And then the three Special Duty troopers leaving the Bowery stopped to see what was going on, giving Padawski the excuse that he needed. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. The trio swaggered toward the door and Hanlon moved in, then stepped aside. Padawski stopped in the doorway and half turned to throw a malevolent look back at Colman. “Some other time. Next time you won’t be so lucky.” They left. Outside, the three SD troopers turned away and moved slowly off.
Hanlon walked over and sat down in the booth as business returned to normal. “They hew you were here, Steve. I heard them talking in the back of Rockefeller’s. So I thought I’d come back down and hang around.”
“I’ve always said you’ve got a good sense of timing, Bret.”
“So, is this fine young fella the Jay you were telling me about?” Hanlon asked.
“That’s Jay. Jay, this is Bret–Bret Hanlon. He runs one of the other platoons and teaches unarmed combat. Don’t mess with him.”
“Was that why those guys took off?” Jay asked, by now having regained most of his color. “It probably had something to do with it,” Colman said, grinning. “That’s the kind of trash you have to deal with. Still interested?”
“I guess I’ll have to think about it,” Jay conceded. Hanlon ordered three hamburger dinners, and the two sergeants spent a half hour talking with Jay about Army life, football, and how Stanislau could crash the protected sector of the public databank. Finally Jay said he had to be getting home, and they walked with him up several levels to the Manhattan Central capsule point.
“Shall we be getting back to the party then?” Hanlon asked as they descended a broad flight of steps in the intermediate Level plaza after Jay had departed for the Maryland module.
Colman slowed and rubbed his chin. He wasn’t in the mood. “You go on, Bret,” he said. “I think I’m just gonna wander around. I guess rd rather he on my own for a while.”
Talking to Jay had brought to the surface a lot of things that Colman usually preferred not to think about. Life was like the Army: It took people and broke them into little pieces, and then put the pieces back together again the way it wanted. Except it did it with their minds. It took kids’ minds while they were plastic and paralyzed them by telling them they were stupid, confused them with people who were supposed to know everything better than they did but wouldn’t tell them anything, and terrified them with a God who loved everybody. Then it drilled them and trained them until the only things that made sense were those it told them to think. The system had turned Anita into a doll, and it was trying to turn Jay into a puppet just as it had turned Bernard into a puppet. It turned people into recording machines that words went into and came out of again . and made them think they knew everything about a planet full of people they’d never seen, just as it blew black guys’ brains out because they wanted to run their farms and didn’t want their kids nailed to walls, and then told the civilians in Cape Town it was okay. And what had it done to Colman? He didn’t know because he didn’t know how else it might have been.
“Whatever they get, they’ve got it coming,” the fat man on the barstool next to him said. “Kids running around wild, breeding like rabbits–It’s disgusting. And making bombs Savages is what they are–no better than the Chinese. Kalens has got the right idea. He’ll teach ‘era some decency and respect.” Colman drank up and left.
Jesus, he thought, he was sick of the system. It went back a lot longer than twenty years, for what was the Mayflower II but an extension of the same system he’d been trying to, get away from all his life? lay was beginning to feel the trap closing around him already. And none of it was going to change–ever. Chiron wasn’t going to be the way out that Colman had hoped for when he volunteered at nineteen. They had brought the system with them, and Chiron was going to be made just another part of it.