Free Emile and the Dutchman by Joel Rosenberg Page A

upperclassman, he's going to say, To hell with it, resigning wouldn't be so bad,' and take a poke at him. On the other hand . . ."
    "Yes, sir?"
    "If you were to transfer to the Contact Service Academy, it's entirely possible that all of your records would be lost in transit. Think about it."
    "How long do we have?"
    "Thirty seconds." He tapped a fingernail on two flimsies. "Sign those, or I'll call the guards and have you hauled away."
    * * *
    Fifteen hours later, we were checking in at Alton. The duty officer had told us to go right to our room and settle in, and we would handle the details in the morning.
    Our billet was in the old wing of Wingate Hall. As we were walking up the stone steps an empty beer bulb flew out of the door and hit me square in the chest.
    It was quickly followed by a cadet captain in an immaculately pressed set of ODs.
    I looked at Manny, and he looked at me; he gave the kind of expansive shrug that you're not allowed to use unless you've got sufficient Latin blood.
    Here we go again, I thought, nodding. We dropped our bags and came to attention.
    The cadet captain wrinkled up his smooth face. "What the—you the two pieces of new meat?" He shook his head, slowly.
    "Sir. Yes, sir."
    "My name is Jim Moriarty, not sir—outside of duty hours. And before you ask, yes, they call me Professor—outside of duty hours," he said, stooping to pick up my bag. "Hey, Julio —the new suckers are here. Get your ass out here and lend a hand."
    "Right away," sounded from inside the building.
    He looked from me to Manny, and then back to me. "And bring two beers. These poor bastards look like they can use them."
    I almost cried.

IX

    "I don't need to hear about Alton. I graduated from Hell High, remember? I know all about shovel-the-shit on duty, have-a-beer off."
    "Right." I shrugged. "Well, in any case, that's how it happened."
    The Dutchman snickered. "That's not quite the way it happened." He nodded smugly. "I didn't think I could see you enlisting voluntarily in the Service. . . ."
    It was my turn to snicker. "Major, I don't know if you've noticed, but Naval officers live a nice, clean life. They don't—"
    "Shuddup. More specifically, Naval cadets—even ones that psych testing has indicated might make decent Contact Service officers—don't volunteer for transfer to the Service—"
    "Damn straight."
    "—unless they get a bit of persuasion." Norfeldt took the compboard off his lap and handed it to me. My eye quickly scanned down to the bottom.

    . . . despite more difficulty than this officer had expected with the assistance of Admiral Braithwaite, said officer was able to secure voluntary transfers from Cadets von du Mark and Curdova.
    At present, there are no further cadets at the Naval Academy whose psych profiles suggest that they would be more appropriate to the Service; accordingly, this officer hereby suggests and requests that he be relieved of his recruitment duties and detailed back to a Contact Team.
    Respectfully submitted,

    Ernest Brubaker,
    First Lieutenant TWCS
    (detailed RECRUITMENT)

    "Son of a bitch ! "
    The Dutchman just chuckled. "Welcome to the real world, Emmy."

Interlude

    von du Mark/Origin of the Contact
    Service/Eleven

    carpetbombs were particularly destructive of soft targets—humans, livestock, wood-framed houses—while the blastbombs burrowed their way into the ground, and then threw vast chunks of earth into the air. It is entirely possible that blastbombs were originally intended for nonmilitary use of some sort.
    Europe was the least hard-hit. Paris, Berlin, Bonn, Düsseldorf and Ploiesti were damaged, but not destroyed; a chain of burrowing blastbombs chewing northward from Trieste almost to Graz killed less than a hundred thousand, as Austria obtained a seashore and a deepwater harbor for the first time in its history.
    Perhaps the Xenos had some way of scanning for population density; the Chinese coast and the Indian subcontinent were among the hardest-hit. While one