by Algis Budrys
This time the chuckles were louder.
“What’s more,” Garvin said softly, “while the voters will not be able to get individual directions, I’m sure they can be made to know how the Army as a whole feels about Berendtsen, and his theories.”
Several heads along the table snapped to sudden attention.
“As you know,” Robert Garvin went on, still softly, “the garrison commander at Philadelphia, Commander Willets, is a staunch follower of Theodore Berendtsen’s. He has distinguished himself in following Berendtsen’s methods and policies exactly. His administration of the garrison, too, has been identical with the pattern laid down by his chief. In short, we have, in Philadelphia, a miniature Berendtsen, with a miniature Army of Unification, administering a miniature Republic. It follows that the reaction of the garrison, and of the people of Philadelphia, to Commander Willets, will be identical with the reaction of the Army as a whole to Theodore Berendtsen. There will also be the close parallel between the condition of the Philadelphians and the condition the citizens of the Republic may expect for themselves should Berendtsen ever become head of the Republic.”
Those members of the City Council who were closest to Garvin laughed aloud and looked at each other with triumphant grins on their faces.
Mackay looked down the length of the table in shock. “But—but that isn’t an AU garrison any more!” he protested. “Hollis took a draft of City policemen down there last year, and rotated the original garrison home.”
Garvin nodded. “Quite so. And the original garrison is now on constabulary duty in Maine. We know that. What’s your point, Mayor?”
Mackay licked his lips in confusion. “Well—” He shot a glance at Hollis, hesitated, but then pressed on. “You know what kind of men we sent down there. And you know we haven’t given Willets any support from here, when he’s demanded replacements and support. Good God, man, he’s been a virtual prisoner down there! Even his communications with Berendtsen are monitored. He’s no more responsible for what’s been going on down in Philadelphia than—than—”
He stopped, at a loss for a comparison.
“—Than Berendtsen is, Mr. Mayor?” Garvin smiled. “Of course. But who knows that, outside of ourselves?”
“Nobody. But it isn’t right! You can’t just rig something as cold-bloodedly as this!”
“And what did you think we were doing in Philadelphia, Mr. Mayor? Conducting an interesting social experiment?”
“No, no, of course not! But this—”
Garvin sighed and ignored him from that point on. He turned to the other members of the city’s government—and thereby, the Republic’s.
“Commander Willets will be recalled home to answer charges of oppression, misadministration, and treason. His trial will take place a week before elections. Our slate of candidates is as follows: for Commander-In-Chief, Merton Hollis.” There was a light spatter of applause from the Council, and Garvin shook the steely-eyed man’s hand vigorously. Then he continued: “For First Citizen—a new office, as you know, in place of the old designation of ‘President’: Robert Garvin.”
The applause was violent this time, and Hollis solemnly shook Garvin’s hand.
“And, for Mayor of the City of New York—” Garvin looked down the table at a smiling Councilman, “William Hammersby.”
Garvin’s look shifted, and Mackay found himself staring helplessly into the eyes of the end.
* * *
The man in the vaguely army-ish clothes clambered to the top of the wall in Union Square, gripping a lamp post for support. He waved the Army of Unification’s blue-and- silver pennant wildly over his head.
“Listen!” he shouted. “Listen, citizens! I was in Philadelphia. I was with Berendtsen for over three years! And I say to hell with the madman, and to hell with his flag!” He ripped away the silver stripe. “I’ve had enough of the color of bayonets!” He threw the tattered pennant away and waved another one over his head, this one colored blue and red. “This is the flag for me! Blue for honor, and red to remember the blood that Berendtsen has drunk!”
“But no white for purity,” Mary Berendtsen murmured to herself from the edge of the crowd. No one in that milling, election-eve crowd heard her. Luckily for her, no one recognized her, either.
Garvin smiled pleasantly down at the new communications officer. “I’m sure you understand your duties, Colonel. Now, here’s the text of your nightly report to Berendtsen.”
And Brent Mackay’s body drifted slowly down the Hudson, out to the broad and waiting ocean.
II
Jim Garvin stood with his hands deep in his pockets, listening to the wind-flapping in the sides of tents as it swept gloomily across the bivouac area. The wind was very cold, condensing his breath into an unpleasant brittle wetness on the thick pile of his collar. He shivered violently as a gust needled his tender right leg, still sensitive from the scattering of buckshot that had chipped its bones two years ago, during the occupation of Jacksonville. A thin light seeped from behind the stringy pines to the east. It was going to be a cold and miserable day.
He looked at his wristwatch and walked toward the nearest tent, glad to be moving. He unsnapped the flap, tightly sealed and stubborn to his numb fingers, and shook the head of the nearer of the two men who slept inside. “All right, Miller, let’s go!”
Miller grunted incoherently and then came awake, rolling over in his wadding of blankets. He found his helmet with a blind movement of his arm, jammed his head into it, and crawled out, nudging his tentmate with a boot as he came. Still bundled, he zipped up his jacket under the blankets before he pulled them off his shoulders, and threw them back into the tent. Begley, the tentmate, crawled out after him, mumbling a string of curses while he handed Miller the canvas flagbag.
“It’s a sonofabitch cold day,” Begley said spitefully as he picked up his bugle.
“Stinkin’ South sucked all the goddam blood out of us,” Miller agreed.
Garvin grunted. Whenever he’d bothered to think about it at all, he’d somehow assumed that the last days of this campaign would be the same as they had been when the still young Army of Unification had swung back down the Jersey palisades into New York—crisp, clear weather with a promise of winter. Instead, the winter was almost over now, and the ground was soaking with rain and molten frost. The raw wind clawed at a man’s insides. It would be a good month before the weather was fit for anything.
But, considering what the last-homecoming had been like, it was probably as good a thing for this one to be different as not. So, he merely grunted.
They walked across the bivouac area to Berendtsen’s trailer without further words. When they reached it, Miller snapped the AU pennant to the jackstaff shrouds while Begley twisted a mouthpiece into his bugle. Garvin stood motionless beside the trailer, his head stiff and erect under its gray helmet, the Senior Sergeant’s green swath dull under a coat of frost. His shoulders were taut, his boots at a forty-five-degree angle.
He looked at his watch again.
“Flag…” He counted to three. “Up!”
Miller sent the blue-and-silver pennant whipping up into the wind, and Garvin’s jacket stretched over his stiff back as Begley blew Assembly. He held to attention while the men kicked their way out of their tents and lined up for roll call.
“This is an army, now,” Berendtsen had said. “It represents a nation. And a nation must have a continuing army. The answer is a tradition of always having an army. Jim, I want you to see that it looks a little like an army.”
If Berendtsen wanted him to set examples of discipline, it was no skin off his nose one way or the other. The men had gradually gotten used to the idea, once they’d realized it made them a more efficient organization when held within reasonable limits. And this was only one of many changes that had come about while the AU was beating its way down the eastern seaboard.
The AU had come a long way, in distance and in time, from the rabble of men who couldn’t have stood be
fore one platoon of this regiment which now made up Berendtsen’s army. Even the bloodied and organized force that had marched back to New York from the Northern Campaign would have been broken by one of the now existing specialist groups—Eisner’s armored cars, probably, that had prowled through the torrential rain of the siege of Tampa like fireclawed hounds—and left to be mopped up by infantry. The AU had learned a lot by the time the blue-and-silver pennant flew over Key West. Learned a lot, enlisted many, looted much. It had learned still more as it returned northwards, cleaning out pockets and dropping garrisons in the familiar strategy that Berendtsen had developed during the Northern Campaign.
So, everything east of the Alleghenies was Berendtsen’s now. Garvin’s gaze swung as he looked bleakly at the lines of silent men, waiting at attention.
The men were lean and hard in their uniforms—old Marine uniforms with helmets and belt buckles finished in crackle-gray paint from a business-machines factory. Most of them would probably have been a match for any soldier that ever walked the Earth, winnowed and weeded as they had been. As to why they fought…Three meals a day and a purpose in life were as good a reason as any. A soldier got his pick of loot—such loot as watches and cigarette lighters, less luxury than convenience—his choice of land to work after his discharge, and a chance to find himself a woman.
Garvin took the roll call report without taking his eyes off the men.
Only a few of them were personally loyal to Berendtsen, but all of them followed him. Garvin wondered how they’d feel when they were pushed across the Appalachians to the west. He wondered, too, how he’d feel personally—and discovered that his mind had been avoiding the subject.
He heard Berendtsen’s hand on the inside latch of the trailer’s door. “Tenn—hut,” he barked, and the men, already stiff, turned their waiting eyes on the door. In their tents, some of them swore they’d keep their eyes oblique the next morning when the trailer door opened. None of them did.
The door opened, and Garvin stepped aside and held it, then swung it back as Berendtsen took three steps forward into the bivouac area.
He was wearing a belted coverall that had been dyed black, and only Garvin, standing slightly behind and a few feet to one side, was in a position to notice that his stomach was heavier than it had been. He surveyed the regiment with his usual unrevealing expression, and today, for the first time and for no obvious reason, Garvin saw that the youthfulness of his face was no more than a mask. His facial skin was waxy, as though someone had taken a cast of young Ted Berendtsen’s features and put it against this older skull under the boyishly-combed but darkening hair, and let his weary eyes look through. His neck was girdled by deep creases.
“All men present, sir,” Garvin said.
Berendtsen nodded curtly. “Good morning, Jim.” His eyes did not change their impersonal and yet intense expression. His face did not lose whatever singleness of purpose it was that gave it its unvarying mold.
And now Garvin realized, in the wake of his sudden glimpse of a Berendtsen stripped of all youth, that Berendtsen had years ago closed the last door that opened from himself to the world, and that now the sound of it had finally reached Garvin’s ears.
“Dismiss the men, Sergeant. All companies messed down and ready to move out in an hour. I want you and Commanders Eisner and Holland in my quarters in five minutes.”
“Yes, sir.” Garvin saluted, issued the orders, and dismissed the men. He walked across the area to where the company commanders were standing in the dawn gloom, leaving the old-young stranger behind.
“We are here.” Berendtsen touched his finger to the contour map of Bucks County and then, characteristically, added a belated “As you know.” Garvin noted that Holland twitched his thin lips opposite him at the map table. Eisner, whose hands were permanently blackened by grease and gear-box dust, and who was completely withdrawn when away from his cars, kept his face expressionless.
“We will be in New York on the day after tomorrow,” Berendtsen went on. “That is—the main body will.” He removed the map and substituted another covering the lower part of New Jersey.
“Now. Our main line of communication between New York and the Philadelphia area, as well as our route to the south in general, cuts across northern New Jersey and across the Delaware at Trenton. Up to now, there has been no reason to enter southern New Jersey at all, with the Camden garrison there to guard our flank, because of the area’s peninsular nature. Which, I am sure, is obvious to all of us.
“Accordingly, A Company, under Commander Holland, will now detach itself from the main body, cross the river at any practicable point, and proceed to occupy southern New Jersey. Garvin, you will take over the First Platoon of A Company, and act as Commander Holland’s Aide-in-the-Field. You will be accompanied by as many armored cars, under the subsidiary command of whatever junior officer Commander Eisner appoints, as the commander feels such a detachment will require. You will draw supplies and support weapons within Commander Holland’s discretion, and will provision from the land, carrying a basic ration for emergencies. Is that clear?”
Holland and Eisner nodded. Garvin, as an NCO, said, “Yes, sir.” He kept his face blank, Berendtsen’s orders made him, in effect, superior in command to whoever the Armored officer would be. They also gave him the duties of a full Lieutenant. He had known, of course, that Berendtsen would someday make him an officer in spite of his many refusals to accept the rank. But now he wondered. Why had Berendtsen waited until now to exercise this elementary circumvention? Up to now, this had looked like a standard mop-up. Now a new factor had entered the circumstances, and Garvin wondered what it really was.
Berendtsen resumed. “Very well. You will send patrols into every town of significant size, and establish communications posts. Liaison is to be maintained by radio with the Camden-Philadelphia Garrison Office, for the purpose of transmitting regular reports. You will set up new garrisons at Atlantic City, Bridgeton, and in the former naval installations at Cape May.”
Berendtsen looked up from the map. “Those are your objectives. You will, of course, pursue our standard occupation and recruitment policies. As usual, hereditary officers in communities surviving around former military installations are to be handled carefully.”
He stopped, and something crossed his face briefly, too rapidly for Garvin to read.
“The Philadelphia garrison commander has reported that the area is only sparsely populated, no penetration having been made by any civilian groups since the dislocation of the old Philadelphia organization six years ago. 1 am told that there was never an opportunity for Philadelphia to conduct large-scale resettlements in the area.
“For this reason, I am sending only one company. However, the Philadelphia garrison had probed the area only lightly, in spite of whatever generalized conclusions the commander may have drawn. The commander, as you have no way of knowing, is a man sent out from New York to replace Commander Willets.” He smiled dryly. “For that reason, I am augmenting the company with the armored detachment, and staffing it with my best men. Commander Eisner, I’ll ask you to bear these remarks in mind when you detail your own officer.
“A few final orders, which I’ll confirm in writing as soon as my clerk has them typed. Be sure you have them before you leave, Commander Holland. As follows: You will maintain radio contact with Philadelphia and New York, but you are an entirely independent command until the area has been completely occupied and assimilated into the Republic. Once this has been accomplished, the Southern New Jersey Command will be subordinated to the Philadelphia Military District, and will be subject to orders from the Philadelphia garrison commander. Until such time, you are on record as a detached unit of the Army of Unification in the field, and are subject only to the orders of the Commander-in-Chief.”
Garvin tried to find something readable in either Berendtsen’s or Holland’s faces, but failed.
Berendtsen didn’t trust his Philadelphia commander, that was sure. And his third-perso
n reference to himself as Commander-in-Chief seemed unnecessarily oblique.
More and more, Garvin began to suspect that there was something wrong. Perhaps the AU had grown to proportions which kept Berendtsen from personally supervising the entire organization, but the Philadelphia garrison was an important one, and it seemed inconceivable that an undependable man had gotten the post.
“Any questions?”
Garvin kept silent, as did the two commanders.
“Suggestions?”
“I’d like to take that detachment in myself, sir,” Eisner said. Life in New York, uneventful as it must inevitably be, held no attraction for him. The New Jersey operation offered an extra month’s action.
Berendtsen shook his head. “I’d considered sending you,” he said, “but I want you in New York too much.”
Eisner’s brows twitched, and the man’s face, unaccustomed to masking his thoughts, showed his plain doubt.
“I’m sorry,” Berendtsen said flatly.
“Yes, sir,” Eisner answered.
“All right, then,” Berendtsen concluded, “You’re dismissed—and good luck.”
Garvin followed the two commanders out of the trailer, while the clerk’s typewriter hammered an accompaniment from their orders—their disquieting official orders that plugged all possible loopholes…against what?
And the wind that keened between the tents seemed stronger now, and more piercing than it had been at reveille.
* * *
Berendtsen watched the company roll out, missing them already. He could feel the gap in the Army almost as surely as if a chunk had been cut out of his side. But there was no help for it.
Perhaps he should have gone in with the whole Army. He’d been tempted to. But the men were close to home—the New York ones, anyway—and they wanted to get back. The rest of them were looking forward to a spree in the city. For some of them it was the first real let-up in six years.
