“What’s that?” Holland’s own voice was wearing thin.
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Integrity, damn it! Give me a definition.”
“Integrity, sir? Why, everyone—”
Holland cut him off with a frustrated curse. “I should have known better than to ask! You can’t even verbalize it, but you’ll cut each other down for it. All right, you go ahead, but don’t expect me to help you make a damned fool of yourself.” He sighed. “Go on home, son. Maybe, in about twenty years or so, you’ll get up guts enough to come and knock on the door like a man, if you want to see Barbara.”
Through the occlusion of his almost overwhelming rage, Cot realized that he could not, now, say anything further which might offend Holland. “I’m certain that if I were to do so, Miss Barbara would not receive me,” he finally managed to say in an even voice, gratified at his ability to do so.
“No, she probably wouldn’t,” Holland said bitterly. “She’s too goddamned well brought up, thanks to those bloody aunts of hers!”
Before Cot could react to this, Holland spat on the ground, and, turning his back like a coward, strode off down the road.
Cot stood atone in the night, his hands clutching his bandolier, grinding the looped cartridges together. Then he turned on his heel and loped home.
He left his carbine on the family arms-rack in the front parlor, and padded about the surface floor in his moccasins, resetting the alarms, occasionally interrupting himself to tense his arms or clamp his jaw as he thought of what had happened. The incredible complexity of the problem overwhelmed him, presenting no clear face which he could attack and rationalize logically.
Primarily, of course, the fault was his. He had committed a premeditated breach of Integrity. It was in its various ramifications that the question lost its clarity.
He had spied on Barbara Holland and done it repeatedly. Her father had become aware of the fact. Tonight, rather than issue a direct challenge, Holland had lain in wait for him. Then, having informed Cot that he was aware of his actions, Holland had not only not done the gentlemanly thing, but had actually ridiculed his expectation of it. The man had insulted Cot and his family, and had derided his own daughter. He had referred to his sisters-in-law in a manner which, if made public, would have called for a bandolier-flogging at the hands of the male members of the female line.
But the fact nevertheless remained that whether Mr. Holland was a gentleman or Holland was not, Cot had been guilty of a serious offense. And, in Cot’s mind as in that of every other human being, what had been a twinging secret shame was as disastrous and disgusting as a public horror.
And, since Holland had refused to solve the problem for him in the manner in which anyone else would unhesitatingly have done so, Cot was left with this to gnaw at his brain and send him into sudden short-lived bursts of anger intermingled with longer, quieter, and deadlier spells of remorseful shame.
Finally, when he had patrolled the entire surface floor, Cot walked noiselessly down to the living quarters, completely uncertain of the degree of his guilt, and, therefore, of his shame and disgrace, knowing that he would not sleep no matter how long he lay on his bed—and he fought down that part of his mind which recalled the image of Barbara Holland.
Fought—but lost. The remembered picture was as strong as the others beside which he placed it, beginning with the first one from five years ago, when, at the age of twenty- one, he had passed her window on his return from Graduate training. And, though he saw her almost every day at the post office or store, these special images were not obscured by the cold and proper aloofness with which she surrounded herself when she was not—he winced—alone.
Again, there was the entire problem of Barbara’s father. The man had been raised in the wild immorality and casual circumstances of the Dirty Years. Obviously, he could see nothing wrong with what Cot had been doing. He had sense enough not to tell anyone else about it, thank the good Lord—but, in some blundering attempt to “get you two kids together,” or whatever he might call it, what would he tell Barbara?
Dawn came, and Cot welcomed the night’s end.
As head of the family since his father’s death in an affair of Integrity two years before—he had, of course, been the Party at Grievance—it was Cot’s duty to plan each day’s activities insofar as they were to vary from the normal farm routine. Today, with all the spring work done and summer chores still so light as to be insignificant, he was at a loss, but he was grateful for this opportunity to lose himself in a problem with which he had been trained to cope.
But after an hour of attempting to think, he was forced to fall back on what, in retrospect, must have been a device his father had put to similar use. If there was nothing else, there was always Drill.
Out of consideration for his grandmother’s age, he waited until 7:58 before he touched the alarm stud, but not even the heavy slam of shutters being convulsively hurled into their places in the armor plate of the exterior walls, the sudden screech of the generators as the radar antennas came out of their half-sleep into madly whirling life, or the clatter as the household children fired test bursts from their machineguns were enough to quench the fire in his mind.
The drill ran until 10:00. By then, it was obvious that the household defenses were doing everything they had been designed to, and that the members of the household knew their parts perfectly. Even his grandmother’s legendary skill with her rangefinder had not grown dull—though there was a distinct possibility that she had memorized the range of every likely target in the area. But that, if true, was not an evasion of her duties but, instead, a valuable accomplishment.
“Very good,” he said over the household intercommunications system. “All members of the household are now free to return to their normal duties, with the exception of the children, who will report to me for their schooling.”
His mother, whose battle station was at the radarscope a few feet away from his fire control board, smiled with approval as she returned the switches to AutoSurvey. She put her hand gently on his forearm as he rose from behind the board.
“I’m glad, Cottrell. Very glad,” she said with her smile.
He did not understand what she meant, at first, and looked at her blankly.
“I was afraid you might neglect your duties, as so many of our neighbors are doing,” she explained by continuing. “But I should not have doubted you, even to that degree.” Her low voice was strongly underlaid with her pride in him. “Your fiber is stronger than that. Why, I was even afraid that your disappointment after our little talk yesterday might distract you. But I was wrong, and you’ll never know how thrilled I am to see it.”
He bent to kiss her quickly, so that she would not see his eyes, and hurried up to the parlor, where the children had already assembled and taken their weapons out of the arms-rack.
By mid-afternoon, the younger children had been excused, and only his two oldest brothers were out on the practice terrain with him.
“Stay down!” Cot shouted at Alister. “You’ll never live to Graduate if you won’t learn to flatten out at the crest of a rise!” He flung his carbine up to his cheek and snapped a branch beside his brother’s rump to prove the point.
“Now, you,” he whirled on Geoffrey. “How’d I estimate my windage? Quick!”
“Grass,” Geoffrey said laconically.
“Wrong! You haven’t been over that ground in two weeks. You’ve no accurate idea of how much wind will disturb that grass into its present pattern.”
“Asked me how you did it,” Geoffrey pointed out.
“All right,” Cot snapped. “Score one for you. Now, how would you do it?”
“Feel. Watch me.” Geoffrey’s lighter weapon cracked with a noise uncannily like that of the branch, which now split at a point two inches below where Cot’s heavy slug had broken it off.
“Have an instinct for it, do you?” Cot was perversely glad to find an outlet for his annoyance. “Do it again.”
Geoffrey shrugged. He fired twice. The branch splintered, and there was a shout from Alister. Cot spun and glared at Geoffrey.
“Put it next to his hand,” Geoffrey explained. “Guess he got some dirt in his face, too.”
Cot looked at the point where the grass was undulating wildly as Alister tried to roll away under its cover. He
