“Jampad, sir,” responded the captain, making no move to assist Fitz.
“That’s it. Imagine if we’d had to fight off another bunch of damned aliens? Go on, Major. Get on your bike. Leave that folder with Daisy on your way out.”
“Sir.” Fitz hated to beg. But there were men, rats and bats he’d fought beside, whose lives were riding on this. “Please read it, sir.”
The general sighed. “I’ll get Hargreaves to read it and give me a summary. But, Major, stop deluding yourself that you have a grasp of military strategy. You should do some reading on the subject. We have excellent field officers to deal with little troop movements. Chaps like Brigadier Charlesworth, who was here just before you came in. People with more know-how about tactics and strategy in their pinkie fingers than you have in your whole body.”
“Very well. I’ll do some reading, sir,” said the major, in the flat even tone that might have made wiser men than the general wary.
But, a small part of his mind reasoned: The useless bastard might just have hit on something. Someone, somewhere must have had to deal with this situation before. And thinking about that beat thinking about that stupid son of bitch, Charlesworth. The brigadier, according to one of the analyses of losses in that folder, was possibly the worst commander on the front. And that was out of an amazing collection of incompetents.
“Do that. Now get along with you.”
And Major Conrad Fitzhugh had to obey.
On the way past he put the folder on the general’s receptionist’s desk. She chewed gum at him.
* * *
“‘Tis exactly as I said.” The rat in his magazine pocket didn’t even stick her nose out. “We’ll have to do it my way.”
“There has got to be another alternative,” said Fitz grimly. “Sure, we’d get away with it—once.”
“Well, I am still going to sneak in tonight and piss in his whiskey decanter. Try and stop me.”
The scarring had done all sorts of things to Fitzhugh’s facial muscles. When he smiled now, he looked like an incoming shark. He didn’t smile often. It tended to frighten the hell out of people. The two idling typists in the corridor suddenly found good reason to get back to work. “I could withhold your chocolate.”
A loud sniff came from his pocket. “You don’t love me anymore.”
Fitz raised his eyes to heaven. Inescapable female logic! Still, since she’d lost her tail, Ariel needed constant reassurance. “Of course I do.”
“Then I want chocolate. Now.”
“You’ll have to settle for a piece of cheese.”
“Don’t want cheese! That’s an arrant stereotypical slander. I’m an insectivore. Not a dairy-productivore.” Another sniff, more like a snuffle. “If you really loved me, you’d give me liqueur-chocolates all the time.”
“You’d pop.”
“I know. But ‘twould be a wondrous way to die!”
Chapter 20: A stairway to Valhalla.
“Now I finally understand what Hegel really meant,” Doc said quietly. He adjusted his pince-nez and then, in a slight singsong, recited: ” ‘Spirit conceived in the element of pure thought is meaningless unless it also becomes manifest in something other than its pure self and returns to itself out of such otherness. The Absolute is a relation of pure love in which the sides we distinguish are not really distinct. But it is of the essence of Spirit not to be a mere thing of thought, but to be concrete and actual.’ ”
He began to adjust his pince-nez again; but, instead, simply took them off and wiped his snout wearily. “It was too late. Without surgery it was always too late. Even with it, too late by hours.”
The group standing around Phylla’s still body were all silent.
Then Nym sighed. “Out, out, brief candle. Well, I suppose I’d better go and fetch some brandy. Or would anyone prefer some wine?”
“You’re going to get drunk?” Siobhan’s voice rose to a squawk of outrage.
Doc nodded. “Of course. The observance of rites for the dead are what set us apart from the animals.”
“But that is to behave like animals, indade!” Eamon sounded genuinely appalled.
“Methinks if we behaved like the animals we came from, we’d eat her,” replied Fal reasonably. “Besides, I thought you’d be in favor of a wake. It is a fine Irish tradition.”