A Matter for Men

Hey, wait a minute-! This torch had a range of almost seventy. What was Shorty trying to pull? I could burn worms long before they got close enough to chomp me!

I waved at him and tried to attract his attention, but he only gri

Well, I'd show him. I reset the range of the flamer to maximum. This time I'd fire as soon as the target got close enough. I wouldn't wait one second longer than necessary.

I focused on the wire-mesh worm, estimated its range, waited till it bounced across an invisible line and squeezed the release. The flame whooshed out with a roar, startling me with its intensity. The asbestoid worm disappeared in a ball of orange fire. Oily black smoke rose from it.

Shorty leapt from the jeep, howling. I cut off the torch hastily. But he wasn't mad at all about his fifty caseys-not even angry about his singed eyebrows. He just ran over and pulled the plug on my battery pack.

"Now you're thinking like a worm-burner," he said. "Fire as soon as they get within range."

I glowered at him. "Why didn't you tell me that in the first place?"

"What-? And let you miss the excitement of learning how to outthink a Chtorran? That's what the lesson was all about."

"Oh," I said. Then, "Can we try it again?"

"Uh, I think not." He was feeling the damage to his eyebrows. "At least not until I get a longer towline for that target."

We never did get the longer towline, what with preparations for the big burn and all, but it worked out all right anyway. A couple more days of shooting at the target-Shorty wore his asbestoid pajamas-and I was ready for the real thing. At least Shorty and Duke were willing to take the chance. I wasn't as sure. I'd heard that worms could be as long as four meters and weigh as much as nine hundred kilos. Or more. Maybe those were exaggerations-I'd find out for myself soon enough-but I'd been brought up to worry.

It's a family tradition. Good worrying is never wasted.

Well, I'd certainly done enough this time-and just in case I hadn't, I was doing a little extra in the jeep. Just to be on the safe side.

Duke noticed it, of course. We were both in the second car. "Relax, Jim. It's not white-knuckle time yet."

"Sorry," I said, trying to grin.

"We won't be there for hours." He leaned back against the seat and stretched his arms. "Enjoy the morning. Look at the scenery."

"Uh, shouldn't we be on the lookout for worms?"

"We are."

"Huh?"

"Shorty's in the first jeep. Louis and Larry are in the last one. You don't know what to look for-that's why you're in the second. And I have more important things to think about." He folded his arms behind his head and appeared to go to sleep.

"Oh," I said.

I was begi

In other words, this was not the army I had thought I was joining-the Teamwork Army. That was dead and gone. I don't know why I hadn't realized. This was something else altogether.

SEVEN

WHITLAW TALKED about the army once.

One of the girls-one of the older ones; her name was Patricia-had been complaining about how her draft board had rejected her choice of "needed skill." (Well, Creative Anarchist had been pretty far out. I couldn't blame them.) "I might as well join the army and be a whore," she said.

"Mmm," said Whitlaw. "With an attitude like that, you probably wouldn't be a very good one."

The class laughed, but she looked miffed. Insulted, even. "What do you mean by that?"

"I mean, you might not be acceptable to them. Morale is very important in the army these days."

"Morale-?" The girl seemed astonished. "They're only a bunch of sweat-pushers-! What about my morale? I'm a political scientist!"

"Not in here, you're not." Whitlaw sat down on the edge of his desk, folded his arms and gri

She sniffed proudly. "But my work with my brain is much more valuable than their work with their bodies."

"Wrong," said Whitlaw. "Your work is valuable only when it's needed. And you're only valuable when your particular skill is scarce. It takes time to train a biological engineer or a quantum mechanic or even a competent AI hacker-but if we had a hundred thousand of them, how much do you think a single one would be worth?"

She didn't answer.

"The only reason we haven't trained that many is that we don't need them. If we did, our society could produce them in two to four years. We've proven that time and again. Your grandfathers proved it when they needed computer programmers and engineers and aerospace technicians and a thousand other specialties to put the first man on the moon-and most of those specialties had to be invented as the needs arose. By the end of the decade, it seemed as if they were as plentiful as sweat-pushers; in fact, some of them actually had to start pushing sweat to survive when the space program was cut back."

"But that was . . . just economics," she insisted. "It's the education that makes a person valuable, isn't it?"

"Is it?" Whitlaw looked at her blandly. "How do you define value? Can you fell a tree? Or milk a cow? Do you know how to operate a bulldozer? Can you lay bricks?"

"Of course not-"

"Then by some standards, you're not valuable at all. You're not a survivor type."

"But-that's manual labor! Anybody can do that."

Whitlaw blinked. "But you can't?"

She looked surprised. "Why should I have to?"

Whitlaw stopped. He eyed her curiously. "Haven't you read any of the assignments?"

"Of course I have, but I'm talking about the real world now." Whitlaw stopped in mid-turn toward his podium. He looked back at her, a startled expression on his face. "I beg your pardon." The class groaned-uh oh-we knew what was coming.

He waited until her mouth ran out of momentum. "Let me explain something to you. In the whole history of the human race, in all the time since we first climbed down out of the trees and stopped being monkeys and started learning how to be people, in all those years, we have managed to maintain what passes for modern civilization for only a very short period. I mark the begi