packaged-up the shavings to be burned. They administered parenteral and enteric doses of broad-spectrum antibiotics. By the time the gnoto girls were finished, Hartford was as bald all over as a six-weeks foetus, as sore as though he'd been sand-blasted, slightly feverish as a result of the injections and madder than hell.

Ignoring his demands to see Colonel Nef at once, the Service Company troopers helped him into his safety-suit. Hartford would have to live inside the suit for a week's quarantine, watched carefully to see whether a missed microbe would breed within him in spite of all the measures taken.

Hartford's company commander refused him permission to speak to the colonel. The lieutenant was to speak to no one concerning Renkei's invasion of the Barracks. He would remain safety-suited inside the Barracks or out; but would otherwise continue with his regular duties.

Hartford returned to the refresher-room where the murder had taken place. Renkei's macerated body had been removed for burning. The room had been carefully decontaminated, to the extent of hosing it down with detergent steam and individually re-refreshing each safety-suit in the huge hall's rows of lockers.

There was nothing to be done against Nef's madness, Hartford thought. He sat on the bench where Renkei had sat. The ultimate breakdown in communication is silencing one side of the dialogue, he thought. That's why killing a man is the ultimate sin; it removes forever the hope of understanding him. It ends for all time the conversation by which brothers may touch one another's mind.

What crap to find in a soldier's thoughts, Hartford told himself. He was an Axenite trooper, a Pioneer, a pistol-packing officer of infantry, commander of the Terrible Third Platoon. He was an Axenite, dedicated by the immaculacy of his birth to the conquest of Man's frontiers.

Hartford snapped his plastic-sheathed Dardick-pistol, death in a supermarket wrapper, from his belt and placed it on the shelf of his locker. He'd seen the village of Kansannamura burned. Pia had died across his shoulder. Paula lay buried, too. Renkei's life had been splashed out on a stream of bullets. Enough of death.

Hartford picked up a pack of field-ration squeeze-tubes and walked down the hallway toward the Syphon.

His leaving would show on the Status Board, of course, but that didn't matter any more. He was deserting the regiment.

He walked 

 Prev. P 29/56 next