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at a time, in rotation.
I wasn't looking forward to the Twenty arriving so much as I was the others my
old friends who now shared with me an inability to read minds. Everybody who
was jacked was completely caught up in this huge project, in which Amelia and
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I were reduced to the status of retarded helpers. It was good to be around
people with a few ordinary, noncosmic problems. People who had time for my own
ordinary problems. Like becoming a murderer for a second time. No matter how
much she deserved it, and had brought it on herself, it was still my finger on
the trigger, my head full of the indelible image of her last horrifying
moments.
I didn't want to bring it up with Amelia, not now, maybe not for a long time.
Reza and I were sitting out on the lawn at night, trying to pick out a few
stars hidden in the glare and haze from the city.
"It couldn't possibly have bothered you as much as the boy," he said. "If
anybody ever had it coming to them, she did."
"Oh, hell," I said, and opened a second beer. "At a visceral level, it doesn't
make any difference who they were or what they did. The kid just got a red
spot on his chest and fell over dead. Gavrila, I sprayed her guts and brains
and fucking arms all over the corridor."
"And you keep thinking about it."
"Can't help it." The beer was still cool. "Every time my stomach growls or I
get a little pain down there, I can see her bursting open. Knowing I have the
same stuff inside."
"But it's not as if you've never seen it before."
"Never caused seeing it before. Big difference."
There was an awkward silence. Reza ran a fingertip around the rim of his
wineglass, but it just hissed.
"So are you going to try it again?"
I almost said Try what again? but Reza knew me better than that. "I don't
think so. Who ever knows?
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Until you die of something else, you can always kill yourself."
"Hey, I never thought of it quite that way. Thanks."
"Thought you needed cheering up."
"Yeah, right." He licked his finger and tried the glass again, with no result.
"Hey, is this an army-issue wineglass? How you guys expect to win a war
without decent glassware?"
"We learn to rough it."
"So are you taking medicine?"
"Antidepressants, yeah. I don't think I'm going to do it."
I was startled to realize I hadn't thought about suicide all day, until Reza
brought it up. "Things have to get better."
I spilled my beer hitting the dirt. Then the sound registered with
Reza machine-gun fire and he joined me on the ground.
THE DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH Projects Agency does not have any combat troops.
But Blaisdell was a major general, and among his secret coreligionists was
Philip Cramer, the vice president of the United States.
Cramer's primacy on the National Security Council, especially in light of the
absence of oversight from the most feckless president since Andrew Johnson,
allowed him to grant Blaisdell authority for two outrageous actions. One was
the temporary military occupation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in
Pasadena, essentially preventing anybody from pushing the button that would
end the Jupiter Project.
The other was an "expeditionary force" under his control in Panama, a country
with which the United
States was not at war. While the senators and justices blustered and postured
over these two blatantly illegal actions, the soldiers involved locked and
loaded and went forth to follow orders.
The JPL action was trivially easy. A convoy pulled up at three a.m. and chased
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out all the night workers, and then locked the place up tight. Lawyers
rejoiced, as did America's persistent antimilitary minority.
Some scientists felt the celebration was premature. If the soldiers stayed in
place for a couple of weeks, constitutional issues would become irrelevant.
Attacking an actual army base was not so simple. A brigadier general filed a
battle order and died seconds later, personally disposed of by General
Blaisdell. It sent a hunter-killer platoon, along with a support company, on a
short hop from Col6n to Portobello, supposedly to put down an insurrection by
traitorous American troops. For security reasons, they of course were
forbidden to contact the Portobello
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0Peace%20by%20Joe%20Haldeman.txt base, and they knew very little other than
the fact that the insurrection was limited to the central command building.
They were to take control of it and await orders.
The major in charge sent back a query as to why, if the insurrection was so
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