THE RECRUIT

BY BRYCE WALTON

It was dirty work, but it would make him a man. And kids had a right to grow up—some of them!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Wayne, unseen, sneered down from the head of the stairs.

The old man with his thick neck, thick cigar, evening highball, potgut and bald head without a brain in it. His slim mother with nervously polite smiles and voice fluttering, assuring the old man by her frailty that he was big in the world. They were squareheads one and all, marking moron time in a gray dream. Man, was he glad to break out.

The old man said, "He'll be okay. Let him alone."

"But he won't eat. Just lies there all the time."

"Hell," the old man said. "Sixteen's a bad time. School over, waiting for the draft and all. He's in between. It's rough."

Mother clasped her forearms and shook her head once slowly.

"We got to let him go, Eva. It's a dangerous time. You got to remember about all these dangerous repressed impulses piling up with nowhere to go, like they say. You read the books."

"But he's unhappy."

"Are we specialists? That's the Youth Board's headache, ain't it? What do we know about adolescent trauma and like that? Now get dressed or we'll be late."

Wayne watched the ritual, grinning. He listened to their purposeless noises, their blabbing and yakking as if they had something to say. Blab-blab about the same old bones, and end up chewing them in the same old ways. Then they begin all over again. A freak sideshow all the way to nowhere. Squareheads going around either unconscious or with eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire into limbo.

How come he'd been stuck with parental images like that? One thing—when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his punkie origins in 

  P 1/10 next