victories are won when a small accurate concentration of intense force is thrust against an enemy's nerve center — as a single bullet might topple a mighty strategist and send an empire into shock.
He found himself still shockable the day he detoured on an errand to the relocation center. He'd found a child's plastic tea set, bartered a lapel dosimeter for it, and kept it hidden until he trailed old tire marks to the grotto where the Grange family maintained its miserable existence. The Grange vehicle was gone. He wondered if they, like others who had chosen separate shelters, had moved nearer town.
But Sandy met him at the entrance. He saw traces of tears in the patina of dust on her cheeks, saw her sunburst of delight as, silently, he pulled the tea set from behind him. 'It's looooovely,' she cooed, hugging it to her breast.
'Don't tell mom if you swiped it, she 'll be back from a swap meet soon.'
He swore it had been a legitimate purchase, his heart full of her reflected joy. She beckoned to him then, and for the first time he eased into the little cavern. Wire-strung blankets defined the room.
The smell was overpowering. A man lay in the single patch of sunlight, only his face showing over hand- stitched quilts. Skin stretched tightly over his white fleshless face, eyes sunken, no hair — not even eyebrows — to relieve his skeletal appearance. The eyes snapped open; the lips formed words. Quantrill wondered how the girl could steel herself to kneel so near the stench of corruption; to smile into the face of death. Quantrill shifted position to hide his shudder.
'It's the boy I met the other day,' Sandy murmured brightly. 'He brought me a tea set.' She watched the gray lips, then nodded. 'We'll go outside before mom gets back, daddy.'
'As soon as possible, Quantrill moved outside and reveled in the clean dry air, admitted that he might have time for a mock tea party. “I snuck away; don't you tell,' he said in an effort at the local dialect. 'Have to get back right soon.'
They were sipping cups full of air when Louise Grange drove up, her eyes darting from one to the other. 'What's happened? Is Doctor Palma here?'
'No'm,' Quantrill said sheepishly, and indicated the tea set. 'I promised Sandy I'd pay her a visit. Thought she might like this.'
Louise Grange placed her hand over her shallow breast, sighed, found a smile for him.' 'That's — awful nice of you.'
'I 'm gonna show him where I play, mom,' Sandy began.
'Not in the hole, child! You didn't go inside, boy?'
Quantrill saw the almost infinitesimal headshake from Sandy. 'Uh — well, we were going to.'
'Not today, I 'm afraid,' said the woman. “It ain't fit for company. It pains me not to be a good neighbor, but—' She wrung thin hands together, beseeching him to understand without words.
'Time I was going anyhow,' he said, and smiled. He waved to the girl as he put the van in motion. As long as she was visible in the rearview, he could see Sandy waving. He saw that his hands were clenched on the steering wheel, and cursed sickness. And friendship.
Sandys jurnal Sep 9 Man.
Ted came again today, brout me a real tea set for my hope chest. Ive hid it here with my kemlamp in church. Well 1 call it church. The rocks in my cave are like carvd trees, they make it look like the bigest church in the world. You can get here from the hole by swimming. My dady would have a hissyflt if he knew how I found out but he coudnt spank me I wish he coud. Mom and my dady talk a lot. She takes notes and he has to wisper things over sinse her crying drouns him out. Im sorry Im getting this page wet. Im waiting for my dady to get better like he says he will. Mom says you have to beleive God will make my dady well. There must be a airshaftfrom the hole to my church sinse I just heard somthing like like moms voise but it sounded more like a booger. I will stop for now and go see.
Sandys jurnal Sep. 10 Tus.
god is a dam lie.
Chapter Forty-Five
The Libyan burrow-bombs may have played hell with the ELF grid, thought Boren Mills, but the concussion had blown him off the Baffin Island listings. Mills and others recovered in a spacious modern hospital in Thunder Bay, just across Lake Superior from the US, and Mills was secretly amused to learn that he now qualified for a foreign service medal. He complained of blurred vision for a week after his eyesight returned to normal, certain that the longer his recuperation, the more likely he would be posted to a reasonable duty station. In his own mind Mills was not malingering. He was studying the war's progress, the better to discover how he might get himself posted to some spot where he would be most effective. Boren Mills had been victimized by an explosion, and knew that he would never be effective in battle.
Thanks to attrition in the Navy, Mills became a full lieutenant upon his return to active duty. His foreign service and purple heart ribbons lent dash to his uniform. A new sparkle invaded his eyes the day they spied a classified bulletin on Israel's new gift to the US.
The Ghost Armada, as it was dubbed, had brought Israelis safely to Cyprus by fooling every extant electronic device. Though chafing at the delay, America was glad to have the new system which could throw false blips on enemy acquisition radar while it kept genuine bogies off the scopes. Mills indulged in a brief brainstorm, concluding that Israel's weapon was nothing like the old Stealth program which had been leaked by the US for political purposes a generation before. The Ghost Armada would have to focus on the sensors, not on the target to be sensed. Its application for US purposes would require the best possible protection. Anybody remotely connected with the program would be nonexpendable, pampered, defended.
Lieutenant Boren Mills spent two days on his letter, updating and modifying his own assessment of his special talents. The self-assessment always formed part of the core of a computer's file on anyone. If he was not identified by a records search as a man ideally suited to help develop a remote-coding microwave system, Boren Mills would be sadly mistaken.
Boren Mills made fewer mistakes than most.
SPL order 251, 23 SEP 96 EXTRACT
PARA 16. FOL NAM NAV OFCR is REL from ASG W/PREV duty STN EFF this date and W/REP for PPTY ASG to Kikepa STN, Nuhau NAV FAC ASAP by MIL TRANS Priority A RPT A to ARR NLT 1 OCT 96 Kikepa STN, Nuhau…
Permanent party posting to Kikepa Point was not quite what Mills had in mind. He considered a relapse, researched the island of Nuhau, then concluded that he would be as secure there as anywhere. Certainly a posting to a naval research facility on a privately-owned island in the Hawaiian chain was better than Baffin Island. If you were going to live one step from the end of the world, it might as well be the warm tropical end.
Mills could have been on a military transport the next day, but wisely spent his next four days in a transient BOQ cramming his head and his personal floppy cassettes with everything he could learn on remote electronic query and input modules. He was a very quick study; by the time he landed on Oahu for the Nuhau hovercraft, Lieutenant Boren Mills would bear some surface similarity to the experience profile he had claimed to the Navy's central computer.
His only worry was the seclusion of Nuhau. There would be no large population there, no finishing schools or sophisticated high schools with their breathtaking arrays of pre-collegiate beauties. Mills's sexual preferences were kinky only in the narrowness of the age group he preferred, i.e., early post-Lolita. Physical ripening, that first delectable flowering of maturity, fascinated Mills; captured his lusts. He did not maltreat or embitter the girls he
