 What realization do you think Wayne might have had after his journey?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Wayne, unseen, sneered down from the head of the stairs. His slim mother with nervously polite smiles and voice fluttering, assuring the old man by her frailty that he was big in the world. They were squareheads one and all, marking moron time in a gray dream. School over, waiting for the draft and all. You got to remember about all these dangerous repressed impulses piling up with nowhere to go, like they say. What do we know about adolescent trauma and like that? Squareheads going around either unconscious or with eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire into limbo. One thing—when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his punkie origins in teeveeland. So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone waiting for the breakout call from HQ. "What, son?" his old man said uneasily. "If you wanta walk. He was still laughing as he whoomed the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp onto the Freeway. He strode under a sign reading Public Youth Center No. 947 and walked casually to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork. Draft call." He wrote on a slip of paper, handed the pass to Wayne. "Thanks, sarge dear," Wayne said and took the elevator up to the Armory. Finally he said, "So make up your mind, bud. It's a big city and you're starting late. You can get a cat, not a mouse, and some babes are clever hellcats in a dark alley." "A corporal with no hair and still a counterboy. The corporal waddled back with the revolver and the switchblade disguised in a leather comb case. He checked them on a receipt ledger, while Wayne examined the weapons, broke open the revolver, twirled the cylinder and pushed cartridges into the waiting chamber. He slipped the knife from the comb case, flicked open the blade and stared at its gleam in the buttery light as his mouth went dry and the refracted incandescence of it trickled on his brain like melted ice, exciting and scary. He slung the holster under his left armpit and tested the spring clip release several times, feeling the way the serrated butt dropped into his wet palm.
 He realized he did not have the emotional strength he thought he had to complete the mission.
 He realized he did not have the emotional strength he thought he had to complete the mission.  He realized that Captain Jack had set him up to make him regret the draft call.  He realized that his parents are to blame for his weaknesses.  He realized that he was emotionally strong enough for the mission, but it was still too gruesome for him.