Lieutenant Beame was one of them. However, he was standing pretty much by himself, thirty feet from the knot of men.
Major Kelly went straight to him, because he liked to get each man alone when he was selling the idea of the credit contract. He knew it would be dangerous to let them group together when he delivered his spiel. It had to be a one-to-one relationship in which he could employ what little talent for discipline he possessed. He had to be able to concentrate on one man in order to overwhelm his victim with his practiced patter and with dire predictions of what the Panzers would do to them if they did not get this damned village built in just six days.
“Got something for you to sign,” Kelly said, giving Beame the paper.
“Oh?”
All the while that Kelly explained the fine points of the credit contract to Lieutenant Beame, the lieutenant stared over Kelly's shoulder at nothing in particular, a silly smirk on his face. When Kelly asked him to sign the paper, Beame took the pencil and scrawled his name in sloppily looping letters. He was still grinning drunkenly. He gave Kelly the scrip without quibbling, and his expression remained eerily mongoloid.
“What's the matter?” Kelly asked. “What are you grinning about?”
Beame hesitated. Then: “I met a girl.”
“I don't understand,” Kelly said.
“The most beautiful girl I've ever seen.” Beame almost drooled.
“Who?”
Beame told him. “I asked her to come back this evening for a romantic dinner. Maybe you can meet her then.”
“In the mess hall?” Kelly asked.
The mess hall, which was the rec room, was anything but romantic. And the food Sergeant Tuttle served them was hardly the stuff of a lover's supper. Sergeant Tuttle was camp cook. He had not been a cook in civilian life, but a sanitation worker in Philadelphia.
“Not the mess hall,” Beanie said. “I've bought some groceries from Tuttle, and I'm going to cook the supper myself. We'll eat down under that stand of pines along the riverbank.” Beame looked at Kelly, but Kelly was strangely unable to catch the lieutenant's eyes. It was as if Beame were looking through him at some vaguely perceived paradise.
“Are you in love?” Kelly asked.
Beame's grin became sloppy. “I guess maybe I am.”
“That's foolish,” Kelly warned him. “Love is a form of hope, and hope is a terminal disease. You get in love with someone, you become careless. Your mind wanders. Next thing you know, you collect a two-hundred-pound bomb down the back of your shirt. Love is deadly. Just fuck her and forget the love part.”
“Whatever you say,” Beame said. Unmistakably, though, the lieutenant had not heard a word the major said.
Kelly was about to press the point, in hopes of saving Beame before it was too late, when Lieutenant Slade arrived with his form. “You get one of these?” he asked Kelly, shoving a yellow paper into the major's hand. He gave one to Beame, who did not even glance at it.
“What's this?” Kelly asked, giving Slade a suspicious look.
“It's a questionnaire,” Slade said. He had an armful of them.
Kelly read the headline across the top: who is the traitor?
“We all know there's a traitor in camp,” Slade said. “Someone keeps telling the German air force when the bridge is rebuilt so they can bomb it again right away. Last night, when I called General Blade and after you gave him our supplies order, I asked him to have this questionnaire printed and delivered when the DC-3 came in. He thought it was a good idea.” Slade pointed to the list of questions and blanks where the answers were to go. “Just fill these in. You don't have to sign your name or anything. There's a response box nailed to the wall outside the rec room, and it's unmonitored. When you have this ready, deposit it in the box.”
Kelly looked at the paper. The first question was: “Right off, are you the traitor, and would you like to confess if we guarantee you a light punishment?”
“See how it works?” Slade asked. “Even if we don't obtain a confession, I will be able to analyze these forms and find out who our informer is.” He smiled, immensely pleased with himself. “Statistical analysis. That's all it is, Major.”
Kelly opened his mouth to tell Slade that he was an idiot, then thought better of it. He read the second question from the sheet: “Have you noticed anyone in the unit behaving strangely lately?”
“That one ought to get a response,” Slade said, nodding his head emphatically. He belonged in an asylum.
With this credit contract business, Major Kelly could not afford to make any new enemies or antagonize old ones. Therefore, he told Slade that the questionnaire was a marvelous idea. “Here, now you take one of my forms,” he said, giving The Snot his credit contract.
Slade looked at it with as much suspicion as Kelly had shown while studying the questionnaire. “What is this?”
“A credit contract,” Kelly said. Using the stature of his rank, the weight of his command, the force of his personality, and the mesmeric quality of his gaze, he tried to make Lieutenant Slade sign the paper and pass over the fifty dollars in scrip.
“I won't sign this paper,” Slade said, when Kelly was done. “And I am not going to give you or Maurice fifty dollars in scrip.” He did not seem to be particularly angry. Indeed, he was grinning at the major. “This is craziness, you know. Opting for this cowardly plan in the first place — then asking your men to hock their reputations to pay for it. This is more than I ever hoped for. You have gone way too far this time.”
“Minute by minute, the eventual arrival of the Panzers becomes more of a reality, a nearer threat,” Major Kelly said. He was beginning the argument which, in his own mind, was the most forceful one in favor of hocking their reputations and anything else on which Maurice wanted to take a lien. “If we tried to fight off a force as large as this Germany convoy—”
“Are you ordering me to sign this?” Slade interrupted, rattling the credit contract in Kelly's face.
The major considered it for a moment. He had successfully pulled that stunt with Coombs. However, though they were much alike on the surface, Coombs and Slade were utterly different underneath. What worked on one might only bring a stiffer resistance from the other. “I can't order you to do anything like that,” Kelly said.
“Damn right,” Slade said. He dropped his credit contract, turned away from them, and hurried over to the men by the rec room door.
“You're in for trouble now,” Beame said.
Kelly watched as Slade conferred with the men standing in the shadows. He was gesturing with one hand, clutching his questionnaires against his chest with the other. He kept pointing at Kelly.
“Sowing dissension,” Beame said.
Most of the men laughed at Slade and walked away from him. But a few, a sizable minority, remained and listened. They might have thought that Slade was an ass, but they nonetheless shared his philosophy. The seed of rebellion was dormant in them, but susceptible to water and gentle cultivation.
“He's telling them not to sign your paper,” Beame said.
“They have to sign.”
“I thought you couldn't make it an order?”
“I can't,” Kelly admitted. “But if too many of them refuse and we can't get up the money that Maurice wants, the whole deal will fall through. The people from Eisenhower won't help us. We won't be able to build the town by ourselves. We won't be able to hide from the Germans. We'll all die.”
In the next hour, fifteen men refused to sign credit contracts.