A Call to Arms by Robert Sheckley

white and blue lines of longitude and latitude. A neon boy in a Dutch sailor’s cap stood above the globe, holding a can of paint. There was an illusion of motion as the boy tilted the paint can. Red paint spilled out and engulfed the globe. It became a crimson sphere, slightly larger than the sun, which, in Leonard’s memory, was also setting nearby.
    When he was very small, that neon globe had seemed to him a real planet. And the Dutch boy had been a giant of some sort, sinister in spite of his blond hair and sunny smile. The Dutch boy was killing the planet with his can of deadly paint. That was how young Leonard saw it.
    In grade school Leonard had learned of the planet Venus. It was slightly smaller than the Earth, so his teacher had said. Leonard had wondered if it might not be Venus that the boy was covering. And, he surmised, the red paint must be making it hot, because he had learned in school that Venus was too hot to support life. But when he asked, his teacher had assured him his neon planet wasn’t Venus.
    Leonard forgot his questions about the Sherwin-Williams globe after a while, but he continued to think about Venus, became fixed on the idea of going there in his father’s train. When he learned that wasn’t going to be possible, he decided he’d have to find another way.
    Though it wouldn’t take him to another planet, he still rode the train: a thing of power, snorting steam; the slow and then more rapid rise and fall of the pistons; the heavy panting noise of the engine as it turned the massive driveshafts; the slow movement of the steel wheels, the train beginning to come to life, a waking giant, and then moving faster, with irresistible force.
    He came to love that feeling of power, and he wondered if it was anything like the sensation astronauts experienced as they hurtled toward the stars. Wondering turned to desire, and that steered him toward his most coveted goal--a spaceship command.
    But the road that would take him there wouldn’t be an easy one. His parents were killed in a car crash when he was fourteen. Leonard had been at a school-sponsored camp in the Catskills. He had no near relatives, and was too proud to ask help from distant kin, so he dropped out of school and went it alone in New York City. There he learned the bitter truth: that no matter how good people said the economy was, for some, there were no jobs. He couldn’t get work without a work record.
    He couldn’t get a work record without working. So he did a lot of hanging out. He might have gone the way of a lot of kids. You saw them hanging out in the inner cities. Hustling, stealing, robbing stores, but mostly just hanging out. Waiting. Waiting for nothing.
    But then he got his first lucky break--a job as a roustabout and beast of labor on the old City of Birmingham , one of the first spaceships on the Earth-lo-Europa run. All that was required was ceaseless and unremitting slave labor.
    Back in those days, the roustabout was needed to do all the physical stuff, because the various skilled-labor unions didn’t permit their pilots, navigators, or even their cooks to so much as lift a garbage can if that wasn’t called for in their job descriptions.
    That was all very well for the union members, but who was to do the grunt work, all the lifting and heaving, the carrying of wastes to the disposal unit, the endless stowing and restowing of the cargo? All the chores it didn’t pay to automate.
    That was Anderson’s work, and one of the unwritten but very real requirements for the job was that the holder of the job be grateful for the opportunity to kill himself with overwork in only a couple of years.
    Anderson didn’t like the attitudes of the people for whom he labored, but he forced himself to do what was necessary, and even to do it with enthusiasm. He earned a lifetime of experience in that job, learning to motivate himself. He lived through it, and his sheer dogged determination proved instrumental in enabling him