“Moray, I feel about you the same as I would feel … well, almost the same as I would feel around some highly intelligent animal. It’s as if you’re not really a human being, just a … something masquerading as one of us. Had I the authority, I’d have you run through the most complete physical examination of which the post medical facility is capable, have them do or at least try to do everything until I was proved right about you. What do you think of that, mister?”
Milo just shook his head. “I think you’ve got what a very brilliant friend of mine, a man who had studied under Dr. Sigmund Freud, used to call a fixation … I think that that was the proper term. Yes, Major Jarvis, you probably would benefit from the attentions of a good psychiatrist and a well-equipped, modern psychiatric facility, for you are clearly disturbed. You are bound to be suffering delusions if you think I’m not human. What the hell else could I be, major? One of H. G. Wells’ damned Martians, maybe?”
VII
Tech Sergeant Milo Moray found Fort Holabird tiny, as posts went, located almost within the actual city limits of Baltimore. Security measures were tight and stringently enforced by a profusion of well-armed guards. Badges and cards bearing photos and fingerprints were de rigueur everywhere on the minuscule post, and without the proper combinations of badges and cards, no individual could even come within close proximity to many of the buildings.
Not that all that much of seeming importance appeared to be happening within those buildings which Milo possessed the proper credentials to enter. After tests had established that he owned a decent command of Swedish, he was set to work that was very reminiscent of what he had done for Dr. Osterreich in Chicago five years before. Day after day, he was presented with Swedish periodicals, newspapers and trade or technical journals for translation. There was no need for a public library, however, at Holabird, for their dictionaries and references were extensive, and, as was often pointed out to him and the others in his section, they were not expected to understand, just to translate for specialists who did not read Swedish.
Milo would have liked being paid by the word as he had been in Chicago, for even with his quarters and food being all provided by the Army, along with uniforms and medical care (something of which he strangely had no need, since he never succumbed to anything worse than an occasional mild cold), his salary was nothing to boast about, especially not in the midst of a civilian economy new-swollen with the high incomes of hordes of war-industry workers. His pay as a tech sergeant was eighty-four dollars per month with an additional thirty dollars per month for his status as a first class specialist, which addition brought his monthly stipend to one hundred and fourteen dollars, within twelve dollars of that of a master sergeant. Even so, his money did not go far, and it was but rarely that he could afford the cost of a bus or railway ticket to meet and carouse with Jethro Stiles at some place between Baltimore and Georgia, nor did he feel that he could or should accept the generous man’s frequent offers of money to allay these expenses.
Finally, one night, thinking of the thousand-odd he had left in the care of Pat O’Shea, he wrote to the old soldier. But the return letter came from Maggie.
“Dear Milo,
“I am so very happy to hear from you once again after all these years. Poor Pat, God keep the dear soul, has been with the angels for almost three years now, which was truly a divine blessing for him, as he had gone stone-blind and was coughing up blood from his gas-damaged lungs day and night. Old Rosaleen suffered a seizure and died in the kitchen during Pat’s wake, and I have since retained a new cook, another policeman’s widow, Peggy Murphey. But I now fear I may soon have to replace her, for her brother-in-law, a recent widower himself, is paying frequent and serious court to her and Police Lieutenant Robert Emmett Murphey strikes me as a man who gets his way, come—or high water, as dear old Pat would have put it.
“We have heard nothing of my eldest son, Michael, since the Japs took the Philippine Islands and can only pray Our Lady that he be safe and well. Joseph was wounded at Pearl Harbor on the morning the Japs attacked the fleet there, but he has recovered and the Navy has him in a school now to make an officer out of him. Sally is nursing at the hospital now, and Kathleen was, too, but when the Nazis attacked Russia, she signed up to be a Navy nurse and she’s now at a Navy hospital out in California, as too is Fanny Duncan.
“That terrible German priest, Father Rustung, was arrested and taken away by the FBI when they arrested all the other Nazis, and good riddance to the lot of them, say I. They say the other priest, the sissified one, went into the Army Chaplain Corps.
“I hear that Irunn Thorsdottar went back to Wisconsin and was nursing at a hospital in or near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and living there as man and wife with her own elder brother. Somehow, the two perverts were found out and prosecuted and sent to the penitentiary for criminal incest. More good riddance to bad rubbish.
“Dr. Guiscarde went into the Army only a week after the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor, and his last letter they say was from a camp in New Jersey. Dr. Osterreich is a captain in the Navy Medical Corps and is somewhere around Washington, D.C. Is that near you?
“Both of the maids I had when you were here married, and I have two new ones—a girl from Latvia and another little colored girl from Kentucky, who is lighter-complected than the old one and a lot easier to understand when she talks.
“I sure hope the Army is feeding you boys well. This new rationing they have now is just terrible, especially on meat and sugar and lard. If it wasn’t for Cook’s connections with some people at the stockyards, we would all be on very strict diets here. But if it will help win this war and get all of you boys home safe, then I say we will just have to put up with it until then.
“Milo, as you can see, I am not sending you much money, and the reason is that Pat took it into his head to invest most of the money you left with him in stocks. He bought you shares in the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and I am sending those certificates to you, instead. If I was you I would hang on to them, because they already are worth something more than what he paid for them back in 1938 and I don’t doubt but what, with the war and all, they are going to be worth way more than they are now in years to come.
“I’d send you more money if I could, but it seems that poor Pat had borrowed against his insurance money and there was just about enough left to get him decently buried and pay for masses for the repose of his dear old soul, and I’m still saving money for a stone of the kind I know he wanted on his grave, too. What with property taxes and income taxes and the extra money I have to give Cook each week to pay for the meat and lard she gets without ration coupons, I am barely scraping by here, and I refuse to touch one penny of the money that comes from the government for the boys.
“Please remember, Milo, prayers to God and His Holy Mother never go unanswered. You might also pray to the Blessed Saint Sebastian, Patron of Soldiers, and I enclose a specially blessed medal of Saint Sebastian for you.
“Our prayers are always for you, Milo. May God bless and guard you always in this war.”
There were four ten-dollar bills, a five and three ones in the package, and a silver medal on a flat-link neck-chain of silver. There was also a stiff document folder secured with a cloth tie, and in it were the stock certificates, a bill of sale, transfer documents and a receipt for something over a thousand dollars. * But a second, smaller package had come in the same mail call. This one, too, was postmarked Chicago, but there was no return address and the handwriting was large, bold and most obviously masculine.
Fingering it, Milo wondered just who it could be who had written him. Guiscarde was in New Jersey, Oster-reich was in Washington, Pat was dead, Rustung was probably interned or in a federal prison or deported long since. So who was there left whom he had known back there, back then? Sol Brettmann? Or could it be one of the other men of Sam Osterreich’s group? He tore the package open to find two envelopes. He opened the thinnest one first and read: