But today he was spared. When he was halfway through the rigmarole the barracks phone rang and the sergeant apologetically answered it.
He returned from his office-cubicle on the double, looking vaguely frightened. “Compliments of General Grote’s secretary, sir, and will you please report to him at G-l as soon as possible.”
“Thank you, sergeant. Step outside with me a moment.” Out on the duckboard walk, with the drizzle trickling down his neck, he asked: “Sergeant, who is General Grote?”
“Never heard of him, sir.”
Neither had Lieutenant Kramer.
He hurried to Bachelor Officers Quarters to change his sullied blue jacket, not even pausing to glance at the puzzle page of the Times, which had arrived while he was at “work.” Generals were special. He hurried out again into the drizzle.
Around him and unnoticed were the artifacts of an Army base at war. Sky-eye search radars popped from their silos to scan the horizons for a moment and then retreat, the burden of search taken up by the next in line. Helicopter sentries on guard duty prowled the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp. Fort Bradley was not all reception center. Above-ground were the barracks, warehouses and rail and highway termini for processing recruits-ninety thousand men and all their goods-but they were only the skin over the fort itself. They were, as the scared kids told each other in the dayrooms, naked to the air. If the yutes ever did spring a megaton attack, they would become a thin coating of charcoal on the parade ground, but they would not affect the operation of the real Fort Bradley a bit.
The real Fort Bradley was a hardened installation beneath meters of reinforced concrete, some miles of rambling warrens that held the North American (and Allied) Army’s G-l. Its business was people: the past, present and future of every soul in the Army.
G-l decided that a fifteen-year-old in Duluth was unlikely to succeed in civilian schools and drafted him. G-l punched his Army tests and civilian records on cards, consulted its card-punched tables of military requirements and assigned him, perhaps, to Machinist Training rather than Telemetering School. G-l yanked a platoon leader halfway around the world from Formosa and handed him a commando for a raid on the yutes’ Polar Station Seven. G-l put foulball Kramer at the “head” of the 561st PRB. G-l promoted and allocated and staffed and rewarded and punished.
Foulball Kramer approached the guardbox at the elevators to the warrens and instinctively squared his shoulders and smoothed his tie.
General Grote, he thought. He hadn’t seen a general officer since he’d been commissioned. Not close up.
Colonels and majors had court-martialed him. He didn’t know who Grote was, whether he had one star or six, whether he was Assignment, Qualifications, Training, Evaluation, Psychological-or Disciplinary.
Military Police looked him over at the elevator head. They read him like a book. Kramer wore his record on his chest and sleeves. Dull gold bars spelled out the overseas months-for his age and arm-, the Infantry, not enough. “Formosa,” said a green ribbon, and “the storming of the beach” said a small bronze spearpoint on it. A brown ribbon told them “Chinese Mainland,” and the stars on it meant that he had engaged in three of the five mainland campaigns-presumably Canton, Mukden and Tsingtao, since they were the first. After that, nothing. Especially not the purple ribbon that might indicate a wound serious enough to keep him out of further fighting.
The ribbons, his age and the fact that he was still a first lieutenant were grounds enough for the MP’s to despise him. An officer of thirty-eight should be a captain at least. Many were majors and some were colonels. “You can go down, Lieutenant,” they told the patent foulball, and he went down to the interminable concrete tunnels of G-l.
A display machine considered the name General Grote when he typed it on its keyboard, and told him with a map where the general was to be found. It was a longish walk through the tunnels. While he walked past banks of clicking card-sorters and their servants he pondered other information the machine had gratuitously supplied: GROTE, Lawrence W, Lt Gen, 0-459732, Unassigned.
It did not lessen any of Kramer’s puzzles. A three-star general, then. He couldn’t possibly have anything to do with disciplining a lousy first-John. Lieutenant generals ran Army Groups, gigantic ad hoc assemblages of up to a hundred divisions, complete with air forces, missile groups, amphibious assault teams, even carrier and missile-sub task forces. The fact of Ms rank indicated that, whoever he was, he was an immensely able and tenacious person. He had gone through at least a twenty-year threshing of the wheat from the chaff, all up the screening and evaluation boards from second lieutenant to, say, lieutenant colonel, and then the murderous grind of accelerated courses at Command and General Staff School, the fanatically rigid selection for the War College, an obstacle course designed not to tram the substandard up to competence but to keep them out. It was just this side of impossible for a human being to become a lieutenant general. And yet a few human beings in every generation did bulldoze their way through that little gap between the impossible and the almost impossible. And such a man was unassigned?
Kramer found the office at last. A motherly, but sharp-eyed, WAC major told him to go right in.
John Kramer studied his three-star general while going through the ancient rituals of reporting-as-ordered. General Grote was an old man, straight, spare, white-haired, tanned. He wore no overseas bars. On his chest were all the meritorious service ribbons his country could bestow, but none of the decorations of the combat soldier. This was explained by a modest sunburst centered over the ribbons. General Grote was, had always been, General Staff Corps. A desk man.
“Sit down, Lieutenant,” Grote said, eyeing him casually. “You’ve never heard of me, I assume.”
“I’m afraid not, sir.”
“As I expected,” said Grote complacently. “I’m not a dashing tank commander or one of those flying generals who leads his own raids. I’m one of the people who moves the dashing tank commanders and flying generals around the board like chess pieces. And now, confound it, I’m going to be a dashing combat leader at last. You may smoke if you like.”
Kramer obediently lit up.
“Dan Medway,” said the general, “wants me to start from scratch, build up a striking force and hit the Asian mainland across the Bering Strait.”
Kramer was horrified twice-first by the reference to The Supreme Commander as “Dan” and second by the fact that he, a lieutenant, was being told about high strategy.
“Relax,” the general said. “Why you’re here, now. You’re going to be my aide.”
Kramer was horrified again. The general grinned.
“Your card popped out of the machinery,” he said, and that was all there was to say about that, “and so you’re going to be a highly privileged character and everybody will detest you. That’s the way it is with aides. You’ll know everything I know. And vice versa; that’s the important part. You’ll run errands for me, do investigations, serve as hatchet man, see that my pajamas are pressed without starch and make coffee the way I like it-coarse grind, brought to the boil for just a moment in an old-fashioned coffee pot. Actually what you’ll do is what I want you to do from day to day. For these privileges you get to wear a blue fourragere around your left shoulder which marks you as a man not to be trifled with by colonels, brigadiers or MP’s. That’s the way it is with aides. And, I don’t know if you have any outside interests, women or chess or drinking. The machinery didn’t mention any. But you’ll have to give them up if you do.”