"Thank you."

"Right." He signed off.

I hung up the phone and turned back to the lieutenant. "Have you got a manual for this thing?"

He looked sour. "Yeah. Somewhere. Wait a minute." He disappeared into the back and came back with a thin booklet which he tossed onto the counter. "Anything else?"

"No, thanks." I put the book in the rifle case along with the two boxes of clips, and closed it. I signed the receipt and picked up the helmet.

As I turned to leave, the lieutenant said, "You know something? I don't believe you're a lieutenant any more than I believe any of the other stories I've heard about you."

I met his gaze. "I really don't care. What you believe is none of my business."

I went outside and tossed the rifle and helmet into the trunk of the car and locked it. Instead of going back to my barracks, I pulled the base map out of the glove compartment and looked for the practice range. There it was, on the far north end of the camp. It took ten minutes to get there-I had to take the long way around.

There was no one there when I arrived. Good. I wanted privacy. I unpacked the rifle and sat down in the car with it across my lap while I read the manual. I locked both safeties, and practiced loading and unloading it. An empty magazine would be automatically ejected. A full one could be snapped into place as easily as inserting a memory clip into a recorder. Good.

Now, how did the laser sight work?

According to the manual, the laser randomly retuned itself every ten-thousandth of a second to a different point in the spectrum, but always beyond the range of visible light. The laser would fire its microsecond bursts at randomly computed intervals. There was no regularity either in the frequency of the beam output or in its frame rate. Only an EV-helmet, when it was plugged into the rifle, could track the myriad infinitesimal packets of coherent light. The wearer would see the laser as a steady beam. No one else-goggled or otherwise-would see anything at all, except perhaps an occasional subliminal flash. The idea was to prevent enemy snipers from homing in on the human end of the beam. Without sophisticated equipment, tracking it was impossible.

I reset it for coded operation and put the helmet back on. Nothing.

I took off the helmet and double-checked its batteries and all connections. They appeared to be in order. I double-checked the connection to the rifle. Again correct. Hm. I put the helmet back on, waited for the image to solidify and turned on the beam again. If it was working, you couldn't prove it by this helmet.

I switched everything off and went back to the manual. It took only a few minutes to find the appropriate section. In large block letters, it said: "IMPORTANT: BE SURE THAT THE SETTING OF THE CODE KEYS IN YOUR HELMET IS IDENTICAL TO THE SETTING OF THE CODE KEYS IN YOUR WEAPON."

It took a few minutes to find the section on the code keysthere were matching panels on both the helmet and the rifle. The laser sent a control pulse to the helmet every time it fired. Both the rifle and the helmet had identical random-number generators, but if they weren't starting from the same seed-the setting of the code keys-the helmet wouldn't track with the laser as it continually retuned itself every ten-thousandth of a second.

You could use the weapon without its laser sight, but with nowhere near the same kind of accuracy.

I reset the code keys on both helmet and rifle and put the helmet on again. Once again, I stood at the center of a surreal world: a landscape of gray, populated with glowing pastel trees and buildings. But this time, when I switched on the laser, the beam appeared as a luminescent bar that seemed to be all colors at once: pink, green, white, blue, yellow, red-it flickered through the spectrum faster than the eye could identify individual hues. I saw only the afterimages as they blurred into each other, and the effect was the perception of colors that I'd never seen before. They were intense and glorious. The beam sliced across the nacreous landscape like a razor. I wrote my name across the sky with it, and I could see the afterimage as a shimmering blur. Was that my eyes or the sensors or something in the digitizing process? No matter, it was eerily beautiful.

Next I tried on the helmet.

It was like looking into h.e.l.l. I was staring into a glowy, ethereallooking world, colored all in shades of red and gray. The helmet sensors scanned the spectrum from beyond ultraviolet to below infra-red, then the image was digitized and new color values were a.s.signed; the resynthesized image was projected directly onto the retina. Clever. But it hurt my eyes. It would take some getting used to.

I retuned the color spectrum and lowered the brightness of the image. Now the scene was multichromed, but individual objects were not. Every building, tree, car, or whatever, was painted only in shades of one dominant color-pink or green or blue. The horizon and distant landscape appeared as layers of purple and gray while closer objects stood out in translucent, almost glowing pastels. They seemed to float against the dingy background. There were no shadows.

It was an eerie and compelling kind of imagery. The world was both familiar and surreal. I could identify objects, I could see them in better detail than I could with the unaided eye, but at the same time, everything had a shimmering aura in this ghostly twilight landscape.

I looked at my hands; they were pale, shading almost to green. In fact, my whole body looked green. Would all human beings look this color?

I got out of the car and turned around slowly, examining the world around me as if I'd never seen it before. And in this sense, I never had. Finally, and with a definite sense of regret, I went back to the car for the rifle.

I connected the helmet-control wire to the stock of the weapon and switched the laser on.

Nothing. No beam.

I switched it off. I took off the helmet. I reset the laser for standard operation. I switched it on. A bright red beam stabbed across the practice field.

Great. The laser worked.

You could easily become addicted to this other-worldly sense of perception. It was very distracting.

Finally, I stopped. I couldn't stall any longer. I loaded a clip into the rifle and switched off both the safeties. I touched the beam to one of the haystacks on the other side of the field. I pulled the trigger.

Someone kicked my arm and the haystack exploded.

I locked both the safeties on and flipped the goggles of the helmet up.

Yes, the haystack had exploded.

The AM-280 was supposed to be recoilless, but it wasn't. No gun is ever completely recoilless. You have to be careful with repeating weapons because they'll "walk up" on you. That's what had happened to me here. Instead of punching a hole in the haystack, I had sliced it vertically upwards.

I flipped the goggles back down, switched off the safeties and blew up another haystack. It took three more tries before I could control the weapon well enough to just punch holes in them. The trick was to focus on the end of the beam and lean into the action of the rifle to steer it. I sliced up the last two haystacks, just to see if the rifle could be used as an axe. It could. Good.

Maybe I could even cut a Chtorran in half with it.

Except I didn't know if I was looking forward to that opportunity or not.

I went back to the car and put the gun back into the case and locked it in the trunk, the helmet too. I drove back to the barracks feeling curiously happy. As if I'd proven something to myself, although I wasn't sure what.

THIRTY-THREE.

THERE WAS a box on the bed when I came in. Inside was a uniform, with appropriate insignia. Only one. There were supposed to be two. Typical army efficiency-half the job is always done on time. I took it out and looked at it. Something was giving me a vaguely uneasy feeling-and it wasn't just the aftereffects of last night's booze. I'd thrown up most of that before it had gotten into my bloodstream, and the Sober-Ups had neutralized the rest before it could do any real damage. No, this was something else, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I just knew that I wouldn't feel quite right wearing this uniform. It had come ... too easily.

Still pondering, I hung it up in the closet.

I was in the shower when Ted staggered in. He didn't even take off his clothes; he just stepped into the shower with me and held his head under the spray.

"Good morning," I said.

"Oh," he said. "Is it morning?"

"For a little while longer anyway." I pulled him away from the shower head so I could rinse off. He sagged against the wall. "What day is it?" he asked.

"Sunday."

"Of what year?"

"Same one." I got out of the shower and grabbed a towel. I didn't particularly want to talk to Ted right now.

I was half-dressed when he sloshed out of the bathroom after me. "Hey, Jim-" he began.

"Eh?"

"I'm sorry I wasn't here yesterday. Or last night. Or this morning. Things just got away from me, that's all."

"Oh?"

He must have sensed my coolness. "Look, you've got to understand-I was doing it for us, trying to make some connections! And I did! I didn't even see any of the sessions yesterday."

"Oh?" Then he must have missed the scene in the conference hall. I didn't ask.

"No. I was scouting."

"I'm sure."

"Listen, it paid off! I've been offered a commission in the Telepathy Corps. I go in for my operation on Wednesday. I'll be getting one of the new multiband implants."

"Oh, terrific."

"It is, Jim!" He grabbed my shoulders. "Before the plagues, it would have taken an Act of G.o.d-or at least an Act of Congress-to get into the corps. Now they're so desperate, they're even willing to waive the psychological requirements."

"I can see that."

"No, you know what I mean."

Yes, I did. "What else did you do for us?"

"I'm sorry, Jim. I did speak up for you, but you weren't qualified. I've got the electronic-language background. And I can travel."

I pulled away from him and went to the closet.

"But listen to me-that's not all. Remember that Chtorran that we heard about, the live one that they captured?"

"Yeah ... ?"

"Well, I got to see him last night. He's amazing!"

"Oh ... ?"

"Yeah-I met that girl you were talking about, Jillanna! You were right. She's really something! That's why I wasn't here last night. I spent the night with her. She's with the project, and she got me in to see him. Really extraordinary. It was feeding time, and-"

"Ted! Stop!"

"Huh?"

"I don't want to hear about it, okay?"

He looked at me confusedly. "You're sure?"

"I'm sure."

He peered at me. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"Are you upset because I didn't come looking for you so you could see it too?"

"No, I'm not."

"-because if that's what it is, Jimbo, I'm sorry, but this was an invitation only for one. If you know what I mean."

I pulled away from him and started getting dressed.

He said, "Hey-you'll get your chance. They're going to show it to the conference this afternoon! They're trucking it over to the hotel right now."

I ignored him. I opened the closet door.

"Hey!" said Ted. "Terrific! They've already delivered my uniform! Great!" I stepped back and he pulled it off its hanger. "How do I look? Lieutenant Theodore Andrew Nathaniel Jackson?"

"Uh-" I didn't say it. I closed my mouth and went back into the bathroom to get a hairbrush instead.

"Oh, come on, Jim-don't be a spoilsport! Say congratulations!"

"Congratulations."

"Like you mean it!" he wailed.

"Sorry, I can't do that. I am not going to sleep better tonight, knowing that you are helping to defend America."

"Well, then that's your problem."

"Don't slam the door on your way out," I said. He didn't.

"s.h.i.t," I said.

THIRTY-FOUR.

"IS THAT thing armed?"