THE blonde got mad. “Our product does not stink! Cosmetics can now guarantee that the new models have even less of a body odor than you, young man! And we do not reactivate or revitalize corpses, I’ll have you know. What we do is reclaim human protoplasm. We re-use worn-out and damaged human cellular material in the area where the greatest shortages currently occur, military personnel. You wouldn’t talk about corpses, I assure you, if you saw the condition that some of those bodies are in when they arrive. Why, sometimes, in an entire baling package—a baling package contains twenty casualties—we don’t find enough to make one good, whole kidney. Then we have to take a little intestinal tissue here and a bit of spleen there, alter them, unite them carefully, activa—”

  “That’s what I mean. If you go to all that trouble, why not start with real raw material?”

  “Like what, for example?” she asked him.

  THE kid gestured with his black-gloved hands. “Basic elements—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and so on.”

  “Basic elements have to come from somewhere,” I pointed out gently. “You might take your hydrogen and oxygen from air and water. But from where would you get your carbon?”

  “From the same place where the other synthetic manufacturers get it—coal, oil, cellulose.” The receptionist sat back and relaxed. “Those are organic substances,” she reminded him. “If you’re going to use raw material that was once alive, why not use the kind that comes as close as possible to the end product you have in mind? It’s simple industrial economics, Commander, believe me. The best and cheapest raw material for the manufacture of soldier surrogates are soldier bodies.”

  “Sure,” the kid said. “Makes sense. There’s no other use for dead, old, beaten-up soldier bodies. Better’n shoving them in the ground, where they’d be just waste, pure waste.”

  Our little blonde chum started to smile in agreement, then shot him an intense glance and changed her mind. She looked very uncertain all of a sudden. When the communicator on her desk buzzed, she bent over it eagerly.

  I watched her with approval. Definitely no fluffhead. Just very feminine. I sighed. You see, I judge plenty of people the wrong way, but only with women is my wrongness an all-the-time proposition. Proving again, that a hell of a lot of peculiar things turn out to have happened for the best.

  “Commander,” she was saying to the kid, “would you go to Room 1591? Your crew will be there in a moment.” She turned to me. “And Room 1524 for you, straight ahead, Commander, if you please.”

  The kid nodded and walked off, very straight and erect. I waited until the door had closed behind him, then I leaned close to the receptionist. “Wish they’d change the Breeding Regulations again,” I told her. “You’d make a damn fine rear-echelon orientation officer. I got more feel of The Junkyard from you than in ten briefing sessions.”

  She examined my face anxiously. “I hope you mean that, Commander. You see, we’re all very deeply involved in this project. We’re extremely proud of the progress the Third District Finishing Plant has made. We talk about the new developments all the time, everywhere—even in the cafeteria. It didn’t occur to me until too late that you gentlemen might—” she blushed deep rich red, the way only a blonde can blush—“might take what I said personally. I’m sorry if I—”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” I assured her. “All you did was talk shop. Like when I was in the hospital last month and heard two surgeons discussing how to repair a man’s arm, and making it sound as if they were going to nail a new arm back on an expensive chair. Real interesting and I learned a lot.”

  I left her looking grateful, which is absolutely the only way to leave a woman, and barged on to Room 1524.

  III

  IT was evidently used as a classroom when reconverted human junk wasn’t being picked up. A bunch of chairs, a long blackboard, a couple of charts. One of the charts was on the Eoti, the basic information list that contains all the limited information we have been able to assemble on the bugs in the bloody quarter-century since they came busting in past Pluto to take over the Solar System. It hadn’t been changed much since the one I’d had to memorize in high school—the only difference was a slightly longer section on intelligence and motivation. Just theory, of course, but more carefully thought-out theory than the stuff I’d learned. The big brains had now concluded that the reason all attempts at communicating with them had failed was not because they were a conquest-crazy species, but because they suffered from the same extreme xenophobia as their smaller, less intelligent communal insect cousins here on Earth.

  That is, an ant wanders up to a strange ant hill—zok!—no discussion, he’s chopped down at the entrance. And the soldier ants react even faster if it’s a creature of another genus. So despite the Eoti science, which in far too many respects is more advanced than ours, they are psychologically incapable of the kind of mental projection or empathy necessary if one is to realize that a completely alien-looking neighbor has intelligence, feelings—and rights! The same as oneself. Far too many humans lack this kind of empathy, for that matter.

  Well, it might be so. Meanwhile, we were locked in a murderous stalemate with the Eoti on a perimeter of never-ending battle that sometimes expanded as far as Saturn and occasionally contracted as close as Jupiter. Barring the invention of a new weapon of such unimaginable power that we could wreck their fleet before they could duplicate the weapon—as they’d been managing to up to now—our only hope was to somehow discover the stellar system from which they came, somehow build ourselves not one starship, but a fleet of them—and somehow wreck their home base or throw enough of a scare into it so-, that they’d pull back their expedition for defensive purposes. A lot of somehows.

  But, if we wanted to maintain our present position until the somehows started to roll, our birth announcements had to take longer to read than the casualty lists. For the last decade, this hadn’t been so, despite the more and more stringent Breeding Regulations, which were steadily pulverizing every one of our moral codes and sociological advances. Then, someone in the Conservation Police noticed that almost half our ships of the line had been fabricated from the metallic junk of previous battles. Where was the personnel that had manned those salvaged derelicts, he wondered . . .

  And thus arrived what Blondie, outside, and her co-workers were diplomatic enough to call soldier surrogates.

  I’D been a computer’s mate, second class, on the old Jenghiz Kahn when the first batch had come aboard as battle replacements.

  Let me tell you, we had real good reason for calling them zombies! Most of them were as blue as the uniforms they wore, their breathing was so noisy it made you think of asthmatics with built-in public address systems, their eyes shone with all the intelligence of petroleum jelly—and the way they walked!

  My friend, Johnny Cruro, the first man to get knocked off in the Great Breakthrough of 2143, used to say that they walked as if they were trying to pick their way down a steep hill at the bottom of which was a large, open, family-size grave. Body held strained and tense—legs and arms moving slow, slow, until suddenly they’d finish with a jerk—creepy as hell.

  They weren’t good for anything but the drabbest fatigue detail. And even then . . . If you told them to polish a gun mounting, you had to remember to come back in an hour and turn them off, or they might scrub their way clear through into empty space. Of course, they weren’t all that bad. Johnny Cruro used to say he’d met one or two who could achieve imbecility when they were feeling right.

  Combat was what finished them, so far as the TAF was concerned. Not that they broke under battle conditions—just the reverse. The old ship would be rocking and streaming as it changed course every few seconds, every Irvingle, scrambler and nucleonic howitzer along the firing corridor turning bright golden yellow from the heat it was generating, a hoarse, yelping voice from the bulkhead loudspeakers pouring out orders, men staggering from one emergency station to another, everyone around you working like a blur and cursing and wondering out loud why the Eoti were taking so long to tag a target as big and as slow as the Khan. Then, suddenly, you’d see a zombie clutching a broom in his rubbery hands and sweeping the deck in the slack-jawed, moronic and horribly earnest way they had . . .

  I remember whole gun crews going amuck and slamming into the zombies with long crowbars and metal-gloved fists. Once, even an officer, sprinting back to the control room, flipped out his side-arm and pumped bolt after bolt of jagged thunder at a blue-skin who’d been peacefully wiping a porthole while the bow of the ship was being burned away. And, as the zombie sagged uncomprehendingly and uncomplainingly to the floor-plates, the young officer stood over him and chanted soothingly, the way you do to a boisterous dog, “Down, boy, down. Down, down, damn you, DOWN!”

  THAT was the reason the zombies were eventually pulled back. Not because of inefficiency—the incidence of battle psycho around them just shot up too high. Maybe, if it hadn’t been for that, we’d have gotten used to them eventually—God knows you get used to enough in combat. But the zombies belonged to something beyond mere war.

  They were so terribly, terribly unstirred by the prospect of dying again!

  Well, everyone said the new models were a big improvement. They’d better be. A slingshot may be one thin notch below an outright suicide patrol, but you need peak performance from every man aboard if you’re going to complete its crazy mission, let alone return. And it’s an awful small ship, and the men have to kind of get along with each other in very close quarters.

  I heard feet, several pairs of them, rapping along the corridor. They stopped outside the door.

  They waited. I waited. My skin began to prickle. And then I heard that uncertain shuffling sound. They were nervous about meeting me!

  I walked over to the window and stared down at the drill field, where old veterans, whose minds and bodies were too worn-out to be repaired, taught fatigue-uniformed zombies how to use their newly conditioned reflexes in close-order drill.

  And then, when the hands I’d clasped behind me had almost squeezed their blood back into my wrists, I heard the door open and four pairs of feet clatter into the room. The door closed, and four pairs of feet clicked to attention.

  I turned around.

  They were saluting me. Well, what the hell, I told myself, they’re supposed to be saluting me. I am their commanding officer. I returned the salute and four arms whipped down smartly.

  I said, “At ease.” They snapped their legs apart, arms behind them. I thought about it and said, “Rest.” They relaxed their bodies slightly. I thought about it again. I said, “Hell, men, sit down and let’s meet each other.”

  They sprawled into chairs, and I hitched myself up on the instructor’s desk. We stared back and forth. Their faces were rigid, watchful—they weren’t giving anything away.

  I wondered what my face looked like. In spite of all the orientation lectures, in spite of all the preparation, I must admit that my first glimpse of them had hit me hard. They were glowing with health, normalcy and hard purpose. But that wasn’t it.

  That wasn’t it at all!

  What was making me want to run out of the door, out of the building, was something I’d been schooling myself to expect since that last briefing session in Arizona Base. Four dead men were staring at me. Four very famous dead men.

  The big man, lounging all over his chair, was Roger Grey, who had been killed over a year ago when he rammed his tiny scoutship up the forward jets of an Eoti flagship. He’d split the flagship neatly in two. Almost every medal imaginable and the Solar Corona. Grey was to be my copilot.

  THE thin, alert man with the tight shock of black hair was Wang Hsi. He had been killed covering the retreat to the asteroids after the Great Breakthrough of 2143. According to the fantastic story the observers told, his ship had still been firing after it had been scrambled three times. Almost every medal imaginable and the Solar Corona. Wang was to be my engineer.

  The darkish little fellow was Yussuf Lamehd. He’d been killed in a very minor skirmish off Titan, but at the time of his death, he was the most decorated man in the entire TAF. A double Solar Corona. Lamehd was to be my gunner.

  The heavy one was Stanley Weinstein, the only prisoner of war ever to escape from the Eoti. There wasn’t much left of him by the time he’d arrived on Mars, but the ship he had come in was the first enemy craft that humanity could study intact. There was no Solar Corona in his day for him to receive even posthumously, but they’re still naming military academies after him. Weinstein was to be my astrogator.

  Then I shook myself back to reality. These weren’t the original heroes, probably didn’t have even one particle of Roger Grey’s blood or Wang Hsi’s flesh upon their reconstructed bones. They were just excellent and faithful copies, made to minute physical specifications which had been in the TAF medical files since Wang had been a cadet and Grey a young recruit.

  IV

  THERE were anywhere from a hundred to a thousand Yussuf Lamehds and Stanley Weinsteins, I had to remind myself—and they had all come off an assembly line a few floors down. “Only the brave deserve the future,” was The Junkyard’s motto, and it was currently trying to assure that future for them by duplicating in quantity any TAF man who went out with especial heroism.

  There was that little gimmick of industrial efficiency again. If you’re using mass production methods, and The Junkyard was doing just that, it’s plain common sense to turn out a few standardized models, rather than have everyone different—like the stuff an individual creative craftsman might come up with. Well, if they are to be standardized models, why not use those that have positive and relatively pleasant associations bound up with their appearance rather than anonymous characters from the designers’ drawing boards?

  Another reason for using hero models was almost more important and harder to define. According to the briefing officer yesterday, there was an obscure feeling—a superstitious feeling, almost—that, if you copied a hero’s features, musculature, metabolism and even his cortex wrinkles carefully enough, you might build yourself another hero. Of course, the original personality would never reappear—that had been produced by long years of environment and dozens of other very slippery factors—but it was distinctly possible, the bio-techs felt, that a modicum of useful courage resided in the body structure alone.

  Well, at least these zombies didn’t look like zombies! For which I was grateful.

  On impulse, I plucked the rolled sheaf of papers containing our travel orders out of my pocket, pretended to study it and let it slip suddenly through my fingers. As the outspread sheaf spiraled to the floor in front of me, Roger Grey reached out and caught it. He handed it back to me with the same kind of easy yet snappy grace. I took it, feeling good. It was the way he moved. I like to see a co-pilot move that way.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He just nodded.

  I STUDIED Yussuf Lamehd next. Yes, he had it too. Whatever it is that makes a first-class gunner, he had it. It’s almost impossible to describe, but you walk into a bar in some rest area on Eros, say, and out of the five slingshotters hunched over the blowtop table, you know right off which is the gunner. It’s a sort of carefully bottled nervousness or a dead calm with a hair-trigger attachment. Whatever it is, it’s what you need. Lamehd had it so strong I’d have put money on him against any other gunner in the TAF I’d ever seen in action.

  Astrogators and engineers are different. You’ve got to see them work under pressure before you can begin to rate them. But, even so, I liked the calm and confident manner with which Wang Hsi and Weinstein sat under my examination. And I liked them.

  Right then, I felt a hundred pounds slide off my chest. I felt relaxed for the first time in days. I really liked my crew, zombies or no. We’d make it.

  I decided to tell them. “Men,” I said, “I think we’ll really get along. I think we’ve got the makings of a sweet, smooth slingshot. You’ll find me—”

  And I stopped. That cold, slightly mocking look in their eyes. The way they had glanced at each other when I told them I thought we’d get along, glanced at each other and blown slightly through distended nostrils. I realized that none of them had said anything since they’d come in. They’d just been watching me and their eyes weren’t exactly warm.

  I stopped and let my mind take a long, deep breath. For the first time, it was occurring to me that I’d been worrying about just one end of the problem, maybe the least important end. I’d been worrying about how I’d react to them and how much I’d be able to accept them as shipmates. They were zombies, after all. It had never occurred to me to wonder how they’d feel about me.

  And there was evidently something very wrong in how they felt about me.

  “What is it, men?” I asked. They all looked at me inquiringly. “What’s on your minds? What’s bothering you?”

  They kept looking at me. Weinstein pursed his lips and tilted his chair back and forth. It creaked. Nobody said anything.

  “Grey,” I said walking up and down in the front of the classroom. “You look as if you’ve got a great big knot inside you. Want to tell me about it?”

  “No, Commander,” he said slowly and deliberately. “I do not want to tell you about it.”

  I grimaced. “If anyone wants to say anything—anything at all—it’ll be off the record—completely off the record. Also, for the moment, we’ll forget about such matters as rank and TAF regulations.” I waited. “Wang? Lamehd? How about you, Weinstein?” They stared at me silently. Weinstein’s chair creaked back and forth.