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.Nothing binding you to the here and now.”Harker stands silently, still not precisely sure how to answer.After an awkward pause, the captain continues.“Of course, we can’t order you to do something like this.But we would like you to volunteer.We can make it worth your while to do so.”“I’d still like more time to think it over, sir.”“Of course.Take your time.We’ve got all the time in the world, haven’t we?”Later with Gary, as they walk across the deserted parade field together.“You bet I volunteered,” Gary says.“It’s not every day you get offered a two-month leave and a bonus, is it?”“But what happens after that?”Gary waves that aside.He is a live-for-the-moment type.“That’s two months from now.Besides, how bad can it be, after what we’ve already been through? You read the booklet, didn’t you? They had one hundred percent success thawing the monkeys out the last four times.It won’t be any harder for us.”“But the world will be changed when we wake up.”“Who cares? The Army’ll still be the same.The Army’s always the same, ever since the beginning of time.Come on, join me.I’ll bet if we ask them nice, they’ll keep us together as a team.Don’t let me go in there alone.”Harker volunteers the next day and gets his two-month leave, plus the bonus paid to the experimental subjects.He and Gary leave the post together to spend their last two months of freedom.The first month they are together almost constantly.It is a riot of clashing colours and flashing girls, of endless movies and shows and drinks.It is largely cheerless, but it occupies their time and keeps their minds on today.The days sweep by like a brash brass carousel, and only by keeping careful track can it be noticed that the carousel goes around in a circle.With a month to go, Harker suddenly leaves his friend and goes off on his own.He lets desolation sink in until it has invaded the roots of his soul.He often walks alone at night, and several times is stopped by the police.Even when someone is with him, generally a streetgirl, he is alone.He looks at things, ordinary things, with new strangeness.The cars going by on the street are suddenly vehicles of great marvels.The skyscrapers that reach above him, their defaced walls and smog-dirtied windows, all become symbols of a world that will not exist for him much longer.He stares for an hour at a penny on the sidewalk, until someone notices what he is staring at and picks the coin up for himself.He talks but little and even his thoughts are shallow.He disengages his brain and lives on a primal level.When he is hungry, he eats; when his bladder or bowels are full, he relieves them.He takes whores to his hotel room for couplings that are merely the release of excess semen.During the last week, he is totally impotent.He returns to the post when his leave is up and, as promised, is assigned to a room with Gary.The latter still seems to be in good spirits, undaunted by the prospects of the immediate future.The presence of his friend should brighten Harker up, but for some reason it only makes him more depressed.For a week, they run him and the other volunteers – three hundred in all – through a battery of medical tests that are the most thorough Harker has ever experienced.Then they lead him, naked, to a white room filled with coffins, some of which are occupied and some of which are still empty.There they freeze him against the time when they will need a good soldier again.It was dark up on the surface, not a night-dark but a dreary, rainy, cloud-dark.A constant drizzle came from the sky, only to steam upward again when it touched the smouldering ruins of what had recently been a city.Buildings were mostly demolished, but here and there a wall stood silhouetted against the dark sky, futilely defying the fearsomeness of war.The ground and wreckage were still boiling hot, but Harker’s suit protected him from the temperature.The drizzle and steam combined to make the air misty, and to give objects a shadow quality that denied their reality.Harker looked around on reflex, taking stock.All around him were his own people, who had also just emerged from the elevator.No sign yet of the mysterious ‘they’ he was supposed to keep busy for four hours.“Spread out,” somebody said, and ingrained instincts took over.Clustered together at the mouth of the elevator, they made too good a target.They scattered at random in groups of one, two or three.Harker found himself with a woman – not a resurrectee, just another soldier.Neither of them spoke; they probably had little in common.One was rooted in time, the other drifted, anchorless and apart.The clouds parted for a moment, revealing a green sun.I wonder what planet it is this time, Harker thought, and even before the idea was completely formed, apathy had erased the desire to know.It didn’t matter.All that mattered was the fighting and killing.That was why he was here.An unexpected movement off to the left.Harker whirled, gun at the ready.A wraithlike form was approaching out of the mists.Three meters tall, stick-man thin, it moved agonisingly, fighting what was, to it, impossibly heavy gravity
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