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That same impersonally toned address, which was as near as she would ever let herself come to affection on the phone. On that note he hung up, reluctantly, feeling it was unfinished but knowing it was all he’d get, and went back out to Al Chomu’s bar but not before he had paused to adjust the swelling in his trousers that that cool soft voice coming so implacably through A. G. Bell’s devilish instrument where he could not reach it, had caused.

And they called them the weaker sex! That was prone to crack up and cry at every crisis! Like hell. The women ran this world; and nobody knew it better than a man in love. Sometimes he thought they did it deliberately, all this conspiracy stuff, just to satisfy some ancient racial love of intrigue inherited from the generations of conspiring to play the role of being dominated.

The cab driver was still waiting for him outside in that hot bright drowsing summer ecstasy of existence, that Warden had not noticed when he came in but was now aware of intensely, and he honked his horn irritably. But Warden did not go on out until he had had another big drink with Al so as to make sure that when he got back to the Company they would smell it on his breath and not think anything unusual about his having disappeared, which they surely would have if he had come back sober.

He stood in the cool cave of the bar against whose big plate window the sun beat vainly and he drank, feeling mad as hell and tough as nails, and wildly ecstatically enjoying the fact that he was Milt Warden and alive, savoring pugnaciously that combative joy that he had lost and had not felt since the battle to get Stark in the kitchen but that now had suddenly come back, while Al Chomu talked on to him about his eldest niece whose picture in white cap and gown was sitting on the back-bar and who was staying on at Stanford for her Master’s on the money of all the dogfaces who bought their whiskey at the Kemoo Liquor Store just because it was old Al, Warden wondering half-mindedly if her haole girlfriends at Stanford had ever heard of fat old Al Chomu (or his money) and answering himself that they undoubtedly had not.

Clicking fast and sharp and thinking powerfully: What if it was a full month’s work? What the hell if it was impossible? If there was one man in the Army who could close out a suicide in a week, that man was Milt Warden.

Knowing he would surely have to marry that woman, who could make him feel like this.

Then he went out into the summer ecstasy of being alive and radiating powerfully, to the cab whose driver obviously was too blunt to feel it, but who still made him for five bucks, and whom he was careful to have let him off in front of the Post Library from which he walked back into the quad and plunged roaring into the heaving upset that was G Company with a suicide.

From then on it was chaos. Nobody knew anything. In crisis, the Old Army maxim ran, seek refuge in anonymity. Automatically, everyone brought everything to The Warden, who was getting paid to do the work and the deciding. He had to handle every tiniest detail personally, without benefit of clergy, working with the big looseleaf volumes of the ARs at his elbow because he had never done a suicide before either.

He drove Mazzioli almost as crazily as he drove himself, expanding explosively, until the clerk who had thought he had suffered everything began to realize he had never even understood the surface meaning of that term and as a defense against such enervating energy languidly started seriously contemplating straight duty with longing for the first time in his career.

Warden only cursed him and drove on like a man cutting his way through the jungle toward a waterhole with a machete, looking back to the lost afternoons the way preachers look back to Salvation, looking forward to regaining them as they do the State of Grace: “This life now is nothing, a dead thing that is useful only as a mean to recapture that lost chord we all of us can remember.”

The future?