Thomas Sherred - Cue for Quiet

"So I did. You know-" and he held my eye steadily-"you're so completely unique, and so-dangerous, that more than once I have been personally tempted to arrange your-elimination. From behind."

I couldn't put up more than a weak grin for that. I had wondered about that, myself. A variation, a deadly one, of the old "if you can't lick 'em, join 'em" theme. And I hadn't been too cooperative.

He went on, slowly. "My personal reactions, for obvious reasons, do not enter into this. But I think, Peter, that you should consider those words very seriously before you are tempted to do or say anything rash."

I agreed that he was probably right, and that it might be better if I piped a quiet tune. "But that's not the way I operate. As far as I'm concerned, I'm responsible to myself, and myself alone. If I wanted to be told what to say and what to think, and when to say it, I would have stayed in when I got my discharge."

He shrugged. "It might be better for all concerned if you were under military discipline, although it might not suit your ego. Take, for example, the two generals you met in Detroit; Generals Hayes and Van Dorf. They both are regarded as brilliant; they are both regarded as too mentally precocious to be risked in physical action. They are two of the most agile minds on the staff."

I took his word for it. "They are still generals to me. And I don't have to stand at attention, and I don't have to take their orders."

"Exactly," and he reached for the cigarettes again. "It is not going to do any good by adding more fuel to your mental furnace, but it is only fair to tell you that the … elimination thing was more or less seriously discussed before you left Detroit."

He didn't give me a chance to blow up, but raced on. "General Hayes and General Van Dorf are sensible men, dealing in material and sensible things. You are neither practical or sensible, in many ways, this being one. They, as well equipped as they are, are not prepared to cope with such a problem presented with such as you. I might add here, that neither is anyone else. What are you laughing at?"

I couldn't help it. "The military mind at its best. First cross up the world by getting a weapon with no defense. Then when someone comes up with a defense for any weapon, including the weapon with no defense, they start turning back flips."

"Take that idiotic grin off your face." Just the same, he thought it was rather comic, himself. "Neither of us are in the Armed Forces, so for the present we can talk and plan freely. If you think, Peter, that all this can be solved with prejudice and a smart remark, you're very, very wrong. The worst is yet to come."

I asked him if I'd had a bed of roses, so far. "I don't think I could be much worse off than I've been so far. How would you like to be penned up-"

"Penned up?" He snorted disgustedly. "You've had yourself a holiday, and you can't see it. Try to see the military, the legal point of view. Here is one person, Peter Ambrose Miller, one man and only one man, with the ability, the power, to cancel at one stroke every scientific advancement that armament has made in the past three thousand years."

"And the big boys don't like it," I mused.

"The little boys, as you use the word, won't like it, either," he said. "But, that's not the point. Not the point at all. The stem of the apple is this-what are we going to do with you?"

"We?" I asked him.

"We," he explained carefully, as to a baby, "is a generic term for the army, the navy, the government, the world in general. As long as you live, as long as you continue to be able to do the things you can do now, a gun or an airplane is so much scrap metal. But-only as long as you live!"

That I didn't like. "You mean that-"

"Exactly what I said. As long as you're alive a soldier or a sailor might as well be a Zulu; useful for the length he can throw a spear or shoot an arrow, but useless as he now stands. There is no army, apparently, right now that is worth more than its body weight-again, as long as you live."

"Do you have to harp on that?"

"Why not? Do you want to live forever, or do you expect to?"

He had me there. You bet I wanted to live forever. "Well?"

He yanked pensively at his upper lip. "Two solutions; one, announce you to the world with a clang of cymbals and a roll of drums. Two, bury you someplace. Oh, figuratively speaking," he added hastily as he saw my face.

"Solution one sounds good to me," I told him. "I could go home then."

He made it quite clear that Solution One was only theoretical; he was firm about that. "Outside of rewriting all the peace treaties in existence, do you remember how our Congress huddled over the Bomb? Can you see Congress allowing you, can you see the General Staff agreeing to share you with, for example, a United Nations Commission? Can you?"

No, I couldn't.

"So," with a regretful sigh, "Solution One leaves only Solution Two. We'll grant that you must be kept under cover."

I wondered if Stein was somewhere at the earphones of a tape recorder. For someone with as big a job as the old man likely had, it seemed that we were talking fairly freely. He went on.

"And that Solution Two has within itself another unsolved problem; who watches you, and who watches the watchers?"

That didn't matter to me, and I said so.

"I suppose not to you, but it would matter to the army, and it would matter to the navy, and when J. Edgar Hoover gets around to thinking about it, it will matter to the FBI."

"So what? Would I get a choice?"

He was curious for a moment. "Would you want one?"

"Maybe, maybe not. I had a uniform once. The FBI go to college and take off their hats in the house, but they're still cops, and I don't like cops. Don't look at me like that; you wouldn't like cops either, if you made less than a couple of hundred a week. Nobody does. So I'm prejudiced against everybody, and just what difference does it make?"

"Not a great deal. I was just curious." He was honest, anyway. "But you can see the possibilities, or the lack of them."

"Look," and I got up to take as many steps as the cabin would allow. "This is where we came in. We could talk all day and get no further. All I want to know is this-what's going to happen to me, and when, and where?"

He followed me with his steady eyes. "Well, at the immediate moment, I'm afraid that-" He hesitated.

"I'm afraid that, quick like a bunny, you're going to have one solid headache if we don't quit using the same words over and over again. Here I am stuck in the middle of all the water in the world, and I'm tired, and I'm disgusted, and I'm starting to get mad. You're trying to smother my head in a pillow, I've got nothing but a first-class run-around from you and everyone I've seen, who has been one man named Bob Stein. I see nothing, I know less, I get cold shoulders and hot promises."

I sailed right on, not giving him a chance to slide in one word. "Why, there must be ten thousand men and maybe some women right upstairs, and who knows how many within a few miles from here, and do I get to even pass the time of day with any of them? Do I? You bet your sweet life I don't!"

"There aren't any women within miles of here, except nurses, and maybe a reporter, and I'm not sure about that."

"Nurses and reporters are human, aren't they?"

Had he found a chink in the armor? He frowned. "Is it women you want?"

"Sure, I want women!" I flared at him. "I want a million of them! I want Esther Williams and Minnie Mouse and anyone else that looks good to me. But I don't want them on a silver platter with a gilt chain. I want them when I want them-my wife and the waitress at Art's, and the beer I used to drink would taste a lot better than the beer you said I'd get and never seen!"