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.I can relate.” He lit himself a cigarette, and stepped back over to the desk.“So, tell you what,” he said, “now that we’re friends, maybe you can answer one question for me.Correct me if I’m right, but I’ve been looking through all this shit,” he lifted the system design manual and shook it at me, “and I still can’t figure out how our system connects to the outside world.”All my nerves went on maximum alert, and a million little warning flags went up.Sure, I had spent two years begging Nuttbruster for a SatLink, but all the cues I was getting from Gary made me real suspicious.I just didn’t trust the man, it was simple as that.So why was he so hot for my computer?I smiled, casual.“Tell me what you want it to do, Gary.Maybe we can work it out.”He dropped the system manual on the desk.“Well, to get right to the crotch of the matter, I was really hoping we could tap the Utah Genealogical Database,” he said.“Wouldn’t that be neat? To build up background information about our applicants? Y’know, see if there are genetic factors that influence.uh, influences?” He went silent, studying me, and took a deep, nervous drag on his cigarette.Okay, Harris, a little voice in the back of my thinkspace said, this is it.How badly do you want the SatLink? Bad enough to give Gary and his little gang of fascists a way to screen applicants by race? Bad enough to negate everything the Colonel tried to build?Get thee behind me! Sudden, I spun off this idea that maybe some hardcodes were wrong.Maybe the war games, maybe the tactical training—maybe even the Colonel’s Advanced Theory class, with all his carefully refined Clausewitz and Mao Zedong —maybe that was all wrong.Maybe sometimes you do reinforce lost positions.See, there’s this thing called integrity.And sometimes it can drive you to actions that, at first glance, seem like truly bad tactical.Stupid actions, pointless actions, actions that have only one redeemer: They’re right.So what if Payne and the rest were ready to give up; I still felt I owed something to the Colonel.Basic insurrection theory holds that defeat on the battlefield is just the first stage in a guerilla campaign.If I stuck around the academy another year, I could make life real miserable for Gary Von Schlager.“Sorry,” I said, and I threw him a big, fake smile.“Can’t be done.All this archaic junk your dad’s bean counter saddled me with, you know.”The disappointment on Gary’s face was intense; half the cigarette went up in his next drag.“Oh, that’s a bummer,” he said.“That’s bad.”Then he looked at me, and smiled brightly.“But we can work on this, okay Mike? There might be another way?”I smiled big.“Sure, Gary.We’ll work on it.We got the whole school year to work on it.” For just a moment I flashed on the Spartan commander at Thermopylae, committing himself to that final, really stupid tactical, all in the name of his personal integrity.After five years, I finally understood why he’d done it.Chapter 20FLASHBACK: It’s a raw, rainy day, ugly even for late March.Clouds hang low and dark in the sky like ghost battleships; the cold wind knifes through every crack and chink in the walls and rattles the panes loose in the window sashes.Come June, I intuit, a lot of Grade Twos are going to be learning the care and handling of caulk guns.But that will be in June.For Now, for the particular timeframe that defines this image, we Advanced Theory students are sitting taut in our seats, paying sharp attention to the Colonel in hopes of keeping our minds off our cold, aching bladders, and trying to lean just a few imperceptible millimeters closer to the Franklin stove—without looking like we’re trying to get closer.After you’ve split a few cords of firewood, you learn that the trick is to out-stoic everybody else.Unless, of course, you want to volunteer to split the next cord.So here we are, wrapped up in extra sweaters and bits of blanket looking just like some of Washington’s soldiers recently thawed out from Valley Forge, while up at the front of the classroom the Colonel paces stiffly back and forth, hands clasped behind his back, that sharp look on his face that means he’s going to toss a real poser at us just as soon as he figures out the toughest way to phrase it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]