"Right,goodthinking,"Buntzsaid."Andif there's not time,we'll make time. Nothing's going to happen that can't wait another half hour."
Herod carried a roll of structural plastic sheeting. Cut and glued to the inside of the plenum chamber, it'd seal the holes till base maintenance welded permanent patches in place. Unless the Brotherhood had shot away all the duffle on the back deck, of course, in which case they'd borrow sheeting from another of the vehicles. It wouldn't be the first time Buntz'd had to replace his personal kit, either.
They were within two klicks of the Government firebase. Even if they'd been farther, a bulldozed surface was a lot better to work on. Out here you were likely to find you'd set down on brambles or a nest of stinging insects when you crawled into the plenum chamber.
As Lahti drove sedately toward the firebase, Buntz opened his hatch and stuck his head out. He felt dizzy for a moment. That was reaction, he supposed, not the change from chemical residues to open air.
Sometimes the breeze drifted a hot reminder of the battle past Buntz' face. The main gun had cooled to rainbow-patterned gray, but heat waves still shimmered above the barrel.
Lahti was idling up the resupply route into the firebase, an unsurfaced track that meandered along the low ground. It'd have become a morass when it rained, but that didn't matter any longer.
There was no wire or berm, just the circle of bunkers. Half of them were now collapsed. The Government troops had been playing at war; to the Brotherhood as to the Slammers, killing was a business.
Lahti halted them between two undamaged bunkers at the south entrance. Truck wheels had rutted the soil here. There was flatter ground within the encampment, but she didn't want to crush the bodies in the way.
Buntz'd probably have ordered his driver to stop even if she'd had different ideas. Sure, they were just bodies; he'd seen his share and more of them since he'd enlisted. But they could patch Herod where they were, so that's what they'd do.
Lahti was clambering out her hatch. Buntz made sure that the Automatic Defense Array was shut off, then climbed onto the back deck. He was carrying the first aid kit, not that he expected to accomplish much with it.
It bothered him that he and Lahti both were out of Herod in case something happened, but nothing was going to happen. Anyway, the tribarrel was still in air-defense mode. He bent to cut the ties holding the roll of sheeting.
"Hey Top?" Lahti called. Buntz looked at her over his shoulder. She was pointing to the nearest bodies. The Government troops must've been running from the bunkers when the first mortar shells scythed them down.
"Yeah, what you got?" Buntz said.
"These guys," Lahti said. "Remember the recruiting rally? This is them, right?"
Buntz looked more carefully. "Yeah, you're right," he said.
That pair must be the deCastro brothers, one face-up and the other facedown. They'd both lost their legs at mid-thigh. Buntz couldn't recall the name of the guy just behind them, but he was the henpecked little fellow who'd been dodging his wife. Well, he'd dodged her for good. And the woman with all her clothes blown off; not a mark on her except she was dead. The whole Quinta County draft must've been assigned here.
He grimaced. They'd been responsible for a major victory over the rebels, according to one way of thinking.
Buntz shoved the roll of sheeting to the ground. "Can you handle this yourself,Lahti?" he said.He gestured with the first aid kit."I can't do a lot,but I'd like to try."
The driver shrugged. "Sure, Top," she said. "If you want to."
Recorded music was playing from one of the bunkers. Buntz' memory supplied the words: "Arise, children of the fatherland! The day of glory has arrived . . . ."
AFTERWORD: WHAT'S FOR SALE
Samuel Johnson apparently meant (and lived by) his statement, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." It disturbed Boswell a great deal to admit that, and of course the opinion isn't really defensible unless you define "blockhead" as, "Anybody who isn't Samuel Johnson." (I've read a lot of Dr. Johnson's writings. It's quite possible that he would've agreed with that definition.)
What most people mean when they quote Johnson is a different thing,though: "Money alone is a sufficient reason to write."
That statement is very easy to support. After all, people dig ditches because they'll be paid for doing so. People drive buses because they'll be paid for doing so. Why on Earth shouldn't people write books just because they'll get money when they turn the books in?
The funny thing is,I've never written simply for the money.(I have dug ditches, driven buses, mucked out a cow yard, and done any number of more unpleasant and less remunerative things than writing.)
Let me make explicit the limitations of that statement: I mean only the words themselves. I'm not implying I feel any sort of moral repugnance toward the practice of writing to order, nor am I suggesting that I'm superior as a man or as a writer to people who've made other decisions.
Furthermore, I am absolutely a commercial writer. I want my work to be read by the widest possible audience, and I want to get paid for that work. (Usually I do get paid, but I don't agree with Johnson: I've donated both fiction and nonfiction to causes which I believe in.)
It wasn't until I'd written an essay explaining why I continued to write when nobody would buy my fiction that it occurred to me to ask the opposite question: Why had I refused commissions to write things which were well within my skill set? The answer to the first was that I wrote as therapy, keeping myself between the ditches mentally after my return from Viet Nam. That realization gave me a point from which to attack the puzzle.
A fact of life in publishing is that the people hired to write media tie-ins, series novels, and similar projects, all have some stature. The only complete beginners involved are fans so heavily steeped in a fictional milieu (for example, Star Trek or Darkover) that their specialized knowledge gives them status.
My first experience of this came at a convention in 1978, just after I'd sold my first two books (but before they'd come out). Jim Baen, who as SF editor of Ace Books had bought Hammer's Slammers, began chatting to me about a great new project: he'd gotten the rights to Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan and had hired Spider Robinson to update it. Jim had then bought a case of beer for a pair of very successful writers and taken notes while they noodled about the direction further Buck Rogers novels should go. All that he needed now was a writer to turn those plot notes into books.
I pretended I didn't know that I was being offered the job. I was (I asked Jim many years later, just to be sure), and I knew that at the time.
It wasn't even that I was offended by the material. I'd read the title novella which formed the first half of the book (it wasn't for a few years that I found the second half, The Airlords of Han) and was impressed by the way Nowlan had built on his presumption that war in the twenty-fifth century would be along the lines of World War I.
But I didn't feel like writing Buck Rogers novels. It was really that simple. (Incidentally, the pay would've been even less than the $2,500 Jim had given me for Hammer's Slammers, but at the time I didn't know that or care.)