Authors: Bruce Bethke
around out on the quad barebutt naked, while his pants took a trip up the
flagpole and got the big salute.
Lucky for me Scott kept his eyes open and his pants on, so he was
still in pretty good shape when I finally pried the boombox away from
his ear sometime after Thursday evening mess. Once I got Angina
Pectoris shut up I was able to spend a good solid hour beating some of
the more elementary rules of troop movement through Scott’s thick
blond head, and he even seemed to catch on to some of it.
Why’d I bother? To be true/true, the academy’s war game wasn’t
half as complicated as division level Peshawar. But it was
enough
like
Net Peshawar to flip my toggles, or at least two important ones: I hate
losing. I
really
hate losing. And I truly
totally
hate losing when I get
killed by someone else’s mistakes.
Result? I tried to share a little of my gaming rolethink with Scott,
and I ended actually feeling a little hopeful—and Scott was feeling
downright cocky—when we went into the Friday game.
The trouble is, it’s so easy to confuse cocky with
smart
. In the battle
he’d just blown, Scott hid our troops in the highlands and waited until
the Spartans finished off the Athenians. Then, while the Spartans were
dancing around the table trying to get position on Borec’s Macedonians,
Scott marched us out brave and hit the Spartans head on.
They didn’t even slow down. With the Macedonians behind us
cutting off our retreat, the Spartans just squeezed us like a big, juicy zit
they wanted to pop. Our little band of goatherds survived about five
minutes, max. The judges called the battle a total loss, Scott blew a
headfuse, and like I said, he went stomping out of the gaming shed.
He was disappeared by the time I got out, but on a guess I jogged
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over to the bunkhouse. The game was bringing out Scott’s latent
bunkhouse sulker streak, and I figured that’s where he’d be. I also
figured that if there was any chance of upgrading his generaling, I’d
have to jump on it before he depressed himself into turning Angina
Pectoris on again.
I guessed right. Scott was lying on his bunk, knees up, holding the
CD in his hands and watching the dusty sunlight prism off its surface. I
jumped up on the next bunk over and waited for Scott to give me an
acknowledge.
He didn’t. I kept trying to be derzky, and not push myself in his
face, but finally my patience timed out. “Tough break,” I said, final.
He looked at me, momentary. “Huh?”
“Getting caught between two hoplite armies like that,” I explained.
“If it’d been another bunch of peltasts, ‘stead of the Macedonians, we’d
have stood a chance.”
His face went into the blank mode he used when he didn’t know
what was going on and he was forgetting to be chill about it.
“Pelwhats?”
“Oh, sure,” I said, trying to sound casual. “The Macedonians are
hoplites, didn’t you know? Heavy armor, just like the Spartans.”
“How’d you find that out?” It sounded like an accusation.
I shrugged. “It’s in the rule book. Check the hit points table,
sometime. We got peltasts. Light armor. That’s why the Spartans grind
us up so easy.”
Scott went back to staring at the CD. Prism reflections did a
lightshow on his face. “Rules are for dweebs,” he said, mostly to
himself.
“But it’s really our advantage,” I said, nonchalant. “When we want
to, we can move more than twice as fast as the hoplites. Check the
movement table.”
Still looking at the disk, Scott asked, “You memorized those
tables?”
I nodded. “Seemed like a good idea.”
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He snapped his head around to glare at me. “You little
smartass!
Who appointed you my fuggin’ remedial tutor?”
“Scott, I—”
“Maybe
you
get it hard for rules and tables! Hell, you got a damn
computer instead of a brain anyway! But
I
got better things to do with
my mind!” He rolled over and slammed the CD into his boombox.
“Wait, dude!” I shouted. “Will you listen—”
BLAM! The opening riff of “Burn the Vagrants” came blasting out
of the speakers at permanent nerve damage volume. “Get out of my
face!” Scott screamed. “And take your fuggin’ little toy soldiers with
you!”
“Scott, I’m just—”
“Bug off, you little twerp! If you’re so fuggin’ smart, why didn’t
they make
you
general?”
Good question, that. Jeez, at least Rayno
listened
to my ideas! I bit
my lip and walked slow out of the bunkhouse. There was a little tool
shed about twenty yards away that basically offered the only bit of shade
on the quad, and I was still sitting on the doorstoop of the shed, trying to
think up sharp ways to let Scott know he was being a pinhead, when Mr.
Style came walking up with a bunch of Macedonians.
“Christ Almighty!” one of the Macedonians—a southern-fried
jarhead but otherwise an okay guy—said, pointing at our bunkhouse.
“That bimbo sounds like a tomcat what got his balls caught in a
blender!” The other Macedonians laughed a lot and kept walking; Mr.
Style stopped and sat down next to me.
“I see Scott is taking the loss with his usual good grace,” he said,
jerking a thumb towards the noise. “You making any progress on him?”
I shook my head. “Certified zero. How’d the rest of the battle go?”
“Typical. The Spartans waxed everybody else’s fannies.”
I picked up a couple pebbles out of the dirt, and started pitching
them at nothing in particular. “Lindsey, old buddy--”
“Please don’t call me that again.”
“Sorry.” I tried again. “Mister, this is gonna be one long summer, if
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all we’re gonna do is get beat up three times a week by the Spartans.
Think the proctors will let us Thebans stage a palace revolution?”
He smiled. “They just might. Here, I picked up a little present for
you.” He reached around, pulled something out of his back pocket, and
threw it in my lap.
I picked it up and looked at it. “New rulebook?” I asked.
He got to his feet, and started brushing the dust off his fatigues. “It’s
about twice as thick as the last one. And this time, we only got
one
copy.
I was supposed to give it to Scott, but I thought I’d put it where it’d do
some good.”
“Thanks, man.” I flipped to the back of the book and started looking
at the tables. If what I was hoping for was there ...
“Next battle’s Monday,” Mr. Style said. I didn’t answer ‘cause I was
getting absorbed in the rules. There was some truly
good
stuff in the new
book. Fatigue factors, logistical tables, unequal forces. “Try to find
something in there that’ll keep us from looking quite so stupid, okay?” I
think I nodded; I don’t remember for sure. Jeez, there were factors in
that new rulebook that were going to make the game a lot more
interesting! It
was
almost as cool as Net Peshawar!
I didn’t notice Mr. Style walking off. In fact, I didn’t notice much of
anything until about the fourth time through “Brucie B Dead,” which
was when I noticed I was getting real tired of listening to Angina
Pectoris. Getting to my feet, still reading the new rulebook, I wandered
off on the path behind the bunkhouses.
It must have been fate. I’d never really gone that way before, I was
just looking for someplace quiet. There was a little sort of ravine that
opened up back of the shower building, ran parallel to the line of
buildings. Down, past the wood shop; past the dispensary. I was walking
along, paying zero attention to everything but the rulebook, until the mo
I hooked my toe on a root and near went splat on my face. Then I caught
my balance, looked up, and spotted a sign I never noticed before:
Library.
Hmm. There was a lower floor under the quartermaster’s, and it was
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a
library?
You wouldn’t suppose that meant...? Deep in my most hidden,
inside pocket, my Starfire started to itch and chafe.
I patted the pocket. “Easy, fella,” I whispered. Then I pasted my
most honest, trustworthy smile on my face, stepped up to the door, and
tried the lock.
It was open. Trying my best to radiate sincerity and politeness, I
opened the door and went in.
The library was one big room, but still a cramped, musty place.
There were three big wood tables and a bunch of maximum-discomfort
style style wooden chairs in the middle, and loads of big bookshelves up
to the ceiling around the perimeter all stuffed full of fat, dusty old
analog books. At the far end of the room there was a cluttered metal
desk, and near it some tall old guy—the librarian, I figured—was
standing with his back to me, poking at a bookshelf. But nothing in the
room looked even slightly like a decent LibSys term. Geez, there wasn’t
even an Intuit CD reader, and every damn
nursery
school back home has
one of those!
My eyes went back to the librarian. There was something odd about
him, too, and it took me a few seconds to flag it. He was big old guy,
beefy going to fat, with wire-rim glasses and thinning white hair. A few
liver spots on his scalp showed through—the hair!
That
was what was
odd about him! What little hair he had was actual normal length! And he
wore civvies!
“What’s the topic for your paper?” he asked weary, not turning
around. His voice was deep and rumbly.
“Huh?”
“It seems like that’s the only time you cadets come in here,” he said,
as he turned to face me. “When you need to do instant research for—”
He stopped short, and pulled his glasses down to look over the tops of
the rims. “Why, you’re one of the summer boys!” He broke into a big
smile. “What brings you in here?”
This was an embarasser; the poor old guy seemed actual
pleased
to
see me. “Uh, sir, I was just looking for a real quiet place to read, sir.”
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“A quiet place to read!” He came swooping around the tables and
offered me a giant finger-crushing handshake. “Well, you’ve come to
the right place! I’m Ralph Lewellyn, the Academy Librarian.”
“Librarian, sir?” I asked. “Not L.I.?”
It took him a few seconds to catch it, then he laughed. “No, son, I’m
most definitely a
librarian
.” He walked me over to a table and offered
me a chair. I sat down. “Now, is there anything in particular you want to
look at? Or would you just like to browse?”
“Actual, sir—”
“Not sir,” he corrected me. “Ralph. Or Mr. Lewellyn, if you feel the
need to be formal.”
I smiled, and tried again. “Actual, Ra—Mr. Lewellyn, I got my
hardcopy right here.” I pulled out the rulebook, and his face fell.