from
Space Cadet
by
Robert A. Heinlein

The cadet did not hold himself erectly; he crouched the merest trifle, knees relaxed and springy, hands ready to grasp. His feet glided softly over the floor. The effect was catlike, easy grace; Matt felt that if the room were suddenly to turn topy-turvy the cadet would land on his feet on the ceiling—which was perfectly true.

Matt wanted very much to look like him.

Matt blurted out, “Excuse me, sir—but what’s to keep a person from cheating by peeking?”

The examiner smiled. “Nothing at all. Go on to your next test.”

Matt left, grumbling. It did not occur to him that he might not know what was being tested.

“You expect to spend long hours studying your new profession, acquiring the skills of the spaceman and the arts of the professional soldier. These skills and arts you must have, but they will not make you an officer of the Patrol.”

He paused, then went on, “An officer in command of a ship of the Patrol, away from base, is the last of the absolute monarchs, for there is none but himself to restrain him. Many places where he must go no other authority reaches. He himself must embody law, and the rule of reason, justice and mercy.

“More than that, to the members of the Patrol singly and together is entrusted such awful force as may compel or destroy, all other force we know of—and with this trust is laid on them the charge to keep the peace of the System and to protect the liberties of its peoples. They are soldiers of freedom.

“It is not enough that you be skillful, clever, brave— The trustees of this awful power must each possess a meticulous sense of honor, self-discipline beyond all ambition, conceit, or avarice, respect for the liberties and dignity of all creatures, and an unyielding will to do justice and give mercy. He must be a true and gentle knight.”

He stopped and there was no sound at all in the huge room. Then he said, “Let those who are prepared to take the oath be mustered.”

Boys trickled across the room until few were left. “Sforza, Stanley, Suliman,“ and then, finally: “Zahm!” The last candidate joined his fellows.

But the cadet did not stop. “Dahlquist!” he called out.

There was no answer.

“Dahlquist!” he repeated. “Ezra Dahlquist!”

Matt felt cold prickles around his scalp. He recognized the name now—but Dahlquist would not be here, not Ezra Dahlquist. Matt was sure of that, for he remembered an alcove in the rotunda, a young man in a picture, and the hot, bright sand of the Moon.

There was a stir in the rank behind him. A candidate pushed his way through and stepped forward. “I answer for Ezra Dahlquist!”

“Martin!”

This time there was no hesitation. He heard Tex’s voice, his tone shrill: “I answer for him.”

“Rivera.”

A strong baritone: “Answering for Rivera!”

“Wheeler!”

“I answer for Wheeler.”

The cadet turned toward the Commandant and saluted:

“All present, sir. Class of 2075, First Muster complete.”

“A fine bunch of boys, sir.”

“That was my impression. All youth and eagerness and young expectation. But how many of them will we have to eliminate? It’s a sorry thing, John, to take a boy and change him so that he is no longer a civilian, then kick him out. It’s the cruelest duty we have to perform.”

“I don’t see a way to avoid it.”

“There is no way. If we had some magic touchstone— Tell the field that I want to raise ship in thirty minutes.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“He said that now that I was assured that his orders were according to regulation he wanted me to know why he had told me how to eat my pie. He even said he could see that I would regard it as improper interference with my private life. I said I guessed I didn’t have any private life any more. He said no, I had one all right, but it would feel pretty microscopic for a while.

“Then he explained the matter. A patrol officer is supposed to be able to move in all society—if your hostess eats with her knife, then you eat with your knife.”

“Everybody knows that.”

“Okay. He pointed out that candidates come from everywhere. Some of them even come from families and societies where it’s good manners for everybody to eat out of one dish, with their fingers . . . some of the Moslem boys. But there is an over-all way to behave that is acceptable anywhere among the top crust.”

“Nuts,” said Matt. “I’ve seen the Governor of Iowa with a hot dog in one hand and a piece of pie in the other.”

“I’ll bet it wasn’t at a state dinner,” Tex countered. “No, Matt, it made sense the way he told it. He said pie wasn’t important, but it was part of a larger pattern—for instance that you must never mention death on Mars or to a Martian.”

“Is that a fact?”

“I guess so. He said that in time I would learn how to ‘eat pie with a fork’ as he put it, under any possible circumstances on any planet.”

“I relieve you, sir. But stick close to me and help me round up these yahoos. I suppose you know them by sight?”

“Uh, I think so, sir.”

“You should—you’ve had time.” Matt was chagrined to find, in the next few moments that the new squad leader—Cadet Lopez—knew the squad muster roll by heart, whereas Matt had to refer to his copy to assist him in locating the members. He was not really aware of the implications of order and efficient preparation; it did impress him as “style.”

“Not astrogation. A ten-year-old child could learn to pilot a spaceship if he had the talent for mathematics. That is kindergarten stuff, Dodson. The arts of space and warfare are the least part of your education. I know, from your tests, that you can soak up the math and physical sciences and technologies. Much more important is the world around you, the planets and their inhabitants—extraterrestrial biology, history, cultures, psychology, law and institutions, treaties and conventions, planetary ecologies, system ecology, interplanetary economics, applications of extraterritorialism, comparative religious customs, law of space, to mention a few.”

Matt was looking bug-eyed. “My gosh! How long does it take to learn all those things?”

“You’ll still be studying the day you retire. But even those subjects are not your education; they are simply raw materials. Your real job is to learn how to think—and that means you must study several other subjects: epistemology, scientific methodology, semantics, structures of languages, patterns of ethics and morals, varieties of logics, motivational psychology, and so on. This school is based on the idea that a man who can think correctly will automatically behave morally—or what we call ‘morally.’ ”

Almost as entertaining was the required seminar in “Doubt.” The course had been instituted by the present commandant and resulted from his own observation that every military organization—with the Patrol no exception—suffered from an inherent vice. A military hierarcy automatically places a premium on conservative behavior and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalize original and imaginative thinking. Commodore Arkwright realized that these tendencies are inherent and inescapable; he hoped to offset them a bit by setting up a course that could not be passed without original thinking.

The method was the discussion group, made up of youngsters, oldsters, and officers. The seminar leader would chuck out some proposition that attacked a value usually regarded as axiomatic. From there on anything could be said.

“You know what they say: ‘Every civilized man has two planets, his own and Ganymede.’ ”

“Huh?”

Pete did not even hear him. “Jupiter hanging overhead, filling half the sky—” He stopped. “It’s beautiful, Matt. There’s no place like it.”

Matt found himself thinking about Des Moines in a late summer evening . . . with fireflies winking and the cicadas singing in the trees, and the air so thick and heavy you could cup it in your hand. Suddenly he hated the steel shell around him, with its eternal free-fall and its filtered air and its artificial lights. “Why did we ever sign up, Pete?”

“The Patrol is not a fighting organization; it is the repository of weapons too dangerous to entrust to military men.

“With the development last century of mass-destruction weapons, warfare became all offense and no defense, speaking broadly. A nation could launch a horrific attack but it could not even protect its own rocket bases. Then space travel came along.

“The spaceship is the perfect answer in a military sense to the atom bomb, and to germ warfare and weather warfare. It can deliver an attack that can’t be stopped—and it is utterly impossible to attack that spaceship from the surface of a planet.”

“We might have ended up with the tightest, most nearly unbreakable tyranny the world has ever seen. But the human race got a couple of lucky breaks and it didn’t work out that way. It’s the business of the Patrol to see that it stays lucky.

“But the Patrol can’t drop an atom bomb simply because some pipsqueak Hitler has made a power grab and might some day, when he has time enough, build spaceships and mass-destruction weapons. The power is too great, too awkward—it’s like trying to keep order in a nursery with a loaded gun instead of a switch.”

Marianne was the sort of girl who never would get clearly fixed in her mind the distinction between a planet and a star. He had not noticed this before, but it and similar matters had come up on the one date he had had alone with her.

And she had referred to his uniform as “cute.”

He began to understand, from Marianne, why most Patrol officers do not marry until their mid-thirties, after retirement.

“How’s your class in astrogation?”

“Oh that— It seems funny to be teaching it instead of flunking it.”

“That’s why you’re stuck with it—you still remember what it was that used to stump you and why.”

“If I’ve reached the place where I’m a good influence on anybody, it’s time I cultivated some new vices.”

“I’d be glad to help.”

“We’ve given the human race a hundred years of peace, and now there is no one left who remembers war. They’ve come to accept peace and comfort as a normal way of life. But it isn’t. The human animal has millions of years of danger and starving and death behind him; the past century is just a flicker of an eyelash in his history. But only the Patrol seems aware of it.”

“Would you abolish the Patrol?”

“Oh, my, no, Matt! But I wish there were some way to make people realize by how thin a barrier the jungle has been shut out. And another thing, too—” Thurlow grinned sheepishly. “—I wish they had some understanding of what we are.”

“It’s . . . well, never mind. Eat it. It won’t hurt you and it will keep you alive.”

“But what is it? I want to know what I’m eating.”

“Permit me to point out that you eat this or go hungry. I don’t care which. If I told you, your local prejudices would get in your way. Just pretend it’s garbage and learn to love it.”

“The Little People are great negotiators; you’ll have to come to New Auckland some time and listen to the proceedings of a mixed court.”

“Keep to the point,” suggested Matt.

“That is to the point—they don’t fight; they just argue until somebody gives in.”