Chapter II

John Reilly was tired, intensely tired, beyond any feeling of exhaustion he had ever known.

The clock in his desk chimed once. He sighed and picked up his lecture notes, stuffing them into a scarred and battered case that he had been carrying since his student days at the Academy. He cast one weary glance around the cluttered office, then steeled himself into a passable imitation of military carriage as he left for the lecture hall.

The Cadet Sergeant-Major outside his door leaped to attention only a little less quickly than his regular service counterpart. Reilly returned their salutes and fell in behind them.

The lecture hall--gymnasium, really; the Academy was perennially overcrowded--was crowded, as usual. The eager young cadets filled the fifty rows of backless benches, while the overflow squatted and stood at the rear until it was impossible for a midget to find room to thread his way through the crowd. Reilly’s class was well-tended for its honest popularity, not just because it was compulsory. There were many “compulsory” lectures in the curriculum that counted themselves proud to find half their audience in attendance.

Reilly stopped in the wings of the stage, listening for a moment to the comfortable discordances of the student band tuning their instruments. The regular service non-com peered through the hangings, catching the bandmaster’s eye. The tuning stopped, and the band swung into a medley of old Academy drinking songs. Reilly smiled, as he remembered happier days when he had participated lustily in the drinking that went along with such music.

From the drinking songs, the band struck up the National Anthem. The noise the cadets made in rising nearly drowned out the music. After the last strains had been permitted to fade away, the bandmaster raised his baton once more and the opening bars of Hail to the Chief! filled the hall. The Sergeants-Major stepped out onto the stage, Reilly following, case clasped loosely between elbow and side.

They passed in front of the half-dozen visitors and moved to either side of the podium, turning until they were facing each other, the regular service man on the right. They snapped into a salute, followed by the entire audience. Reilly lay his case on the podium, turned and bowed to the visitors, then faced the audience again and returned the salute.

Immediately two thousand arms dropped to their owners’ sides and the cadets resumed their seats.

Reilly unzipped his case and drew out his notes.

He arranged them carefully on the podium, although he knew that at no time during the next hour would he so much as glance at them again. The case stowed away under the podium, he took a deep breath and placed his hands flat on the podium’s surface. Technicians in the control booth over the far end of the hall trained parabolic mikes on his lips, waiting for him to begin the lecture as he had begun hundreds of other preceding lectures, before audiences much like this. The faces might change; the uniforms were the same, and so were the underlying feelings of the wearers of the uniforms, year in and year out.

“The greater good for the greater number!”

The cadets let out a mutual sigh, none aware that breath had been held.

“A motto, gentlemen: merely a motto. Like Ad Astra per Aspera, E Pluribus Unum or Through These Portals Pass the Most Wonderful Customers in the Galaxy.” An appreciative titter ran through the audience.

“But what is a motto?” continued Reilly, warming to his subject, overly familiar though it was. “It’s more than just a snappy way of stringing words together. It has a meaning. Often the meaning, such as in the commercial example I just gave, is on the frivolous side. But more often there is something intently serious behind a motto. Ad Astra--’To the Stars.’ For centuries this has been almost a religion for men, as our ancestors broke the bonds of a single planet and spread out into the galaxy. Libraries have been written of the heartbreaks and joys, the sorrows and jubilations that have been found in the far reaches of space.

“E Pluribus Unum--’United We Stand.’ Even older and, if possible, dearer to the hearts of men. Our very government is based on the essential concept contained in these three words from the past.

“‘The greater good for the greater number’. If government runs on one motto, then civilization is based on this!”

Team B was dead on its feet when the copter finally returned to Base with the first rosy glow of dawn lightening the horizon. They stumbled to the ground, as sorry a looking group as Luke Royceton had ever seen. Their masquerade of grime and war paints was nearly obscured by an honest layer of general dirt. They filed into wardrobe and stripped off their clothes, leaving them in ragged piles on the floor. Then they hit the showers, luxuriating under the needle sprays and the caress of soap sliding over their skin.

The discarded costumes were gone when they emerged, feeling closer to human, twenty minutes later. In place of the animal hides were shorts, doublets and the calf-length boots of Base-centered personnel.