anybody who can saw off a leg – meaning me. If this is the only way I can fight the
Huns, then this is what I’ll do -1 owe that to Ted Bronson. Understand me, sir?’
‘I quite understand.’
`How soon can you put somebody else here to watch the youngsters?’
I could hear both sides, so I took the phone. `Father, Brian can’t come home now but
I can. Although I may be able to put Betty Lou there in my place even quicker.
Either way, you can go ahead with your plans. But, Father, listen to me. You take
care of yourself! Do you hear me?’
`I’ll be careful, daughter.’
`Please do so, please! I’m proud of you, sir. And Theodore is proud of you, too. I
know.’
`I shall try hard to make both you and Ted proud of me, Maureen.’
I said goodbye quickly and hung up before my voice broke. Briney was looking
thoughtful. ‘I’ll Nave to get busy right away and correct my age with the Army. Or
they might start saying that I am too old.’
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`Briney! Surely you don’t expect to convince the Army that you are your Howard age?
‘they have years and years of records on you.’
`Oh, I wouldn’t try to sell the Adjutant-General my Howard age. Although I don’t
think I look any older than the forty-six it says on my driver’s licence. I mean
that I want to correct the little white lie I told in 1898, when I was actually
fourteen but swore that I was twenty-one so that they would let me enlist.’
`Fourteen indeed! You were a senior at Rolla.’
`I was precocious, just like our children. Yes, dearest, I was a senior at Rolla in
’98. But there is nobody left in the War Department who knows that. And nobody is
likely to tell them. Maureen, a reserve colonel fifty-six years old is a lot more
likely to be ordered to duty than one who is sixty-three. About one hundred per cent
more likely.’
I’m using a Time agent’s field recorder keyed to my voice and concealed in a body
cavity. No, no, not concealed in the tunnel of love; that would not do, as Time
agents aren’t nuns and are not expected to be. I mean an artificial cavity about
where my gall bladder used to be. This gadget is supposed to be good for a thousand
hours and I hope it is working properly because, if these spooks scrag me – better
make that when they scrag me – I hope that Pixel can lead somebody to my corpse and
thereby let the Time Corps retrieve the record. I want the Circle to understand what
I was trying to do. I should have done it openly, I suppose, but Lazarus would have
grabbed it away from me. I have perfect hindsight – not so good in the other
direction.
Brian did manage to ‘correct’ his War Department age, simply because his general
wanted him. But he did not manage to get himself ordered to a combat command.
Instead combat came to him – he was holding down a desk at the Presidio and we were
living in an old mansion on Nob Hill when the Japanese pulled their sneak attack on
San Francisco, 7 December 1941.
It is an odd feeling to look up into the sky, see planes overhead, feel their
engines deep in your bones, see their bellies give birth to bombs, and know that it
is too late to run, too late to hide, and that you have no control whatever over
where those bombs will hit – on you or on houses a block away. The feeling was not
terror; it was more a sense of déja vu, as if I had been there a thousand times
before. I don’t care to feel it again but I know why warriors (real ones, not wimps
in uniform) always seek combat assignments, not desk jobs. It is in the presence of
death that one lives most intensely. `Better one crowded hour of life -‘
I have read that in time line three this sneak attack was made on Hawaii, not San