Paratime Trouble by MERRY CHRISTMAS

Author:MERRY CHRISTMAS [CHRISTMAS, MERRY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pequod Press
Published: 2017-10-18T05:00:00+00:00

III

The family men were among the first volunteers. Verkan gave Mills the shotgun and ordered him to guard the prisoners, then let Ranthar take down the details on the new recruits to the Company. He was trying to sleep when Susan Majors knocked on the cubicle wall.

“It seems, Captain, that you have sympathizers,” she began. “You may even have a majority.”

“Miss Majors, I don’t think you can envision our situation exactly as it is. I neither want nor need a majority.”

“You’ll just take the food and stores from the lockers?”

“Correct.”

“And you’ll leave behind those others, all of those who won’t join your Company when you go?”

“Yes,” Verkan said wearily. He was beginning to feel as if he were watching a debate in the Executive Council between Management and the Opposition Party. “Why not?”

She looked at him coldly. “So we either become your slaves, or else we are abandoned?”

Verkan slowly crawled from his sleeping place and sat against the wall. “Putting it roughly, that’s right, Miss Majors. You once said you didn’t have a military mind. Well, I do. I don’t consider private soldiers slaves, and I don’t consider outsiders my business or my responsibility. Those of you that don’t join the Company will keep—or best be kept—out of my way, but beyond that they can do as they please.”

She sputtered incoherently.

He looked up at her. “Please sit down or get out, Miss Majors. I’ve told you before that I don’t like looking up at you.”

She sat on the box-chair Ranthar had prepared.

When she was settled, Verkan continued, “Don’t you get it, Miss Majors? You appear intelligent, and you’re certainly well-educated. There is no government left, or if there is it’s in total disarray. Certainly not, at least, as you understand government, a big sugar daddy to deal out food and sympathy for everyone. That’s gone, dead—kaput. Maybe we could have once carried the dead weight, but not now. Everyone pulls together. We work and we die together, but we don’t carry dead weight.”

“Hah. Then why are you talking about protecting children, the Mills’ baby for example? He can’t help you.”

“Because, Miss Majors, I wouldn’t want a man in my Company who wasn’t concerned about his family. What do you think it’s all about, Lady Bountiful? You do-gooders seem to let your love of the masses get in the way of understanding real obligations, like families. What in the hell did they teach you at that college of yours, anyway?”

She looked at him pettishly. “There’s no need to be insulting, Captain Verkan. And I still don’t see why everyone has to follow your orders without question.”

“Because, the world as you know it—is gone. What we have now is a place where you are lucky just to survive. You might just live by following orders, but not any other way. You can count on it.”

“If it takes all that,” she declared, “just to survive—if you have to throw away all that’s beautiful and noble—I don’t want to survive. I don’t think I want to live in your world, Captain Verkan.

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