The war in 2020 by Peters Ralph 1952-

Author:Peters, Ralph, 1952-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York : Pocket Star Books
Published: 1992-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

THE WAR IN 2020

outside tripped his thoughts. As the questions were repeated to him again and again, he found it ever more difficult to focus. And the interrogator exaggerated the smallest grammatical inconsistencies in his story.

When the beating was at its worst, he tried to close his mind to it, to think only of the thing he loved the most in the world. He had long thought that it was his military service, but he knew now, with utter mental clarity, that it was Valya. Not even his mother, who had died in the plague years, had meant so much to him. Dying was terribly frightening. And yet . . . he knew it was really nothing. There had been so much death. But it seemed needlessly cruel, unbearable, that he would die without ever seeing his wife again.

He was grateful that the questions posed to him were all of a military nature. The KGB major never once asked about his family or about his nonmilitary friends. Babrysh-kin guessed that those questions were for more leisurely peacetime interrogations. Now there was only the war. And he was glad. It would be all right to die. He would have preferred to die in combat, being of some use. But the manner of dying had come to seem increasingly a matter of accident. Perhaps, really, one death was as good as another. As long as Valya wasn't dragged into it, as long as nothing hurt her. He even knew—and remembered without malice—that she had been unfaithful to him once. Perhaps she was being unfaithful to him now. But it did not matter. She was such a special girl. And because he believed that she had been unfaithful that time out of spite, only to hurt him, it had not hurt so much. It was not as if she had really loved another. And he knew he had broken many promises, that he had failed her again and again. It was a country, an age, of broken promises. And he suspected that Valya was far, far more helpless than she realized.

He made a deal with God. Not with the brief, small god whose fist hammered him over and over again, but with the other God who might be out there after all, who should be out there. He would die willingly, so long as Valya was not harmed. So long as he became only another corpse and the affair ended at that. He thought of Valya: the

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