Frederik Pohl by Merchants' War (epub)

Author:Merchants' War (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2022-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Tarb’s Downfall

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I

I knew I shouldn’t have signed those Reserve papers in college, but who knew they’d take it seriously? When you’re ten years old you join the Junior Copywriters. When you’re fifteen it’s the Little Merchandising League. In college it’s the Reserves. Everybody does it. It’s two course credits a semester, and you don’t have to take English lit. All the smart students spotted it for a snap course.

But for somebody who’d got the bad breaks, somebody like me, it wasn’t all that smart.

If I’d kept my wits about me I’d have seen a way to escape—maybe find Mitzi and grovel for a job—maybe find a friendly medic to help me fail the physical. Maybe suicide. What I actually did was closest to Option 3.1 went on a Moke binge, lacing the stuff with Vodd-Quor, and woke up on a troop transport. I had no memory at all of reporting for duty, and not much of what turned out to be the forty-eight hours before that. Total blackout.

And total hangover. I didn’t have time to appreciate the sordid miseries of traveling military style because I was too absorbed in the internal miseries of my own head. I was just beginning to be able to open the eyes without instant death when they dumped me, and five hundred others, at Camp Rubicam, North Dakota, for two weeks of the officers’ refresher course. It consisted mostly of being told that we were doing society’s most honorable work, plus close-order drill. Then it was pack your keyboard, sling your disk bag on your shoulder, all aboard for a field exercise.

Field exercise. I’d hate to get involved in the real thing.

The first troop transport had been plain hell. This one was nearly identical, except that it lasted many hours longer and I had to face it cold sober. No food. No toilets. No place to go outside the cocoon you were supposed to “rest” in. Nothing to drink but water—and the “water” was as close to purest ocean brine as you could get without actually breaking the law. The worst was we didn’t know how long it was going to last. Some people thought it was all the way to Hyperion, to teach the gas miners a lesson. I might have thought so myself except that the transport had only wings and jets. No rockets. No space travel, therefore; so it had to be somewhere on Earth.

But where? The rumors that floated through the fetid air from bunk to bunk were Australia—no; Chile—no, positively; the watch officer had been heard to tell the flight engineer definitely Iceland.

We wound up in the Gobi Desert.

We piled out of the transport with our kits and our bursting bladders and lined up to be counted. The first thing we noticed was it was hot. The second thing was it was dry. I don’t mean your average summer hot-spell dry, I mean dry. The wind blew fine white dust everywhere. It got between your fingers.

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