THE HOPLITE
By Richard Sheridan
They were the mightiest warriors the
universe had ever known. All they
lacked was——something to live for!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Jord awoke to the purr of the ventilators billowing the heavy curtainsat the doorway. Through them, from the corridor, seeped the cold,realistic, shadowless light that seemed to sap the color from man andmatter and leave only drabness and emptiness.
His eyes were sandy with sleep. He blinked. The optic nerves readiedfor sight, pupils focused, retina recorded. The primordial fear ofunfamiliar things disappeared as he recognized the objects in the room,identified waking as a natural phenomenon and remembered the day'sobjectives.
He lay quietly on the pallet; dimly conscious of identity, clingingphysically to the temporal death vanishing behind his opened eyes. Palelight, swollen bladder, sticky throat, quiescent body, unimportanthunger, dim fear of incipient living.
He felt for the cigarettes on the floor beside his bed. His careful,sleepy fingers passed lightly over the ashy ashtray and fell onwrinkled cellophane. Dry tubes from a synthetic Virginia. He shook acigarette from the pack and lay with it jutting from his lips. Thesteady, filtered, odorless breeze centered on his senseless frontallobes and whispered down his silver cheeks.
A light. His hand crawled, finger walking across the crimson carpetto the grouping, found the metal tube and flew back to his chest. Hefumbled with the trigger. His muscles were lethargic and he pressed ithard with a childish impatience.
Perseverance.
Now the metal tip glowed orange as the radioactive motes in the tubedestroyed themselves with rigid self-control. Careful suction, then,and a cubic foot of tobacco smoke howled down his esophagus into hislungs, examined each feathery cranny and left by muscular contraction.
It tasted bad, but he'd expected that it would.
He didn't have to smoke all of it. The habit decently required onlythat he take a puff, leave it smolder, take another, allow himself tobe scorched and futilely try to set the bed afire.
He watched the smoke being plucked from the air by the purifiers to beexpelled with other smokes, smells and gases into an atmosphere thatconsisted of little else.
His last night's pleasure stirred, vainly fought the inevitable andfluttered its hands. "You awake, Soldier?"
The room glowed with a rosy light.
"Approximately."
The woman uncoiled herself and lay flat. Through the tangle of bronzedhair, one ear shone whitely. She brushed the hair from her eyes andher scarlet mouth opened in a feline yawn. The woman was pink andwhite; she quivered in voluptuous ecstasy and slithered on the satinwith her own satiny, round and naked flesh.
"I didn't hear the alarm," she said, her voice thick with the residueof sleep. Her body pressed warm to his as she slid his cigarette fromhis fingers.
He shared the cigarette, thinking of the distance between the bed andthe bathroom. The clock told him he had eight minutes to wait formaximum emission. His physiological chart showed a tolerance of nineand one-third hours.
Eight minutes to wait. Then he would have twenty minutes in which toshower, and fifteen to clothe himself in the shimmering, clingingopaque that, like the casing on a sausage,