Between Planets by Heinlein Robert A

Author:Heinlein, Robert A. [Heinlein, Robert A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Young Adult, Adventure, Fantasy, Classics
ISBN: 9780709071389
Amazon: 0709071388
Goodreads: 50854
Publisher: Robert Hale Ltd.
Published: 1951-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

X

“While I Was Musing the Fire Burned”

PSALM XXXIX:3

THE GOVERNMENT did do something; the draft act was passed the next day. Don heard about it at noon; as soon as the lunch hour rush was over he dried his hands and went uptown to the recruiting station. There was a queue in front of it; he joined its tail and waited.

Over an hour later he found himself facing a harried-looking warrant officer seated at a table. He shoved a form at Don. “Print your name. Sign at the bottom and thumb it. Then hold up your right hand.”

“Just a minute,” Don answered. “I want to enlist in the High Guard. This forms reads for the Ground Forces.”

The officer swore mildly. “Everybody wants the High Guard. Listen, son, the quota for the High Guard was filled at nine o’clock this morning—now I’m not even accepting them for the waiting list.”

“But I don’t want the Ground Forces. I’m—I’m a spaceman.”

The man swore again, not so mildly. “You don’t look it. You last-minute patriots make me sick—trying to join the sky boys so you won’t have to soldier in the mud. Go on home; when we want you we’ll send for you—and it won’t be for the High Guard. You’ll be a duckfoot and like it.”

“But—”

“Get out, I said.”

Don got. When he reached the restaurant Old Charlie looked at the clock then at him. “You soldier boy now?”

“They wouldn’t have me.”

“Good thing. Get me up some cups.”

He had time to think about it while bending over suds. Although not inclined to grieve over spilt milk Don could see now that Sergeant McMasters’ advice had been shrewd; he had missed what was probably his only chance (slim as it might have been) to get to Mars. It seemed a vacuum-tight certainty that he would spend the war (months? years?) as a duckfoot in the Ground Forces, getting no nearer to Mars than opposition distance—say sixty, seventy million miles. Hardly shouting distance.

He thought about the possibility of claiming exemption on the basis of Terran citizenship—but discarded it at once. He had already claimed the right to come here as a citizen of Venus; blowing hot and cold from the same mouth did not suit him. His sympathies lay with Venus anyhow, no matter what the lawyers eventually decided about his nationality.

More than that, even if he could stomach making such a claim, he could not see himself behind wire in an enemy alien camp. There was such a camp, he knew, over on East Spit. Sit out the war there and let Isobel bring him packages on Sunday afternoons?

Don’t kid yourself, Don, my boy—Isobel was fiercely patriotic; she’d drop you like a mud louse.

“What can’t be cured must be endured”—Confucius or somebody. He was in it and that was that—he didn’t feel too upset about it; the Federation didn’t have any business throwing its weight around on Venus anyhow. Whose planet was it?

He was most anxious to get in touch with his parents and to let them know he had Dr.

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