The nurse, catching a sign from the doctor, took up another hypodermic and made it ready. “Please, Mr. DeBeckett,” she said. Good humored, he permitted her to spray the surface of his wrist with a fine mist of droplets that touched the skin and penetrated it. “I suppose that is to give me strength,” he said. “Well, I am grateful for it. I know I must leave you, but there is something I would like to know. I have wondered . . . For years I have wondered, but I have not been able to understand the answers when I was told them. I think I have only this one more chance.”
HE felt stronger from the fluid that now coursed through his veins, and accepted without fear the price he would have to pay for it. “As you know,” he said, “or, I should say, as you children no doubt do not know, some years ago I endowed a research institution, the Coppie Brambles Foundation. I did it for the love of you, you and all of you. Last night I was reading the letter I wrote my attorneys—No. Let us see if you can understand the letter itself; I have it here. Will, can you read?”
Will was nine, freckled darkly on pale skin, red haired and gangling. “Yes, Mr. DeBeckett.”
“Even hard words,” smiled the dying man.
“Yes, sir.”
DeBeckett gestured at the table beside him, and the boy obediently took up a stiff sheet of paper. “Please,” said DeBeckett, and the boy began to read in a highpitched, rapid whine.
“ ‘Children have been all my life and I have not regretted an instant of the years I devoted to their happiness. If I can tell them a little of the wonderful world in which we are, if I can open to them the miracles of life and living, then my joy is unbounded. This—I have tried, rather selfishly, to do. I cannot say it was for them! It was for me. For nothing could have given me more pleasure.’ ”
The boy paused.
DeBeckett said gravely, “I’m afraid this is a Very Big Think, lovelings. Please try to understand. This is the letter I wrote to my attorneys when I instructed them to set up the Foundation. Go on, Will.”
“ ‘But my way of working has been unscientific, I know. I am told that children are not less than we adults, but more. I am told that the grown-up maimers and cheats in the world are only children soiled, that the hagglers of commerce are the infant dreamers whose dreams were denied. I am told that youth is wilder, freer, better than age, which I believe with all my heart, not needing the stories of twenty-year-old mathematicians and infant Mozarts to lay a proof.
“ ‘In the course of my work I have been given great material rewards. I wish that this money be spent for those I love. I have worked with the heart, but perhaps my money can help someone to work with the mind, in this great new science of psychology which I do not understand, in all of the other sciences which I understand even less. I must hire other eyes.
“ ‘I direct, then, that all of my assets other than my books and my homes be converted into cash, and that this money be used to further the study of the child, with the aim of releasing him from the corrupt adult cloak that smothers him, of freeing him for wisdom, tenderness and love.’ ”
“That,” said DeBeckett sadly, “was forty years ago.”
HE started at a sound. Overhead a rocket was clapping through the sky, and DeBeckett looked wildly around. “It’s all right, Mr. DeBeckett,” comforted little Pat. “It’s only a plane.”
He allowed her to soothe him. “Ah, leveling,” he said. “And can you answer my question?”
“What it says in the ’Cyclopedia, Mr. DeBeckett?”
“Why—Yes, if you know it? my dear.”
Surprisingly the child said, as if by rote: “The Institute was founded in 1976 and at once attracted most of the great workers in pediatric analysis, who were able to show Wiltshanes’s Effect in the relationship between glandular and mental development. Within less than ten years a new projective analysis of the growth process permitted a reorientation of basic pedagogy from a null-positive locus. The effects were immediate. The first generation of—”
She stopped, startled. The old man was up on his elbow, his eyes blazing at her in wonder and fright. “I’m—” She looked around at the other children for help and at once wailed, “I’m sorry, Mr. DeBeckett!” and began to cry.
The old man fell back, staring at her with a sort of unbelieving panic. The little girl wept abundantly. Slowly DeBeckett’s expression relaxed and he managed a sketchy smile.
He said, “There, sweetest. You startled me. But it was charming of you to memorize all that!”
“I learned it for you,” she sobbed.
“I didn’t understand. Don’t cry.” Obediently the little girl dried her eyes as DeBeckett stretched out a hand to her.
But the hand dropped back on the quilt. Age, surprise and the drug had allied to overmaster the dwindling resources of Elphen DeBeckett. He wandered to the plantoms on the wall. “I never understood what they did with my money,” he told Coppie, who smiled at him with a shy, painted smile. “The children kept coming, but they never said.”
“Poor man,” said Will absently, watching him with a child’s uncommitted look.
The nurse’s eyes were bright and wet. She reached for the hypodermic, but the doctor shook his head.
“Wait,” he said, and walked to the bed. He stood on tiptoe to peer into the dying man’s face. “No, no use. Too old. Can’t survive organ transplant, certainty of cytic shock. No feasible therapy.” The nurse’s eyes were now flowing. The doctor said to her, with patience but not very much patience, “No alternative. Only kept him going this long from gratitude.”
The nurse sobbed, “Isn’t there anything we can do for him?”
“Yes.” The doctor gestured, and the lights on the diagnostic dials winked out. “We can let him die.?”
LITTLE Pat hiked herself up on a chair, much too large for her, and dangled her feet. “Be nice to get rid of this furniture, anyway,” she said. “Well, nurse? He’s dead. Don’t wait.” The nurse looked rebelliously at the doctor, but the doctor only nodded. Sadly the nurse went to the door and admitted the adults who had waited outside. The four of them surrounded the body and bore it gently through the door. Before it closed the nurse looked back and wailed: “He loved you!”
The children did not appear to notice. After a moment Pat said reflectively, “Sorry about the book. Should have opened it.”
“He didn’t notice,” said Will, wiping his hands. He had touched the old man’s fingers.
“No. Hate crying, though.”
The doctor said, “Nice of you. Helped him, I think.” He picked up the phone and ordered a demolition crew for the house. “Monument?”
“Oh, yes,” said another child. “Well. Small one, anyway.”
The .doctor, who was nine, said, “Funny. Without him, what? A few hundred thousand dollars and the Foundation makes a flexible world, no more rigid adults, no more—” He caught himself narrowly. The doctor had observed before that he had a tendency to over-identify with adults, probably because his specialty had been geriatrics. Now that Elphen DeBeckett was dead, he no longer had a specialty.
“Miss him somehow,” said Celine frankly, coming over to look over Will’s shoulder at the quaint old murals on the wall. “What the nurse said, true enough. He loved us.”
“And clearly we loved him,” piped Freddy, methodically sorting through the contents of the dead man’s desk. “Would have terminated him with the others otherwise, wouldn’t we?”
The Quaker Cannon
When a stick-up artist uses a gun . . . he doesn’t have to fire it to produce the desired results. And a military invasion has certain similar characteristics, if properly arranged . . .
I
LIEUTENANT John Kramer did crossword puzzles during at least eighty percent of his waking hours. His cubicle in Bachelor Officers Quarters was untidy; one wall was stacked solid with newspapers and magazines to which he subscribed for their puzzle pages. He meant, from week to week, to dean them out but somehow never found time. The ern, or erne, a sea eagle, soared vertically
through his days and by night the ai, a three-toed sloth, crept horizontally. In edes, or Dutch communes, dyers retted ecru, quaffing ades by the ton and thought was postponed.
John Kramer was in disgrace and, at thirty-eight, well on his way to becoming the oldest first lieutenant in the North American—and Allied—Army, He had been captured in ’82 as an aftermath of the confused fighting around Tsingtao. A few exquisitely unpleasant months passed and he then delivered three TV lectures for the yutes. In them he announced his total conversion to Neo-Utilitarianism, denounced the North American—and Allied—military command as a Joathcsoine pack of war-waging, anti-utilitarian mad dogs, and personally admitted the waging of vital warfare against the United Utilitarian Republics.
The yutes, or Utilitarians, had been faithful to their principles. They had wanted Kramer only for what he could do for them, not for his own sweet self, and when they had got the juice out of him they exchanged him. In ’83 he came out of his fog at Fort Bradley, Utah, to find himself being court-martialed.
He was found guilty as charged, and sentenced to a reprimand. The lightness of the sentence was something to be a little proud of, if not very much. It stood as a grudging tribute to the months he had held out against involutional melancholia in the yute Blank Tanks. For exchanged PW’s, the severity of their courts-martial was in inverse proportion to the duration of their ordeal in Utilitarian hands. Soldiers who caved in after a couple of days of sense-starvation could look forward only to a firing squad. Presumably a returned soldier dogged—or rigid—enough to be driven into hopeless insanity without co-operating would have been honorably acquitted by his court, but such a case had not yet come up.
Kramer’s “reprimand” was not the face-to-face bawling-out suggested to a civilian by the word. It was a short letter with numbered paragraphs which said (I) you arc reprimanded. (2) a copy of this reprimand will be punched on your profile card. This tagged him forever as a foul ball, destined to spend the rest of his military life shuffling from one dreary assignment to a no flier, without hope of promotion or reward.
He no longer cared. Or thought he did not; which came to the same thing.
He was not liked in the Officers Club. He was bad company. Young officers passing through Bradley on their way to glory might ask him. “What’s it really like in a Blank Tank. Kramer?” But beyond answering, “You go nuts,” what was there to talk about? Also he did not drink, because when he drank he went on to become drunk, and if he became drunk he would cry.
So he did a crossword puzzle in bed before breakfast, dressed, went to his office, signed papers, did puzzles until lunch, and so on until the last one in bed at night. Nominally he was Commanding Officer of the 561st Provisional Reception Battalion. Actually he was—with a few military overtones—the straw boss of a gang of clerks in uniform who saw to the arrival, bedding, feeding, equipping, inoculation and transfer to a training unit of one thousand scared kids per week.
On a drizzle-swept afternoon in the spring of ‘85 Kramer was sounding one of those military overtones. It was his appointed day for a “surprist” inspection of Company D of his battalion. Impeccable in dress blues, he was supposed to descend like a thunderbolt on this company or that, catching them all unaware, striding arrogantly down the barracks aisle between bunks, white-gloved and eagle-eyed for dust, maddened at the sight of disarray, vengeful against such contraband as playing cards or light reading matter. Kramer knew, quite well, that one of his orderly room clerks always telephoned the doomed company to warn that he was on his way. He did not particularly mind it. What be minded was unfair definitions of key words, and ridiculously variant spellings.
The permanent-party sergeant of D Company bawled “Tench-hut!” when Kramer snapped the door open and stepped crisply into the barracks. Kramer froze his face into its approved expression of controlled annoyance and opened his mouth to give the noncom his orders. But the sergeant had miscalculated. One of the scared kids was still frantically mopping the aisle.
Kramer halted. The kid spun around in horror, made some kind of attempt to present arms with the mop and failed. The mop shot from his soapy hands like a slung baseball bat, and its soggy gray head schlooped against the lieutenant’s dress-blue chest.
The kid turned white and seemed about to faint on the damp board floor. The other kids waited to see him destroyed.
Kramer was mildly irritated. “At ease,” he said. “Pick up that mop. Sergeant, confound it, next time they buzz you from the orderly room don’t cut it so close.”
The kids sighed perceptibly and glanced covertly at each other in the big bare room, beginning to suspect it might not be too bad after all. Lieutenant Kramer then resumed the expression of a nettled bird of prey and strode down the aisle. Long ago he had worked out a “random” selection of bunks for special attention and now followed it through habit. If he had thought about it any more, he would have supposed that it was still spy-proof; but every noncom in his cadre had Jong since discovered that Kramer stopped at either every second bunk on the right and every third on the left, or every third bunk on the right and every second on the left—depending on whether the day of the month was odd or even. This would not have worried Kramer if he had known it; but he never even noticed that the men beside the bunks he stopped and were always the best-shaved, best-policed and healthiest looking in each barracks.
Regardless, he delivered a certain quota of meaningless demerits which were gravely recorded by the sergeant. Of blue-eyed men on the left and brown-eyed men on the right—this, at least, had not been penetrated by the noncoms—he went on to ask their names and home towns. Before discovering crossword puzzles he had memorized atlases, and so he had something to say about every home town he had yet encountered, in this respect at least he considered himself an above-average officer, and indeed he was.
It wasn’t the Old Army, not by a long shot, but when the draft age went down to fifteen some of the Old Army’s little ways had to go. One experimental reception station in Virginia was trying out a Barracks Mother system. Kramer, thankful for small favors, was glad they hadn’t put him on that project, even here he was expected, at the end of the inspection, to call the “men” around him and ask if anything was bothering them. Something always was. Some gangling kid would scare up the nerve to ask. gee, lieutenant, I know what the Morale Officer said, but exactly why didn’t we ever use the megaton-head missiles, and another would want to know how come Lunar Base was such a washout, tactically speaking, sir. And then he would have to rehearse the dry “recommended discussion themes” from the briefing books; and then, finally, one of them, nudged on by others, would pipe up, “Lieutenant, what’s it like in the Blank Tanks?” And he would know that already, forty-eight hours after induction, the kids all knew about what Lieutenant John Kramer had done.
But today he was spared. When he was halfway through the rigamarole the barracks phone rang and the sergeant apologetically answered it.
He returned from his office-cubicle on the double, looking vaguely frightened. Compliments of General Grote’s secretary, sir, and will you report to him at G-1 immediately.
“Thank you, sergeant. Step outside with me a moment.”
Out on the duckboard walk, with the drizzle trickling down his neck, he asked; “Sergeant, who is General Grote?”
“Never heard of him, sir.”
Neither had Lieutenant Kramer.
He hurried to Bachelor Officers Quarters to change his sullied blue jacket, nor even pausing to glance at the puzzle page of the Times, which had arrived while he was at “work.” Generals were special. He hurried out again into the drizzle.
Around him and unnoticed were die artifacts of an army base at war. Sky-eye search radars popped from their silos to scan the horizons for a moment and then retreat, the burden of search taken up by the next in line. Helicopter sentries on guard duty prowled the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp. Fort Bradley was not all reception center. Aboveground were the barracks, warehouses and rail and
highway terminal for processing recruits—ninety thousand men and all their girls—but they were only the skin over the fort itself. They were, as the scared kids told each other in the day rooms, naked to the air. If the yutes ever did spring a megaton attack, they would become a thin coating of charcoal on the parade ground, but they would not affect the operation of the real Fort Bradley a bit.
The real Fort Bradley was a hardened installation beneath meters of reinforced concrete, some miles of rambling warrens that held the North American—and Allied—Army’s G-1 Its business was people: the past, present and future of every soul in the Army.
G-1 decided that a fifteen-year-old in Duluth was unlikely to succeed in civilian schools and drafted him. G-1 punched his Army tests and civilian records on cards, consulted its card-punched tables of military requirements and assigned him, perhaps, to Machinist Training rather than Telemetering School. G-1 yanked a platoon leader halfway around the world from Formosa and handed him a commando for a raid on the yutes’ Polar Station Seven. G-1 put foulball Kramer at the “head” of the 561st PRB. G-1 promoted and allocated and staffed and rewarded and punished.
Foulball Kramer approached the guard box at the elevators to the warrens and instinctively squared his shoulders and smoothed his tie.
General Grote, he thought. He hadn’t seen a general officer since he’d been commissioned. Not close-up. Colonels and majors had court-martialed him. He didn’t know who Grote was, whether he had one star or six, whether he was Assignment, Qualifications, Training, Evaluation, Psychological—or Disciplinary.
Military Police looked him over at the elevator head. They read him like a book. Kramer wore his record on his chest and sleeves. Dull gold bars spelled out the overseas months—for his age and arm, the Infantry, not enough. “Formosa,” said a green ribbon, and “the storming of the beach” said a small bronze spearpoint on it. A brown ribbon told them “Chinese Mainland,” and the stars on it meant that he had engaged in three of the five mainland campaigns—presumably Canton, Mukden and Tsingtao, since they were the first. After that, nothing. Especially not the purple ribbon that might indicate a wound serious enough to keep him out of further fighting.
Collected Short Fiction Page 269
