“I’m afraid you’re stuck with me,” Ted said, and finished his peas.
“Why, you egocentric—”
“Robert, you’ll go to your room and stay there!” his mother exclaimed, half-rising, her cheeks flushed. “Ted, I’m very sorry about all this. I don’t know what to say.”
Ted looked up. “I wasn’t simply being polite when I said he was right, you know.”
Margaret Garvin looked as bewildered as Bob had. “Well. Well,” she fumbled, “I don’t know…”
“Suppose we just finish supper,” Matt said, and for a moment Jim hoped he would be obeyed. But Bob pushed his chair farther back and stood up.
“I don’t think I particularly care to eat here right now,” he delivered, and strode out of the apartment.
“Forgot his carbine,” Jim commented, glad of the opportunity to say something at last.
Ted looked at him, his lips twitching into a thin smile. “Wouldn’t go too well with his attitude right now, would it?”
“Guess not,” Jim admitted. He dropped his eyes to his plate, realizing that he had learned something about Ted Berendtsen today, but was still unable to see what it was that let him project the force of his calm authority as though it were a physical strength.
Jim looked up again, and saw Ted staring across the room at the blank wall, his eyes as old as Matt’s, who was trying to reach across the length of the table and silently explain to Margaret with his expression alone.
“You ought to give him a district to run, pretty soon, Matt,” Berendtsen said unexpectedly. He smiled at Matt’s astonished look. “He uses his head.”
Matt snorted—a somehow painful sound. The sound a man makes when he condemns something dear to him.
“It’s still a republic,” Ted reminded him. “I’d rather have him argue with me than have him sit there nodding dumbly. Right now, he’s learning to think. Give him a little practice, and he’ll be ready to learn how to think past his emotions. Don’t forget, we’re going to need administrators by the dozens.”
Matt nodded slowly, some of his lost pride in his son returning. “I’ll see.”
“Do you suppose he was right?” Mary asked, looking gravely at her husband.
Jim turned his glance toward his sister. Her remark was completely characteristic. She sat quietly for hours, watching and listening, and what went on in her mind, perhaps Ted Berendtsen alone could guess. Perhaps not even he. And then finally, she said a few words much as she had now.
“Heil Berendtsen? I don’t know,” Ted admitted. “I don’t think so—but then, a man can’t tell when he’s going paranoid, can he?”
And Jim caught another glimpse of the special hells that Berendtsen reserved for himself.
Boston was easy, by the time they came to it. They occupied the suburbs, isolating the city proper, and Matt sent a light naval force to control the harbor. The news of how Providence had fallen must have reached the city, for the opposition was light. It was not so much the overwhelming weight of Berendtsen’s men that forced the surrender—it was the far more crushing power of the past year’s bloody history. By the time they reached Boston, it was the dead, more than the army’s living, who fought Berendtsen’s battles.
An army they were, by now; The Army of Unification, no longer simply “the New York bunch.” Men from Bridgeport and Kingston marched with them, beside others, now, from Lexington and Concord.
James Garvin, Sergeant-Rifleman, stood on a hilltop with his corporal, a lean-jawed, pipe-sucking man named Drumm, and watched the men forming up.
“The Army of Unification,” Drumm said, his face reflective. “Another one of your brother-in-law’s casually brilliant ideas. No regional tag, and a nice idealistic implication. No disgrace to be beaten by it, since it’s an ‘army,’ and much easier to convince yourself into joining, since it has the built-in ideal of ‘unification’ to recommend it. You know, I’m more and more convinced that Berendtsen is one of your rare all-around geniuses.”
Jim grunted and stuffed his own pipe full of the half-cured Connecticut tobacco he was gradually becoming accustomed to. He liked Drumm. He’d been a good man ever since he’d joined up, and he was somehow comfortable to talk to. “He does all right,” Jim agreed.
Drumm smiled slightly. “He does a shade better than that.” A reflective look crossed his face, and he turned his head to focus on the knot of officers clustered around Berendtsen’s figure as he passed out orders. “I wonder, sometimes, what a man like that thinks of himself. Is he his own hero, or does he feel some gospel burning inside him? Does he perhaps think of himself as nothing more than a man doing a job? Does he shut out the signs that tell him some of his men hate him, and some love him? Does he understand that there are men, like us, who stand to one side and try to analyze every move he makes?”
“I don’t know,” Jim said. It was an old topic, and they found themselves bringing it up again and again. “My kid brother has a theory about him.”
Drumm spat past his pipestem. “Had a theory—he’s developed a dozen since, or he’s false to type.” He sighed. “Well, I suppose we have to have young intellectuals, if we’re ever to survive to be middleaged philosophers. But I wish some of them, at least, would realize that they themselves encourage the high mortality rate among them.” He grinned wryly. “Particularly in these peculiar times. Well—” he nodded down at the men, “time to put it on the road again. Maine, here we come, ready or not.”
Jim walked down the hill toward his platoon. Maine, here we come, he thought. And then back down the coast again, and home. And after that, out again, southward. The dirty, bitter, smoking frontier, and behind it, union. More and more, he could feel his own motives shifting from expediency to a faith in the abstract concept of a new nation, and civilization pushing itself upward again. But the dirt and the bitterness went first, and he and Harvey Drumm walked with it, following Ted Berendtsen.
They were deep in Connecticut on the backward swing, cleaning out a few pockets that had been missed, when Jack Holland, who was Jim’s company commander now, came up to him.
Jack was still the same self-contained, controlled, fighting man he had been. His face, like Jim’s, was burned a permanent brown, and he wore an old Army helmet, but he hadn’t changed beyond that. His rifle was still slung from his shoulder at the same angle it had always held, and his eyes were steady. But his expression was set into a peculiar mask today, and Jim looked at him sharply.
“Ted wants to talk to you, Jim,” he said, his voice unreadable. “You free?”
“Sure.” Jim waved a hand to Drumm, and the corporal nodded.
“I’ll keep their pants dry,” he said, raising a chorus of derisive comments from the men.
“Okay, let’s go,” Jim said, and walked back beside Holland, who remained silent and gave him no opening to learn what had happened. They reached Berendtsen, who was standing alone without his usual group of officers waiting for instructions, and, once again, Jim frowned as he saw that even Berendtsen’s mask was more firm than usual. There was something frightening in that.
“Hello, Jim,” Berendtsen said, holding out his hand.
“How’s it going, Ted?” Jim said. The handshake was firm, as friendly as it ever had been, and Jim wondered if it had been his own attitude that made him think they were far more apart than they once had been.
Berendtsen let a grim smile flicker around the corners of his mouth, but when it was gone his face was sadder than Jim ever remembered seeing it.
“Bob just called me on the radio,” he said gently. “Matt died yesterday.”
Jim felt the chill stretch the skin over his cheekbones, and he knew that Jack had put his hand on his shoulder, but for those first few seconds, he could not really feel anything. He could never clearly remember, through the rest of his life, exactly what that moment had been like.
Finally he said, “How’d it happen?” because it was the only thing he could think of to say that would sound nearly normal and yet not snowball within him into more emotion than he could hide.
“He died in bed,” Berendtsen said, his voice even softer. “Bob couldn’t know what it really was. There are so many things to go wrong with a man that could be handled easily, if we had any trained doctors. But all we have are some bright young men who’ve read a lot of medical books and are too proud to admit they’re plumbers.”
