Starship Troopers

  But that was the way he had signed himself.

  I spent the whole long hike back to camp thinking about that amazing letter. It didn’t sound in the least like anything he had ever said in class. Oh, I don’t mean it contradicted anything he had told us in class; it was just entirely different in tone. Since when does a short colonel call a recruit private “comrade”?

  When he was plain “Mr. Dubois” and I was one of the kids who had to take his course he hardly seemed to see me—except once when he got me sore by implying that I had too much money and not enough sense. (So my old man could have bought the school and given it to me for Christmas—is that a crime? It was none of his business.)

  He had been droning along about “value,” comparing the Marxist theory with the orthodox “use” theory. Mr. Dubois had said, “Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet.

  “These kitchen illustrations demolish the Marxian theory of value—the fallacy from which the entire magnificent fraud of communism derives—and illustrate the truth of the common-sense definition as measured in terms of use.”

  Dubois had waved his stump at us. “Nevertheless—wake up, back there!—nevertheless the disheveled old mystic of Das Kapital, turgid, tortured, confused, and neurotic, unscientific, illogical, this pompous fraud Karl Marx, nevertheless had a glimmering of a very important truth. If he had possessed an analytical mind, he might have formulated the first adequate definition of value…and this planet might have been saved endless grief.

  “Or might not,” he added. “You!”

  I had sat up with a jerk.

  “If you can’t listen, perhaps you can tell the class whether ‘value’ is a relative, or an absolute?”

  I had been listening; I just didn’t see any reason not to listen with eyes closed and spine relaxed. But his question caught me out; I hadn’t read that day’s assignment. “An absolute,” I answered, guessing.

  “Wrong,” he said coldly. “‘Value’ has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—‘market value’ is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible.” (I had wondered what Father would have said if he had heard “market value” called a “fiction”—snort in disgust, probably.)

  “This very personal relationship, ‘value,’ has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him…and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts ‘the best things in life are free.’ Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted…and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.

  “Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.” He had been still looking at me and added, “If you boys and girls had to sweat for your toys the way a newly born baby has to struggle to live you would be happier…and much richer. As it is, with some of you, I pity the poverty of your wealth. You! I’ve just awarded you the prize for the hundred-meter dash. Does it make you happy?”

  “Uh, I suppose it would.”

  “No dodging, please. You have the prize—here, I’ll write it out: ‘Grand prize for the championship, one hundred-meter sprint.’” He had actually come back to my seat and pinned it on my chest. “There! Are you happy? You value it—or don’t you?”

  I was sore. First that dirty crack about rich kids—a typical sneer of those who haven’t got it—and now this farce. I ripped it off and chucked it at him.

  Mr. Dubois had looked surprised. “It doesn’t make you happy?”

  “You know darn well I placed fourth!”

  “Exactly! The prize for first place is worthless to you…because you haven’t earned it. But you enjoy a modest satisfaction in placing fourth; you earned it. I trust that some of the somnambulists here understood this little morality play. I fancy that the poet who wrote that song meant to imply that the best things in life must be purchased other than with money—which is true—just as the literal meaning of his words is false. The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion…and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself—ultimate cost for perfect value.”

  I mulled over things I had heard Mr. Dubois—Colonel Dubois—say, as well as his extraordinary letter, while we went swinging back toward camp. Then I stopped thinking because the band dropped back near our position in column and we sang for a while, a French group—“Marseillaise,” of course, and “Madelon” and “Sons of Toil and Danger,” and then “Legion Étrangère” and “Mademoiselle from Armentières.”

  It’s nice to have the band play; it picks you right up when your tail is dragging the prairie. We hadn’t had anything but canned music at first and that only for parade and calls. But the powers-that-be had found out early who could play and who couldn’t; instruments were provided and a regimental band was organized, all our own—even the director and the drum major were boots.

  It didn’t mean they got out of anything. Oh no! It just meant they were allowed and encouraged to do it on their own time, practicing evenings and Sundays and such—and that they got to strut and countermarch and show off at parade instead of being in ranks with their platoons. A lot of things that we did were run that way. Our chaplain, for example, was a boot. He was older than most of us and had been ordained in some obscure little sect I had never heard of. But he put a lot of passion into his preaching whether his theology was orthodox or not (don’t ask me) and he was certainly in a position to understand the problems of a recruit. And the singing was fun. Besides, there was nowhere else to go on Sunday morning between morning police and lunch.

  The band suffered a lot of attrition but somehow they always kept it going. The camp owned four sets of pipes and some Scottish uniforms, donated by Lochiel of Cameron whose son had been killed there in training—and one of us boots turned out to be a piper; he had learned it in the Scottish Boy Scouts. Pretty soon we had four pipers, maybe not good but loud. Pipes seem very odd when you first hear them, and a tyro practicing can set your teeth on edge—it sounds and looks as if he had a cat under his arm, its tail in his mouth, and biting it.

  But they grow on you. The first time our pipers kicked their heels out in front of the band, skirling away at “Alamein Dead,” my hair stood up so straight it lifted my cap. It gets you—makes tears.

  We couldn’t take a parade band out on route march, of course, because no special allowances were made for the band. Tubas and bass drums had to stay behind because a boy in the band had to carry a full kit, same as everybody, and could only manage an instrument small enough to add to his load. But the M.I. has band instruments which I don’t believe anybody else has, such as a little box hardly bigger than a harmonica, an electric gadget which does an amazing job of faking a big horn and is played the same way. Comes band call when you are headed for the horizon, each bandsman sheds his kit without stopping, his squad mates split it up, and he trots to the column position of the color company and starts blasting.

  It helps.

  The band drifted aft, almost out of earshot, and we stopped singing because your own singing drowns out the beat when it’s too far away.

&nb
sp; I suddenly realized I felt good.

  I tried to think why I did. Because we would be in after a couple of hours and I could resign?

  No. When I had decided to resign, it had indeed given me a measure of peace, quieted down my awful jitters and let me go to sleep. But this was something else—and no reason for it, that I could see.

  Then I knew. I had passed my hump!

  I was over the “hump” that Colonel Dubois had written about. I actually walked over it and started down, swinging easily. The prairie through there was flat as a griddle-cake, but just the same I had been plodding wearily uphill all the way out and about halfway back. Then, at some point—I think it was while we were singing—I had passed the hump and it was all downhill. My kit felt lighter and I was no longer worried.

  When we got in, I didn’t speak to Sergeant Zim; I no longer needed to. Instead he spoke to me, motioned me to him as we fell out.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “This is a personal question…so don’t answer it unless you feel like it.” He stopped, and I wondered if he suspected that I had overheard his chewing-out, and shivered.

  “At mail call today,” he said, “you got a letter. I noticed—purely by accident, none of my business—the name on the return address. It’s a fairly common name, some places, but—this is the personal question you need not answer—by any chance does the person who wrote that letter have his left hand off at the wrist?”

  I guess my chin dropped. “How did you know? Sir?”

  “I was nearby when it happened. It is Colonel Dubois? Right?”

  “Yes, sir.” I added, “He was my high school instructor in History and Moral Philosophy.”

  I think that was the only time I ever impressed Sergeant Zim, even faintly. His eyebrows went up an eighth of an inch and his eyes widened slightly. “So? You were extraordinarily fortunate.” He added, “When you answer his letter—if you don’t mind—you might say that Ship’s Sergeant Zim sends his respects.”

  “Yes, sir. Oh… I think maybe he sent you a message, sir.”

  “What?”

  “Uh, I’m not certain.” I took out the letter, read just: “‘—if you should happen to run across any of my former mates, give them my warmest greetings.’ Is that for you, sir?”

  Zim pondered it, his eyes looking through me, somewhere else. “Eh? Yes, it is. For me among others. Thanks very much.” Then suddenly it was over and he said briskly, “Nine minutes to parade. And you still have to shower and change. On the bounce, soldier.”

  VII

  The young recruit is silly—’e thinks o’ suicide.

  ’E’s lost ’is gutter-devil; ’e ’asin’t got ’is pride;

  But day by day they kicks ’im, which ’elps ’im on a bit,

  Till ’e finds ’isself one mornin’ with a full an’ proper kit.

  Gettin’ clear o’ dirtiness, gettin’ done with mess,

  Gettin’ shut o’ doin’ things rather-more-or-less.

  —Rudyard Kipling

  I’m not going to talk much more about my boot training. Mostly it was simply work, but I was squared away—enough said.

  But I do want to mention a little about powered suits, partly because I was fascinated by them and also because that was what led me into trouble. No complaints—I rated what I got.

  An M.I. lives by his suit the way a K-9 man lives by and with and on his doggie partner. Powered armor is one-half the reason we call ourselves “mobile infantry” instead of just “infantry.” (The other half are the spaceships that drop us and the capsules we drop in.) Our suits give us better eyes, better ears, stronger backs (to carry heavier weapons and more ammo), better legs, more intelligence (“intelligence” in the military meaning; a man in a suit can be just as stupid as anybody else—only he had better not be), more firepower, greater endurance, less vulnerability.

  A suit isn’t a space suit—although it can serve as one. It is not primarily armor—although the Knights of the Round Table were not armored as well as we are. It isn’t a tank—but a single M.I. private could take on a squadron of those things and knock them off unassisted if anybody was silly enough to put tanks against M.I. A suit is not a ship but it can fly, a little—on the other hand neither spaceships nor atmosphere craft can fight against a man in a suit except by saturation bombing of the area he is in (like burning down a house to get one flea!). Contrariwise we can do many things that no ship—air, submersible, or space—can do.

  There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships and missiles of one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective, that the war is over because that nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time—we’ve never been told to go down and kill or capture all left-handed redheads in a particular area, but if they tell us to, we can. We will.

  We are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die. We’re the bloody infantry, the doughboy, the duckfoot, the foot soldier who goes where the enemy is and takes him on in person. We’ve been doing it, with changes in weapons but very little change in our trade, at least since the time five thousand years ago when the foot sloggers of Sargon the Great forced the Sumerians to cry “Uncle!”

  Maybe they’ll be able to do without us someday. Maybe some mad genius with myopia, a bulging forehead, and a cybernetic mind will devise a weapon that can go down a hole, pick out the opposition, and force it to surrender or die—without killing that gang of your own people they’ve got imprisoned down there. I wouldn’t know; I’m not a genius, I’m an M.I. In the meantime, until they build a machine to replace us, my mates can handle that job—and I might be some help on it, too.

  Maybe someday they’ll get everything nice and tidy and we’ll have that thing we sing about, when “we ain’t a-gonna study war no more.” Maybe. Maybe the same day the leopard will take off his spots and get a job as a Jersey cow, too. But again, I wouldn’t know; I am not a professor of cosmopolitics; I’m an M.I. When the government sends me, I go. In between, I catch a lot of sack time.

  But, while they have not yet built a machine to replace us, they’ve surely thought up some honeys to help us. The suit, in particular.

  No need to describe what it looks like, since it has been pictured so often. Suited up, you look like a big steel gorilla, armed with gorilla-sized weapons. (This may be why a sergeant generally opens his remarks with “You apes—” However, it seems more likely that Caesar’s sergeants used the same honorific.)

  But the suits are considerably stronger than a gorilla. If an M.I. in a suit swapped hugs with a gorilla, the gorilla would be dead, crushed; the M.I. and the suit wouldn’t be mussed.

  The “muscles,” the pseudo-musculature, get all the publicity but it’s the control of all that power which merits it. The real genius in the design is that you don’t have to control the suit; you just wear it, like your clothes, like skin. Any sort of ship you have to learn to pilot; it takes a long time, a new full set of reflexes, a different and artificial way of thinking. Even riding a bicycle demands an acquired skill, very different from walking, whereas a spaceship—oh, brother! I won’t live that long. Spaceships are for acrobats who are also mathematicians.

  But a suit you just wear.

  Two thousand pounds of it, maybe, in full kit—yet the very first time you are fitted into one you can immediately walk, run, jump, lie down, pick up an egg without breaking it (takes a trifle of practice, but anything improves with practice), dance a jig (if you can dance a jig, that is, without a suit)—and jump right over the house next door and come down to a feather landing.

  The secret lies in negative feedback and amplification.

  Don’t ask me to sketch the circuitry of a suit; I can’t
. But I understand that some very good concert violinists can’t build a violin, either. I can do field maintenance and field repairs and check off the three hundred and forty-seven items from “cold” to ready to wear, and that’s all a dumb M.I. is expected to do. But if my suit gets really sick, I call the doctor—a doctor of science (electromechanical engineering) who is a staff Naval officer, usually a lieutenant (read “captain” for our ranks), and is part of the ship’s company of the troop transport—or who is reluctantly assigned to a regimental headquarters at Camp Currie, a fate-worse-than-death to a Navy man.

  But if you really are interested in the prints and stereos and schematics of a suit’s physiology, you can find most of it, the unclassified part, in any fairly large public library. For the small amount that is classified, you must look up a reliable enemy agent—“reliable” I say, because spies are a tricky lot; he’s likely to sell you the parts you could get free from the public library.

  But here is how it works, minus the diagrams. The inside of the suit is a mass of pressure receptors, hundreds of them. You push with the heel of your hand; the suit feels it, amplifies it, pushes with you to take the pressure off the receptors that gave the order to push. That’s confusing, but negative feedback is always a confusing idea the first time, even though your body has been doing it ever since you quit kicking helplessly as a baby. Young children are still learning it; that’s why they are clumsy. Adolescents and adults do it without knowing they ever learned it—and a man with Parkinson’s disease has damaged his circuits for it.

  The suit has feedback which causes it to match any motion you make, exactly—but with great force.