Whistle Read Free Page B

one, was that charisma people were a race, a den, a nest of Super-liars.
    When you learned that, it took away everything. It took away the satisfaction and it took away whatever had given you the drive in the first place. It made it all worthless. And ludicrous. It put you right back down there in the barnyard, looking like—and smelling like—the rest of the livestock. The livestock you had wanted to avoid being one of.
    And he was supposed to be his own company’s hero. Damn them, damn them, Winch thought suddenly and savagely, God damn them. They weren’t worth the turds to put in a sock and thump them over the head with. Why should he give a damn about them?
    The bottle was still sitting on his chest. He let the hand holding it slide away down over the berth edge and put it away.
    God damn their souls, cannon fodder was what they were. He couldn’t be expected to keep them all alive forever, could he?
    Winch raised up on his elbow and stared through the open door, across the passageway. Across the passageway was what had once been the ship’s main lounge. There was your cannon fodder.
    There were easily several hundred of them. All the chairs and tea tables had been removed and replaced with hospital beds. In ranked rows. Here in the one huge room were the serious cases which needed constant attention. White-jacketed figures moved among them under the high ceiling. Here and there a medic squatted, supervising the giving of glucose or plasma from a glass jug hanging on a white stand. The room had not been repainted, and all its gay gilt and vermilion and mirrors stared down on all the slow quiet pain.
    Only four of Winch’s company were on board this trip, four including himself. And only one of them was in there in the lounge.
    His first look at the main lounge had made him weak in the stomach. We all of us feel that way when we first see it, he thought. It made such a clear, concise picture of the cost for you. The only ones of us who didn’t notice the lounge were those who traveled in it, and only those who traveled in it failed to notice the smell it gave off.
    Apparently the news of landfall had passed that way, too, because a murmur was fluttering weakly across the lounge. Many of the reclining figures had raised up in their bandages. It was an eerie picture. Some of them had their entire heads bandaged, as they peered about. Winch went on staring at them, rapt. The smell from it was almost insupportable.
    Man-stink. How used to it he had gotten over the years. And all its various flavors. What was that word? Effluvia. Sweaty male armpits and smelly male feet. Socks and underwear. Fetid breath. Uninhibited belches and farts. Ranked open toilet bowls and urinals in the early morning. It mingled with the smell of toothpaste and shaving soap from the row of washbasins all down the other side.
    And now he could add a new one. Suppuration. Suppuration and granulation. The sweet foul smell of injured flesh trying slowly, painfully to heal itself down there under the lymph-stained bandages. It diffused itself throughout every part of the big lounge, and overflowed its doors. It would stay in his nose with the others the rest of his life.
    Which in the case of Mart Winch might not be too fucking long. If he didn’t take care of himself. He wasn’t supposed to drink. He wasn’t supposed to smoke, either. Defiantly, he reached down for the musette and pulled the bottle up and had another, and lit a cigarette.
    Neither gesture helped. He was still standing at the same junction as before. A night junction. Trailer trucks whammed by. Nobody stopped. How unmanly could you get, here at the end of the string? Where there wasn’t any audience. An aging, pitiless, tough, old infantry 1st/sgt, looking desperately everywhere for a shot of pity. It was laughable.
    Hell, he wasn’t even wounded. He was only sick. An unaccustomed hollowness opened up in him at the word. Shit, he had never been sick a day in his life. Under the