It was a sign of how much he’d thought of Matt, that Ted should be openly bitter.
All the way back along the Hudson, Harvey Drumm was the most important thing on Jim Garvin’s mind. Harvey Drumm, and something he’d said and done.
They had been bivouacked outside Albany. Jim and Harvey had been leaning their backs against a tree and smoking quietly in the darkness.
“Well,” Drumm said at last, “you won’t be seeing me in the morning, I guess. That Sawtell boy in the third squad’ll make a good corporal. You can replace Miller with him, and move Miller up into my spot. How’s it sound?”
“Sounds fine for Miller and Sawtell,” Jim answered. “I’m not sure I like it. You going over the hill?”
Drumm sucked on his pipe. “Yes and no. You might say I was going out to do missionary work.”
That didn’t make much sense. “You’re crazy,” Jim said perfunctorily.
Drumm chuckled. “No. The only thing insane about me is my curiosity. Trouble is, it keeps getting satisfied, and then I have to take it somewhere else. That, and my mouth. My mouth wants to satisfy other people’s curiosity whether they want it or not. It’s time to take ’em both over the hill. Over the next range of hills, maybe.”
“Look, you know I’m your superior officer and I could have you shot.”
“Shoot me.”
“Oh, God damn it! What do you want to get out now, for? Ted’s going to be taking the army lots of new places. Don’t you want to be along, if you’re so curious?”
“I know Ted’s story from here on. I think maybe he does, too.” Drumm’s voice no longer had anything humorous in it. “I think maybe he read the same books I did, after he realized what his job was. Not that we go about it in the same way, but the source books are the same.
“See, you can learn a lot from books. They’ll tell you simple, practical things. Things like what relationship a wrench has to a bolt, and what a bolt’s function is. They won’t tell you what the best way for you to hold a wrench might be, so you can do the best job. If you’re any good, you can figure it out for yourself And it’s the same way with much more complicated things, too.
“You know, just before the plague, the United States was almost sure it was going to have a war with a country called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. At first they thought the principal weapons would be bombs. But after a while, the best opinion was that rather than wreck all the useful machinery, and poison the countryside for centuries, the weapons used would be bacteriological ones. Diseases. Short-term plant poisons. And crippling chemicals. To this day, nobody knows for sure whether the plague that hit us wasn’t something designed to evade all the known antibiotics and bacteriophages—something that got away from somebody’s stockpile, by accident. Everyone denied it, of course. I don’t suppose that part of it matters.
“But just suppose somebody had written a book about what it would be like —really be like—for the people who lived through it. And suppose thousands of copies of that book had been lying around, out in the open in thousands of stores, for people to find after the plague.
“Think of the mistakes it might have saved them.
“That’s what books are for. Books, and mouthy, curious people like me. We soak up a lot of stuff in our heads, while other people are too busy doing practical things. And then we go out, and give it to them as they need it.
“So I think I’m due to go off. There must be people out in the wide world who need somebody to tell ’em what a bolt does, and what a wrench does to a bolt.”
“They’ll shoot you as soon as you show up, most likely.”
“So they’ll shoot me. And then they’ll never know. Their tough luck.”
Jim Garvin sighed. “All right. Harv, have it your way.”
“Almost always do.”
“Where you headed?”
“South, I guess. Always hated the cold rain. South, and over the mountains. I don’t figure Berendtsen’ll have time to get to New Orleans. Shame. I hear it’s a beautiful place.”
“Well, if you’re going, you’re going,” Jim said, passing over the Berendtsen part of what Harv had said. He’d be there himself to see about that. “I wish you weren’t. For a mouthy guy, you make a good noncom.”
“Sorry, Jim. I’d rather conquer the world.”
They’d shaken hands in the darkness, and the last Jim Garvin ever saw of Harv Drumm, the long-legged man was walking away, whistling an old song Drumm used to sing around campfires, now and then. It was an old Australian Army marching song, he’d said: “Waltzing Matilda,” it was called, and some of the words didn’t make much sense.
“Well, what’re you going to do?” Bob Garvin demanded, his mouth hooked to one side. The passage of a handful of years had not changed him.
Berendtsen looked at him coldly. “Take the army south. As soon as possible. Trenton’s been taken over by the Philadelphia organization. You’re more aware of that than I am. You got the original report.”
Bob smiled thinly, and Jim, looking at him, winced. He tried to find some sort of comfort in his mother’s expression, but she simply sat with her hands in her lap, her face troubled.
“Still a few worlds left to conquer, eh? Well, go and good riddance to you.”
Mary looked up. “I don’t think you should, Ted. You know as well as I do what he’s up to. He got this man, Mackay, elected to Mayor. He’s got half the minor administrative posts in his pocket. The reason he’s so anxious to see you out of New York is because then he’ll be able to take over completely.”
Ted, like Mary, ignored Bob completely, and Jim smiled at his brother’s annoyance.
“I’m sorry, Mary,” Berendtsen said gently, “but this is a republic. Bob has every right to try and bring his group into a position of leadership. If the people decide they want him in, I have no right to block him with whatever prestige the Army might give me.
“And I do have to go out again. It’s become increasingly clear to me that as much of the country has to be unified as possible. I do not especially like the techniques necessary to that unification, but the important thing—the one, basic, important thing—is the union. Everything else follows after. After that, it’s up to the people to decide how that union’s going to function internally. But first the unification must be made.”
Mary shook her head in angry frustration, and, for the first time, Jim saw all the emotion she controlled beneath her placid surface.
“Aren’t you sick of killing? Why do you hide behind these plans and purposes for tomorrow? Can’t you, sometime, think in terms of now, of the people you are killing now?”
Ted sighed, and for one stark moment the mask fell away entirely, until even Bob Garvin turned pale.
“I’m sorry, darling. But I’m not building something for just now. And I can’t think in terms of individual people—as you’ve said, I kill too many of them.”
A silence that seemed to last for hours settled over them. Bob held the unsteady sneer on his face, but kept quiet. Jim looked at Berendtsen, who sat with his gaze reaching far beyond the open window.
Finally, Mary stood up awkwardly, her hands moving as though to grasp something that constantly turned and twisted just in front of her, there but unreachable.
“I—I don’t know,” she said unsteadily. “That’s the kind of thing you can’t answer.” She looked at Ted, who turned his face up to her. “You’re the same man I married,” she went on. “Exactly the same man. I can’t say, now, that I’ve changed my mind—that I’m backing out of it all. You’re right. I’ve always thought you were right. But it’s a kind of rightness that’s terribly hard to bear. A man shouldn’t—shouldn’t look so far. He shouldn’t work in terms of a hundred generations when he’s only got his own to live. It’s more than his own generation should be asked to bear.”
“Would you like to call it off between us?” Ted asked gently.
Mary avoided his eyes, then bit her lip and faced him squarely. “I don’t know, Ted.” She shook her head. “I don’t know myself as well as you do.” She sat down, finally, indecisively, and looked at none of them.
“Well,” Bob said. “What’s your move, Jim?”
He’d been waiting for someone to get around to that, hoping illogically that the question would not be raised, knowing that it must. And he discovered that he was still afraid of his younger brother.
