Already it is a delightful place, better in many ways for a few days R & R than is most of Terra. In the second place, while it has an awful lot of civilians, more than a million, as civilians go they aren't bad. They know there is a war on. Fully half of them are employed either at the Base or in war industry; the rest raise food and sell it to the Fleet. You might say they have a vested interest in war, but, whatever their reasons, they respect the uniform and don't resent the wearers thereof. Quite the contrary. If an M. I. walks into a shop there, the proprietor calls him "Sir," and really seems to mean it, even while he's trying to sell something worthless at too high a price.
But in the first place, half of those civilians are female.
You have to have been out on a long patrol to appreciate this properly.
You need to have looked forward to your day of guard duty, for the privilege of standing two hours out of each six with your spine against bulkhead thirty and your ears cocked for just the sound of a female voice. I suppose it's actually easier in the all-stag ships... but I'll take the Rodger Young. It's good to know that the ultimate reason you are fighting actually exists and that they are not just a figment of the imagination.
Besides the civilian wonderful 50 per cent, about 40 per cent of the Federal Service people on Sanctuary are female. Add it all up and you've got the most beautiful scenery in the explored universe.
Besides these unsurpassed natural advantages, a great deal has been done artificially to keep R & R from being wasted. Most of the civilians seem to hold two jobs; they've got circles under their eyes from staying up all night to make a service man's leave pleasant. Churchill Road from the Base to the city is lined both sides with enterprises intended to separate painlessly a man from money he really hasn't any use for anyhow, to the pleasant accompaniment of refreshment, entertainment, and music.
If you are able to get past these traps, through having already been bled of all valuta, there are still other places in the city almost as satisfactory (I mean there are girls there, too) which are provided free by a grateful populace—much like the social center in Vancouver, these are, but even more welcome.
Sanctuary, and especially Espiritu Santo, the city, struck me as such an ideal place that I toyed with the notion of asking for my discharge there when my term was up after all, I didn't really care whether my descendants (if any) twenty-five thousand years hence had long green tendrils like everybody else, or just the equipment I had been forced to get by with. That professor type from the Research Station couldn't frighten me with that no radiation scare talk; it seemed to me (from what I could see around me) that the human race had reached its ultimate peak anyhow.
No doubt a gentleman wart hog feels the same way about a lady wart hog but, if so, both of us are very sincere.
There are other opportunities for recreation there, too. I remember with particular pleasure one evening when a table of Roughnecks got into a friendly discussion with a group of Navy men (not from the Rodger Young) seated at the next table. The debate was spirited, a bit noisy, and some Base police came in and broke it up with stun guns just as we were warming to our rebuttal. Nothing came of it, except that we had to pay for the furniture—the Base Commandant takes the position that a man on R & R should be allowed a little freedom as long as he doesn't pick one of the "thirty-one crash landings."
The accommodation barracks are all right, too -- not fancy, but comfortable and the chow line works twenty-five hours a day with civilians doing all the work. No reveille, no taps, you're actually on leave and you don't have to go to the barracks at all. I did, however, as it seemed downright preposterous to spend money on hotels when there was a clean, soft sack free and so many better ways to spend accumulated pay. That extra hour in each day was nice, too, as it meant nine hours solid and the day still untouched—I caught up sack time clear back to Operation Bughouse.
It might as well have been a hotel; Ace and I had a room all to ourselves in visiting non-com quarters. One morning, when R & R was regrettably drawing to a close, I was just turning over about local noon when Ace shook my bed. "On the bounce, soldier! The Bugs are attacking."
I told him what to do with the Bugs.
"Let's hit dirt," he persisted.
