His wife looked expectant.
“I’m going to close with an original de Camp prophecy, which will make just as much sense as any of Mike’s, with a damned sight better meter and grammar. Listen:
“Pelagic young spark of the East
Shall plot to subvert the Blue Beast,
But he’ll dangle on high
When the Ram’s in the sky,
And the Cat shall throw dice at the feast.
“You like?”
His wife said it was a limerick, of all things, and what did it mean?
“Why not a limerick? That’s a great verse form of American folk rhyme—a natural for an American prophecy, And as to what it means, how do I know? Did Mike know what he meant when he wrote ‘Near to Rion next to white wool, Aries, Taurus, Cancer, Leo, the Virgin’?
“But this I swear to: If this article sells and de Camp’s Prophetic Limerick is there in print for future McCanns to study, by 2342 it will have been fulfilled as surely as any quatrain Mike ever wrote, or I lose all trust in the perverted ingenuity of the human race.”
A.D. 1943:
By the time the magazine reached Sergeant Harold Marks, there was not much left in it to interest him. The Varga girls and the Hurrell photographs had gone to decorate the walls of long-abandoned outposts, and most of the cartoons had vanished, too. Little remained but text and ads, and Sergeant Marks was not profoundly concerned with what the well-dressed man in America was wearing last Christmas.
Until he had almost finished looking through it, he would have been more than willing to swap the magazine for a cigarette or even for a drag on one, but at the end he hit the de Camp article.
The Sergeant’s sister Madeleine was psychic. At least, that was her persistent claim, and up until she joined the WAACs nobody had been able to persuade her otherwise. Sergeant Marks had no later news from his sister than the discomforting word that she had received her commission and now outranked him, but he was willing to bet that she still spent as much time as she could spare telling her unfortunate non-coms about the wonders of Nostradamus.
It was good to see somebody tear into the prophecy racket and rip it apart. This de Camp seemed a right guy, and his lucid attack did Sergeant Marks’ heart good.
Especially the prophetic limerick. The sergeant was something of an authority on limericks. He had yet to find a man in the service whose collection topped his. But the pelagic young spark from the East tickled him even more than the unlikely offspring of the old man of Bombay or the peculiar practices of the clergy of Birmingham.
Sergeant Marks carefully tore the limerick out of the magazine and slipped it in his pocket. He’d copy it out in a V-letter to Madeleine when they managed to get in touch again.
He thumbed back over the magazine, hoping that he might have overlooked some piece of cheesecake that had escaped previous vandals. Then, without warning, all hell broke loose from the jungle and Sergeant Marks forgot cheesecake and prophecy alike.
Civilian Harold Marks used to scoff at stories of heroes who captured machine-gun nests single-handed. That was before he joined the Marines and learned that practical heroism is not a mythical matter.
He still didn’t know how it was done. He knew only, and that with a half-aware negligence, that he had done it. He was in the jungle, master of a green-painted machine gun, and he was alone save for a pile of unmoving things with green uniforms and yellow faces.
There were more of them coming. A green gun looks funny in your hands, but it works fine.
There were no more coming.
Toting the green killer, Sergeant Marks returned to the ambushed outpost. His throat choked when he recognized Corporal Witchett by his hairy palms. There was no face to recognize him by.
There had been few enough men here. Now there seemed to be only one. The ambush had been destroyed, but at a cost that—
Sergeant Marks hurried to where he heard the groan. He knelt down by the lieutenant and tried to catch his faint words.
“Reinforcements . . . tomorrow . . . try . . . hold on . . . up to you, Marks.”
“I will, sir,” the sergeant grinned, “unless they outnumber me. They might send two detachments.”
The lieutenant smiled dimly. “Saw you . . . nest . . . fine work, Marks . . . see you get medal for—”
“Swell custom, posthumous medals,” said Sergeant Marks.
A look of concern came into the officer’s too sharply highlighted eyes. “Sergeant . . . you’re wounded—”
Marks looked down at his blood-blackened shirt and his eyes opened in amazement. Then the jungle began to jive to a solid boogie and his eyes closed for a long time.
When they opened again, he saw a hospital ward and muttered warm prayerful oaths of relief. So the reinforcements had showed up before another Jap detachment. He hoped the lieutenant had held out. And what the hell had happened to Boszkowicz and Corvetti and—
Funny, having Chinese nurses. Nightingales from the Celestial Kingdom. All the other patients Chinese, too. Funny. And yet they didn’t look quite—
When the doctor came, there was no doubt of the situation. The teeth and the mustache and the glasses, the standard cartoon set-up. But not comical. And certainly not Chinese.
Sergeant Marks heard a strange croaking that must have been his own voice demanding to know what went on and since when did American Marines rate a pampered convalescence in a Jap hospital? He felt almost ashamed of himself. There seemed to be something like an involuntary Quislingism in enjoying these Nipponese benefits instead of sprawling dead in the jungle.
The doctor made a grin and noises and went away. He came back ushering in two men in uniform. The older one was a fierce little man with a chestful of medals. The other was
