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Down Among the Dead Men
William Tenn
I stood in front of the junkyard's outer gate and felt my stomach turn over slowly, grindingly, the way it
had when I saw a whole terrestrial subfleet—close to 20,000 men—blown to bits in the Second Battle of
Saturn more than eleven years ago. But then there had been shattered fragments of ships in my visiplate
and imagined screams of men in my mind; there had been the expanding images of the Eoti's box-like
craft surging through the awful, drifting wreckage they had created, to account for the icy sweat that
wound itself like a flat serpent around my forehead and my neck.
Now there was nothing but a large, plain building, very much like the hundreds of other factories in
the busy suburbs of Old Chicago, a manufacturing establishment surrounded by a locked gate and
spacious proving grounds—the Junkyard. Yet the sweat on my skin was colder and the heave of my
bowels more spastic than it had ever been in any of those countless, ruinous battles that had created this
place.
All of which was very understandable, I told myself. What I was feeling was the great-grandmother
hag of all fears, the most basic rejection and reluctance of which my flesh was capable. It was
understandable, but that didn't help any. I still couldn't walk up to the sentry at the gate.
I'd been almost all right until I'd seen the huge square can against the fence, the can with the slight
stink coming out of it and the big colorful sign on top:
Don't Waste Waste
Place All Waste Here
Remember—
Whatever is Worn Can Be Shorn
Whatever is Maimed Can Be Reclaimed
Whatever is Used Can Be Reused
Place All Waste Here
—Conservation Police
I'd seen those square, compartmented cans and those signs in every barracks, every hospital, every
recreation center, between here and the asteroids. But see-ing them, now, in this place, gave them a
different meaning. I wondered if they had those other posters inside, the shorter ones. You know: " We
need all our re-sources to defeat the enemy — and garbage is our biggest natural resource."
Decorating the walls of this particular building with those posters would be down-right ingenious.
Whatever is maimed can be reclaimed... I flexed my right arm inside my blue jumper sleeve. It felt
like a part of me, always would feel like a part of me. And in a couple of years, assuming that I lived that
long, the thin white scar that circled the elbow joint would be completely invisible. Sure. Whatever is
maimed can be re-claimed. All except one thing. The most important thing.
And I felt less like going in than ever.
And then I saw this kid. The one from Arizona Base.
He was standing right in front of the sentry box, paralyzed just like me. In the center of his uniform
cap was a brand-new, gold-shiny Y with a dot in the center: the insignia of a sling-shot commander. He
hadn't been wearing it the day before at the briefing; that could only mean the commission had just come
through. He looked real young and real scared.
 
I remembered him from the briefing session. He was the one whose hand had gone up timidly during
the question period, the one who, when he was recognized, had half risen, worked his mouth a couple of
times and finally blurted out: "Excuse me, sir, but they don't—they don't smell at all bad, do they?"
There had been a cyclone of laughter, the yelping laughter of men who've felt them-selves close to
the torn edge of hysteria all afternoon and who are damn glad that someone has at last said something
that they can make believe is funny.
And the white-haired briefing officer, who hadn't so much as smiled, waited for the hysteria to work
itself out, before saying gravely: "No, they don't smell bad at all. Unless, that is, they don't bathe. The
same as you gentlemen."
That shut us up. Even the kid, blushing his way back into his seat, set his jaw stiffly at the reminder.
And it wasn't until twenty minutes later, when we'd been dismissed, that I began to feel the ache in my
own face from the unrelaxed muscles there.
The same as you gentlemen...
I shook myself hard and walked over to the kid. "Hello, Commander," I said. "Been here long?"
He managed a grin. "Over an hour, Commander. I caught the eight-fifteen out of Arizona Base.
Most of the other fellows were still sleeping off last night's party, I'd gone to bed early; I wanted to give
myself as much time to get the feel of this thing as I could. Only it doesn't seem to do much good."
"I know. Some things you can't get used to. Some things you're not supposed to get used to."
He looked at my chest. "I guess this isn't your first sling-shot command?"
My first? More like my twenty-first, son! But then I remembered that everyone tells me I look
young for my medals, and what the hell, the kid looked so pale—"No, not exactly my first. But I've never
had a blob crew before. This is exactly as new to me as it is to you. Hey, listen, Commander: I'm having
a hard time, too. What say we bust through that gate together? Then the worst'll be over."
The kid nodded violently. We linked arms and marched up to the sentry. We showed him our
orders. He opened the gate and said: "Straight ahead. Any elevator on your left to the fifteenth floor."
So, still arm in arm, we walked into the main entrance of the large building, up a long flight of steps
and under the sign that said in red and black:
Human Protoplasm Reclamation Center
Third District Finishing Plant
There were some old-looking but very erect men walking along the main lobby and a lot of
uniformed, fairly pretty girls. I was pleased to note that most of the girls were pregnant. The first pleasing
sight I had seen in almost a week.
We turned into an elevator and told the girl, "Fifteen." She punched a button and waited for it to fill
up. She didn't seem to be pregnant. I wondered what was the mat-ter with her.
I'd managed to get a good grip on my heaving imagination, when I got a look at the shoulder patches
the other passengers were wearing. That almost did for me right there. It was a circular red patch with
the black letters TAF superimposed on a white G-4. TAF for Terrestrial Armed Forces, of course: the
letters were the basic insignia of all rear-echelon outfits. But why didn't they use G-1, which represented
Personnel? G-4 stood for the Supply Division. Supply!
You can always trust the TAF. Thousands of morale specialists in all kinds of ranks, working their
educated heads off to keep up the spirits of the men in the fighting perimeters—but every damn time,
when it comes down to scratch, the good old de-pendable TAF will pick the ugliest name, the one in the
 
worst possible taste.
Oh, sure, I told myself, you can't fight a shattering, no-quarter interstellar war for twenty-five years
and keep every pretty thought dewy-damp and intact, But not Supply, gentlemen. Not this place—not
the Junkyard. Let's at least try to keep up appearances.
Then we began going up and the elevator girl began announcing floors and I had lots of other things
to think about.
"Third floor—Corpse Reception and Classification," the operator sang out.
"Fifth floor—Preliminary Organ Processing."
"Seventh floor—Brain Reconstitution and Neural Alignment."
"Ninth floor—Cosmetics, Elementary Reflexes, and Muscular Control."
At this point, I forced myself to stop listening, the way you do when you're on a heavy cruiser, say,
and the rear engine room gets flicked by a bolt from an Eoti scram-bler. After you've been around a
couple of times when it's happened, you learn to sort of close your ears and say to yourself, "I don't
know anybody in that damned engine room, not anybody, and in a few minutes everything will be nice
and quiet again." And in a few minutes it is. Only trouble is that then, like as not, you'll be part of the
detail that's ordered into the steaming place to scrape the guck off the walls and get the jets firing again.
Same way now. Just as soon as I had that girl's voice blocked out, there we were on the fifteenth
floor ("Final Interviews and Shipping") and the kid and I had to get out.
He was real green. A definite sag around the knees, shoulders sloping forward like his clavicle had
curled. Again I was grateful to him. Nothing like having somebody to take care of.
"Come on, Commander," I whispered. "Up and at 'em. Look at it this way: for char-acters like us,
this is practically a family reunion."
It was the wrong thing to say. He looked at me as if I'd punched his face. "No thanks to you for the
reminder, Mister," he said. "Even if we are in the same boat." Then he walked stiffly up to the
receptionist.
I could have bitten my tongue off. I hurried after him. "I'm sorry, kid," I told him earnestly. "The
words just slid out of my big mouth. But don't get sore at me; hell, I had to listen to myself say it too."
He stopped, thought about it, and nodded. Then he gave me a smile. "OK. No hard feelings. It's a
rough war, isn't it?"
I smiled back. "Rough? Why, if you're not careful, they tell me, you can get killed in it."
The receptionist was a soft little blonde with two wedding rings on one hand, and one wedding ring
on the other. From what I knew of current planet-side customs, that meant she'd been widowed twice.
She took our orders and read jauntily into her desk mike: "Attention Final Con-ditioning. Attention
Final Conditioning. Alert for immediate shipment the follow-ing serial numbers: 70623152, 70623109,
70623166, and 70623123. Also 70538966, 70538923, 70538980, and 70538937. Please route
through the correct numbered sec-tions and check all data on TAF AGO forms 362 as per TAF
Regulation 7896, of 15 June, 2145. Advise when available for Final Interviews."
I was impressed. Almost exactly the same procedure as when you go to Ordnance for a
replacement set of stern exhaust tubes.
She looked up and favored us with a lovely smile. "Your crews will be ready in a moment. Would
you have a seat, gentlemen?"
We had a seat gentlemen.
After a while, she got up to take something out of a file cabinet set in the wall. As she came back to
her desk, I noticed she was pregnant—only about the third or fourth month—and, naturally, I gave a
little, satisfied nod. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the kid make the same kind of nod. We looked at
 
each other and chuckled. "It's a rough, rough war," he said.
"Where are you from anyway?" I asked. "That doesn't sound like a Third District accent to me."
"It isn't. I was born in Scandinavia—Eleventh Military District. My home town is Goteborg,
Sweden. But after I got my—my promotion, naturally I didn't care to see the folks any more. So I
requested a transfer to the Third, and from now on, until I hit a scrambler, this is where I'll be spending
my furloughs and Earth-side hospitalizations."
I'd heard that a lot of the younger sling-shotters felt that way. Personally, I never had a chance to
find out how I'd feel about visiting the old folks at home. My father was knocked off in the suicidal
attempt to retake Neptune way back when I was still in high school learning elementary combat, and my
mother was Admiral Raguzzi's staff secretary when the flagship Thermopylae took a direct hit two years
later in the famous defense of Ganymede. That was before the Breeding Regulations, of course, and
women were still serving in administrative positions on the fighting perimeters.
On the other hand, I realized, at least two of my brothers might still be alive. But I'd made no
attempt to contact them since getting my dotted Y. So I guessed I felt the same way as the kid—which
was hardly surprising.
"Are you from Sweden?" the blonde girl was asking. "My second husband was born in Sweden.
Maybe you knew him—Sven Nossen? He had a lot of relatives in Stockholm."
The kid screwed up his eyes as if he was thinking real hard. You know, running down a list of all the
Swedes in Stockholm. Finally, he shook his head. "No, can't say that I do. But I wasn't out of Goteborg
very much before I was called up."
She clucked sympathetically at his provincialism. The baby-faced blonde of clas-sic anecdote. A
real dumb kid. And yet—there were lots of very clever, high-pressure cuties around the inner planets
these days who had to content themselves with a one-fifth interest in some abysmal slob who boasted the
barest modicum of maleness. Or a certificate from the local sperm bank. Blondie here was on her third
full husband.
Maybe, I thought, if I were looking for a wife myself, this is what I'd pick to take the stink of
scrambler rays out of my nose and the yammer-yammer-yammer of Irvingles out of my ears. Maybe I'd
want somebody nice and simple to come home to from one of those complicated skirmishes with the Eoti
where you spend most of your conscious thoughts trying to figure out just what battle rhythm the filthy
insects are using this time. Maybe, if I were going to get married, I'd find a pretty fluffhead like this more
generally desirable than—oh, well. Maybe. Considered as a problem in psychology it was interesting.
I noticed she was talking to me. "You've never had a crew of this type before either, have you,
Commander?"
"Zombies, you mean? No, not yet, I'm happy to say."
She made a disapproving pout with her mouth. It was fully as cute as her approv-ing pouts. "We do
not like that word."
"All right, blobs then."
"We don't like bl—that word either. You are talking about human beings like your-self,
Commander. Very much like yourself."
I began to get sore fast, just the way the kid had out in the hall. Then I realized she didn't mean
anything by it. She didn't know. What the hell—it wasn't on our orders. I relaxed. "You tell me. What do
you call them here?"
The blonde sat up stiffly. "We refer to them as soldier surrogates. The epithet 'zom-bie' was used to
describe the obsolete Model 21 which went out of production over five years ago. You will be supplied
with individuals based on Models 705 and 706, which are practically perfect. In fact, in some
respects—"
 
"No bluish skin? No slow-motion sleepwalking?"
She shook her head violently, Her eyes were lit up. Evidently she'd digested all the promotional
literature. Not such a fluffhead, after all; no great mind, but her hus-bands had evidently had someone to
talk to in between times. She rattled on enthu-siastically: "The cyanosis was the result of bad blood
oxygenation; blood was our second most difficult tissue reconstruction problem, The nervous system was
the hardest. Even though the blood cells are usually in the poorest shape of all by the time the bodies
arrive, we can now turn out a very serviceable rebuilt heart. But, let there be the teeniest battle damage to
the brain or spine and you have to start right from scratch. And then the troubles in reconstitution! My
cousin Lorna works in Neural Align-ment and she tells me all you need to make is just one wrong
connection—you know how it is, Commander, at the end of the day your eyes are tired and you're kind
of watching the clock—just one wrong connection, and the reflexes in the finished individual turn out to
be so bad that they just have to send him down to the third floor and begin all over again. But you don't
have to worry about that. Since Model 663, we've been using the two-team inspection system in Neural
Alignment. And the 700 series—oh, they've just been wonderful."
"That good, eh? Better than the old-fashioned mother's son type?"
"Well-1-1," she considered. "You'd really be amazed, Commander, if you could see the very latest
performance charts. Of course, there is always that big deficiency, the one activity we've never been able
to—"
"One thing I can't understand," the kid broke in, "why do they have to use corpses! A body's lived
its life, fought its war—why not leave it alone? I know the Eoti can outbreed us merely by increasing the
number of queens in their flagships; I know that manpower is the biggest single TAF problem—but we've
been synthesizing pro-toplasm for a long, long time now. Why not synthesize the whole damn body, from
toenails to frontal lobe, and turn out real, honest-to-God androids that don't wallop you with the stink of
death when you meet them?"
The little blonde got mad. "Our product does not stink! Cosmetics can now guar-antee 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 reuse 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 a whole baling package—a baling pack-age contains twenty
casualties—we don't find enough to make one good, whole kid-ney. 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 like carbon, hydro-gen, oxygen and
so on. It would make the whole process a lot cleaner."
"Basic elements have to come from somewhere," I pointed out gently. "You might take your
hydrogen and oxygen from air and water. But where would you get your carbon from?"
"From the same place where the other synthetics manufacturers get it—coal, oil, cellulose."
The receptionist sat back and relaxed, "Those are organic substances," she re-minded 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 is 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 look and changed her
mind. She looked very uncertain all of a sudden. When the communicator on her desk buzzed, she bent
 

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