“Shit.” Croyd retracted the move, knocking the white knight down again. “And here I thought I had your back to the wall.” Mark gave him a thin smile. Once upon a time he had been a middling-hot chess player; he’d held a master’s rating in high school and college, playing tournaments, memorizing games by the book-load. Time and extensive experimentation with psychoactive chemicals had left certain gaps in his knowledge, and he hadn’t had much occasion to keep his skills honed since. He still fancied himself a dangerous player.
Unfortunately Croyd played with the banzai intensity of an amateur. All those classical openings painstakingly committed to memory, all Mark’s fianchettos and his Nimzo-Indian Defenses, all his careful strategic analysis, blew right out the door in the face of a player who didn’t know enough to know what he wasn’t supposed to do. Despite the misfire of Croyd’s current attack, Mark saw yet another draw looming a few moves ahead like the face of a glacier.
Somebody rapped on the bunker’s doorpost with something hard. “Hello? Anybody in here?”
“Lizards and old hippies, if that counts,” Croyd called. “Come right on in.”
Brew and Luce entered, Brew folding an umbrella, Luce’s face streaming with rain and his T-shirt soaked transparent and clinging to his rather flabby middle. Umbrellas were bogus, apparently.
Gilbert immediately started batting at the air, which was a near-solid blue haze from about the level of Mark’s breastbone up, with several of his arms. “You’re smoking that damned cigar in here. I don’t know why the Colonel permits tobacco onbase. Smoking is a bourgeois habituation, fostered by capitalist consumer fascism.”
“That must be why every Viet over the age of three years old smokes,” Croyd said affably.
“It can’t really be helping you,” Evan Brewer offered in his sweet-reason voice.
Croyd laughed. “Get real, man. Maybe I’m damaging my tissues and my precious bodily essence. But every two, three months I go night-night and the wild card deals me a whole new set. Where’s the damage?”
“Side-stream smoke adversely affects the health of those around you,” Luce said primly, folding his lower sets of arms while his upper continued to fan.
“What? Meadows? He’s got enough bad habits of his own. A little cigar smoke won’t make him much difference.” He drew on the cigar and released an aromatic jet toward the log beams of the ceiling.
“So, you gentlemen have something in mind, or is this a social call? Us old guys need our sleep. But I guess you know that.”
Luce scowled. He liked to think of himself as a youth in rebellion, although he was old enough to have fathered most of the second-generation Brigaders. “Colonel wants to see you. Now.”
“Are we in trouble?” Mark asked.
Luce glowered, still feeling the sting of Croyd’s “old guys” crack. Brew shrugged. “He didn’t tell us to point guns at you, for what that’s worth,” he said easily.
“Can’t beat old-fashioned courtesy,” Croyd said, standing and sweeping his stubby tail left and right a couple of times as if to shake the kinks out. He swayed briefly, as if drunk, then collected himself. “Let’s not keep the man waiting.
The Colonel’s office was paneled in some dark-stained hardwood. Mark guessed teak, but he wasn’t sure if that came from Vietnam. It was also small, cozy to the point of near claustrophobia for three individuals, their chairs, and a lordly wooden desk.
The room was additionally crowded with two-dimensional occupants, stuck up on the walls and sharing frames with Charles Sobel. There was a young Captain Sobel, painfully earnest, Doug MacArthur chin proudly ajut as General Westmoreland pinned a medal on his chest. There were pictures of Major Sobel, a little older, a little more creased around the eyes, posing with members of the joker Brigade company he had commanded in the early seventies. There were a lot of photos of Sobel in civilian clothes, shaking hands with Jimmy Carter, shaking hands with Andrew Young, shaking hands with Robert Redford, shaking hands with the Hero Twins in Guatemala, shaking hands with Gregg Hartmann, back in uniform to shake hands with joker Brigade survivors in front of the Vietnam Wall, whitewater rafting with Soviet veterans of Afghanistan. He probably shook their hands, too, but for some reason had neglected to memorialize it. “Care for a drink, gentlemen?” Colonel Sobel asked, leaning back in his padded leather chair. Soft New Age music played from a small generator-run CD system. “I have a modest but, if I may say so, fairly high-quality collection of hard liquor.”
Croyd asked for Wild Turkey and settled for Jack Daniel’s. Mark accepted a cognac without specifying a brand name. Alcohol was not his drug of choice.
Sobel poured some brandy for himself and passed the snifter back and forth beneath his nose, savoring the bouquet.
“La lucha continua.” He almost sighed. “The struggle goes on.”
He looked at them. “You may wonder at finding me in such decadent surroundings.”
“Farthest thing from our minds, Colonel,” Croyd said.
“The truth is, life in our materialist consumer-oriented society accustoms one to certain perquisites, certain comforts. It is difficult to do entirely without them. And in truth, why put oneself to the stress of going cold-turkey from decadence, as it were, when there is so much urgent work to be done?”
“No point at all,” Croyd said. “We’re behind you all the way, Colonel.”
He sort of hung his head to one side and gave Mark a big wink. Mark fought an urge to slap him. What the hell was wrong with him?
Sobel nodded. “You gentlemen are aces. Powerful aces. You have a great deal to offer our revolution. And I hope you won’t take it amiss if I mention that you’re getting up in years. Not that you’re old, of course, but, simply put, you aren’t as young as you once were. Neither am I, of course; why, I’m probably older than either of you.”
Croyd raised a three-fingered hand, palm-down, wagged it side-to-side. He was pushing sixty; he had been fourteen when Dr. Tod and Jetboy held the very first Wild Card Day, more or less over his head. His long periods of sleep and the ancillary effects of the wild card virus had kept him in stasis in a sort of indeterminate maturity. His story was not exactly common knowledge. He had told it to Mark in a crystal-meth rush. Over and over.
Not seeming to notice the gesture, Sobel folded his hands on the desk before him. “What I’m saying is, we’re all equal here, but of course I’m willing to take cognizance of both your age and the unique contributions you can make.”
“We want to pull our weight, sir,” Mark said.
Have you gone completely insane, you drug-addled freak? Cosmic Traveler wanted to know. Don’t you know better than to contradict a man who holds life-and-death power over us? And listen to him — do you like filling sandbags?
“You will do that, and more. ’From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.’ You have special needs and special abilities both. You, Dr. Meadows, can call upon your ’friends’ — you’ll have to tell me how you do that, comrade-to-comrade, one of these days.”
“Um,” Mark said.
“I’m also aware of your fine scientific background. We have a crying lack of qualified medical personnel. The Republic’s medical assets are so thinly stretched — another crime to be laid at America’s door, denying this country the aid it needs to expand its medical services.”
They got plenty of gelt to blow on guns and tanks and warplanes, buppie, J. J. Flash thought. Mark had a flash of relief — he was feeling centered enough at the moment that he knew he hadn’t actually spoken the words aloud. Then he glanced frantically at Croyd, afraid he’d say them, or something to their effect. Croyd didn’t, but he gave Mark another bulb-eyed stage wink, which was almost as bad.