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By Root 9165 0

the division had come to Anopopei. There was the knowledge of his position as a servant, the unpleasant contrasts always so apparent to him between the enlisted men and the officers. There was most of all the disgust for the staff officers he concealed so unsuccessfully. It was the riddle of what made the General tick that kept Hearn on. After twenty-eight years the only thing that interested him vitally was to uncover the least concealed quirks of any man or woman who diverted him. He had said once, "When I find the shoddy motive in them I'm bored. Then the only catch is how to say good-bye." And in return he had been told, "Hearn, you're so goddam healthy, you're nothing but a shell."

True, probably.

In any case it was not easy to find the shoddy motive in the General. He owned, no doubt, most of the dirty little itches, the lusts for things which were unacceptable to the mores of the weekly slick-paper magazines, but that did not discount him. There was a talent, an added factor, a deeper lust than Hearn had run across before, and, more than that, Hearn was losing his objectivity. The General worked on him even more than he affected the General, and Hearn loathed the very idea. To lose his inviolate freedom was to become involved again in all the wants and sores that caught up everybody about him.

But even so there was a wry isolated attention with which he watched the process unfolding between them.

He saw the General about an hour later in his tent. Cummings was alone for the moment, studying some air operations reports. Hearn understood immediately. After the first two or three days of the campaign, when no Japanese air attacks had developed on Anopopei, it had been decided at higher levels to remove the squadron of fighter planes that had been assigned to the campaign and had operated from another island over a hundred miles away. They had not been of great use but the General had been hoping that when the airfield he had captured was enlarged for the Air Corps, he could use that air support against the Toyaku Line. It had enraged him when the airplanes had been shunted to another campaign, and that had been the time when he had made his remark about enemies.

He was studying the theater air operations reports now to find out if any aircraft were being used needlessly. In another man it would have been absurd, a self-pitying castigation, but with the General it was not. He would absorb every fact in the report, probe the weaknesses, and when the time came and the captured airfield was ready, he would have a strong series of arguments, documented by the reports he studied now.

Without turning around, the General said over his shoulder, "You did a damn fool thing today."

"I suppose so." Hearn sat down.

The General moved his chair about slightly, and looked thoughtfully at Hearn. "You were depending on me to bring you out of it." He smiled as he said this, and his voice had become artificial, slightly affected. The General had many different types of speech; when he spoke to enlisted men he swore slightly, made his voice a little less precise. With his officers he was always dignified and remote, his sentences always rigidly constructed. Hearn was the only man to whom he spoke directly, and whenever he did not, whenever the down-to-junior-officer-level affectation slipped in, it meant that he was very displeased. Hearn had once known a man who stuttered whenever he was telling a lie; this on a more subtle level was as effective a clue. The General was obviously furious that he had had to come to Hearn's support in such a way that headquarters would talk about it for days.

"I guess I did, sir; I realized that afterward."

"Will you tell me why you behaved like such an ass, Robert?" Still the affectation. It was almost effeminate. The General had given Hearn when he first met him an immediate impression of very rarely saying what he thought, and Hearn had never had occasion to change his mind. He had known men who were casually like him, the same trace of effeminacy, the same probable capacity for extreme ruthlessness,