Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition Read Online Free PDF Page B

dented, if the xylotron threw burnt insulation all over the xylotronist, they brought it to me, for soldering, hammering, emergency rewiring—even a little first aid. I got to be pretty good—undoubtedly the reason I had been chosen for retraining.
     
    “It is not all so bad,” the Colonel shattered me of my reverie, although I thought he spoke more to himself than to me. “While you are in training, you will be available should we need you. I suspect there will be no replacement, not in a hurry, anyway.”
     
    I nodded. Nothing he said required—or justified—a reply.
     
    “There may be other opportunities, even after you are rotated out into the field. I shall try to see there are, if it would please you, Whitey.”
     
    “I would like it very much, sir.”
     
    “Good. Also, you will always have your musical talent to fall back on, as a comfort to yourself, your comrades. It could be worse, could it not, Corporal?”
     
    I saluted, snapped my heels. “Yes, sir, Colonel, sir, it could be worse, sir.”
     
    He gave me a very unmilitary grin, shook his head ruefully. If one thing the Navy—or the Army, for that matter—could arrange, it was for things to be worse. He knew it. I knew it.
     
    I turned smartly, started out of his office.
     
    “Whitey?”
     
    I turned again, curious. He removed his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, looked back up at me. “Since we will not be getting a replacement, take your mandolar with you. You will need to stay in practice, anyway.”
     
    “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
     
    “Do not thank me, son, I am not authorized to give away Navy property. I do not know what happened to Corporal O’Thraight’s mandolar, just before he got reassigned. Thank the Navy, boy. I do it every day. You could never print the words I use to do it.”
     
    -4-
     
     
     
    The voice in the corridor outside said, “Here it is: YD-038.”
     
    Nobody knocked. The door opened. Miss Sixte, ninth-floor mother for the local Navy Reserve creche stepped inside.
     
    I snapped to attention.
     
    It was a gray room, three meters by three, with a gray door, six little gray bunks, YD-036 through YD-041 inclusive, smoothly tucked to regulation tautness. Miss Sixte kept pretty much to herself. Sometimes you could hear her sobbing in her own room after lights-out. None of the kids ever managed to discover why.
     
    Everybody else had gone to calisthenics that morning; I had been told to wait. It made me nervous. I had never spent much time here in the daylight. Behind Miss Sixte, a tall, thin man carried an odd-shaped plastic box by the handle. “Whitey, this is Sergeant Tenner of the Twenty-third Aerofleet Band. He is going to be your teacher.”
     
    I had teachers, plenty. Tenner looked okay, though, if kind of weird: cadaverouslike, with slicked-down hair, olive skin, a good smile. Good hands, with long, thin fingers. “Whitey?” He offered me one of the hands.
     
    “Sergeant,” I answered, gravely adult as I could be, “What is that you are carrying, sir?”
     
    “Not ‘sir’, ‘Sarge’. Take a look.” He handed me the case. I fumbled with the spring latches. Inside, in a tight-fitting bed of bright yellow plush, lay the most beautiful object I had ever seen.
     
    About the length of my forearm, it had a long tapered neck on the flat face of which six inlaid columns of square brightly-colored buttons touched each other at the edges, like mosaic tiles, each about the size of a thumbnail. They marched down the neck in twenty-four rows, until it blended with the body: not much larger than the neck, very slightly ovoid. At its bottom was a cluster of tiny knobs. Six long plastic vanes stuck out from the face, centimeter-high, six centimeters long.
     
    Tenner took the beautiful thing from my reluctant hands, arranged the fingers of his left on the neck-buttons, just-so, fluttered his right thumb down across the hinge-springed vanes.
     
    A chord more wonderful than anything I had ever heard.