And the first whiff of tear gas reached him.
And he could feel the young terror of all the other basic trainees in the pipe, reduced to harried sewer-crawling by a world they never made.
One second, there he was in the pipe, his heart pounding like a jack hammer. The next second, he was huddled over on hands and knees atop his own bed at home. The bedroom door was open, and soft light filtered up from the living room downstairs, and he could recognize his room, his bed, his desk, the full-length mirror on the closet door, the painting of a collie hanging on the wall over the bureau. I’m crazy! he thought wildly.
And the next second, he was back in the pipe in the miserable dark, hands fumbling for the gas mask. He found it, and got it on at last, and the people behind him were pushing and swearing. He crawled through the pipe and ran with the rest.
Colonel Brice stood on the road across the ravine, watching the scurrying basic trainees down below, and wondering whether there’d be one in this group or not. He watched the TI’s drop their tear gas bombs down toward the entrances of the drainage pipe, listened to the crash and boom of the combat simulation from up and down the length of the ravine, and he hoped there would be one. There wasn’t any reason for this, otherwise.
He wondered how much longer he could fight modernization on this front. He had the older staff officers on his side, of course; none of them would ever really believe in their heart of hearts that the every-man-a-rifleman-first concept was obsolescent now. But there were younger men coming up, men who realized that this week of bivouac was a farce, that its only result was to terrify, anger, and occasionally maim the basic trainees. The vast majority of Air Force enlisted men were going to be clerks or technicians, in support of the airplanes and missiles which were the actual combat arm. Besides, reducing the sixteen weeks of Army basic training to a five-day bivouac was, at the least, overly optimistic
Thank heaven, the colonel thought, for the military mind. Or is that a contradiction in terms? But, at any rate, as long as the military mind retains its basic qualities of blind unadaptability, every single enlisted man in the Air Force would go through this bivouac: Colonel Brice’s field experiment.
And if they phase out the bivouac, he thought, I’ll just have to find some other way to screen these people.
The colonel looked up at the control shack just in time to see the door open and Ed Clark stick his head out to speak to the runner.
They’ve found someone! he thought, and started for the control shack, not waiting for the runner to come down to him. Behind him, the TI’s with the tear gas bombs looked after him, and then glanced at one another and shrugged. Neither of them knew where Colonel Brice fit into the general scheme of things.
No one seemed to know. But he was always there, every week, every Wednesday night, to watch the night problem.
The runner met the colonel halfway up the slope. “Mr. Clark wants to see you, sir,” he said.
“I know,” said the colonel. “Thank you.”
“Yes, sir.”
The colonel held in the smile he felt tugging at his lips. The runner was so frankly curious. Only three people on this base were allowed into the control shack, or knew what went on in there. The colonel himself, and Ed Clark, and Paul Swanson. Not even Lieutenant general Poole, the base commander, knew anything about the colonel and his two assistants, and not even he was allowed inside the control shack, a fact which pleased the good general not at all.
There was no way to open the door from the outside. The colonel knocked, and Ed Clark pushed the door open for him. “Come on in, sir,” he said. “We’ve got a real dilly this time.”
The colonel stepped into the shack and closed the door, glancing at Clark and Paul Swanson, seated over by the TV screen.
The three men were of decided types. Colonel James Brice, tall and lean in his blue uniform, was square-jawed and thin-lipped, his brown eyes deep set beneath shaggy brows, his gray hair cropped close to his skull. Before the Second World War, he had been an anthropologist, associated with a New England university. He had learned to fly a plane, since there were some areas of the world which could be reached by no other kind of vehicle, and when the war had come along he had wound up in the Army Air Corps. He had stayed in the service, switching over to the new-born Air Force in 1947, and settled into Intelligence in 1949-
Ed Clark was twenty-six and looked ten years younger. His boyish, cheerful face was topped by pale blond hair in the inevitable crewcut. He was tall and slender, looking exactly like a first-string center on a high school basketball team. He was wearing tan slacks and a shortsleeved white shirt, open at the collar. He and Paul Swanson were both enlisted men, and took the prerogative given Intelligence personnel to wear civilian clothing. The base finance officer was the only individual on the base outside this room who knew their ranks. They sirred only Colonel Brice, and were called Mister by both enlisted men and officers on the base.
Paul Swanson was short and wiry, black-haired and full-lipped. He was twenty-three, and looked five years older. He came originally from New York City, and no one could have mistaken his place of origin. Dressed now in black trousers and a pale-green shirt, he glumly watched the dim figures moving across the television screen, piped up from the infra-red camera concealed in the drainage pipe down at the ravine.
The colonel looked at the TV screen for a second, then looked back at Ed Clark. “What is it this time?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Clark admitted. “We did get a picture of him, though, so we’ll be able to identify him.”
“Well, what did he do?” asked the colonel.
It was Paul Swanson who answered. “He disappeared.”
“He did what?”
“It was just for a second,” Swanson went on. “I almost missed it, it was so fast. But he just up and disappeared. And then, a second later, he came right back again.”
“Disappeared,” mused the colonel. “Invisibility? That one I don’t go for. You don’t just suddenly change your entire body chemistry to glass.”
“He did it,” said Swanson simply. “He learned it in the Orient,” suggested Clark. “The mysterious power to cloud men’s minds.”
“Cloud men’s minds, maybe,” said the colonel. “Cloud an infra-red television camera, never. Particularly when you don’t know it’s there.”
“Maybe he did,” said Swanson.
“A telepath?” The colonel brightened. If that’s what it is, at last — but why the disappearing act?” He turned to Swanson. “What was his reaction to it? How did he act after he’d done it? Guilty, pleased with himself, or what?”
“Scared to death,” said Swanson. “I don’t think he’d planned on doing it. He just got rattled, and did it.”
“So what do we do now?” asked Clark.
“Sit and wait,” said the colonel.
“Identify him, and keep an eye on him. But there’s no sense approaching him until we find out exactly what it is he’s doing and what his attitude toward it all is.” The colonel glanced at the TV screen again. The basic trainees were still crawling hurriedly through the drainage pipe, the line pausing intermittently to hurriedly don gas masks and then crawl on.
“He disappeared,” said the colonel softly, and shook his head.