they’d said. It did not mean anything to him. Could it really mean something to them?
We all of us feel the same way at some point, he told himself. All of us who knew anything. Home could get to be very unreal. Besides, it didn’t seem fair, to us. All of us being so lucky. Getting to lose a leg or an arm or an eye and come back home out of the fire to all the bars and pussy. While the others, the healthy ones, had to stay out there and try to live and breathe in the smoke.
Winch felt for his worn musette bag and unfastened the catches and pulled out a bottle of Scotch and brought it up to him. He told himself not to drink from it. He told himself he was not allowed. Then he uncapped it, and took a long, hot double swallow.
Well, so long out there, you! Toast, you fuckers!
He dipped the neck of the bottle in salute of his toast. If booze was a poison, a particular poison for him now, it was sure one hell of a marvelous poison.
This thing of reputations. It was peculiar. People were always talking about command presence. They said, either someone had command presence, or he did not have it. They said, if you did not have command presence, you could not learn it. A lot of bullshit.
A new word for it, which was really a very old word for it, was beginning to be popular again after five hundred years. An old Church word out of the Middle Ages, charisma. You either had charisma or you didn’t, and if you had it you could do anything you wanted, demand anything, and people would follow you and obey you.
What people did not understand about command presence was that it did not come from the inside but was imposed upon some object person, from the outside, by the followers themselves. They wanted something to look up to. They wanted someone to tell them what to do. Command presence was created by the eyes of the commanded. A land of massive human conspiracy. Maybe it also existed in the eyes of foolish commanders. But no smart commander believed it. He merely utilized it. Hadn’t he been doing it himself for years?
Winch sighed and put one hand behind his head. Winch had been one of the charisma people, one of the “stars” of his Division for years. So much so that he was known in other Divisions, across the Army. What he had learned from it was that all celebrities were alike. They were a secret club of thieves. They recognized each other on sight, and they never attacked each other in any depth. The club’s secret password was a look of shrewdness in the eyes with you, a look of complicity. They never talked about charisma. What Winch had learned from charisma people, from being one, was that charisma people were a race, a den, a nest of Super-liars.
When you learned that, it took away everything. It took away the satisfaction and it took away whatever had given you the drive in the first place. It made it all worthless. And ludicrous. It put you right back down there in the barnyard, looking like—and smelling like—the rest of the livestock. The livestock you had wanted to avoid being one of.
And he was supposed to be his own company’s hero. Damn them, damn them, Winch thought suddenly and savagely, God damn them. They weren’t worth the turds to put in a sock and thump them over the head with. Why should he give a damn about them?
The bottle was still sitting on his chest. He let the hand holding it slide away down over the berth edge and put it away.
God damn their souls, cannon fodder was what they were. He couldn’t be expected to keep them all alive forever, could he?
Winch raised up on his elbow and stared through the open door, across the passageway. Across the passageway was what had once been the ship’s main lounge. There was your cannon fodder.
There were easily several hundred of them. All the chairs and tea tables had been removed and replaced with hospital beds. In ranked rows. Here in the one huge room were the serious cases which needed constant attention. White-jacketed figures moved among them under the high ceiling. Here and there a medic squatted, supervising the giving of glucose or plasma from a glass jug hanging on a