“Thanks a lot! I never even went to the senior prom.”
A vision of Beverly Rowntrce clicked into place, suddenly and clearly, like a slide into a projector: furious, weeping, whining at him in that nagging, badgering way she had. The head-doctors hadn’t dug deep enough into Alan Lessing; they hadn’t dredged up all the ugly muck and spread it out in the light of day. Here was a picture he never let even himself see: Beverly telling him she was pregnant, telling him it was his baby, telling him she didn’t love him — didn’t even particularly like him. It was time she married somebody, and he was it: the prick and the pocketbook. She would agree to an abortion, however, but then he’d have to pay for the best: a first-class vacation somewhere while she got her oven cleaned.
He wasn’t the father. He could count days and months as well as she could, and it wasn’ t possible. He could guess who the father was, but Beverly had picked him instead. Why? She must have seen him as the dumbest asshole since Simple Simon. That was what hurt.
She was wrong, though: he would not be blackmailed. He would not pay. He would not marry her. He’d marry a black widow spider before he’d tie himself to Beverly Rowntree. He was going to college next year, and no conniving bitch of a Great White Whale was going to wreck that. He told her so, explicitly, bluntly, and in detail. After that evening he never saw Beverly again.
Liese was watching, twin furrows of puzzlement between her brows. She had no idea what he was thinking. His problems could come later.
He went to her.
She held him off, turning her head to the side, so that he got only a nose full of tickling, blonde hair. “No. No commitment.”
Commitment again! Liese and Mulder both! Did she mean that she wanted no commitment? Or that he lacked it? Whatever! He held her gently, and, sure enough, he fell her tenseness ebbing.
“Take what I can give,” he urged. “All the commitment I’ve got. No education, no money, no class, no talent, no permanent job. A body that’s middle-aged, tired, scarred, and not as sexy as it used to be. Take it or leave it.”
“Goddard offered better.” He thought she was smiling. “Make me queen over his kingdom. All I survey.” She sounded quavery, but this time he was sure it was laughter. “Asked me to marry him. Out by Mulders’ swimming pool.”
“And?”
“Told him I couldn’t survey anything with his hairy belly in the way.”
It was Lessing ‘s turn to laugh.
“Neither of us is a winner,” he chuckled. “Let’s go see if money, power, and sinful luxury can ruin two beautiful people. Watch the next heart-throbbing installment of ‘Mulder’s Maudlin Mansion*!”
“No commitment. No marriage. Not now.” She took his hand. “Green light?”
“Either of us can bring up those things later. The other one can always say, ‘Gub off, foozy!’”
She hugged him, and he kissed her, hard and deep. Then things got better.
“Come on. My room. No Eighty-Five there.” She was just as urgent as he was.
She waited while he closed the sewing-room door after them. As a parting joke, he called, “Good night, Eighty-Five!”
He did not see the tiny, red light blink on beside the camera high up in the ceiling molding, or hear Eighty-Five answer, “It is not night, Mister Lessing. The time is 11:03 hours. But have a nice day anyway.”
During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man — The nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.
There was never a good war, or a bad peace.
War is much too serious a thing to be left to the military.
Der Krieg ist nichts als eine Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs mit Einmischung anderer Mittel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Thursday, February 3, 2050
The vid-screens showed snow, ash-grey rocks, and low undergrowth so dark as to appear black. Nothing moved in that landscape. Cadre-Lieutenant Arlen Mullet set the mug of steaming coffee down within Lessing’s reach and retired. Jennifer Caw had not finished her first cup yet.
“They really going to surrender?” she asked.
“That’s what Gottschalk told me over our Magellan hookup.”
“Who?”
“Benjamin Gottschalk, the lib-rebs’ commander. Captain, he calls himself. Used to be an instructor at Stanford. Sociology.”
Jennifer wriggled on the military cot, rubbed her mittens together, and jammed them into the pockets of her white, alpaca ski-coat. The lava beds of northern California were a refrigerator in February, more like the high ranges of the Pacific Northwest than the palms, sand, and surf of “Free Calimerica” to the south. The cold bit right through canvas camp-chairs, Cadre uniforms, and thermal underwear.
“What a place to die in! Like the other side of the moon.” Jennifer shook out her auburn locks. She was “just passing through” and had stopped in at the Cadre base camp for a social visit. Spying for Goddard was more like it. That didn’t bother Lessing. Better him than somebody less friendly.
“Here. Liese sends these.” Jennifer fished into a green, leather purse as big as a soldier’s knapsack and handed him a vid-cassette, a book, and four photographs. Lessing laid the first two items aside and glanced quickly at the pictures: Liese speaking in an auditorium (their relationship had helped her speech problem); Liese at the dinner table with Wrench clowning behind her; Liese in ski-togs on Mount Rainier, Liese and Mulder grinning at the camera like Goldilocks and Papa Pig. Liese! How he missed her!
Outside something roared hugely, startling them. “A tank rev-ving up,” he explained, “in case the lib-rebs want to play some more instead of surrendering.”
The new M90A4 Heston tank was gigantic. The lib-rebs had grabbed a few of the monsters to begin with, but now they were down to using antiquated museum-pieces, such as old M60A3s. The Heston possessed a 120-mm gun, two 7.62-mm mounted machine guns, an air-defense missile launcher, and the latest communications gear, deflectors, rocket-confusers, and armor. Some Hestons were equipped with laser cannon as well, but those were all down near newly captured Sacramento, staging for the assault on San Francisco. When that was over, they’d go see about L.A.
No tank was much good in the lava beds; the region was crisscrossed with strange, little bluffs and ravines, heaped with knife-edged volcanic stones and boulders, and pitted with caves. Mullet, who haled from Eugene, Oregon, said that this had been the site of an earlier, almost forgotten conflict, the Modoc War of 1873, in which about a hundred and sixty Indians held off the U.S. Army for months. These days “Captain Jack’s” refuge was home to a different war party: some three hundred rag-tag lib-reb guerrillas fighting a rear-guard action to delay the U.S. Army’s mop-up in northern California.
It had taken weeks of paper wars at the Pentagon, newly refurbished and restocked with bureaucrats, before the generals had agreed to let Lessing’s fledgling American Freedom Brigade — the name Outram had chosen, although the unit was closer in size, makeup, and function to a division than a brigade — handle what should have been a minor police action. Like the Modoc War, this took more lime and lives than anybody had expected, and the Cadre was losing face. Lessing was intent on finishing the job right and correcting the image.