Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein Read Free Book Online

there and embossed into our papers. The Fleet Sergeant finally looked up. “Why, it’s ‘way past the break for lunch. Time for chow, lads.”
    I swallowed hard. Uh...Sergeant?”
    “Eh? Speak up.”
    “Could I flash my folks from here? Tell them what I—Tell them how it came out?”
    “We can do better than that.”
    “Sir?”
    “You go on forty-eight hours leave now.” He grinned coldly. “Do you know what happens if you don’t come back?”
    “Uh . . . court-martial?”
    “Not a thing. Not a blessed thing. Except that your papers get marked,
    Term not completed satisfactorily, and you never, never, never get a second chance. This is our cooling-off period, during which we shake out the overgrown babies who didn’t really mean it and should never have taken the oath. It saves the government money and it saves a power of grief for such kids and their parents—the neighbors needn’t guess. You don’t even have to tell your parents.” He shoved his chair away from his desk. “So I’ll see you at noon day after tomorrow. If I see you. Fetch your personal effects.”
    It was a crumby leave. Father stormed at me, then quit speaking to me;
    Mother took to her bed. When I finally left, an hour earlier than I had to, nobody saw me off but the morning cook and the houseboys.
    I stopped in front of the recruiting sergeant’s desk, thought about saluting and decided I didn’t know how. He looked up. “Oh. Here are your papers. Take them up to room 201; they’ll start you through the mill. Knock and walk in.”
    Two days later I knew I was not going to be a pilot. Some of the things the examiners wrote about me were: insufficient intuitive grasp of spatial relationships . . . insufficient mathematical talent . . . deficient mathematical preparation . . . reaction time adequate . . . eyesight good. I’m glad they put in those last two; I was beginning to feel that counting on my fingers was my speed.
    The placement officer let me list my lesser preferences, in order, and I caught four more days of the wildest aptitude tests I’ve ever heard of. I mean to say, what do they find out when a stenographer jumps on her chair and screams, “Snakes!” There was no snake, just a harmless piece of plastic hose.
    The written and oral tests were mostly just as silly, but they seemed happy with them, so I took them. The thing I did most carefully was to list my preferences. Naturally I listed all of the Space Navy jobs (other than pilot) at the top; whether I went as power-room technician or as cook, I knew that I preferred any Navy job to any Army job—I wanted to travel.
    Next I listed Intelligence -- a spy gets around, too, and I figured that it couldn’t possibly be dull. (I was wrong, but never mind.) After that came a long list: psychological warfare, chemical warfare, biological warfare, combat ecology (I didn’t know what it was, but it sounded interesting), logistics corps (a simple mistake; I had studied logic for the debate team and “logistics” turns out to have two entirely separate meanings), and a dozen others. Clear at the bottom, with some hesitation, I put K-9 Corps, and Infantry.
    I didn’t bother to list the various non-combatant auxiliary corps because, if I wasn’t picked for a combat corps, I didn’t care whether they used me as an experimental animal or sent me as a laborer in the Terranizing of Venus—either one was a booby prize.
    Mr. Weiss, the placement officer, sent for me a week after I was sworn in. He was actually a retired psychological-warfare major, on active duty for procurement, but he wore mufti and insisted on being called just “Mister” and you could relax and take it easy with him. He had my list of preferences and the reports on all my tests and I saw that he was holding my high school transcript -- which pleased me, for I had done all right in school; I had stood high enough without standing so high as to be marked as a greasy grind, having never flunked any courses