Free The Müller-Fokker Effect by John Sladek

rectangles, each in turn composed of four marching lines of ten children each. One was Spot. He could be easily singled out, had anyone been looking, as the one who changed step every four or five paces, and always unsuccessfully. No one, however, was looking.
    Fouts suppressed a yawn. ‘What are your plans, General?’
    ‘I’m supposed to command a new outfit, X Forces, but I don’t know any more about it than you do. All I know is, we assemble in Florida and await orders from the Pentagon. From that gentleman soldier, General Weimarauner.’ He grimaced. ‘Keep all that under your hat, of course.’
    ‘Of course.’
    The general turned his toothless profile to watch the kids. ‘These boys are pretty easy to handle. About all you have to do is drill the heck out of them and keep them from playing with themselves.’
    Rocky considered playing with oneself sinful, weakening, deleterious to physical and mental health, and probably the main cause of syphilis, so-called ‘thalidomide babies’, divorce and losing battles.
    Accordingly he forbade solitary showers, toilet doors, single rooms, photographs of any females except mothers, lectures in human biology, dirty jokes, obscene language and possession of any object that might conceivably be used in masturbation. Shower and toilet time were strictly limited, and touching one’s own unclothed body minimized.
    Most jacking off, therefore, went on in the library at study time. Nearly every cadet who was old enough jazzed the bottom of a table while staring blankly at
The Rise of the Dutch Republic
or Herodotus.
    The library was a large drafty room dominated by Rocky’s favorite picture, a painting of Galahad inscribed:
    My strength is as the strength of ten
    Because my heart is pure
     
    ‘Another thing,’ said the general. ‘Watch out for letters home. Censor them. Remember, parents magnify the slightest complaint.’
    Fouts jutted his chin in a tight-collar gesture. ‘But don’t the parents wonder when they get a blacked-out letter?’
    ‘I didn’t mean like military censorship. I meant, if you get a letter that isn’t right, throw it out. I’ve had one kid here writing three letters a week
begging
his mother to take him home. Well, naturally,
that
kind of thing…’
    ‘Naturally, sir. I don’t believe in coddling America’s next generation of fighting men.’
    Wes Davis thought she was just about the whitest woman he’d ever seen. There seemed to be a special message for him alone in the way she held up a slip and said, ‘DRIX just
eats
dirt! Your white undies will be whiter than Heaven knows!’
    One of the other prisoners in the recreation lounge made the mistake of saying something about getting in her undies. It took a guard and three trustees to pull Wes off him.
    Later Wes calmed himself enough to read his cellmate a little of the book he was working on:
    ‘The difference between a nigro and us is like between a skyscraper and a mud hut or a moon rocket and a spear, or God Almighty and a wood baboon. If you wanted a computer, who would you go to a black African country or our Great Nation? If you wanted a constitution a painting or a poem who would you ask some black savage with a bone through his nose or a white man like Tom Jefferson, Norm Rockwell or Ed Guest? Can we go on listening to the syphilitic Europeans and Communist junky perverts who insist the nigro is our equal? He is not our equal because he is not even human!
    ‘What human could live the way the colored do in Harlem—six or ten to a room? And in Calcutta and Tokyo even more! What human could work for the wages of a black in South Africa—$10 a month! And how about savage rhythm music and cannibalism?
    ‘Let’s look at some of the nigros’ heroes. George Washington Carver introduced the peanut, a plant whose vines soon killed off the cotton and made land worthless! Peanut vines wrapped themselves around the great heart of the South, choking her to death!’
    ‘By God, Wes, I