It wasn’t until the next day that things slowed down enough for Jeremy to think about what had happened in the drainage pipe. That afternoon, he sat on the sunlit grass with the rest of the basic trainees in his flight, and listened to a man in pressed fatigues explain the principles of the carbine.
Then he had time to think. And to get scared all over again.
It had been an hallucination. It must have been an hallucination, there was no other way to explain it.
He worried and fretted and chewed his thumb-knuckle all afternoon, and by nightfall he had himself convinced. Never mind the clarity and reality of that scene, the feel of the texture of the bedspread beneath his hands, or how accurately he had seen himself reflected in the closet minor. Home was seven hundred miles away.
He had not gone home. It had been an hallucination.
He convinced himself at last, and for three days he stayed convinced. And then he got the letter from his mother.
The letter itself was simply one of the newsy, chatty notes he had come to expect from his mother in his seven weeks in the Air Force. But one sentence in it stood out as though it were written in fire.
The sentence concerned Jeremy’s dog, Andrew. “I thought at last we’d, broken Andrew of the habit of sleeping on your bed,” his mother wrote, “but last night he did it again, leaving muddy marks all over the bedspread. He was gone, of course, by the time I got there!”
Two days later, bivouac being over and the flight back at the barracks, Jeremy went on sick call. To the man-with-clipboard who marched the sick call group to the infirmary, he said, “I’m having hallucinations.” To the white-garbed medic who questioned him at the infirmary, he said, “I’m having hallucinations.” To the sour-looking doctor who got around to him at ten o’clock, he said, “I’m having hallucinations.”
The doctor looked a little more sour. “What sort of hallucinations?” he wanted to know. “Girls, or pink elephants?”
“Neither.” And Jeremy told him what had happened, and showed him the letter from his mother.
The doctor was looking increasingly sour. “What else?” he demanded.
“That’s all.”
“You said hallucinations.”
“Just the one,” said Jeremy. “Just that one.”
The doctor glowered at the letter from Jeremy’s mother, and then glowered at Jeremy. “You wouldn’t be malingering, would you?” he demanded.
“No, sir,” said Jeremy. He was getting scared again — basic training was a good place to learn how to be scared — and he was devoting a lot of time to trying to cover it. If the doctor thought he were scared, he would think it was because Jeremy was guilty of something. Like malingering, which meant goofing off by faking sickness, and which could result in a court-martial.
“You wouldn’t be,” continued the doctor, glowering more than ever, “angling for a section eight, would you? You figure you’d rather be a nut than an airman, is that it?”
“No, sir,” said Jeremy.
The doctor dropped the letter on his desk where Jeremy could reach it, and leaned back. “I don’t know what you want from me,” he said. “You aren’t physically sick. You say you had this one hallucination five days ago, and now here you are on sick call. What do you want me to do about it?”
“I keep worrying,” Jeremy told him. “I keep thinking as though it really happened. I can’t think about anything else.”
The doctor sighed, looked sour, shook his head. “There’s nothing I can do,” he said. “Forget it. If it was an hallucination, so what? It’s all over, and it didn’t come back. So forget about it.”
“That’s why I’m here, sir,” said Jeremy. “I can’t forget about it.”
“You want to see a psychiatrist, is that it?” The doctor’s tone showed clearly that this proved his earlier suspicions, that Jeremy was a faker trying to get a section eight, hoping to get an insanity discharge.
Jeremy almost said no. He didn’t want anybody to think he was a malingerer or a fake. He didn’t want anybody to think that he would try to lie his way out of the Air Force.
But the memory of the last five days was too strong in him. He’d been sleeping poorly, he hadn’t been able to concentrate on anything, his marching had deteriorated to worse than what it had been his very first day in basic training, he was goofing up on inspection, he was generally confused and miserable over this thing. So he nodded and said, “Yes, sir, I guess so.”
The doctor sighed. “All right, airman,” he said heavily. He made a brief note in Jeremy’s medical record, and wrote something else on a small sheet of paper which he clipped to the record folder. “You come on sick call Thursday morning,” he said. “Go on back to your flight now.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jeremy. He got to his feet. “Thank you, sir.”
The doctor mumbled, and looked sour.
The chief surgeon was being difficult. He, too, was a bird colonel — just recently having received his eagles, from the obvious pleasure he took in making life difficult for another officer of equal rank — and he saw no reason why he should do what Colonel Brice wanted. “Medical records,” he said pompously, “are classified material. Authorized personnel only. I’m afraid I’ll have to know your reason for wanting to see this man’s records, and also your request will most definitely have to come through the proper channels. You must know, Colonel Brice, the proper procedure for—”
“Ketchup,” said the colonel, disgusted. Since his two boys had grown old enough to understand and imitate the vocabulary of their elders, this had become the colonel’s one swear word, and it was usually disconcerting to other people the first time they heard him use it.
It was disconcerting to the chief surgeon. “I beg your pardon?”
“Where’s your hot line?” demanded the colonel.
“Well, really, Colonel, it requires an emergency of—”
“Ketchup,” said the colonel again. He came around the chief surgeon’s desk and, over that astonished gentleman’s protests, proceeded to open desk drawers.
The bright red phone was in the bottom drawer on the right-hand side. The colonel picked it up, waited a second, and then said, “Brice. For Corey.” He waited a few seconds more, and then said, “Jack? I’m fine. I want some records and — Right you are.” Deadpan, he handed the receiver to the chief surgeon.
The chief surgeon, bug-eyed, put the phone to his ear and announced his name and rank. Then he listened, nodded vacantly, said, “Of course, sir. Certainly, sir,” and put the receiver gently back onto its cradle. He closed the door, and in a chastened voice said, “I had no idea—”
“That’s all right, Colonel. Now, if I could have the medical records—”
“Of course. Certainly. Immediately.”
It took, as a matter of fact, just about ten minutes for the records to get into Colonel Brice’s hands. Then the colonel, at his request, was given an empty office where he and Clark and Swanson could look them over at leisure.
They already knew quite a bit about their man: Jeremy Masters, Airman Basic, AF12451995; twenty years, five months and twelve days old; born in Crane City, Pennsylvania; lived there all his life until he went away to attend a small liberal arts college at Marshall, in the same state; two years of college, average grades; enlistment in the Air Force; score of 73 on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Stanine scores ranging between six and eight, with a nine on clerical; negative police check; a class one physical profile on everything except eyes, where he had a two, being somewhat nearsighted; no known subversive activities, and made no sports teams in high school or college; studied trumpet four years, not very good at it.