“Perfectly reasonable,” said Heller. “Bad enough to have a chemical weapon already without its being defective. Must be an awful army.”
“Oh, it is, it is,” said Bang-Bang. “Dogfaces. Anyway, then you came to the swamp and no ropes to get over it so I had to make up your mind for you and I hope I did right.
“Some Regular Army lieutenant with glasses noticed it was your senior year and noticed in your prior military training at Saint Lee’s that you’d never indicated preference for branch of service. Well, I hedged. But he said the classroom work in your senior year depended on it and you had to choose. And so he handed me a long list.
“Well, kid, I knew you didn’t want to dig latrines, so the infantry is out. And I didn’t want some dumb army jerk pulling a lanyard on a 155 when your head was in the barrel, so the artillery is out. And these days, all tanks is good for is to get burned up in, so that’s out. I knew that you, like me, hated MPs, so that’s out. When I finished the list, it left only one thing. I hope you will like it. G-2.”
“What’s that?”
“Intelligence. Spies! It seemed to sort of fit my job right now — a Marine infiltrating the Army. So I knew it would make you feel good, too.”
I didn’t feel good. I reeled!
Bang-Bang got to the books and pamphlets in the mountain. They were marked Restricted and Confidential and Secret.
“Look at this one,” said Bang-Bang. “‘Codes, Ciphers and Cryptography.’ ‘How to Talk Secret.’ Look at these things. ‘How to Train Spies.’ ‘How to Sneak Somebody Back of the Enemy Lines to Poison the Water.’ ‘How to Seduce the Wife of the Enemy General and Get Her to Give You Tomorrow’s Battle Plans.’ Good, solid stuff! And look at the number of these manuals. Dozens! ‘How to Tail a Russian Agent.’ ‘How to Select Sensitive Targets to Destroy Industrial Capacity.’ Good, solid stuff, kid!”
“Let me see those.” And he got hold of one about blowing up trains. And then another about the art of infiltration. Heller started to laugh.
“Are you pleased, kid?”
“Fantastic,” said Heller.
“Oh, I’m glad you’re pleased, kid. I just thought I was being a little bit selfish. You see, it makes me feel less degraded.”
Bang-Bang recovered his USMC fatigue cap and put it on. Then he got an Army fatigue cap and put it on over it, hiding the Marine one.
Then Bang-Bang got down on all fours and crept to the other side of the tree and peered out with exaggerated care. He was clowning!
“Spies,” said Bang-Bang. “A Marine spying on the Army! Get it, kid?”
Heller was laughing. He was laughing very hard. But I knew he wasn’t laughing at the same thing Bang-Bang was.
Suddenly I knew how Izzy Epstein must have felt when the catastrophe he had dreaded struck. This Earth espionage technology was probably pretty crude. But it was espionage technology. It would make my job so much harder!
I hastily wrote another dispatch to the New York office repeating my earlier order to find Raht and Terb and promising torture along with extinction if they didn’t comply! Heller had to be stopped!
Chapter 3
About the only thing different about Friday was that they had a different command post and iced soft drinks in a bucket!
What a way to go to college! Lying around on the lawn, watching the girls go by. Well, it was Bang-Bang who did most of the girl watching. Heller was getting caught up on grammar school and high school and college. But Bang-Bang did enough girl watching for both of them. Still, what an idyllic scene. How pastoral! Disgusting!
Saturday, however, was different. Bang-Bang had disappeared somewhere, some muttering about drilling. But Heller reported to some hall and began to take “counselling examinations” to determine which subjects and what part of them he should be tutored on.
I had slept late and when I did the scan through, I simply ignored his rapid pen movements on the exams he was doing. He is always showing off. I sped straight through to an interview he was having with some assistant dean.
“Agnes,” the assistant dean was calling over his shoulder. “Are you sure that marking machine is in repair?”
A voice floated back. “Yes, Mr. Bosh. It has been flunking its quota all morning.”
Mr. Bosh, an intense-eyed young man, fiddled with the big stack of completed exam papers he had and then looked at Heller. “There must be some mistake here. Your grade transcript said these were all D average and these exams are A average.” A very severe glint came in his eye. “There is something unexplained here, Wister.”
“Sometimes students have been known to date the wrong somebody’s daughter,” said Heller.
Mr. Bosh sat up straight and then beamed. “Of course, of course. I should have thought of that. Happens all the time!”
Chuckling to himself, he bundled the exam papers up and marked them To be microfilmed for student’s file.
“Well, Wister, all I can say is, you’re off the hook. There are no weak spots here to be tutored, so we will simply mark that completed in your admission requirements. All right?”
“Thank you very much,” said Heller.
Mr. Bosh leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Tell me, just off the record, you didn’t knock her up, did you?”
Heller leaned over and whispered, “Well, I’m here for my senior year, aren’t I?”
Mr. Bosh went into howls of laughter. “I knew it, I knew it! Oh, priceless!” And with great camaraderie, he shook Heller’s hand and that was that.
There was something in Bosh’s attitude that irritated me. Possibly the way he was beaming at Heller. There was nothing that remarkable about Heller’s passing: he had had several days and several long evenings in the lobby to review those subjects and, to him, it must have been a sort of ethnological study of how some primitive might view these things. There was nothing remarkable at all about a postgraduate combat engineer of the Voltarian Fleet passing a few lousy kiddie subjects like perverted quantum mechanics. It made me quite cross, really. Spoiled my faith in these Earth people — not that I’d ever had any. Just riffraff.
I walked around the yard for a while. Two of the children were picking grapes and I accused them of eating more than they picked and after I’d gotten them crying real good, kicked them and felt better.
I called the taxi driver and wanted to know when the Hells he was going to complete delivery of Utanc and he told me it was all on schedule. That made me feel a lot better. Watching that (bleeper) Heller being whistled into his room every night by gorgeous women had been getting to me more than I had admitted. And that I never actually saw him doing anything with them made it even worse! One’s imagination runs riot sometimes!
Only the possible early arrival of Utanc gave me morale enough to go back and watch what was happening around Heller. But all he was doing was trotting around a track in a running suit, not even making good time. He stopped and watched a football squad being mustered up, apparently lost interest and resumed his running. How can anybody just run for a couple of hours? What do they think about?
I went outside again, and after a long delay in locating him, talked on the phone to the hospital contractor who said the earth-moving was almost finished, the water, electrical and sewage ready to place and he’d be into pouring foundations tomorrow. So I couldn’t find anything to rag him about beyond being at the building site working when I was trying to call him.