He read them and got tears in his eyes and I said hastily, “Look, Father, I’m going to try to come back — I wouldn’t want any other outfit than the Roughnecks. And with you in them … oh, I know it’s disappointing but—”
“It’s not disappointment, Juan.”
“Huh?”
“It’s pride. My boy is going to be an officer. My little Johnnie — Oh, it’s disappointment, too; I had waited for this day. But I can wait a while longer.” He smiled through his tears. “You’ve grown, lad. And filled out, too.”
“Uh, I guess so. But, Father, I’m not an officer yet and I might only be out of the Rog a few days. I mean, they sometimes bust ’em out pretty fast and—”
“Enough of that, young man!”
“Huh?”
“You’ll make it. Let’s have no more talk of ‘busting out.’” Suddenly he smiled. “That’s the first time I’ve been able to tell a sergeant to shut up.”
“Well … I’ll certainly try, Father. And if I do make it, I’ll certainly put in for the old Rog. But—” I trailed off.
“Yes, I know. Your request won’t mean anything unless there’s a billet for you. Never mind. If this hour is all we have, we’ll make the most of it — and I’m so proud of you I’m splitting my seams. How have you been, Johnnie?”
“Oh, fine, just fine.” I was thinking that it wasn’t all bad. He would be better off in the Roughnecks than in any other outfit. All my friends … they’d take care of him, keep him alive. I’d have to send a gram to Ace — Father like as not wouldn’t even let them know he was related. “Father, how long have you been in?”
“A little over a year.”
“And corporal already!”
Father smiled grimly. “They’re making them fast these days.”
I didn’t have to ask what he meant. Casualties. There were always vacancies in the T.O.; you couldn’t get enough trained soldiers to fill them. Instead I said, “Uh … but, Father, you’re — Well, I mean, aren’t you sort of old to be soldiering? I mean the Navy, or Logistics, or—”
“I wanted the M.I. and I got it!” he said emphatically. “And I’m no older than many sergeants — not as old, in fact. Son, the mere fact that I am twenty-two years older than you are doesn’t put me in a wheel chair. And age has its advantages, too.”
Well, there was something in that. I recalled how Sergeant Zim had always tried the older men first, when he was dealing out boot chevrons. And Father would never have goofed in Basic the way I had — no lashes for him. He was probably spotted as non-com material before he ever finished Basic. The Army needs a lot of really grown-up men in the middle grades; it’s a paternalistic organization.
I didn’t have to ask him why he had wanted M.I., nor why or how he had wound up in my ship — I just felt warm about it, more flattered by it than any praise he had ever given me in words. And I didn’t want to ask him why he had joined up; I felt that I knew. Mother. Neither of us had mentioned her — too painful.
So I changed the subject abruptly. “Bring me up to date. Tell me where you’ve been and what you’ve done.”
“Well, I trained at Camp San Martín—”
“Huh? Not Currie?”
“New one. But the same old lumps, I understand. Only they rush you through two months faster, you don’t get Sundays off. Then I requested the Rodger Young—and didn’t get it — and wound up in McSlattery’s Volunteers. A good outfit.”
“Yes, I know.” They had had a reputation for being rough, tough, and nasty — almost as good as the Roughnecks.
“I should say that it was a good outfit. I made several drops with them and some of the boys bought it and after a while I got these.” He glanced at his chevrons. “I was a corporal when we dropped on Sheol—”
“You were there? So was I!” With a sudden warm flood of emotion I felt closer to my father than I ever had before in my life.
“I know. At least I knew your outfit was there. I was about fifty miles north of you, near as I can guess. We soaked up that counterattack when they came boiling up out of the ground like bats out of a cave.” Father shrugged. “So when it was over I was a corporal without an outfit, not enough of us left to make a healthy cadre. So they sent me here. I could have gone with King’s Kodiak Bears, but I had a word with the placement sergeant — and, sure as sunrise, the Rodger Young came back with a billet for a corporal. So here I am.”
“And when did you join up?” I realized that it was the wrong remark as soon as I had made it — but I had to get the subject away from McSlattery’s Volunteers; an orphan from a dead outfit wants to forget it.
Father said quietly, “Shortly after Buenos Aires.”
“Oh. I see.”
Father didn’t say anything for several moments. Then he said softly, “I’m not sure that you do see, Son.”
“Sir?”
“Mmm … it will not be easy to explain. Certainly, losing your mother had a great deal to do with it. But I didn’t enroll to avenge her — even though I had that in mind, too. You had more to do with it—”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Son, I always understood what you were doing better than your mother did — don’t blame her; she never had a chance to know, any more than a bird can understand swimming. And perhaps I knew why you did it, even though I beg to doubt that you knew yourself, at the time. At least half of my anger at you was sheer resentment … that you had actually done something that I knew, buried deep in my heart, I should have done. But you weren’t the cause of my joining up, either … you merely helped trigger it and you did control the service I chose.”
He paused. “I wasn’t in good shape at the time you enrolled. I was seeing my hypnotherapist pretty regularly — you never suspected that, did you?—but we had gotten no farther than a clear recognition that I was enormously dissatisfied. After you left, I took it out on you — but it was not you, and I knew it and my therapist knew it. I suppose I knew that there was real trouble brewing earlier than most; we were invited to bid on military components fully a month before the state of emergency was announced. We had converted almost entirely to war production while you were still in training.
“I felt better during that period, worked to death and too busy to see my therapist. Then I became more troubled than ever.” He smiled. “Son, do you know about civilians?”
“Well … we don’t talk the same language. I know that.”
“Clearly enough put. Do you remember Madame Ruitman? I was on a few days leave after I finished Basic and I went home. I saw some of our friends, said goodby — she among them. She chattered away and said, ‘So you’re really going out? Well, if you reach Faraway, you really must look up my dear friends the Regatos.’
“I told her, as gently as I could, that it seemed unlikely, since the Arachnids had occupied Faraway.
“It didn’t faze her in the least. She said, ‘Oh, that’s all right — they’re civilians!’” Father smiled cynically.
“Yes, I know.”
“But I’m getting ahead of my story. I told you that I was getting still more upset. Your mother’s death released me for what I had to do … even though she and I were closer than most, nevertheless it set me free to do it. I turned the business over to Morales—”
“Old man Morales? Can he handle it?”
“Yes. Because he has to. A lot of us are doing things we didn’t know we could. I gave him a nice chunk of stock — you know the old saying about the kine that tread the grain — and the rest I split two ways, in a trust: half to the Daughters of Charity, half to you whenever you want to go back and take it. If you do. Never mind. I had at last found out what was wrong with me.” He stopped, then said very softly, “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal … but a man.”