Jord awoke to the purr of the ventilators billowing the heavy curtains at the doorway. Through them, from the corridor, seeped the cold, realistic, shadowless light that seemed to sap the color from man and matter and leave only drabness and emptiness. His eyes were sandy with sleep. He blinked. The optic nerves readied for sight, pupils focused, retina recorded. The primordial fear of unfamiliar things disappeared as he recognized the objects in the room, identified waking as a natural phenomenon and remembered the day's objectives.
He lay quietly on the pallet; dimly conscious of identity, clinging physically to the temporal death vanishing behind his opened eyes. Pale light, swollen bladder, sticky throat, quiescent body, unimportant hunger, dim fear of incipient living.
He felt for the cigarettes on the floor beside his bed. His careful, sleepy fingers passed lightly over the ashy ashtray and fell on wrinkled cellophane. Dry tubes from a synthetic Virginia. He shook a cigarette from the pack and lay with it jutting from his lips. The steady, filtered, odorless breeze centered on his senseless frontal lobes and whispered down his silver cheeks.
A light. His hand crawled, finger walking across the crimson carpet to the grouping, found the metal tube and flew back to his chest. He fumbled with the trigger. His muscles were lethargic and he pressed it hard with a childish impatience.
Perseverance.
Now the metal tip glowed orange as the radioactive motes in the tube destroyed themselves with rigid self-control. Careful suction, then, and a cubic foot of tobacco smoke howled down his esophagus into his lungs, examined each feathery cranny and left by muscular contraction.
It tasted bad, but he'd expected that it would.
He didn't have to smoke all of it. The habit decently required only that he take a puff, leave it smolder, take another, allow himself to be scorched and futilely try to set the bed afire.
He watched the smoke being plucked from the air by the purifiers to be expelled with other smokes, smells and gases into an atmosphere that consisted of little else.
His last night's pleasure stirred, vainly fought the inevitable and fluttered its hands. "You awake, Soldier?"
The room glowed with a rosy light.
"Approximately."
The woman uncoiled herself and lay flat. Through the tangle of bronzed hair, one ear shone whitely. She brushed the hair from her eyes and her scarlet mouth opened in a feline yawn. The woman was pink and white; she quivered in voluptuous ecstasy and slithered on the satin with her own satiny, round and naked flesh.
"I didn't hear the alarm," she said, her voice thick with the residue of sleep. Her body pressed warm to his as she slid his cigarette from his fingers.
He shared the cigarette, thinking of the distance between the bed and the bathroom. The clock told him he had eight minutes to wait for maximum emission. His physiological chart showed a tolerance of nine and one-third hours.
Eight minutes to wait. Then he would have twenty minutes in which to shower, and fifteen to clothe himself in the shimmering, clinging opaque that, like the casing on a sausage, would cover him, leaving only his eyes, ears and mouth. These the neurologist would take care of before the mechanics fitted him into his machine for his next tour of duty.
There was a time for eating, time for a last cigarette, time for briefing and a long, long time for the Galbth II.
Time for everything but living.
Gently he kissed the woman's soft neck. "What's your name?" he asked wistfully, his attention divided between the short gold hairs at the base of her head and the all important clock.
The woman chuckled chidingly and toyed with his hands, tracing the veins that stood rigid on their backs where the tortured nerves had forced them to the surface like a maze of pale blue pipes.
She did not answer. He could no more know her name than he could know her face behind the silver opaque—than he could know her voice behind the vocal distorter—no more than he could know anyone, or that anyone could know him.
Three times a week the Sex-Dispatcher sent him a woman. For all he knew it could be the same woman, or three different women.
"Can I tell the dispatcher that I pleased you?" The voice distorter had shifted and made her sound as though she had a cold. It was, of course, impossible. That scourge hadn't attacked the fortress in thirty years. In all probability it would never attack it again.
He nodded, grinding the cigarette into the ashtray. "It would be nice," he said, "if we could know one another."
She smiled. "Some day."
The clock gave warning, counting backwards through thirty seconds. Jord patted the woman's thigh in dismissal. "You may as well go now."
She slid from the bed, neither reluctant nor impatient. Her simple tunic lay on the crimson rug where she had dropped it nine hours before. "Good-by, Soldier," she said.
He was already on his way to the bathroom. If he should see her again, her voice would be different, her hair would be different. She had no scars or physical aberrance that he could recognize her by. She was healthy, intelligent and normal, and therefore selected for breeding. So was he. Ask the geneticists. He had.
In the bathroom, the clock told him to wash his face. Carefully he rubbed desensitizer on his mask, on the ten thousand artificial nerve endings that transcribed every motion of the living tissue it encased and magnified that motion a thousand times to the mightier motions of the machine.
The desensitizer entered the porous material; the mask sagged and became transparent like a cellophane sack. He lifted it from his face.
Two huge holes for eyes, a gaping rent of a mouth. He threw it with disgust into the depository. It would go back to the Neurological Division to be cleaned and repaired.
He looked into the mirror with the interest of a man who sees his face on rare occasions. The nerves stood out like splintered cracks in glass. He fingered his face lovingly, unmindful of the agony caused by his touch, remembering the woman. He wondered in what manner her face would differ from his.
The pain made him stop thinking about it and he closed his eyes to spray a weak solution of desensitizer on the burning flesh. Almost immediately the pain was gone; but it left him with a marble mask that wouldn't come to life again until the effects of the desensitizer wore off.
He washed quickly in warm water, rubbed disinfectant on the atrophied area, rinsed it and stepped in front of the dryer. A thousand tongues of almost corporeal warmth licked over his skin.
He had shaved and desensitized his body the night before, so it was only a matter of washing and disinfecting before he climbed into the overall casing and stepped clumsily into the sensitizing shower. The huge bag began to shrink and cloud, adhering to his body as though it were another layer of his skin.
Since the casing acted as a magnifying extension of his nervous and muscular systems, his body, within the casing, felt nothing. There was no sense of contact as he walked across the floor and opened the bathroom door. As far as feeling went, he was without a body.
He said "hello" experimentally, to see if the distorter was still on. It wasn't. The hard flatness of his voice surprised him. The rosy light was gone also. Something peculiar to women caused the filter to slide over the coldly glowing silver. No man could cause it. No warrior was supposed to want to.
He went through the curtains into the tube-like corridor and joined the other silver warriors on their way to the mess hall. He knew no one of them, yet knew them all. In battle, no friend of his would die, yet no one would die that he did not know. Two hundred years of war in this forgotten bit of the universe had shown the value of this. Some day, if he lived to be old, he would become a civilian. Until then the only faces he would see would be his own and those of the subnormal servers in the mess hall. He had no loyalties except to the fortress. The fortress was his past, present and future.
He nodded a greeting to his server. "How are you today, Teddy?" The voice distorter made him a gentle baritone.
The moron stared at him blankly, not understanding what was spoken, not caring. It was mentally impossible for him to care about anyone and psychologically impossible for anyone to care about him. That was why he was allowed to serve in the mess.
He set Jord's rations before him in their plastic containers. A scientific measure of calories, proteins, vitamins, minerals and hay-like roughage.
Jord wished the idiot was able to talk, but decided against holding a one-sided conversation with him. He used to do it quite often, taking pleasure in the shifting planes of his face, until he'd become sick with longing for a complete human being. He knew no one and only his psychiatrist knew him. The fortress was to him one complete body.
The parts of that body could never be allowed to become more important than the total of those parts. It was the first thing a potential master of a Galbth II learned: The basic lesson in loneliness.
He choked down the measured kilograms of roughage, saving the concentrates until the last when he could suck out the synthetic flavoring and delude himself for a moment that he was eating food. His fare consisted of the precise amount necessary to keep him operating at maximum efficiency and maintain optimum size. A two-pound variation in his weight would require a refitting.
He smoked his last cigarette for the day and then made his way to the third section briefing room.
There were twelve warriors in his section. Except for microscopic differences in their builds, there was little, if anything, to distinguish one from the other. They had no contact with anything as personalized as officers. Each warrior was a separate unit. The centralization of authority was complete. There was only the loudspeaker to command. For a time the warriors had been allowed to designate the voice as "The General," but it was soon discovered that they felt a particular loyalty to the name. The word was dropped. To designate authority, a warrior used the word: "Authority." This word also served as his official concept of politics. With all the strength of the fortress in the warriors, this was t............