"Mail call!" The Grade One gopher stuck his face into my improvised office. "Letter for you, sir!"

I didn't look up from my terminal; I was deep in the heart of the academic system, tracking down a truly nasty bug. A few weeks before some idiot kid had buried a line in every program that said if student_id$="Michael Harris" then grade_val$="A", and he couldn't remember all the places where he'd hidden it.

The gopher was still standing there, waiting for me to take the envelope.

"Is it important?" I asked, stealing a quick look up.

He stared at the envelope; I saw his lips move as he silent read David & Martha Harris off the return address label. "It's from your parents," he said, making a major intellectual leap. I started to get out of my chair, then checked the system date on my terminal instead.

Yup. August 28. Allowing for post office lag, Dad was right on schedule. "Put it on the table," I said, and went back to my work.187 There was a time when I used to get buzzed about letters from home.

That was before I remembered a little program I'd helped Dad install on his personal computer: LetterRight! Input a name and six keywords, select a style (business/formal, business/bootlicking, personal/friend, personal/family, or service/complaint), and it kicked out one page of generic verbal oatmeal for you. Tie in the optional LetterBase! module, and it kept track of the names and keywords you used.

Link it to your clock/calendar, and it kicked out letters automatic.

Interface the OCR scanner, and it read your incoming mail, copped a few keywords, stuck them in the LetterBase! file with an xref to the correspondent's name, and used them to generate your next letter. All you had to do was keep your printer in blank paper.

It was February of my second Grade One year when I flagged I was on Dad's mid-quarter mailing list. The business templates were at least smart enough not to use Sunday dates, but the personal mid-quarter option always used the 15th. Six sequential letters from Dad, dated 11/15, 2/15, 5/15, 8/15, 11/15, and 2/15 again, and I started to get suspicious. Going back over the letters, I applied the Turing Test...

Which wasn't a fair trial, was it? After all, that only proved the letters weren't written by an intelligent being. It didn't rule out their being written by Dad. So I suckertrapped my next two letters; simply loaded them with bizarro keywords. When Dad's May 15 letter started with, "Sorry to hear about your hysterectomy," I knew I had him nailed.

I shot a glance at the letter the gopher had left on the table. It could wait. I had lots of work to do.

All the same, sometimes the recombined keywords made funny reading. I flip/flopped a few times, finished disarming the program currently in memory, then saved it and decided to take a break. Walking over to the table, I picked up the envelope, did a double-take on the address, and tore it open frantic.

The letter was in Mom's big, sloppy handwriting. It said: #.

"Dear Mikey,188 "This is hard to say, so I'll just get it over with. Your father probably never told you, but we've been on the brink of divorce ever since you left.

"Why? Because your father lied to me. He convinced me that we were just sending you away for the summer, and by the time I came to believe that he really would enroll you full time- "A bad marriage is hard to explain, Mikey. You put on blinders.

There's so much you pretend not to see. It's like clinging to floating wreckage: you can see the sh.o.r.e, but you just can't bring yourself to let go and swim for it. After all, you are still afloat, and with luck you might drift that way.

"I pretended not to see that your father was just too busy to bother with you. I pretended not to see what was going on between him and Faun-and Barbi before her, and Cyndi after, and then there was Buffy, and Loni, and Sandi, and I don't believe that even he can remember all their names.

"I tried to ignore all that; after all, I had a marriage to save. I had a son. And then, when you got to be a nuisance, I was even willing to sacrifice you to save my marriage.

"You don't appreciate the power of a bad relationship, Mikey. It's like the worst drug of all. There's no high; all you hope for is that you can stay numb. And I was hooked.

"Until last month, when your stepsister Krystle had her baby. (Did your father tell you she was pregnant? Did he even tell you she was married?) That makes you an uncle, Mikey; unfortunately, it also made David a grandfather. When he realized that- "He bought a red motorcycle, got a hair transplant, and filed for divorce. He gets the condo; I'd forgotten about that d.a.m.ned prenuptial contract. My replacement's already moved in, and she's due to graduate from high school any day now.

"I'm sorry, Mikey. I'd fight for your custody and try to bring you home, but your father gets free legal services as part of his benefits and I can't find a lawyer willing to take on Fuji-DynaRand. Don't bother189 writing back. I still don't have a permanent address.

"I'll be in touch.

"Love always, Mom."

I was still sitting there, holding the letter and staring blank into s.p.a.ce, when the Colonel stuck his head through the doorway. "Say, Harris, I was just thinking-," he stopped, and looked hard at me.

"Harris?" he asked after a few seconds. Slow, I turned to look at him. Slow, and dull, and numb.

"Yeah?" I said. Not even, "Yeah, sir?" Which proves how numb I was. Like, I'd just invited him to bite my head off. There was a pause-a long, empty pause, while my brain said I should go for damage control and my gut said why bother?

The colonel pointed to the letter, and said, soft, "Bad news from home?"

I nodded.

He stepped into the room, shut the door, and pulled up a chair.

"Want to talk about it, son?"190

Chapter 18.

"Fall in!" Payne brayed. "Form up!" He looked around the airstrip and spotted some poor wide-eyed kid hiding in the weeds. "Are you waiting for an invitation, p.i.s.sant?" The kid, definitely a top contender for the t.i.tle of Ugliest Haircut in the Entire Free World, got up slow out of the poison ivy and joined the thirty other cadet recruits standing in front of the briefing shed.

I slugged down the last of my coffee and started collecting the props for my magic show.

Payne was still shouting at the kids when I stepped out of the shack.

"Dress that line!" he bellowed. "You call that a line, p.i.s.sants?" I stopped, looked them over, and had to admit he was right; it was about the poorest excuse for a line I'd seen all summer. But Payne was good at his job, and he had two full weeks yet to get them ready for fall quarter.

I had maximum confidence he'd pull it off.

Payne made eye contact with me. I shot him a little nod.

"Ten-shun!" he screamed, and the poor kids jumped half out of their skins.

"Thank you, sergeant," I said quietly. He stepped back deferential, and I walked up smiling. A few of the cadet recruits tentative smiled back.

p.i.s.sants obviously didn't recognize the good cop/bad cop routine when they saw it. This was going to be fun.

"Hi," I said to the new boys, and smiled again. A few more of them started to thaw. "I'm Cadet Captain Harris, and I'm here to give you a little introductory lesson in electronic counter measures." While they were still wondering what that meant, I switched on the wand and started walking down the line.

It chirped on the first one. I checked the EM signature display, then191 announced, "Matsus.h.i.ta digital watch." Kid couldn't have looked more surprised if I'd pulled his brain out through his nose.

The second recruit's person was clean, but something in his suitcase tripped the wand. "Vidslate," I announced. Then I looked at the secondary trace. "And a couple comicbook ROMs." He was still looking embara.s.sed when I moved onto the third one. The third recruit was regular gold mine; digital watch on his wrist, calculator in his left breast pocket, and a personal music player stashed in his suitcase. "I hope you brought plenty of CDs," I advised him, half-kidding, full earnest.

Around the tenth time the wand chirped, some kid with frizzy red hair and Dumbo ears asked the question I'd been waiting for all along.

"Suh? What all is that thang, ennaway?" I stepped back, and smiled. I love cadet recruits. They're so predictable.

"This," I said, looking casual at the wand, "is a little gadget we built around the sensing module of an M-387 Personal Anti-Radiation Missile." I made an elaborate pa.s.s over Frizzy with the wand, spotted the Panasonic chessputer in his right jacket pocket. "Mind if I borrow your chess game for a minute?" Too surprised to think, he handed it over.

Switching the chessputer into demo mode (I wanted to make sure it was the noisiest circuit for miles around), I gave it to one of the other recruits and pointed at a stand of scrub oak on the other side of the airstrip. "Run over there and stick this in the crotch of one of those trees," I said. "Then hurry back here." The kid instant took off, and inward, I marveled. Command presence really does work!

When the runner was safely back on this side of the airstrip, I stepped into the briefing shed and picked up my second prop. "This is an M-387 PARM launcher," I said as I came walking out into the sunshine again. They gasped, excited. If you're pathologically into guns-like most Von Schlager voluntaries are-then I guess something that looks vaguely like an Uzi with a 25mm bore must be pretty impressive. "The M-387 PARM!" I began, in a parade-field bellow Payne would have been proud to use, "is a 500-gram rocket-propelled munition designed to192 home in on stray electromagnetic radiation!" I flashed the weapon around so they could all ooh and aah at the black, efficient ugliness of it.

"Effective to one-point-five kilometers!" I continued, "the projectile is sensitive to radio frequency leakage from virtually all consumer digital products, including watches, calculators, ROM read-Ooops!"

WHOOSH! The little rocket streaked across the airstrip and took a sharp dive into the scrub oak. BLAM! Scratch one chessputer-and the tree it was sitting in.

Slow, I picked myself up, dusted off my pants, and took a discrete scan of the new boys. Bad sign: Only three of them had had the presence of mind to hit the dirt when the weapon "misfired." Payne had more work ahead of him than I thought.

"The ChiComms have a similar munition," I continued as if nothing had happened, "as well as an air-dropped version that can go into dormant/mine mode. There are a lot of one-armed Burmese who used to wear digital watches." Some of the boys, I flagged, were now staring at me with genuine fear on their faces, then looking to Payne as if hoping he'd save them.

Good. They were supposed to react like that.

"When you reach the campus, you will be asked to turn in your personal electronics," I concluded. "I suggest you do so." Turning, I nodded crisp to Payne.

"Left face!" he bellowed. "Double-time, forward!" The cadet recruits started off up the jeep trail to the academy. Payne stuck with them a mo, then dropped back.

"Was the stumble convincing?" I asked, quiet.

"Getting better," he whispered back. "In fact, not bad for a Grade Four whose braids are still shiny."

"Thank you, sir." He cut me a quick wink, then jogged off to catch up with his boys. I went back into the briefing shed and started cleaning the M-387 launcher.

It's simple: applied Machiavelli, really. In political science we'd spent half of Spring quarter discussing The Prince and the whole issue193 of whether it was better for a leader to be loved or feared. We concluded old Niccol? got it right when he said they weren't mutual exclusive polarities; in fact, a leaders' best option is to be both.

A pity Machiavelli never had matrix algebra. I of course immediate concepted a multi-dimensional array with love/hate on one major axis, fear/contempt on another, respect/disrespect on a third, and the whole thing solving to a variable on an obedience/insolence continuum. The concept was so perfect in my head I just couldn't wait to get out of the cla.s.sroom and start coding the algorithm!

But once again, I started with coding and ended up cussing Nuttbruster six ways from Sunday. He'd never let me buy the neural coprocessor I kept asking for, and this was exactly the sort of job that neurals did best.

Still, even with the clumsy Imperfect But Marketable digital hardware I was able to crunch enough numbers over the summer to prove the Academy was making a serious mistake with cadet recruits.

When I'd first arrived, the combination of Payne and Roid Rogers put me somewhere way out in the fear/hate parts of the matrix. But all the Academy had to do was make a small change in the reception routine- get rid of those smiling s.a.d.i.s.ts with the airport detex-and most boys did a 180o flip on the hate axis. They were happy to surrender their contraband. The DIs and I had tested it three times now on the arriving fall cla.s.s, and it worked perfect!

'Course, I also had an ulterior motivational. It'd taken me the better part of a year to debug the Academy's computer system, and I hadn't had time to trojan it yet. So I'd be d.a.m.ned if I was gonna let some smarta.s.s kid smuggle in a pocket computer and slip a virus into my network.

I was just closing the lock on the M-387's case when I heard cadet boots come pounding down the path from the academy. A message from the Colonel, no doubt; by now most every other staffer was adjusted to the network messaging system, but a certain stubborn old bird still stuck to paper speedmemos. "It's a lot harder to ignore a panting runner who's194 standing there waiting for a reply," he'd told me, one of the many times I'd tried to show him how the messaging system worked. Turning around, I started to reach for the door, then changed my mind out of fear for the safety of my fingers.

Good decision. A second later the door blew in, followed by a winded Grade One. "Cadet Captain Harris!" he gasped. "Message from Colonel Von Schlager, sir!"

"Thanks." I returned his salute and took the piece of paper. It said about what I expected; the Colonel wanted to see me in his office p.r.o.nto. Reaching for the M-387 case, I sudden spun out another idea and turned around. "Cadet, what's your name?"

"Duvalier, sir!"

I laid a hand on the case and patted it gentle. "Duvalier, can I trust you to make sure the M-387 goes straight back to the armory?"

"Sir! Yes, sir!" The kid's eyes just lit right up, like I'd asked him to squire the President or something, and he picked up the weapon.

Staggering a little under the load-d.a.m.ned thing must have weighed near half as much as he did-he bobbed his head in a sort of a salute, said, "Thank you, sir," and caromed out the door.

I shook my head at the weirdness of it. If I'd ordered him to take the weapon back, he would've acted like a bleeding martyr with an att.i.tude problem. But since I made the job sound like a privilege, he couldn't wait to do it. Big time weirdness, I decided: The Academy was teaching me how to push all the good jarhead motivational b.u.t.tons, but I still wasn't any closer to understanding them.

With a shrug, I xoffed that line of thought and started up the trail towards the Academy.

Immediate summons to the Colonel's office were by now common enough that I was sort of getting used to them, but Chomsky's pa.s.sing me straight into the sanctum sanctorum-still a mighty rare procedural, as far as I was concerned-made me just a little uneasy. Then, when the Colonel looked up from some paperwork and shot me a tight, frustrated195 expression I'd never seen before, I started to feel true worry. We got through all the usual reporting and saluting c.r.a.p, and he pointed to a chair. "Sit down, Harris." I did-but not before I flagged he had my personal file sitting right in front of him. My stomach did a nervous flip.

The Colonel looked at the top sheet again, then snorted, and looked at me. "Harris, were you aware that you turn 18 next Monday?"

The instincts were still there; I fought the urge to reply smarta.s.s. Not b.l.o.o.d.y likely I'd forget my birthday, was it? "Yes, sir."

He pushed a semi-folded sheet of paper across the desk at me. "This letter came in on the morning plane." I flattened the paper and scanned it.

Fuji-DynaRand stationery. I'd recognize it anywhere. I jumped down to the bottom of the page, checked the signature. Not from Dad. It was signed by some lawyer in the F-D Legal Affairs department, Employee Benefits section ...

I returned to the top of the letter and read it through slow. Twice.

When I looked up again, the Colonel asked, "Do you understand what this means, Harris?"

"Dad's not going to pay my Fall quarter tuition, sir. He's cut me off without a cent." I scanned the letter one more time. Funny. I thought I should feel angry or something, but I wasn't even surprised.

"It also means that come Monday, you're free to leave."

My head started to spin a little. Free. After ten thousand years in the bottle I was free.

"The airbus will take you to Seattle," he was going on. "You should be able to hitch a Learjet ride from there, but after that, you're on your own." He looked at me sharp; I was still phasing in and out on the concept of free. "How does this make you feel, Harris?"

I looked at him. Truth to tell, this situational had occurred to me a couple times in the last few weeks, and I'd already done a good deal of preprocessing. So how did I feel? The real truth? Maximum honest?

"Disappointed, sir." I said at last. "I wanted to complete the academic program."196 He leaned back in his chair, did a brief impression of Rodin's Thinker, and looked me over, appraising. "Are you certain of that?"

No hesitation. "Yes, sir."

He looked at me a while longer, then said, "I was hoping you'd say that." Leaning forward, he picked up another sheet of paper. "I've already discussed your situation with Captain Nuttbruster. It seems accountants can never simply give things away, but I do control a small discretionary fund which should cover your tuition, and he's willing to write off your room and board as the computer administrator's stipend.

Does this sound acceptable to you?"

It didn't take a second's thought. "Yes, sir."

"Good. Report to the bursar's office at 0800 Monday morning. He'll have the papers ready for you to sign. Dismissed." Slow, I stood up and started for the door. It was tough to figure out how I felt; I mean, one little part.i.tion of my thinks.p.a.ce thought I should be mad at getting cut off so cold. Another whiney little voice way in the back kept screaming I was an idiot, for pa.s.sing up this silver-plate opportunity to get out of the Academy.

But mostly what I felt was warm; an at-home kind of warm. For once I'd made a decision that felt right to at least 80% of my brain, and it was a truly good feeling.

Hand on the doork.n.o.b, I hesitated. "Harris?" he called out. Dammit, I knew he was gonna do that!