Jim looked over at him as they rode stirrup to stirrup. “Yeah,” he said sourly, “but this is different, this time. Stonewall Cogswell and Bitter Dave Langenscheidt hate each other’s guts. It’s something you seldom see in Category Military. Mercenaries are philosophical about the way they make their living. One day you’re up against a lad. The next month you might be on the same side he is. In between fracases, we’re a tightly-knit club. If some lad is down on his luck, there’s nobody quicker than a mercenary to chip in, even though a couple of months later they might be shooting at each other. But that’s not the way it is with Cogswell and Langenscheidt. Go into some officer’s club, between fracases, and they can be seen in the same room. The temperature goes up several degrees. Neither looks at each other. Neither leaves. But you can feel it all over the room.”
Joe said, “Can’t we get any more speed out of these plugs? What the hell’s that got to do with tomorrow? Everybody knows they hate each other’s guts.”
“What it’s got to do is this. They’ve fought three times: this is the fourth. They’ve never been on the same side and aren’t ever about to be. The first three times, Stonewall had taken Bitter Dave, in spite of the fact that Langenscheidt is one of the best general officers going. This time, Cogswell really wants to clobber him, really finish him off to the point where Bitter Dave will be considered a has-been. And he sees his chance for a real debacle. He’s only got one week to go. Then the Category Military Department might even call it a draw. Some of those early skirmishes came out with Bitter Dave’s lads looking pretty good. No, you can bet that Old Stonewall isn’t thinking as coolly as usual—and it scares me.”
“Oh, great,” Joe growled. “Just wizard. It’s all we need. After getting through three weeks of this, to get in the dill and cop one tomorrow!”
Jim said, “Same deal as always? If one of us takes a hit the other splits any additional hospital costs, fifty-fifty?”
“Same deal. This Lockheed-Cessna Corporation has a bad reputation for taking care of its casualties. The funkers put up just enough medico money to meet the minimum requirements of the Category Military Department; then you’re on your own, and if you’ve copped a bad one that lays you up for over a month, you pony up.”
They were on the outskirts of Kingston. The town on the Hudson River was the staging area of the Lockheed-Cessna element, as Catskill, some thirty miles to the north and also on the river, was headquarters of the Douglas-Boeing. This late afternoon, the town was jumping. Besides the multitude of uniformed officers and lads connected with the logistics of getting munitions and other supplies into the Military Reservation and to General Cogswell, Kingston was overflowing with fracas buffs. Undoubtedly, during the day they glued themselves to telly sets, but during the night they poured out onto the streets and into the bars, restaurants, and nightclubs.
It was a phenomenon Jim and Joe were thoroughly acquainted with. Immediately before a fracas there was a carnival atmosphere in such towns as Kingston and Catskill. The fracas-buffs turned up en masse to meet and associate with their heroes. It was practically impossible for a mercenary of any rank to buy a drink for himself. And it was practically impossible not to get laid. The fans were ultra-conscious of the fact that these soldiers would soon be in action, battling before the telly lenses, being wounded, or even killed.
The two lieutenants headed for the Hofbrau Bar, their favorite. They had to zigzag down the street, in between the horse-drawn wagons that were hauling supplies of food and ammunition to Stonewall’s division. Internal-combustion trucks were ruled off a military reservation when a fracas was in progress.
They hitched their horses to the rack before the Hofbrau, noting there were only three other animals there. Only a few of Cogswell’s officers were in town, undoubtedly on business for the general.
Jim chortled, “I’m going to start off with a John Brown’s Body.” He walked over to the bar.
Joe climbed up on the stool beside him and said, “You remember what the general said, Back by dawn—and sober.”
“Yeah,” Jim told him with a wicked grin. “I feel like Cinderella. However, look at these.” He held out a hand which contained two pills. “Sober-ups,” he said.
Joe groaned. “They’re worse than the hangover.”
“But sometimes necessary. You get the whole hangover compressed into a few minutes.”
“As though I didn’t know,” Joe said. He ordered the drinks.
Joe and Jim looked about. There were three of their fellow Lockheed-Cessna officers in a booth, but Joe and Jim recognized none of them. Undoubtedly, they were in logistics, not infantry. Otherwise, the room was full of civilians, some of whom already looked as though they were drenched. They’d probably been drinking all day while stationed in front of their telly screens.
A girl came over to Joe’s right, another to Jim’s left.
The girl near Joe, a plumpish, kittenish-looking blonde, whose name he was later to forget in short order, said, “Can I buy you a drink, Joe Mauser?”
Joe looked at her questioningly.
She said, “I’ve been watching you all week. I’ve been here a week now. It’s the most exciting fracas I’ve ever seen. It’s wizard. You’ve been in the dill a dozen times.”
Meanwhile, Jim was having a conversation with his vivacious brunette, an Italian girl by the looks of her, and quite small.
The drinks had arrived and the bartender put them down and then looked at the two girls and then at Joe and Jim.
“They’re with us,” Jim said.
“They’re with anybody,” the bartender said in negation. “Anybody in a uniform.” He walked off.
Joe said to his blonde, “I’ll buy you one.”
“Oh, no, it’s on me,” she said quickly. “I want to be able to tell my friends that I bought a drink for Lieutenant Joe Mauser.”
She had a glass already in her hand, and she climbed up on the stool next to Joe. “In fact,” she said, “I’d like to be able to tell them that I got drenched with Joe Mauser.”
Joe looked at Jim Hawkins and said, “Do we want company on this binge of ours?” He should have known better than to ask. Jim Hawkins was one of the horniest men he’d ever met.
Jim didn’t even return the look. He kept his eyes on his brunette and said, “I don’t know about you, but I just fell in love. Love at first sight, they call it.”
His girl giggled.
Joe sent his eyes down to the bartender and called to him, “Four more John Brown’s Bodies.”
The bartender shrugged resignation and began assembling the multi-ingredients for the drinks.
They left the Hofbrau Bar and went to the Continental Room for the floorshow. Then they left the Continental and went to the Woodstock Bar with its pseudo-artistic atmosphere. The real Woodstock, the former art colony up in the foothills of Mt. Overlook, was now a burnt-out victim of the fracases. Joe and Jim had ridden through it on the way down from the Lake Hill area where the action was being joined.
Jim said, “Drinking like this is too expensive. We should get a bottle and go off to ourselves.”
His vivacious brunette said quickly. “We have a room, Lieutenant Jim.”
“A room?”
Joe’s blonde said hurriedly, “We reserved it six months in advance, as soon as we heard that this fracas was scheduled. We had to pay triple rates—but it has two beds.” These were the ones who would give practically anything to hold Joe or Jim, or any other mercenary, in their arms the night before they were to see them in the dill the following day. To see them either kill others, preferably in profusion… or to die themselves. Yes, these two fracas-buffs were typical.
But Joe and Jim were already so far gone that having sex in beds side by side meant nothing to them. Down through the ages, the niceties had meant little to warriors who knew that on the morrow they would very possibly cop the last one. Who worries about anything—including VD—when in the morning you would very possibly cop the last one?
Joe said, at one point, after a bout, “Hey, Jim. Watch the time. We’ve got to be back before dawn.”
Jim was resting, too, smoking a cigarette, and letting the ashes drop to the floor beside him. “I’m watching it,” he said. He reached down and picked up the glass he had on the floor too. How he kept from dropping ashes into his drink was a mystery, since he was as drenched as Joe.
The brunette said sleepily, sex-satiated, “What happens tomorrow?”
Even in his alcoholic condition, Joe tightened. He said, “Nothing.” Espionage was not unknown when rival corporations were in a fracas.
His blonde said, “How come you two infantry officers got a pass, right in the middle of everything?”
Jim had also been alerted. He said, “We’ve got a special in with Stonewall Cogswell. He loves Nothing exciting is going on, so he gave us some time off.”
The brunette giggled. “It’s always fun to have some inside information,” she said. “Then you have something to watch for on the telly the next day.”
“I’ll bet,” Joe said. “Like what?”
The blonde snuggled up against him, and she was a bit too lush for his tastes. She said, “Well, actually, we’re Lockheed-Cessna fans, but yesterday we went up to Catskill, just to look around. We ran into the two cutest Rank Privates. They were drivers. They were darling, but just privates, not lieutenants like you two gentlemen. They were trying to be impressive, but we knew they’d only been in a few fracases.”
“So how did they try to impress you?” Joe said.
“Oh, you know. They told us how important what they were hauling was.”
Jim grunted. “Bully beef? Extra rounds of mortar shells?”
And his brunette said, “Oh, no. They were hurrying in a lot of mitrailleuse and ammunition for them.”
Joe said, “What in the hell’s a mitrailleuse?”
The brunette said, “We didn’t know either. But they looked important, and kind of drenched, too. Looked like a small machinegun.”
Jim propped himself up on an elbow. “Whatd’ya mean a small machinegun? There is no small machinegun allowed in the fracases.”
“Well, from what Johnny, or whatever his name was, said, it’s one that one man can carry.”
Jim said, “That’s silly. The smallest machinegun allowed in the fracases is the Maxim. Ideally, it takes a ten-man crew, including the ammunition carriers, of course.”
“Well, from what he said, one man can use it and maybe another to carry the extra pans for him.”
“What pans?” Joe snapped.
The girl was nonplused. “I think he meant the ammunition came in circular pans, like he called them. You know, not very big caliber like the Maxim or a Gatling gun. That’s almost like a cannon. I’ve seen them in several fracases.”
“So have I,” Joe said grimly. He, too, was on an elbow now, and looked over at Jim. He said, “Ringing in new equipment in the last week of a fracas?”
Jim said, “There’s nothing in the rules against it. It just doesn’t happen very often. Usually when you go into a fracas you’ve already got everything you plan to use on hand. But there’s nothing against it.”
Joe said, “There weren’t any light, portable machineguns in use before the year 1900.”
“That’s what I thought,” Jim said.
But the brunette said, “They’re French. Johnny said that General Langenscheidt had found out that the French used them in the Franco-Prussian War, or whatever the name of that old fracas was, way back in 1871.”
Jim and Joe were suddenly on their feet, stark naked.
Joe said to the blonde, “You mean to tell me Bitter Dave has been bringing in highly portable machineguns so handy that if he had a thousand men, five hundred of them could be so armed?”
The cuddly blonde was taken aback. “Well, that was what Johnny was bragging.”
“And we’re scheduled to storm those trenches in the morning,” Jim said.
The two men began to put on their clothing, both breathing deeply. They ignored the two girls, who were wide-eyed.
Jim said, “We’ve got to get to Cogswell in time to call off the charge.”
Joe agonized, “What’re we going to get to him with? The fact that two mopsies told us something that’s impossible?”
“You oughtn’t to call us mopsies,” the brunette protested indignantly. “We paid every cent that was paid tonight.”
“Shut up,” Jim said to her, staring at Joe. “What’d you plan on doing?”
Joe looked at his wrist chronometer. “We’ll separate and go out on the streets. We’ll collar every mercenary we see and ask him if he’s heard anything about Langenscheidt ringing in new French light machineguns. We’ll go into every bar that’s still open and ask the bartenders if they’ve overheard any conversations to that extent. We’ll promise them ten shares of Variable Basic if they can come up with any information.”
Jim glared at him. “Where in the name of Holy Jumping Zen would we get ten shares of Variable?”
“If there is such information,” Joe said, “the general would get Lockheed-Cessna to pony it up. At this point, screw it. Just promise. Let’s go, Jim.”
Chapter Twelve
At that stage of the nightmare, Joe Mauser, deeply asleep, broke into a sweat.
He and Jim had split up and made their desperate attempt to get more information. It wasn’t forthcoming. They had considered going up to Catskill and nosing around, but they had no time for that. In their Lockheed-Cessna uniforms they would have stood out like a couple of elephants in a violet patch; they simply didn’t have the time to find and switch to mufti.
They drew a blank, got back to their horses, and headed for Lake Hill as fast as they could spur their animals. Dawn was breaking. Up ahead, they could see and hear Stonewall Cogswell’s initiating barrage. He was shelling the enemy entrenchments, preliminary to ordering the final charge.
Joe doubted the effectiveness of the barrage. General Langenscheidt was well dug in with the remainder of his shattered troops. When they arrived on the scene, Jim spurred on to rejoin their commands. It only needed one of them to report to Cogswell. Joe took on that duty. The general was deep in scurrying officers, scurrying orderlies, and scurrying aides. Joe had difficulty getting through. Colonel Paul Warren, one of the aides, as harassed as his commanding officer, finally got him in, when Joe’s urgency became evident.