And that, thought Mazer, is the end of that.
The answer did not come for more than three hours. What was that, a month back on Earth?
“Who is it from?” asked Mazer, knowing perfectly well who it would turn out to be. So the boy had taken his time before pushing the matters. Time enough to learn how impossible his task was? Probably not.
Mazer was sitting on the toilet—which, thanks to the Formics’ gravitic technology, was a standard gravity-dependent chemical model. Mazer was one of the few still in the service who remembered the days of air-suction toilets in weightless spaceships, which worked about half the time. That was the era when ship captains would sometimes be cashiered for wasting fuel by accelerating their ships just so they could take a dump that would actually get pulled away from their backside by something like gravity.
“Lieutenant Hyrum Graff.”
And now he had the pestiferous Hyrum Graff, who would probably be even more annoying than null-g toilets.
“Erase it.”
“I am not allowed to erase ansible communications,” said the female voice blandly. It was always bland, of course, but it felt particularly bland when saying irritating things.
I could make you erase it, if I wanted to go to the trouble of reprogramming you. But Mazer didn’t say it, in case it might alert the program safeguards in some way. “Read it.”
“Male voice?”
“Female,” snapped Mazer.
“Admiral Rackham, I’m not sure you understood the gravity of our situation. We have two possibilities: Either we will identify the best possible commanders for our war against the Formics, or we will have you as our commander. So either you will help us identify the traits that are most likely to be present in the ideal commander, or you will be the commander on whom all the responsibility rests.”
“I understand that, you little twit,” said Mazer. “I understood it before you were born.”
“Would you like me to take down your remarks as a reply?” asked the computer.
“Just read it and ignore my carping.”
The computer returned to the message from Lieutenant Graff. “I have located your wife and children. They are all in good health, and it may be that some or all of them might be glad of an opportunity to converse with you by ansible, if you so desire. I offer this, not as bribe for your cooperation, but as a reminder, perhaps, that more is at stake here than the importunities of an upstart lieutenant pestering an admiral and a war hero on a voyage into the future.”
Mazer roared out his answer. “As if I had need of reminders from you!”
“Would you like me to take down your remarks as—”
“I’d like you to shut yourself down and leave me in—”
“A reply?” finished the computer, ignoring his carping.
“Peace!” Mazer sighed. “Take down this answer: I’m divorced, and my ex-wife and children have made their lives without me. To them I’m dead. It’s despicable for you to attempt to raise me from the grave to burden their lives. When I tell you that I have nothing to tell you about command it’s because I truly do not know any answers that you could possibly implement.
“I’m desperate for you to find a replacement for me, but in all my experience in the military, I saw no example of the kind of commander that we need. So figure it out for yourself—I haven’t any idea.”
For a moment he allowed his anger to flare. “And leave my family out of it, you contemptible…”
Then he decided not to flame the poor git. “Delete everything after ‘leave my family out of it.’”
“Do you wish me to read it back to you?”
“I’m on the toilet!”
Since his answer was nonresponsive, the computer repeated the question verbatim.
“No. Just send it. I don’t want to have the zealous Lieutenant Graff wait an extra hour or day just so I can turn my letter into a prize-winning school essay.”
But Graff’s question nagged at him. What should they look for in a commander?
What did it matter? As soon as they developed a list of desirable traits, all the bureaucratic buttsniffs would immediately figure out how to fake having them, and they’d be right back where they started, with the best bureaucrats at the top of every military hierarchy, and all the genuinely brilliant leaders either discharged or demoralized.
The way I was demoralized, piloting a barely-armed supply ship in the rear echelons of our formation.
Which was in itself a mark of the stupidity of our commanders—the fact that they thought there could be such a thing as a “rear echelon” during a war in three-dimensional space.
There might have been dozens of men who could have seen what I saw—the point of vulnerability in the Formics’ formation—but they had long since left the service. The only reason I was there was because I couldn’t afford to quit before vesting in my pension. So I put up with spiteful commanders who would punish me for being a better officer than they would ever be. I took the abuse, the contempt, and so there I was piloting a ship with only two weapons—slow missiles at that.
Turned out I only needed one.
But who could have predicted that I’d be there, that I’d see what I saw, and that I’d commit career suicide by firing my missiles against orders—and then I’d turn out to be right? What process can test for that? Might as well resort to prayer—either God is looking out for the human race or he doesn’t care. If he cares, then we’ll go on surviving despite our stupidity. If he doesn’t, then we won’t.
In a universe that works like that, any attempt to identify in advance the traits of great commanders is utterly wasted.
“Incoming visuals,” said the computer.
Mazer looked down at his desk screen, where he had jotted:
Desperation
Intuition (test for that, sucker!)
Tolerance for the orders of fools.
Borderline—insane sense of personal mission.
Yeah, that’s the list Graff’s hoping I’ll send him.
And now the boy was sending him visuals. Who approved that?
But the head that flickered in the holospace above his desk wasn’t an eagerbeaver young lieutenant. It was a young woman with light-colored hair like her mother’s and only a few traces of her father’s part-Maori appearance. But the traces were there, and she was beautiful.
“Stop,” said Mazer.
“I am required to show you—”
“This is personal. This is an intrusion.”
“—all ansible communications.”
“Later.”
“This is a visual and therefore has high priority. Sufficient ansible bandwidth for full motion visuals will only be used for communications of the—”
Mazer gave up. “Just play it.”
“Father,” said the young woman in the holospace.
Mazer looked away from her, reflexively hiding his face, though of course she couldn’t see him anyway. His daughter Pai Mahutanga. When he last saw her, she was a tree-climbing five-year-old. She used to have nightmares, but with her father always on duty with the fleet, there was no one to drive away the bad dreams.
“I brought your grandchildren with me,” she was saying. “Pahu Rangi hasn’t found a woman yet who will let him reproduce.” She grinned wickedly at someone out of frame. Her brother. Mazer’s son. Just a baby, conceived on his last leave before the final battle.
“We’ve told the children all about you. I know you can’t see them all at once, but if they each come into frame with me for just a few moments—it’s so generous of them to let me—