Robert Adams - A Man Called Milo Morai

“Your story you wrote down for us checks out, all of it. But, Jesus God, mister, with the linguistic abilities you have, why in hell have you wasted so much time as a damned infantry sergeant? Christ Almighty, man, that’s the hardest, most thankless drudgery in the Army, what you’re doing. And we, my service, is desperate for people like you, and our need gets greater every day, too. I think I’m safe in promising you that if you make application for transfer to the Counterintelligence Corps, you’ll be a commissioned officer inside a month and you’ll probably outrank me before a year is up.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Milo. “But I’m happy where I am. I have no desire to be an officer. I’m needed in B Company, and my friends, my buddies are all there.”

“Not good enough, mister, not good enough at all,” snapped Jarvis. “Fuck what you want, mister, this is war! Go on back to your company, your friends, your buddies … for now. But I’m going to have orders cut transferring you and your abilities to where they’ll do the. most good for Uncle Sam and the U.S. Army.

“That’s it, Moray. Dismiss. Lieutenant Carter will give you back your sidearm as you leave and Sergeant Lawford will see you’re driven back to wherever you were when they found you.”

Milo’s hand was on the knob when Jarvis spoke once more. “You’re no longer restricted, of course, Moray, and you’ll notice a few faces missing from B Company in the next few days, too. I can no longer justify keeping them and you in place. But I still don’t trust you, mister. I think, I feel that there’s one hell of a lot more to you than meets the eye. My intuition tells me that there’s something damned odd about you, and my intuition is never wrong, so I mean to take you and just what you are or are not on as a sort of personal crusade … when this war doesn’t interfere, that is.

“Yes, you have scads of highly placed friends and supporters, but then so too do I, mister, and you’d better believe it, too. No matter how high you rise in rank, I’m going to keep digging at this secret of yours until I finally expose it and you.

“No, don’t turn that knob, not yet, Moray. This … this thing that I sense about you is … well, if certain persons heard all of what I feel about you, they’d most likely see me tucked away in some back ward at Walter Reed in a straitjacket for the duration of the war.

“Moray, I feel about you the same as I would feel … well, almost the same as I would feel around some highly intelligent animal. It’s as if you’re not really a human being, just a … something masquerading as one of us. Had I the authority, I’d have you run through the most complete physical examination of which the post medical facility is capable, have them do or at least try to do everything until I was proved right about you. What do you think of that, mister?”

Milo just shook his head. “I think you’ve got what a very brilliant friend of mine, a man who had studied under Dr. Sigmund Freud, used to call a fixation … I think that that was the proper term. Yes, Major Jarvis, you probably would benefit from the attentions of a good psychiatrist and a well-equipped, modern psychiatric facility, for you are clearly disturbed. You are bound to be suffering delusions if you think I’m not human. What the hell else could I be, major? One of H. G. Wells’ damned Martians, maybe?”

Tech Sergeant Milo Moray found Fort Holabird tiny, as posts went, located almost within the actual city limits of Baltimore. Security measures were tight and stringently enforced by a profusion of well-armed guards. Badges and cards bearing photos and fingerprints were de rigueur everywhere on the minuscule post, and without the proper combinations of badges and cards, no individual could even come within close proximity to many of the buildings.

Not that all that much of seeming importance appeared to be happening within those buildings which Milo possessed the proper credentials to enter. After tests had established that he owned a decent command of Swedish, he was set to work that was very reminiscent of what he had done for Dr. Osterreich in Chicago five years before. Day after day, he was presented with Swedish periodicals, newspapers and trade or technical journals for translation. There was no need for a public library, however, at Holabird, for their dictionaries and references were extensive, and, as was often pointed out to him and the others in his section, they were not expected to understand, just to translate for specialists who did not read Swedish.

Milo would have liked being paid by the word as he had been in Chicago, for even with his quarters and food being all provided by the Army, along with uniforms and medical care (something of which he strangely had no need, since he never succumbed to anything worse than an occasional mild cold), his salary was nothing to boast about, especially not in the midst of a civilian economy new-swollen with the high incomes of hordes of war-industry workers. His pay as a tech sergeant was eighty-four dollars per month with an additional thirty dollars per month for his status as a first class specialist, which addition brought his monthly stipend to one hundred and fourteen dollars, within twelve dollars of that of a master sergeant. Even so, his money did not go far, and it was but rarely that he could afford the cost of a bus or railway ticket to meet and carouse with Jethro Stiles at some place between Baltimore and Georgia, nor did he feel that he could or should accept the generous man’s frequent offers of money to allay these expenses.

Finally, one night, thinking of the thousand-odd he had left in the care of Pat O’Shea, he wrote to the old soldier. But the return letter came from Maggie.

“Dear Milo,

“I am so very happy to hear from you once again after all these years. Poor Pat, God keep the dear soul, has been with the angels for almost three years now, which was truly a divine blessing for him, as he had gone stone-blind and was coughing up blood from his gas-damaged lungs day and night. Old Rosaleen suffered a seizure and died in the kitchen during Pat’s wake, and I have since retained a new cook, another policeman’s widow, Peggy Murphey. But I now fear I may soon have to replace her, for her brother-in-law, a recent widower himself, is paying frequent and serious court to her and Police Lieutenant Robert Emmett Murphey strikes me as a man who gets his way, come—or high water, as dear old Pat would have put it.

“We have heard nothing of my eldest son, Michael, since the Japs took the Philippine Islands and can only pray Our Lady that he be safe and well. Joseph was wounded at Pearl Harbor on the morning the Japs attacked the fleet there, but he has recovered and the Navy has him in a school now to make an officer out of him. Sally is nursing at the hospital now, and Kathleen was, too, but when the Nazis attacked Russia, she signed up to be a Navy nurse and she’s now at a Navy hospital out in California, as too is Fanny Duncan.

“That terrible German priest, Father Rustung, was arrested and taken away by the FBI when they arrested all the other Nazis, and good riddance to the lot of them, say I. They say the other priest, the sissified one, went into the Army Chaplain Corps.

“I hear that Irunn Thorsdottar went back to Wisconsin and was nursing at a hospital in or near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and living there as man and wife with her own elder brother. Somehow, the two perverts were found out and prosecuted and sent to the penitentiary for criminal incest. More good riddance to bad rubbish.

“Dr. Guiscarde went into the Army only a week after the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor, and his last letter they say was from a camp in New Jersey. Dr. Osterreich is a captain in the Navy Medical Corps and is somewhere around Washington, D.C. Is that near you?