Young had a gash on his cheek that was more messy than deep and a huge bruise along his jaw to go with it, and
four rioters were left behind with sore heads or other minor injuries. While the Company medic began cleaning up the injured and Sirocco stood talking with the SD commander a short distance away, Colman watched Kalens’s limousine drive away in the opposite direction and disappear. That was how it had always been, he could see now. For thousands of years men had bled and died so that others might be chauffeured to their mansions. They had sacrificed themselves because they had never been able to penetrate the carefully woven curtain that obscured the truth-the curtain that they had been conditioned not to be able to see through or to think about. But the Chironians had never had the conditioning.
The inverted logic that had puzzled him had not been something peculiar to the military mind; it was just that the military mind was the only one he had ever really known. The inversions came from the whole insane system that the Military was just a part of-the system that fought wars to protect peace and enslaved nations by liberating them; that turned hatred and revenge into the will of an all benevolent God and programmed its litanies into the minds of children; that burned and tortured its heretics while preaching forgiveness, and made a sin of love and a virtue of murder; and which brought lunatics to power by demanding requirements of office that no balanced mind could meet. A lot of things were becoming clearer now as the Chironians relentlessly pulled the curtain away.
For the curtain that was falling away was the backcloth of the stage upon which the dolls had danced. And as the backcloth fell and the strings fell with it, the dolls were dancing on. The dolls were dancing without the strings because there were no strings. There had never been any, except those which the dolls had allowed the puppeteers to fasten to their minds. But those strings had held up the puppeteers, not the dolls, for the puppeteers were falling while the dolls danced on.
Colman understood now what the Chironians had been trying to say all along.
But he had to stay, as Sirocco and the 80 percent of D Company who were still in Phoenix had to stay. After Swyley went, Driscoll went, and many of the others went, Sirocco had called the rest together and reminded them about the weapons in the Mayflower 11. “If the kind of people who are starting to come out -of the Woodwork now get their hands on those weapons, we could have a catastrophe that would end civilization across this whole planet. You’ve all seen what’s happening back on Earth. Well, the same mentalities are here too, and they’re panicking. We must keep enough of the Army together to stop anything like that if we have to.” And so they had stayed.
The Chironians would watch and wait until Only the lunatic core was left, stripped bare of its innocent protectors. Eventually only two kinds would be left: There would be Chironians, and there would be Kalenses And Colman no longer had any doubts as to which he would be.
In the D Company Orderly Room in the Omar Bradley barracks block, Hanlon secured his ammunition belt, put
on his helmet, and took his M32 from the rack. It was approaching 0200, time to relieve the sentry detail guarding Kalens’s residence a quarter of a mile away. “Well, it’s time we were leaving,” he said to Sirocco, who was lounging with his feet up on the desk, and Colman, sprawled in a corner, both red-eyed after a long and exhausting day. “I’ll try to shout quietly. I’d hate to be disturbing His Honor in his sleep.”
Sirocco smiled tiredly. ‘”You’re excused from taking off your boots,” he murmured.
“Are we still invited to the Fallowses tonight, Steve?’ Hanlon asked, stopping at the door to look back at Colman.
Colman nodded. “I guess so. I’ll probably be asleep when you come off duty. Better give me a call.”
“I will indeed. See you later.” Hanlon left, and they heard him forming up the relief guard outside.