suicide.

The reporting officer about-faced, saluted Colonel Nef, about-faced again. "Present...."

"Preezent...."

"Preeezent...."

"Preeeezent...."

"HAHMS!" Fifteen hundred Dardick-rifles, sheathed in plastic, slapped perpendicular. The blue-clad officers, armed with pistols, touched their index fingers to their helmet-temples. The bandsmen's drums growled, the electronic horns sobbed against their mutes, and the flutes in lonely purity played the theme of "Oh, Pioneers!" For all his har-de-har-hardness, Hartford felt a sting in his eyes at this moment, as he did whenever the splendidly stage-managed ceremony of Retreat was performed. After the Anthem, much louder, the band played Retreat. The colors crept down the flagstaff, into the reverent arms of a pair of Service Policemen.

"Oh-deph, HAHMS! By line-of-battalions, line-of-companies, line-of-platoons, line-of-squads, return to quarters and dismiss!" The light colonel made one last salute to CINCK, and the little ballet on the reviewing-stand was over. The troopers were now free to go in to their showers, their latrines, their suppers, and their women.

"At ease," Hartford told the Terrible Third. "Rest. Smoke if you've got 'em."

The men chuckled dutifully at the oldest joke in the service. An Axenite trooper, sealed in his germ-free safety-suit and helmet, is by definition a non-smoker outside his Barracks. It would be another hour they'd be outside, since the Third was next to the last of the fifty platoons to swim home through the Syphon. While the companies on the far left flank of the Regiment were ballooning-up and peeling-off in columns-of-squads to enter the Barracks, Hartford went back to talk with Piacentelli, C.O. of First Platoon.

II

Getting inside the Barracks was a production. The safety-suits worn outside presumably bore on their outer surfaces all the dust-borne bugs native to Kansas. To carry these bacteria into the Barracks, to be inspired and ingested by Axenites—humans who'd never before had a 

 Prev. P 5/56 next