• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 14121 0

a noncom, could inextricably lead a man to the Stockade, and from there—unless the opinion in him changed, unless they broke him—lead him on step by irrevocable step to where he sat in a Chevrolet sedan on a sideroad at night holding a snub nosed .38 in an angry frightened hand and waited for the shots to pour out of the darkness into him at any moment, all this occurring in a peaceful nation not at war. It was an overpoweringly weird idea that made him shiver. He just managed to catch himself from thinking that it might even have been himself and then remembered what Slater had said about some boys could not shoot birds. He felt a curiously unreal quality about everything around him. The power of thought, he told himself, all from such an innocent beginning.

“Captain,” Jake said to him chokingly, “I’m positively instructing you to give this man Prewitt the goddam book, if he doesnt come around before its too late for him to train for Smokers.”

“I’ve meant to do that all along, Sir,” Holmes said, “except that perhaps I’ve thought it might not be necessary.” He felt a little sorry for the poor old bugger.

“It’ll be necessary,” Jake said brutally. “You can take my word for that. And that is a direct order, Captain.” He sat back in his chair.

Holmes, however, did not feel the least bit anxious. His majority in Regiment that he had had his eye on was nothing compared to a job on the Brigade staff perhaps. And even if the job did not pan out, Delbert could do nothing to him as long as Sam Slater kept an eye on him.

“The important thing,” Sam Slater said, moving in like a fencing master who takes advantage of a pause in his pupils’ bout to give a little more instruction, “the important thing is to remember the logic behind the thing. You wouldnt let a single cantankerous mule hold up the whole pack train from carrying supplies up the Waianae Range, would you? If you couldnt get him to move, you’d push him off, wouldnt you?”

“No,” Holmes said. “Yes.”

“Thats all it amounts to.”

“That is it, isnt it?” Holmes asked nervously. “You have to think of the majority and the end in view, dont you? You have to be cruel, perhaps, for the good of the whole? That is it, isnt it?”

“Thats it exactly,” Sam Slater said, with a curiously feminine satisfaction. “Anyone who governs must be cruel.”

“Yes,” Holmes said, feeling suddenly for no reason like he had been seduced, the way a woman must feel, he thought, after she has let some guy get into her pants.

“You’re learning swiftly,” Sam Slater said to him.

After that Jake did not try to change the subject any more. Sam Slater went right back into his theory, talking almost hurriedly now. The two of them were still talking it when the two Majors from Regiment came in and were duly startled by the presence of a general officer and slunk around to get a reinforcing drink and, finding they were still ignored, slunk off to drink it.

The two of them were still talking when S/Sgt Jefferson came back with the women. And they went on talking, Holmes listening intently because he knew now he was forced by Prewitt into a position where he could no longer evade this thing and so must go on or else go back, Sam Slater elaborating the comforting creed that had evolved from being in a similar position once, his eyes lighting up a little now as he talked.

The two hefty specimens who had attached themselves to their laps drank and listened puzzledly. Jake and the two Majors had already given it up and adjourned to the back rooms to take up the business they had come here for.

But Holmes had almost forgotten that. The talk, for Holmes, was momentarily opening up whole series of new vistas. Things he had not even guessed at before now. And he strained hard concentrating, catching only glimpses before the cloud bank rolled back covering them up, but always opening new ones beyond that he thought he could maybe see completely.

“Reason,” Sam Slater said, “is the greatest discovery ever made by man. Yet it is the most disregarded and least used. No wonder reasonable, sensitive men become bitter and disillusioned.