But what Corporal Swyley was concentrating on so intently were the minute specks of brighter reds that might or might not have been imperfectly obscured defensive positions, and the barely discernible hairline fragments that could have been the thermal footprints of recent vehicle movements.’
How Swyley did what only he did so well was something nobody was quite sure of, least of all Swyley himself. Whatever the reason, Swyley’s ability to pick out significant details from a hopeless mess of background garbage and to distinguish consistently between valid information and decoys was justly famed and uncanny. But since Swyley himself didn’t understand how he did it, he was unable to explain it to the systems programmers, who had hoped to duplicate his feats with their image-analysis programs. That had been when the “-sits” and the “-zoologists’ began their endless batteries of fruitless tests. Eventually Swyley made up plausible-sounding explanations for the benefit of the specialists, but these were exposed when the programs written to their specifications failed to work. Then Swyley began claiming that his mysterious gift had suddenly deserted him completely.
Major Thorpe, Electronics Intelligence Officer at Brigade H.Q., had read somewhere that spinach and fish were sure remedies for failing eyesight, so he placed Corporal Swyley on an intensive diet. But Swyley hated spinach and fish even more than he hated being tested, and within a week he was afflicted by acute color-blindness, which he demonstrated by refusing to see anything at all in even the simplest of training displays.
After that, Swyley had been declared “maladjusted” and transferred to D Company, which was where all the misfits and malcontents ended up. Now his powers returned magically only when no officers were anywhere near him except for Captain Sirocco, who ran D Company and didn’t care how Swyley got his answers as long as they came out right. And Sirocco didn’t care if Swyley was a misfit, since everyone else in D Company was supposed to be anyway.
It probably meant that there was no easy way of getting out of D Company again let alone out of the regular service, Colman reflected as he watched in the darkness and waited for Swyley to deliver his verdict. And that made it unlikely that Colman would get the transfer into Engineering that he had requested,
It seemed self-evident to him that nobody in his right mind would want to get killed, or to be sent to places he’d never heard of by people he’d never met in order to kill other people he didn’t know. Therefore nobody in his right mind would be in the Army. But since the Army was full of people whom it had judged to be acceptably sane and normal, it seemed to follow that the Army’s ideas of what was normal had to be very strange. Now, to transfer into something like Engineering seemed on the face of it to be a perfectly natural, reasonable, constructive, and desirable thing to want to do. And that seemed enough to guarantee that the Army would find the request unreasonable and him unsuitable.
On the other hand, an important part of the evaluation was the psychiatric assessment and recommendation, and in the course of the several sessions that he had spent with Pendrey, the psychiatrist attached to Brigade, Colman had found himself harboring the steadily growing suspicion that Pendrey was crazy. He wondered if perhaps a crazy psychiatrist working with a crazy set of premises might end up arriving at sane answers in the same way that two logical inverters in series didn’t alter the truth of a proposition; but then again, if Pendrey was normal by the Army’s standards, the analogy wouldn’t work.
Sirocco had endorsed the request, it was true, but Colman wasn’t sure it would count for very much since Sirocco ran D Company, and anything he said was probably inverted somewhere along the chain as a matter of course. Perhaps he should have persuaded Sirocco not to endorse the request. On the other hand, if anything recommended by Sirocco was inverted to start with, and if Pendrey was crazy but normal by the Army’s standards, and if the premises that Pendrey was working with were also crazy, then the decision might come out in Colman’s favor after all. Or would it? His attempt to think the tortuous logic of the situation once again was interrupted by Swyley at last leaning back and turning his face away from the screen.