“I cannot thank you enough, Heer Claassen,” Simon stammered. “Professor Sanmartin has mentioned how much help you have been in establishing a separate Department of Suid-Afrikan Ecology. I do not know what we could have done without you.”
“Oh, I didn’t do so much.” Claassen beamed. “Last year, I think that Professor Dr. Adam Vlok would have walked on hot coals to get Raul as far away from the biology department’s budget as possible.”
Sanmartin laughed and gestured. “Go ahead and tell them, Christos. Simon knows the truth and the other two are cleared for it.”
“Dear old Professor Dr. Vlok had to have his arm twisted very hard, although he has since learned to recognize the sensation and acquiesce gracefully. This department is something that our people need. I doubt that Adam has had an original thought in twenty years, and the way his department avoided studying or teaching anything about Suid-Afrikan biology was criminal. We bent his nose sideways when we told him that Raul was going to be a professor, despite Raul’s—•” “Nonexistent credentials,” Sanmartin finished for him. Claassen grinned mirthlessly. “I still remember the look on his face when you said that you weren’t going to accept a salary.”
Maria Viljoens smiled. “I remember Professor Sanmartin’s first class. Oh, those clothes you wore! Wherever did you get them? They hardly fit.”
“Borrowed,” Sanmartin reminisced. “Thirty first- and second-year students. Ten minutes into the lecture, it dawned on them that I seriously expected them to do oral presentations in English and original fieldwork. At the first break, half of them rushed off to the registrar’s office to change.”
Viljoens glanced at her two compatriots slyly. “We three stayed.”
“And you have done very well, since then,” Claassen said gallantly. “Raul showed me your habilitation, Genetic Analysis of Speciation among Amphtiles of the Drakensberg Region. I confess I don’t understand a word of it.”
“Why don’t you brief Heer Claassen on it, Maria. Nonspecialized briefing. Ten minutes in length.” Sanmartin, who slept through boring lectures and expected normal people to do the same, had taught his students military briefing techniques.
Viljoens caught her breath, then launched in. She finished in nine minutes, eleven seconds.
“Amazing,” Claassen said in wonder. “Most of our professors can’t explain a thing about what they do in language a simple banker can understand, and there’s not one of them who does not use ten words where one would serve, excepting Raul who does not count. Tell me, Maria, have you done this presentation before?”
“I gave it to the first-year students a few weeks ago.” She gave Sanmartin an exceedingly dirty look. “Professor Sanmartin gave me fifteen minutes then.”
“And you did an excellent job, both times.” Sanmartin tapped Beetje lightly on the shoulder. “Simon, it’s your turn to be up on a pedestal. I deliberately haven’t shown Christos your latest work on reversing the damage that the USS mining operations did to the land and waterways.”
Beetje laughed. “Sir, he practically dictated the topic to me.” Composing himself, he explained, “Although ecological reclamation work has been accomplished on Earth, no one ever thought through the problems of doing so in a Suid-Afrikan context. Originally, it struck me as mere engineering— mechanic’s work, so to speak. I wanted to do something, well, scholarly—some majestic addition to the sum of human knowledge, like how to apply Einstein’s theory of relativity to genetics or something.” Beetje gestured toward Sanmartin. “He said, ‘Be different. Be useful.’ ”
Maria Viljoens slipped her arm into Beetje’s possessively. “It required a great deal of work. Of the first dozen test projects, eleven failed and the twelfth was only a partial success.” “And as soon as Simon showed me his results, I laid my hand on the cover and asked him how we could implement them,” Sanmartin interjected.
“I hadn’t thought that part of it through, so that took another three months,” Beetje said.
“Night and day,” Karel Koekemoer said ruefully, and everyone laughed.
“When I gave it to Professor Sanmartin, he asked me if it was right. I told him that I wouldn’t have given it to him if I thought it was wrong, but he just smiled and said, ‘No. I’m not interested in whether you think it’s right, I want to know if it’s right.’ So I spent two more months, and when I gave it back to Mm, he said, ‘Okay. We’ll begin with it tomorrow.’ ” “And your plan has helped us to clean up the areas that the USS mining operations destroyed,” Claassen said complacently.
“In a manner of speaking, sir. It provided a scientific blueprint, but every detail needed fixing up. Some of them still do.”
“Oh, Simon! How can you say such things,” Maria Viljoens said, pulling him close.
“It worked well enough to earn him tenure,” Sanmartin observed.
“Which Professor Dr. Vlok fought, tooth and nail.” Claassen looked at Sanmartin. “Dear old Adam only thought that he was ruthless and hard-headed.”
“I attended classes in a tougher school,” Sanmartin said mildly. “It gradually dawned on Adam that I thought what we were trying to accomplish was important, and that if he gave me any problems, I was going to rip his heart out and feed it back to him one slice at a time. After that, he was very gracious about it.”
“Writing was not easy,” Beetje said to fill the awkward silence. “I did not have most of the necessary knowledge. I had to work with the chemists, the agronomists, the biochemists, the faculty of the Department of Mining and Metallurgy, even Professor Vlok. At first, I didn’t even know how to ask them questions. Then Professor Sanmartin made me spend two weeks at the mine pithead so that I could figure out how to do what needed to be done without bankrupting everyone concerned.” “One thing that I have never been able to worm out of RauS is how long it will take to fully restore the land that USS poisoned,” Claassen said, eyeing him. “Now that I have you, perhaps you can tell me.”
“If funding continues at the current level, we should have most of the work done in about twenty-five years,” Beetje said confidently.
Claassen’s eyes bulged. “So long,” he whispered. “I did not realize.”
“Most people do not realize how long it takes to repair severe environmental degradation, Heer Claassen,” Viljoens said shyly, but firmly.
“So what do you think, Christos?” Sanmartin asked him. “If these two can speak this glibly iu front of the board, there should be no problem, despite their youth. And I assume that Heer Koekemoer here is next in line. These are difficult times,” Claassen replied.
“You won’t find people on the planet who’ll do the job better,” Sanmartin said. “All right, the plan is this. Effective Thursday, I am resigning my position as department head. Simon, I expect you to be confirmed in my place. Christos and the chancellor already know, and if we hear a peep out of Professor Dr. Vlok, Professor Dr. Vlok will regret it.”
Simon Beetje touched the fingers of one hand to his lips and looked at Maria Viljoens. “So soon?”
“It’s politics. Simon, you’re already doing the job. You’ve been drafting the budget and handling the day-to-day stuff for six months. Well, the mission is yours now. Maria and Karel will help you out.” What Sanmartin wanted to say and didn’t was that men Simon’s age were given command of infantry companies and expected to win wars. “Christos, is there anything you can add?”
Claassen nodded. “The mission, of course, is not merely to teach students and study Suid-Afrikan plants and animals, but also to teach our people an ethic so that we haven’t destroyed what makes Suid-Afrika unique by the time the three of you are my age. Despite our political differences, Raul and I are of one heart, one mind, on this.”
“I hope you understand, sir, that I will not ‘carry out the mission’ in precisely the way that Professor Sanmartin has done. Although I have learned from him and respect him very much, I am my own person,” Beetje said.
Maria Viljoens gasped, “Simon!”
; “No, young Simon is quite correct in saying this to me, Juffrou Viljoens,” Claassen explained. “Raul and I expect nothing less.”
“I have two boxes of original records out in the vehicle, five and a half years of fieldwork, plus some stuff from Earth,” Sanmartin said lightly. “Why don’t you three come get them?” Recognizing how completely Sanmartin was severing his ties, Beetje reached out his hand and found tears running down his face. Sanmartin embraced the three of them in turn.
When they left, Claassen said privately to Sanmartin, “I wish that you would let us keep you on the faculty. We could put you on some sort of sabbatical, you know.”
“Christos, I’m not a professor. We both know that the only reason that I got away with the charade for this long is that the professors who were politically reliable enough to come here were a pretty mediocre lot. Even though I’ve been doing this for five years, I still don’t know how to be a professor, and I’m not sure I want to learn.”
Christos Claassen understood, a little. Hanna Bruwer had explained. Sanmartin’s mother had been a university professor of economics in Buenos Aires. On Sanmartin’s sixteenth birthday, she said things in public about environment degradation and civil rights that earned her a twenty-year sentence. By dying early, she cheated the government out of sixteen years.
Sanmartin stepped off the path and gently nudged a seed fern he had planted with his toe. “Simon and Karen already know more about Suid-Afrikan ecology than I’ll ever know, and I learned years ago to never look back. Did you know that a year or two ago, Simon actually wanted to join our battalion’s reserve company and be a soldier part-time.”
“What did you tell him?” Claassen asked quietly.
“That I needed him here. That he was this planet’s seed com.” Claassen made a small jest. “Is being a soldier so bad?” “No. Being a soldier is fine. It disciplines you for other things. But war is for professionals—it tends to ruin you for anything else.” Sanmartin looked over his shoulder at the campus. “I will miss this place. Oh, I meant to tell you. The Manchurians will be taking over the Pretoria and Johannesburg caserns from us tomorrow—one battalion in each casern. Call it a New Year’s present.”
“What?” Claassen said, taken aback.
“The order came down this morning. Ostensibly, we’re concentrating the battalion in Bloemfontein to intensify our effort to root the ARM boys out of the forests. We’ve been expecting it—Admiral Horii asked Anton when we could be ready to move out, and Anton said tomorrow, which set a few wings flapping, I’m sure. It means that Colonel Sumi will begin taking charge of antiterrorist activities in the cities.”
“What does this mean for us?” Claassen asked, his good humor erased.
“I’m sure that there’s a ringi circulating around Admiral Horii’s staff, but Anton and I haven’t seen it. My guess is that Sumi is building a consensus for some pretty tough measures. I expect that we’ll have to make the ARM disappear our way before Colonel Sumi gets everyone to agree to let him try to make the ARM disappear his way,” Sanmartin said distantly.
Tuesday(311)
NEXT TO THE SPACEPORT SHUTTLE RUNWAY, THE TEMPORARY LODG-
ments of the First Manchurian Battalion hummed with activity as the battalion prepared to move into permanent quarters. Elbowing his way through the crowd, Section Sergeant Ma bellowed, “Hey, Duck-Face! Lieutenant Akamine wants to see you!”
The unflattering and often descriptive nicknames the Manchurian soldiers attached to one another would have horrified their Japanese officers had they known.
Recruit Private “Duck-Face” Gu looked up. “What does that little rat-eyed pirate dwarf Pig-Snout Akamine want now?” he complained. “One-Eye” Wong began snickering in the comer of the tent.
“To scream at you, what else? When the admiral came through, he inspected your area. Don’t you know how to roll a hammock?” “Sawtooth” Ma asked his subordinate.
“Oh,” Gu moaned, holding his head, “all pirate dwarf officers are motherless.” He looked up at his section sergeant. “What is it going to take to make Pig-Snout happy?”
“Your private parts, lightly roasted,” Ma said with relish. “Of course, I could put in a word for you.”
“Oh, pirate dwarf officers and all sergeants are motherless,” Gu moaned. “How much?”
“Enough.” Ma rubbed his fingers together. “And more for saying things like that about your old sergeant, who keeps Lieutenant Pig-Snout from making your miserable, worthless life more miserable and worthless. Besides, why do you care how much? You’ll make lots of money off the locals when they start acting up.”
“I thought the long-nosed barbarian colonel had the locals tamed,” Gu said, reluctantly reaching for his billfold.
“All locals act up. Haven’t you been in the Imperial Army long enough to know that?” Ma said complacently. “You don’t think they sent the pirate dwarfs and blacklegs here to sit around with their fingers up their noses, do you? Now get moving, and remember to grovel for Pig-Snout, he likes that. And remember to hurry back! We are leaving in twenty minutes.”
Similar activity was occurring at Coldewe’s casern on the outskirts of Johannesburg as the men of C Company prepared to vacate the knoll they had lovingly fortified to make room for the First Manchurian.
“The Iceman can keep Bloemfontein. I don’t want to move there,” Corporal Uborevich complained, already two hours behind schedule. “Vosloo, admirals should be drowned at birth!” Both Recruit Private Vosloo and his platoon leader, Sublieutenant Jan Snyman, smiled as they finished packing up their personal gear.
“You should think positively, Corporal,” Vosloo said cheerfully with a wink. “I have a cousin in Bloemfontein. The girls there aren’t as sophisticated as these big-city girls, so you might have some luck. Although maybe not—I hear they shave their legs and wear shoes.”
Uborevich snorted contemptuously, and a few other members of his section suppressed grins. Uborevich’s unbelievable stories about the women he dated grew more incredible every time he repeated them.
“I always liked the one where Bory claimed a woman came up to him at a night guard post, lifted her skirt, and told him to stand at attention,” Vosloo said happily as a half dozen trucks carrying the Manchurian advance party began pulling up.
When Sergeant Ma and Private Wong hopped out of the back of their vehicle, Uborevich wiped the damp tears from his eyes. “She’s a good casern. Treat her nicely.”
Casting a steely eye at his section sergeant, Wong asked Uborevich in labored English, “What are these amphtiles? Are they dangerous?”
Fate had placed Uborevich at the right place at the right moment. “Oh, no,” he assured Wong solemnly. “A machine gun will slow them down every time, and they only really get mean after dark. We hardly ever lose more than a few men. Of course, if they bite you, it’s like that!” He snapped his fingers. “Poison. There’s no antidote. You walk three steps and fall over dead.”
When other C Company men nodded, the Manchurians assumed the worst. In reality, the C Company men were merely acknowledging that Uborevich actually could tell a completely unbelievable story that didn’t involve a woman. C Company had speculated a lot about that.
The platoon of armored cars from Lieutenant-Colonel Okuda’s Ninth Light Attack Battalion, which had accompanied the Manchurians, began pulling into the revetments. Lieutenant Danny Meagher elbowed Hans Coldewe in the ribs. “Hans, there’s something odd about their Cadillacs. I’ve been shot at by them often enough to know,” he said in a musical voice.
A former mercenary—a fairly notorious one—Meagher had worked for USS and ended up on the wrong side of the uprising after USS had left its meres minus their pay and mostly dead. After the rebellion, Meagher had entered himself on the battalion’s muster roll with characteristic bravura as “Daniel van Meagher.”
Coldewe responded slowly. “The Cadillacs with 30mm guns look all right, but there’s something wrong with the 90mm guns on the others.”
“Having been on the other side, I’m sure it’s something we’ll want to look into,” Meagher replied.
IN BLOEMFONTEIN THAT EVENING, THE ENTIRE BATTALION GATH-
ered for a muted New Year’s celebration. One custom involved pouring a dipper full of melted lead into a bucket of cold water to read the future.
“Black spots mean future sadness,” Isaac Wanjau, the moderately incongruous keeper of C Company’s traditions, explained to some young troopers as Yuri Malinov poured the lead.
After a slight hesitation, Timo Haerkoennen announced officially, “It looks like a ship. Better make travel plans.” Meagher nudged Coldewe and whispered, “It looks more like a bullet to me.”
Wednesday(311)
AFTER HANGING HAMMOCKS EVERYWHERE THERE WAS ROOM,
Matti Harjalo solved the problems caused by the influx of personnel from the Pretoria and Johannesburg caserns by deploying half the battalion in the forests to crowd the ARM boys. Still, it was the first time since Vereshchagin’s battalion landed that all four companies were together, and space was at a premium. A new partition split Haijalo’s cubicle down the middle, leaving him barely enough room for a hammock, a field desk, and a terminal.
At the moment, the hammock was in use, and Haijalo barely opened one eye when he heard a soft knock on his door.
In addition to his other duties, Senior Communications Sergeant Timo Haerkoennen acted as a very efficient buffer between Harjalo and the rest of the universe. “Sir, Major Sanmartin’s here. I’ll send him in,” Haerkoennen said quietly.
“What’s up, Raul,” Harjalo said, planting his feet on the floor and rubbing his eyes as Sanmartin entered.
“Trouble. The local police have found a body—one of our more outspoken local radicals. Nobody had seen him for a day or two. Someone put a 9mm round in the back of his head and stuffed him into a trash can. It looks like he was tortured before he was shot.”
“Is the ARM cleansing its ranks of deviants again?”
Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02] Page 9