Poul Anderson - Operation Chaos

She did.

I don’t have many souvenirs of the war. It was an ugly time and best forgotten. But one keepsake will always be with me, in spite of the plastic surgeons’ best efforts. As a wolf, I’ve got a stumpy tail, and as a man I don’t like to sit down in wet weather.

That’s a hell of a thing to receive a Purple Heart for.

Here we reach one of the interludes. I’ll skip over them fast. They were often more interesting and important to us—to Ginny and me—than the episodes which directly involved our Adversary. The real business of people is not strife or danger or melodrama: it’s work, especially if they’re so fortunate as to enjoy what they do; it’s recreation and falling in love and raising families and telling jokes and stumbling into small pleasant adventures.

But you wouldn’t care especially about what happened to us in those departments. You have your personal lives. Furthermore, a lot of it is nobody’s business but ours. Furthermore yet, I have only one night to ’cast. Any longer, and the stress might have effects on me. I don’t take needless chances the unknown; I’ve been there.

Finally, the big events do matter to you. He’s also your Adversary.

Let me therefore just use the interludes to put episodes in context. Okay?

This first period covers roughly two years. For several months of them Ginny and I remained in service, though we didn’t see combat again. Nor did we see each other, which was worse on two counts. Reassignment kept shuffling us around.

Not that the war lasted that long. The kaftans had been beaten off the Caliphate. It disintegrated like a dropped windowpane, in revolutions, riots, secessions, vendettas, banditry and piecemeal surrenders. America and her allies didn’t need armed forces to invade enemy-held territory. They did need them, and urgently, for its occupation, to restore order before famine and plague broke loose. Our special talents had Ginny and me hopping over half the world—but not in company.

We spent a barrel of pay on postage. Nevertheless I took a while to decide I really had better propose; and while her answer was tender, it wasn’t yes. Orphaned at a rather early age, she’d grown to womanhood with a need for warmth—and a capacity for it which required that tough career-girl shell to guard her from hurt. She would not contract a marriage that she wasn’t certain could be for life.

I was discharged somewhat before her and went home to reweave threads torn loose by the war. Surprisingly few showed in the United States. Though the invaders had overrun nearly half, throughout most of float conquest they were present only a short while before we rolled them back, and in that while we kept them too busy to wreak the degree of harm that luckless longer-held corners like Trollburg suffered. Civil government followed on the heels of the Army, more rapid and efficient in its work than I’d have expected. Or maybe civilization itself was responsible. Technology can produce widespread devastation, but likewise quick recoveries.

Thus I returned to a country which, apart from various shortages that soon disappeared, looked familiar. On the surface, I mean. The psyche was some thing else again. Shocked to their souls by what had happened, I suppose, shocked more deeply than they knew, a significant part of the population had come unbalanced. What saved us from immediate social disaster was doubtless the variety of their eccentricities. So many demagogues, self-appointed prophets, would-be necromancers, nut cultists in religion and politics and science and dieting and life style and, Lord knows what else, tended to cancel each other out. A few of them did grow ominously, like the Johannine Church, of which much more anon.

However, that didn’t happen in a revolutionary leap. Those of us who weren’t afflicted with some fanaticism—and we were the majority, remember—seldom worried more than peripherally. We figured the body politic would stop twitching in the natural course of events. Meanwhile we had our careers and dreams to rebuild; we had the everydays to get through.

Myself, I went back to Hollywood and resume werewolfing for Metro-Goldwyn-Merlin. That proved a disappointment. It was a nuisance wearing a fake brush over my bobbed tail, for me and the studio alike. They weren’t satisfied with my performance either; nor was I. For instance, in spite of honest trying, I couldn’t get real conviction into my role Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy and the Thing Meet Paracelsus . Not that I look down on pure entertainment, but I was discovering a newborn wish to do something more significant.

So there began to be mutual hints about my rep nation. Probably only my medals delayed a crisis. 1 war heroes were a dime a coven. Besides, everybody knows that military courage is a large part training and discipline, another large part the antipanic geas; the latter is routinely lifted upon discharge, because civilians need a touch of timidity. I don’t claim more than the normal share of natural guts.

About that time Ginny was demobbed. She came straight to visit me. That was quite a reunion. She wouldn’t accept my repeated proposals—“Not yet, Steve, dear; not till we see what we’re both like under ordinary conditions; don’t you understand?”—but I seemed to be running well out in front.

In the course of several days, besides the expected things, we did considerable serious talking. She drew to the forefront of my mind what my true ambition was: taming Fire and Air to create an antigravity spell powerful enough that men could reach the planets. In fact, I’d set out to be an engineer. But funds ran low in my freshman year, and a talent scout happened to see me in some amateur theatricals, and one thing led to another. Like most people, I’d drifted through life.

Ginny was not like most people. However, she’d been doing some rethinking too. She was welcome back at Arcane, but wondered if she really wanted to work for a large organization. Wouldn’t her own independent consulting agency give her freedom to explore her own ideas? For that she needed further goetic knowledge, and the obvious way to acquire it was to go for a PhD.

And ... between our savings and our GI, we could both now afford a return to college.

The clincher came when, after some correspondence, Trismegistus University offered her an instructorship—since she already had an M.A. from Congo—while she did her advanced studies. I fired off an application to its school of engineering and was accepted. A few weeks later, Steven Matuchek and MGM parted ways with many polite noises, and he and Virginia Graylock boarded a supercarpet for the Upper Midwest.

At first everything went like lampwork. We found us decent inexpensive rooms, not far apart. Classes were interesting. We spent most of our free waking hours together. Her resistance to an ear1y marriage was eroding at such a rate that I extrapolated she d accept me by Christmas and we’d hold the wedding right after the spring finals.

But then we felt the kicker. Right in the belly.

We’d known that the generally good faculty was saddled with a pompous mediocrity of a president, Bengt Malzius, whose chief accomplishment had been to make the trustees his yes-men. What he said, went. As a rule that didn’t affect anybody on a lower level, at least not much. But in the past year he had decreed that academic personnel, without exception, must take a gees to obey every University regulation while their contracts were in force.

Few persons objected strongly. By and large, the rules were the standard ones; and salaries were good; and the new compulsion was intended as a partial check on the rebelliousness, nuttiness, and outright nihilism that had been growing to a disturbing extent of late, not only among students but among faculties. Ginny went along.