But she had, and it was breaking his heart, because even though he had been noble about insisting on the divorce, he had believed her when she said she could never love any other man.
She did love another man. He was gone only a year, and she…
No, he had been gone three decades now. Maybe it took her ten years before she found another man. Maybe…
“I will have to report this physical response,” said the computer.
“You do whatever you have to,” said Mazer. “What are they going to do, send me to the hospital? Or—I know—they could cancel the mission!”
He calmed down, though—barking at the computer made him feel marginally better. Even though his thoughts raced far beyond the words he was reading, he did read all the other letters, and now he could see hints and overtones. A lot of unexplained references to “we” and “us” in the letters. She wanted him to know.
“Send this to Graff. Tell him I know he broke his word almost as soon as he gave it.”
The answer came back in a moment. “Do you think I don’t know exactly what I sent?”
Did he know? Or had he only just now realized that Kim had slipped a message through, and now Graff was pretending that he knew it all along…
Another message from Graff: “Just heard from your computer that you have had a strong emotional response to the letters. I’m deeply sorry for that. It must be a challenge, to live in the presence of a computer that reports everything you do to us, and then a team of shrinks try to figure out how to respond in order to get the desired result. My own feeling is that if we intend to trust the future of the human race to this man, maybe we ought to tell him everything we know and converse with him like an adult. But my own letters have to be passed through the same panel of shrinks. For instance, they’re letting me tell you about them because they hope that you will come to trust me more by knowing that I don’t like what they do. They’re even letting me tell you this as a further attempt to allow the building of trust through recursive confession of trickery and deception. I bet it’s working, too. You can’t possibly read any secret meanings into this letter.”
What game is he playing? Which parts of his letters are true? The panel of shrinks made sense. The military mind: Find a way to negate your own assets so they fail even before you begin to use them. But if Graff really did let Kim’s admission that she had remarried sneak through, knowing that the shrinks would miss it, then did that mean he was on Mazer’s side? Or that he was merely better than the shrinks at figuring out how to manipulate him?
“You can’t possibly read any secret meanings into this letter,” Graff had said. Did that mean that there was a secret meaning? Mazer read it over again, and now what he said in the third sentence took on another possible meaning. “To live in the presence of a computer that reports everything you do to us.” At first he had read it as if it meant “reports to us everything you do.” But what if he literally meant that the computer would report everything Mazer did to them.
That would mean they had detected his undetectable reprogramming of the computer.
Which would explain the panel of shrinks and the sudden new urgency about finding a replacement for Mazer as commander.
So the cat was out of the bag. But they weren’t going to tell him they knew what he had done, because he was the volatile one who had done something insane and so they couldn’t believe he had a rational purpose and speak to him openly.
He had to let them see him and realize that he was not insane. He had to get control of this situation. And in order to accomplish that, he had to trust Graff to be what he so obviously wanted Mazer to think he was: An ally in the effort to find the best possible commander for the IF when the final campaign finally began.
Mazer looked in the mirror and debated whether to clean up his appearance. There were plenty of insane people who tried, pathetically, to look saner by dressing like regular people. Then again, he had let himself get awfully tangle-haired and he was naked all the time. At least he could wash and dress and try to look like the kind of person that military people could regard with respect.
When he was ready, he rotated into position and told the computer to begin recording his visual for later transmission. He suspected, though, that there would be no point in editing it—the raw recording was what the computer would transmit, since it had obviously reported his earlier reprogramming.
“I have reason to believe that you already know of the change I made in the onboard computer’s programming. Apparently I could take the computer’s navigational system out of your control, but couldn’t keep it from reporting the fact to you. Which suggests that you meant this box to be a prison, but you weren’t very good at it.
“So I will now tell you exactly what you need to know. You—or, by now, your predecessors—refused to believe me when I told them that I was not the right man to command the International Fleet during the final campaign. I was told that there would be a search for an adequate replacement, but I knew better.
“I knew that any ‘search’ would be perfunctory or illusory. You were betting everything on me. However, I also know how the military works. Those who made the decision to rely on me would be long since retired before I came back. And the closer we got to the time of my return, the more the new bureaucracy would dread my arrival. When I got there, I would find myself at the head of a completely unfit military organization whose primary purpose was to prevent me from doing anything that might cost somebody his job. Thus I would be powerless, even if I was retained as a figurehead. And all the pilots who gave up everything they knew and loved on Earth in order to go out and confront the Formics in their own space would be under the actual command of the usual gang of bureaucratic climbers.
“It always takes six months of war and a few dreadful defeats to clear out the deadwood. But we don’t have time for that in this war, any more than we did in the last one. My insubordination fortunately ended things abruptly. This time, though, if we lose any battle then we have lost the war. We will have no second chance. We have no margin of error. We can’t afford to waste time getting rid of you—you, the idiots who are watching me right now, the idiots who are going to let the human race be destroyed in order to preserve your pathetic bureaucratic jobs.
“So I reprogrammed my ship’s navigational program so that I have complete control over it. You can’t override my decision. And my decision is this: I am not coming back. I will not decelerate and turn around. I will keep going on and on.
“My plan was simple. Without me to count on as your future commander, you would have no choice but to search for a new one. Not go through the motions, but really search.
“And I think you must have guessed that this was my plan, because you started letting me get messages from Lieutenant Graff.
“So now I have the problem of trying to make sense of what you’re doing. My guess is that Graff is trained as a shrink. Perhaps he works as an intelligence analyst. My guess is that he is actually very bright and innovative and has got spectacular results at… at something. So you decided to see if he could get me back on track. Only he is exactly the kind of wild man that terrifies you. He’s smarter than you, and so you have to make sure you keep him from getting the power to do anything that looks to you like it might be dangerous. And since everything remotely effective will frighten you, his main project has been figuring out how to get around you in order to establish honest communication between him and me.