Regiment of Women (19 page)

Thirty men docilely arose and began to dress.

Jackie was whining about his uniform.

“Don't we get slips? Look how this skirt hangs without a slip underneath!” He flipped through his issue of pantyhose. “Perfectly hideous. Oh, why can't they be sheer!”

“I guess the idea is durability,” said Cornell. He had modestly got into the dress first. Now, reaching up under the skirt, he pulled off his civilian black-bikini pants and stepped into the cotton panties of a style he had not worn since small-boyhood. At least they weren't as grotesque as the jailhouse bloomers.

“Well, they aren't durable either,” Jackie said. “Here's a run already. Oh damn! Will they give me a replacement, do you think? Or will I just get abused if I ask?”

“I'll speak to the sergeant,” Cornell promised.

“She looks like she can be nasty. This is a terrible place, Georgie.”

“Now, don't keep telling yourself that. We've got to make the best of it for six months.”

It would take more than a slip to make Jackie's uniform presentable. The dress was far too small, the skirt far above his knobby knees, and the style was not intended to be mini. At the bosom the buttons strained the holes, mainly because of Jackie's barrel chest: his boobs were modest today. Their size changed with his outfits.

Howie, on the other side, had got a good fit, but, being only eighteen, he looked good in anything. But Cornell himself did not fare badly. His dress was slack on top, of course, but sleek across the fanny and hips, and the hemline fell properly just below the kneecaps.

“Howie,” Cornell asked. “Do you mind telling me about those?” He gestured at the boy's rounded breasts. “Are they injected, or what?”

Howie shrugged. “They're just balled anklets. That's all. I used to use paper towels, but you could hear them rustle.” He was a naive sort.

They were seated on folding chairs in the camp theater, along with hundreds of new conscripts from the other barracks. A middle-aged officer walked briskly from the wings to stage center, before an enormous, blank motion-picture screen. She wore a gray crewcut and a well-tailored uniform, above the left breast pocket of which were several rows of multicolored ribbons.

“Welcome to Camp Kilmer,” she said into the standing microphone, after tapping it smartly to see if it was live. “I am your commanding officer, Colonel Peckham. You are at the beginning of your sperm term. Some of you may be apprehensive now, but I think I can say you will soon find it more of an adventure than an ordeal. Thousands of young men have passed through this camp in its long history—and before that, thousands of young women, en route to the wars, and many of those brave girls are buried in some foreign land, having sacrificed their lives in the defense of democracy.

“This very camp is named for one of them—Joyce Kilmer, the poetess who authored ‘Trees' and subsequently died in combat. That was a century or more ago, and yet she is not forgotten.

“Be assured that while your own contribution may not be so spectacular, it is valuable—uh, very valuable.”

The colonel looked into the palm of her hand; she seemed to have a note there.

“Now, the next item on the agenda will be a training film. Watch this closely. Experience has shown that the semen-gathering process can be somewhat frightening to certain conscripts if they come to it without intellectual preparation. This film was created with just such a purpose in mind: it will remove and/or correct the false impressions that many of you may have gotten from sperm veterans of other eras. Techniques have been vastly improved in recent years. Old vets may have told you horror stories about the inefficient, even dangerous, milking machines to which they were strapped, etcetera, etcetera. Most of these tales never held water.”

The colonel smiled and shook her close-cropped head. “And insofar as they did, they do so no longer. At this installation we have the latest equipment, and our technicians are graduates of an intensive training course. They are supervised by doctors. You have already had two of our meals. The government spares no expense in maintaining the quality of the high-protein diet. I urge you to eat everything on your trays. It is put there for your own good, to ensure your continued health and provide strength for your efforts.

“I also recommend that you cooperate, with good will, in all phases of the program; that you participate wholeheartedly in the supervised recreation. That way the time will pass like a dream. There are rewards for doing your duty, and there are penalties for failure to do it. This is not a penal colony, and speaking as your commanding officer, may I say that no sight pleases me as much as a new crop of bright young faces and robust young bodies.

“I wish you good ejaculations
I”
She looked over their heads at the projection booth in the rear of the balcony and snapped her fingers. “Roll the film.”

The lights went out. Jackie leaned against Cornell.

“I bet she can be mighty nasty.”

There were other mutterings in the auditorium, which seemed more stifling in the dark. It was beginning to be a hot day outside, and the place was neither air-conditioned nor effectively ventilated. Some conscripts were not given to using deodorants. Cornell raised his handkerchief, on which he had fortunately sprinkled some cologne before leaving the barracks.

The lights went on again, and the colonel marched onto the stage.

“Now hear this,” she said. “Anyone caught talking during the picture will be dealt with.” Cornell saw Sergeant Peters rise at the end of the row and glare at her group.

The lights were extinguished, and the picture came on the screen in glaring color, accompanied by a lively show-tune played by an invisible string orchestra. A litle group of young men, in the Sperm Service uniform, were seen sitting in a lounge full of chintz-covered furniture. They smiled, chattered, and passed a dish of what looked like foil-covered bonbons.

Over this scene a title began to appear, as if being written by an invisible pen, in flowing pink script:
Introducing the Sperm Service
is what it said when finished.

The benevolent voice of a female narrator was heard.

“You boys are about to embark on an enchanting voyage.” At which the men on the screen turned and giggled at the camera. One of them popped a bonbon into his mouth and licked the fingers that had held it.

“This picture is a travelogue of that voyage. Come along!” A roly-poly fat sergeant came into the lounge, smiled at the men, and then took in her pudgy hand the square chin of one husky blond. “You look so sweet today, Maxie.” Maxie simpered. “I think I'll put you at the top of the class.”

Maxie gasped happily and rose. She took his hand, and the camera followed them through a flower-stenciled door, which opened by an unseen agency.

“The other boys,” said the narrator, “are a wee bit jealous, boys being boys. But they know their turns will come. And they also know that dear old Sarge Winters, a twenty-year veteran of the Sperm Service cadre, loves all her lads.”

Now Winters and Maxie were in a room with pale-blue wallpaper and a cerise rug. A kind of sitz bath of turquoise plastic occupied one corner. The sergeant proved it was full of water by dipping in one fat finger. Since there were no faucets on it, Cornell wondered how it had been filled. There was a false sort of tone to this whole thing.

When the camera next went to Maxie, he was magically wearing a semitransparent pink peignoir, which parted to the knee as he lifted his large foot and gingerly touched the big toe to the surface of the liquid.

“Oo.”

“Too hot?” The sergeant was concerned.

“Oh, no. It's dreamy.”

His back to the camera, the sergeant taking off the peignoir and holding it to screen his descent, Maxie lowered himself into the bath.

The violins played, Maxie's blissful face was seen in closeup, eyelids softly lowering. Then Sarge Winters' genial dewlaps were seen, then a bowlful of tea roses, then back to a view of Sarge bundling Maxie in a huge fluffy pink towel.

“Would you believe,” asked the narrator, “that this is all there is to it? Well, it is! Maxie will now have a lovely meal in the recently redecorated dining room, take a nap in his comfy bed, and be ready for the usual evening of fun: a new hit musical, a fashion show of the season's collections. On other nights there is discotheque dancing, or a famous name from the world of coiffure will give a demonstration hairstyling, a body-specialist will give figure analyses.

“Your sperm term is so many things. You are doing your duty. You are serving your country. You are making new friends. You are realizing your potential as men. And you are having
fun!”

The music swelled up once again, and across the broad figure of Maxie, who, swaddled in his pink towel, smiled beatifically, the pink script began to appear:
Produced by the Sperm Service, U.S. Army Medical Corps, Department of Survival
.

Cornell had been summoned to the company commander's office. He arrived there with some trepidation. Had he already been spotted as a troublemaker?

A swarthy first sergeant told him to wait, but hardly had he sat down on the camp chair than a woman in olive-drab trousers and shirt, two silver bars on one side of the collar and a caduceus on the other, emerged from an inner office.

She wore a stern, feminine sort of smile. Cornell tried to keep his chin up and his gaze guiltless.

“Georgie Alcorn?”

He nodded timorously.

“Come in, please.”

A stark, military room, containing only a desk, its chair, and a cardboard carton on the floor behind. The captain sat down. Cornell stood rigidly so as to inhibit an impulse to tremble.

“Relax,” said the captain. “At rest, as we say in the women's army.” She had wavy brown hair in the short Army cut, shaved clean for an inch above the ears. “Alcorn,” she said, head down, examining some papers. “Alcorn, I've had some reports on you already.”

Cornell covered his mouth.

The captain looked up with a genial grin. “Very good reports, Alcorn. You seem to be a natural leader, with unusual presence for a man. I like that. You're not one of the typical simpering young boys we usually get. I see you're almost twenty-five, just under the wire. But the real stuff doesn't just come automatically with age.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

The captain frowned abstractly. “Alcorn, I don't have an easy job here. Sometimes I'd rather be back with the shrapnel, mortar bursts, and booby traps in Rumania—I left a hand there.” She lifted her left arm and showed the rounded pink stump at the cuff.

“Oh,” Cornell began, “I'm terribly—”

She cut him off. “No, no, not I'm a
soldier
, Alcorn. I knew what I was getting into, and I brought back a DSC.” She waved the stump once in a counterclockwise circuit, then put it away.

“I didn't bring you here to boast of my exploits. Alcorn, I've found in handling men that a woman can go only so far. It's finally a matter of biology, I think. Boys have secret places in their characters which only another male can really understand. Now, we could be absolute tyrants here, but we don't want to be except as a last resort. It works out better for all concerned if things run well, if the boys don't just perform their duties as a kind of drudgery into which they've been forced, but willingly, even enthusiastically. It makes my job easier, and time flies for them. Before they know it, their term is up and they all go home—enriched, really.”

The captain frowned. “But it's another story if sullenness develops, or hysteria, spitefulness, and so on—the sort of emotional problems that invariably crop up when men are in the company of their own sex for very long.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“What I'm getting to, Alcorn, is: I want you to be barracks leader for your, uh, barracks. This post carries no extra money but considerable authority. In fact, you will be just under Sergeant Peters in the chain of command—unofficially, in a technical sense; naturally, the AR's and AWs both specifically forbid the official appointment of any male person to a position of authority—I refer to the Army Regulations and Articles of War.” She held her head back and looked up her nose at Cornell.

“But in a meaningful way, you will be part of this line of power, and in Peters' absence will be responsible for executing her orders, which, of course, may in many cases emanate higher up, higher than me, even, from the colonel or the divisional general, and so on, and maybe eventually the Secretary of Survival and even the President”

The captain plunged her only hand into the cardboard box behind the desk. Cornell had assumed it was a container for waste paper. She brought from it a little hat, a cloche, in canary-yellow felt, the crown encircled by a green grosgrain ribbon, its split ends trailing at the rear.

“This is the barracks leader's badge of authority: the B.L. bonnet. We think it's quite attractive, and I've never heard of a boy who disagreed.” She handed it across to him. “Try it on.”

Cornell found the issue compact in his shoulder bag and, having blown the powder off the mirror, looked at himself. It was actually quite cute.

“Cute,” said the captain. “You have a sweet face, Alcorn.”

When Cornell glanced at her over the open compact, she cleared her throat and spoke gruffly.

“I've decided you should be B.L. of your barracks, Alcorn. I hope you agree. Now, report to Sergeant Peters.” She lowered her head and began to leaf through the papers.

Back at the barracks, the yellow cloche caused the movement of heads, first to look, then to reverse in jealousy. Only Howie and Gordie were generous, both smiling in admiration, the latter saying: “How darling!” Even sycophantic Jackie's nose was out of joint. “
I
didn't get a hat,” he said. “
I
never get anything.”

Cornell did not dare to ascertain whether Farley, whose bed was across the aisle, was present and looking. He explained his new position to the three friends.