Joe Haldeman - Work Done for Hire

I didn’t like the actual sniper-ing much, but was surprised to find that I loved the shooting itself, burning up ammo on the rifle range, trying for smaller and smaller groups. In sniper school I often got the day’s best MOA—number of hits within a minute of arc—which was good for a half-day pass on the weekend. Take a cab to a scummy bar off base and try to pick up some girl who didn’t have a financial motive.

I never did pay for it, neither stateside nor in the desert. Maybe I pretended it was virtue. But I was a virgin when I got drafted, and had a grim anti-fantasy about doing something stupid, and the whore laughing at me.

Which of my regrets about the army was strongest—killing people? Following orders from idiots? Wasting three of my most productive years?

Maybe it was not getting laid. Being too shy or scared, when really I was in a horny guy’s heaven. Some of those hookers in Columbus were stunning, but the ones who peopled my fantasies were ordinary cute girls who looked like the coeds I’d spent so much undergraduate time and energy not fucking.

After combat, it was easy. Just ask the damned girl! What’s she going to do, chuck a grenade at you? And combat veterans my age and education were pretty rare still, that early in the war. I learned to play that mystique pretty well, the year between army “separation” and the night Kit ignored my bashed-in mouth and rescued me from my wicked ways.

It was not yet noon when I pulled into the English & Philosophy Building parking lot. I called Kit and discussed possibilities, then drove out to the Coralville Strip and got a two-foot-long loaded submarine to split.

Funny how driving a route you’ve just biked seems to take about the same length of time. The bike ride had been almost three hours and the trip back was not even thirty minutes. But I enjoy biking along in a meditative state; driving, I had to put it on cruise control to keep from speeding out of boredom. Plus a little submarine hunger, even though I’d shortened my half by a couple of bites.

She or a maid had made up the bed, and she was sitting in the lone chair, reading. She had showered and changed her bandage, a less dramatic single wrap of gauze. We went outdoors to a picnic table to attack the sub.

She rode the length of the motel parking lot and decided that discretion was the better part of valor, though I think being a mathematician, she might express that differently. “D >> V”?

We drove back to my place because I had tools and a workstand, and we drank wine while I cleaned and adjusted her bike. I even tuned the spokes on her rear wheel, ping-ping-ping, a process she’d never seen, which delighted her.

She picked up a family portrait that was sitting on top of my nailed-together bookcase. “Hear from your dad recently?”

“Still boning what’s-her-name in Chicago, I guess. I did get an e-mail day before yesterday that went to a couple hundred of his closest friends. He’s opening in Chicago next week. Probably go up.” Dad was a sometime actor, though most of his money came from teaching drama in adult ed, a sure road to big bucks.

“That would be a good gesture,” she said carefully. “It wouldn’t bother you if what’s-her-name was there?”

“No, no. She’s all right. I guess collecting fossils is a legitimate hobby.”

She studied the picture. “I don’t know. I’d say he looks pretty good. He looks like you.”

“Not anymore. He has a bushy white beard now, and horn-rim glasses. Not as much hair. Closer to Lear than Hamlet.”

“Hamlet’s overrated. Who wants a worrywart?

“Careful, there. I played Hamlet in high school.”

“No, really? I’ve known you all this time and I didn’t know that?”

“Wasn’t a big deal. I’d already decided not to follow in Dad’s footsteps.”

“Trotting in front of the footlights. Was he disappointed?”

“Funny, no; not at all. He was all for me getting a doctorate and teaching. It was Mom who wanted me to act.”

She laughed. “While your dad was cheating on her with actresses?”

“Funny business.” I shrugged. “She might’ve known back then; maybe not. It didn’t all come out until the divorce.” Five years ago.

“Did your dad ever say… did you know?”

“Oh, hell, yes. Not in so many words, just a wink or a raised eyebrow now and then. And when he was happy he really showed it. By the time I was sixteen I could tell that his being happy didn’t have much to do with what was going on at home. Then Mother caught them together, I think by accident.”

“‘There are no accidents.’ Who said that?”

“Schiller? Maybe the captain of the Titanic .”

“Was it what’s-her-name?”

“No, not even an actress. She was a tech person, a lighting engineer. Not even pretty—that annoyed the hell out of Mother.”

She traced her finger over the glass of the picture. “Your mother’s more than pretty. Glamorous.”

“Yeah, I guess. Little life lesson there.”

“I’m glad you’re not attracted to beautiful women.”

Nothing safe to say to that. I touched her nose, then kissed her gently.

She giggled while we were kissing. “Sorry! I can be so awful!”

“Naw. You just need an editor sometimes.”

She stood up and pulled her T-shirt off in one cross-arm jerk, and then stepped out of her shorts. “So come edit me. If you’re done with the bicycle.”

I wasn’t, quite. But it could wait.

Relaxing after a big meal, Hunter sometimes let his mind wander back to other times and places.

His home planet, Vantor, was beautiful but not pleasant, a hard place to grow up—if you lived long enough to grow. Of his twelve littermates, all male, only one other lived to become adult.

There had been four, but on the eve of their tenth birthday they went into the pit together, and only two were allowed to come out. He could still taste his brothers’ blood, and feel it splashing on his face.

He would not dishonor that memory by eating humans raw. Their taste was insipid anyhow, and needed cooking with spices and herbs. Especially the taste of their sexual parts, pallid and tame. They fought fiercely over that part, the last birthday, thinking it gave strength and courage.

After the tenth, they didn’t count birthdays. You lived until you died, and that would be a long time.

He was not sure how he had gotten to Earth, or what his purpose was here. He was content to wait, and hunt, and eat.

He sat there unmoving through the night, neither asleep nor awake. At first light, he took a shovel with a sharp square blade and cut out a rectangle of turf. He carefully squared out the hole, depositing the dirt on a canvas drop cloth. When the hole was handle-deep, he went into the trailer and brought out the inedible remnants of the luckless jogger. Before covering it with dirt he undressed, straddled the hole, and evacuated generously into it. Then he filled the grave, stamping the soil down tightly, and carefully replaced the turf. He saturated the area with his alien urine, which he knew contained butyric acid. No bloodhound would come near it.

He went back into his trailer and turned the heat up to a comfortable hundred degrees. Then he carefully eased himself onto the oversized recliner and opened up his paperback book: The Pawns of Null-A , by A. E. Van Vogt.

He had read it before, but that was all right. He didn’t read for information.

Kit stared at the last page and set it down carefully. “So he eats this guy’s balls and then shits on his bones and pisses on his grave. Couldn’t you be a little less tasteful?”

“Well, actually, it’s his brother’s balls.”