He proceeded then to tell me all these reasons and excuses, in the process of informing me about himself; and if I had been actually interviewing him for purposes of reportage I could have convicted him of his small soul and little worth, out of his own words, a dozen times over. There was a whine to his story as he told it. The real money in soldiering was in work as a mercenary, but all the good mercenary opportunities went either to men of the Friendlies, or the Dorsal. Frane did not have either the guts or the conviction to live the hair-shirt life of even a commissioned officer among the Friendlies. And, of course, the only way anyone could be a Dorsai was to be bora one. That left only garrison work, cadre-work, officering the standby forces of worlds or political areas-only to be shoved aside for the top command posts when war did come, by the mercenaries bom or built and imported for the actual fighting.
And garrison work, needless to say, paid a pittance compared to mercenary wages. A government could sign second-class officer material like Frane to long-term contracts at low salaries and hold them to it. But when the same government wanted mercenaries, it needed mercenaries; and every time it needed mercenaries, then quite naturally those who were in the business of laying their lives on the line for cash, drove hard bargains.
But enough about Commandant Frane, who was not that important. He was a little man who had now convinced himself that he was about to be recognized-in the Interstellar News Services at that-as a potentially big man. Like most of his kind he had a wildly inflated view of the usefulness of publicity in furthering a man’s career. He told me all about himself, he showed me about the positions on the hillside where his men were dug in; and by the time I was ready to leave, I had him reacting like a well-tuned machine to my every suggestion. So, just as I was about to head back behind the lines, I made it- the one real suggestion I had come here to make.
“You know, I’ve just had an idea,” I said, turning back to him. “Battle Headquarters has given me permission to pick out one of the enlisted men to assist me during the rest of the campaign. I was going to pick out one of the men from Headquarters Pool, but you know, it might be better to get one of the men from your Command.”
“One of my men?” He blinked.
“That’s right,” I said. “Then if there’s a request for a follow-up story on you or they want expansion of the original details about the campaign as you’ve seen it here, I could get the information from him. It wouldn’t be practical to chase you all over the battlefield for things like that; otherwise I’d simply have to message back advising that follow-up or expansion wasn’t possible.”
“I see,” he said; and his face cleared. Then he frowned again. “It’ll take a week or two to get a replacement up here so that I can let someone go, though. I don’t see how-”
“Oh, that’s all right,” I said, and fished a paper out of my pocket. ‘ ‘I Ve got authority to pick up anyone I want without waiting for his replacement-if the Commandant lets him go, of course. You’d be a man short for a few days, naturally, but-”
I let him think about it. And for a moment he was thinking-with all the nonsense gone out of his head-just like any other military commander in such a position. All the Commands in this sector were understrength after the last few weeks of battle. Another man out meant a hole in Franc’s line, and he was reacting to the prospect with the conditioned reflexes of any officer in the field.
Then I saw the prospect of promotion and publicity fight its way back to his attention, and the battle was joined in his head.
“Who?” he said at last, almost more to himself than to me. What he was asking himself was where he could best spare someone. But I took him up on it, as if the question had been all for me.
“There’s a boy in your Command called Dave Hall-”
His head came up like a shot. Suspicion leaped into being, plain and short and ugly in his face. There are two ways to deal with suspicion-one is to protest your innocence, the other, and better, is to plead guilty to a lesser charge.
“I noticed his name on the Command roster when I was looking you up at Battle Headquarters, before I came up here to see you,” I said. “To tell the truth, it was one of the reasons I chose”-I emphasized the word a little, so that he shouldn’t miss it-“you for this writeup. He’s a sort of shirt-tail relative of mine, this Dave Hall, and I thought I might as well kill two birds with one stone. The family’s been after me to do something for the boy.”
Frane stared at me.
“Of course,” I said, “I know you’re short-handed. If he’s that valuable to you-”
If he’s that valuable to you, my tone of voice hinted, / won’t think of arguing that you give him up. On the other hand, I’m the man who’s going to be writing you up as a hero-type for the sixteen worlds to read, and if I sit down to my vocoder feeling you could have released my relative from the front lines, and didn V-
He got the message.
“Who? Hall?” he said. “No, I can spare him, all right.” He turned to his command post and barked, “Runner! Get Hall in here-full pack, weapons and equipment, ready to move out.”
Frane turned back to me as the runner left.
“Take about five minutes to get him ready and up here,” he said.
It took closer to ten. But I didn’t mind waiting. Twelve minutes later, with our Groupman guide, we were on our way back to Battle Headquarters, Dave and I.
CHAPTER 6
Dave had never seen me before, of course. But Ei-leen must have described me, and it was plain he recognized my name the minute the Commandant turned him over to me. At that, though, he had sense enough not to ask me any foolish questions until we had made it back to Battle Headquarters and gotten rid of that Groupman guiding us.
As a result I had a chance to study him myself on the way in. He did not assay too highly on my first examination of him. He was smaller than I, and looked a good deal younger than the difference in our ages should have made him. He had one of those round, open faces under taffy-colored hair which seem to look boyish right up into middle age. About the only thing that I could see that he seemed to have in common with my sister was a sort of inborn innocence and gentleness-that innocence and gentleness of weak creatures who know they are too weak to fight for their rights and win, and so try to make the best of it by the willingness of their dependence on the good will of others.
Or maybe I was being harsh. I was no denizen of the sheepfold myself. You would rather find me outside, slinking along the fence and cocking a thoughtful eye at the inmates.
But it is true, Dave seemed nothing great to me as far as appearance and character were concerned. I do not think, either, that he was any great shakes mentally. He had been an ordinary programmer when Eileen had married him; and he had worked part time, and she full time, these last five years trying to get him through a Cassidan University schedule in shift mechanics. He had had three years yet of work to go when he fell below the seventy-percentile median on a competitive examination. It was his bad luck that this should happen just at that moment when Cassida was raising its levies for sale to New Earth in the present campaign to put down the North Par-titioh rebels. Away he went, in uniform.
You might think that Eileen had immediately appealed to me for help. No such thing-though the fact that she had not, puzzled me, when I finally heard of it. Though it should not have. She told me, eventually, and the telling stripped my soul and left its bare bones for the winds of rage and madness to howl through. But that was later. Actually, the way I found out about Dave going with the levies for New Earth was because our uncle Mathias, quietly and unexpectedly, died; and I was required to get in touch with Eileen on Cassida about the estate.
Her small share of the estate (contemptuously, even sneeringly, Mathias had left the bulk of his considerable fortune to The Final Encyclopedia Project as testimony that he thought any project concerning Earth and Earthmen so futile that no help could make it succeed) was no use to her unless I could make a private deal for her with some Earth-working Cassi-dan who had a family back on Cassida. Only governments or great organizations could translate planetary wealth into the human work-contracts that were actually transferable from one world to another. It was so that I learned that Dave had already left her and his native world for the ruckus on New Earth.