"It's not time," he snapped. He was angry that Rufus's gibe took him in for a moment. "Anyway, a few minutes aren't a big deal. Since when did you ever get to your first class on time?"
"We're here now, Brainard, baby," Kohl said in a lugubrious voice. "Seeing our buddy off. Pallbearers at your funeral, that's what we are."
"If he doesn't come to his senses," said Price. "Hey Rufe? Pass me the bottle if soldier boy doesn't want it."
"Hey, look at this one," Lilly said as he switched the chip in his hologram projector.
The image of a tracked vehicle seared the jungle with a rod of flame. As soon as the flamethrower shut off, two armored bulldozers snarled in to clear the gap before it could regrow. Despite the bath of fire, vines lifted and slashed until the dozer blades or crushing treads managed to sever them.
One of the bulldozers broke through the vines into a fifty-foot circle of sand. The driver started to back away. The surface lurched. The bulldozer sank to the top of its treads.
A armored recovery vehicle roared to life. Its path was blocked by the self-propelled plows which tore through the surface layers behind the bulldozers and injected herbicides into the cuts.
The stricken bulldozer lurched again and tilted forward. The engine compartment sank completely beneath the surface. The treads still rotated in reverse, but they could not bite on the loose sand.
The hatch at the rear of the cab flew open. The driver climbed onto the mounting ladder and poised there. Firm ground was twenty feet away.
The bulldozer shuddered. It began to slide downward as swiftly as a submarine which has vented its ballast. Two jointed, hairy arms as thick as treetrunks reached up from the center of the clearing and pulled the vehicle deeper.
The driver leaped desperately. He landed on the agitated sand. As the bulldozer slipped beneath the surface, its turbulence dragged the man along with it.
The image went blank. Lilly put another chip into the projector. "And that's just land-clearing!" he said gleefully. "You're gonna have people shooting at you besides!"
He'd lifted the chips from the library of Iowa Technical School, where he was completing work in biology. In a year, Lilly would sit glassy-eyed in a chair while his computer plotted plankton patterns onto charts—
Which might be transmitted to the netters—
Which would ignore the charts in favor of continuing their plodding progress across the fishing grounds, stolid in the certainty that any slight gains would be offset by time lost in departing from the preset pattern.
All five of the youths were students . . . except for Rufus and for Brainard, who had just received their two-year degrees.
Brainard swallowed and looked across the slidewalk to the recruiting office. It was still closed, a massively-armored portal as forbidding as a bank vault. Mercenary recruiters were frequent targets of mob violence, both because of what they were and because they were different from the normal round of life in the keeps.
For that matter, the mob didn't need much of a reason to riot.
"Here's one for you, Brainard," Lilly said as he loaded another chip. "Take a look at this!"
Some Free Companies maintained recruiting offices in one or two of the Keeps by whom those companies were frequently hired. Wysocki's Herd, the Seatigers, and the Battlestars shared choice locations on a rotating basis in more than a dozen of the undersea domes. This technique spread the three companies' recruiting base and advertised their wares to the upper levels of keep society: the men who made decisions on war, peace, and hiring.
Brainard thought the recruiter for Wysocki's Herd was on duty in Iowa Keep this week, but he wasn't sure.
And it didn't really matter.
"Back in the Settlement Period, they planned to colonize the surface," said Kline, the other biotechnician. "Nothing came of it."
"Earth came of it," Kohl snorted. "People blowing themselves all up. Hey Rufe—how about some more of that punch."
"Hey, you guys. Look at this. It's a neat one."
"Dead soldier," said Rufus, turning the bottle upside down. The drop that formed on the rim did not fall.
"We got beer left in the cooler," Kohl offered. He spun the lid open.
The hologram hanging above the middle of the circle was of a lifeboat, bright yellow and seemingly empty. It bobbed as the sea's glassy surface swelled slowly, then subsided. The boat's image enlarged as the camera closed in.
"That didn't really affect things," Kline said. "The Holocaust, I mean. The surface colonies were supposed to be sent from the Keeps, not Earth. They just weren't. Too big an effort, I guess."
The lifeboat filled the holographic field. The camera was positioned above the little vessel, looking straight down. It seemed to be empty until the cameraman increased magnification still further.