. Its only real choice had been to train them first as operators and only secondly as true technicians, and that took time. Years of it, in most cases, which meant it was only really practical to train the people who formed its long-term, professional core.

The Peoples Marines had faced the same problems, though on a somewhat lesser scale. Battle armor and support weapons weren't something one wanted in the hands of technical ignoramuses, and the days when the dregs of an uneducated society could be turned into first-line soldiers without massive remedial training had gone out with the bolt-action rifle, but the Marines had always been a long-service outfit, with a lower percentage of conscripts. Coupled with their (relatively) simpler equipment, they'd been able to impose a more uniform level of training which came far closer to matching the tactical competence of their Manticoran counterparts, although maintenance remained a chronic problem even for them.