"As soon as the minimum time allowed, she married again," Von Ulrich said. "And you pretend it means nothing?"

"She never did mean much of anything, sir. I mean, she was an interfering kind of woman. She wouldn't let a man live."

"All right, Barton. What about this? She was committing adulterous acts with this fellow, this Major General Woods. She was having an affair with him for two years before you volunteered for duty in the basketball."

"I figured she was playing around."

"You what?"

"It figured."

"You still pretend it meant nothing, that it means nothing now?"

"I don't know what it means. What's it got to do with me now? It was all right, I guess. I could have gone on with it. But this is better."He dimly remembered Jean bitching all the time of an evening because Barton kept forgetting to take his officer's exam, and how she had to skimp along on an NCO's lousy salary, and so on and so forth. Very much the nagging kind. She wouldn't let him read either. He would tell her he was just sort of stupid, and had always been a drifter anyway, and just sort of fell into marriage and that he never had had any ambition particularly, and anyway big brass got ulcers and heart conditions. And then she would drag little Joey, the big-headed little brat into it, and talk about how little Joey didn't have the right kind of idealized image to assure him a respectable future, and little Joey would stand there and nod his oversized head.

"What about little Joey's future?" Jean would say. "You want him to be just another stupid NCO? And what about his teeth? He's got to have his teeth straightened. They tease him at school, call him The Squirrel."

"Yeah, Dad. You want me to be personable and saleable and high on the success potential scale? What about my teeth protruding?"

And when Barton went into the bathroom and came back out, Jean was throwing all those books he'd had such a hard time finding into the incinerator. Barton volunteered the next day for basketball duty.

It didn't even seem long ago to Barton. It was oddly like a dream that might have been in the past, or the future, or never at all.

Von Ulrich grabbed up the spacegram and walked stiffly erect out of the basketball.

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