'I know where he is. Just get him and fast.'
'Yessir,' said the man and disappeared.
'You seem to have got yourself a problem,' said Captain Clodiak.
Glaushof tried to shrug it off. 'He can't have broken through the cordon and even if he has he's going to burn on the fence or get himself arrested at the gate,' he said. 'I'm not worried.'
All the same he found himself glancing round at the familiar dull buildings and the roadways between them with a new sense of suspicion as though somehow they had changed character and had become accomplices to the absent Wilt. With an insight that was alarmingly strange to him he realized how much Baconheath meant to him; it was home, his own little fortress in a foreign land with its comfortable jet noises linking him to his own hometown, Eiderburg, Michigan, and the abattoir down the road where the hogs were killed. As a boy he had woken to the sound of their squeals and an F111 screaming for take-off had the same comforting effect on him. But more than anything else Baconheath with its perimeter fence and guarded gates had been America for him, his own country, powerful, independent and freed from danger by his constant vigilance and the sheer enormity of its arsenal. Squatting there behind the wire and isolated by the flat reaches of the Fens from the old crumbling villages and market towns with their idle, inefficient shopkeepers and their dirty pubs where strange people drank warm, unhygienic beer, Baconheath had been an oasis of brisk efficiency and modernity, and proof that the great US of A was still the New World and would remain so.
But now Glaushof's vision had shifted and for a moment he felt somehow disassociated from the place. These buildings were hiding this Wilt from him and until he found the bastard Baconheath would be infected. Glaushof forced himself out of this nightmare and was confronted by another. Lieutenant Harah came round the corner. He was clearly still paying for his sexist attitude to Captain Clodiak and had to be supported by two APPS men. Glaushof had almost been prepared for that. The garbled noises the Lieutenant was making were something else again and could hardly be explained by a kick in the groin.
'It's the AI, sir,' one of the men explained, 'I guess he must have loosed off a canister in the lobby.'
'Loosed off a canister? In the lobby?' Glaushof squawked, appalled at the terrible consequences to his career such a lunatic action seemed certain to provoke. 'Not with those women'
'Affirmative,' ejaculated Lieutenant Harah without warning. Glaushof turned on him.
'What do you mean, affirmative?'
'Absolute,' Harah's voice hit a new high. And stuck there. 'Absolute absolute absolute absolute...'
'Gag that bastard,' shouted Glaushof and shot round the corner of the building to see what he could do to rescue the situation. It was beyond hope. For whatever insane reason Lieutenant Harah, perhaps in an attempt to defend himself against a second strike from Captain Clodiak, had wrenched the pin from a gas grenade before realizing that his gas mask had come off in his fall. Gazing through the glass doors at the bizarre scenes in the lobby, Glaushof was no longer worried about Mrs Ofrey's interference. Draped over the back of a chair with her hair touching the floor and happily obscuring her face, the wife of the Chief Administrative Executive resembled nothing so much as a large and incontinent highland ewe which had been put rather prematurely through a Fair Isle knitting machine. The rest of the class were in no better shape. The astro-navigation officer lay on her back, evidently re-enacting a peculiarly passive sexual experience, while several other students of British Culture and Institutions looked as though they were extras in some film depicting the end of the world. Once again Glaushof experienced the ghastly sensation of being at odds with his environment and it was only by calling up reserves of approximate
