The newly reactivated dreams woke him three times, sweating and fearful, during the course of the night. In the morning they, the whole tour group, flew off in the big Army plane to Lincoln. Two days later they flew on to Denver for their engagement there, last stop on the outward leg of the tour.

Lincoln was a pretty small town, so there hadn't been much hanky-panky there. But Jerry Kurntz was promising a rousing debacle for Denver.

By Denver the nightmares had begun to dim.

CHAPTER 30.

STRANGE HAD NOT CALLED Prell back because he hadn't thought it was worthwhile.

Besides, his new outfit was going out in the field for ten days of field problems and he had an enormous amount of work to do then and the next day getting his field kitchens ready.

Prell's indifference over the phone had shocked Strange. It had never occurred to Strange that someone, especially among themselves, wouldn't care about Landers. He might have expected it among the company remnants as a whole, but not from the old hard-core nucleus. It meant that now even the nucleus was breaking up, its parts going off in different directions, pushed by new interests, new loyalties.

The worst part of all that was that it made Strange find his own loyalty suspect. It wasn't really loyalty, apparently. It was a commodity to be sold, traded off, exchanged, according to the whims of the Army in a war, an Army too big to worry about loyalties except in very large bundles. Winch had told him this once.

What was it he had said? Where had it been? On the hospital ship. The day of the big home landfall. They were pulling into San Diego.

What had he said? Johnny Stranger, all that shit of the old outfit is over. You better believe it. You better get it through your thick Texas head. Something like that.

Winch had been right, as he always was. He had just been ahead of time, ahead of everybody, was all. As he usually was.

It must be hard on the sanity, seeing things ahead of time like Winch. Seeing. And knowing. And telling people. Who never listened. Damned hard on the sanity. Strange was glad it was a talent he didn't have.

But now it was catching up to Strange, like a slap in the face. While Winch was already prepared.

Strange had no loyalty to his new outfit at all. It was just a bunch of people, brought together from scattered parts. Officers, some ambitious, some not. Enlisted men, some ambitious, the rest just putting in time, hoping to survive. The ambitious ones, officers and EM, kept moving on, out and upward to somewhere, but of the outfit.

The outfit itself was a communications unit. A bunch of wooden switchboards (they would get metal ones in England, they were told), destined to be set up out in the woods somewhere, and become the link between some Division and its sister Divisions, or some corps of tanks and another corps. Nobody knew exactly what yet. That was the kind of stuff they were going to be practicing on their field maneuvers. Strange was one of the company mess/sgts.

How could you have any loyalty to that? You could have loyalty to your work, but that was all. Perhaps the fire and the strains of combat would combine them and squeeze them into one big self with one big loyalty, when they got to Europe. But they weren't that now. And Strange felt no loyalty to any of them.

He had had some loyalties left, back at the hospital. He had developed a strong loyalty there to Col Curran, for example. And there had been the loyalty to the old-company men who had met at his suite in the Peabody; it was a thinning and diminishing loyalty, true, as more and more of them went back to duty and were scattered, and as he himself got more involved with Frances Highsmith, but it was still a countable loyalty. Frances herself was a serious loyalty, if not an Army one. And then there had been his prime loyalty of all, to the nucleus of four he had been a part of and had come back home with. Strange had never believed that that could break apart.

But the hospital appeared to have been the breaking and thinning point of all a man's loyalties. His own last session with Curran was indicative of all of Strange's, it seemed.

Curran had called him in, one morning during morning rounds, for what he laughingly said might be their last conference, Strange's heart had begun to beat in his ears. He had wondered, lately, about the fact that only he and Prell were left. First Winch with his heart problem or whatever it was, then Landers with that really bad ankle of his, both had gone. Even Prell with his two horribly crippled legs was being set up for hospital discharge to start his war bonds tours. All of them had been worse off than Strange, with his minor hand wound. And yet Strange still languished on his ward, with no word one way or the other. How come?

Curran wasted no time disabusing him. "Your hand hasn't healed as well as we expected. That's why I've kept you as long as I have."

"What do you mean, hasn't healed? It isn't sore, isn't infected. It feels fine to me." He held it up and wiggled it, clenched and unclenched it. A panic ran all through him at the idea of being discharged from the Army, now.

"I don't mean the physical healing. That's fine. I'm talking about the internal healing, the mechanics, the thing we went in there to correct. We had such a success with the operation we thought we had every right to assume it would heal perfectly. But it hasn't." Curran held out his own hand for Strange's wrist.

"Here," he said. "Clench it. Now unclench it. You feel that little pull, that little hesitation?"

Strange had to nod. "Yes."

"Well that's what I mean. It could be," Curran looked at him a moment, as if he were about to list every possible thing it might be, then shrugged, "-it could be a lot of things. It could be something that will go away.

"But my hunch is that it won't. My hunch is it'll get worse. Certainly it's going to bother you later in life."

"Well, what does that mean for right now?" Strange asked. "Does that mean I'm not going to get out of here and back to duty?"

Curran began to laugh. "You still want to get overseas to England, like you said?"

"That's what I'm after," Strange said stiffly.

"I'm not going to keep you here. Just what your hand does not need now is another operation. No, I'm sending you back to duty in a day or two."

"That's great," Strange said. "You had me scared."

"But I've got to warn you about the hand," Curran said sharply. "It could start up tomorrow. Or a week from now. My advice to you is to favor it because of this."

It was Strange's turn to grin. "I can fake it. I went on working with it for six months the first time."

"I wouldn't advise you to. You saw what happened to it in six months the first time."

"I ought to be able to fake it a year this time."

"In any case, I have to send you back as limited duty," Curran said.

"Actually my job as a mess/sgt isn't all that much different," Strange said cautiously, "whether I'm with an infantry line company or some limited duty outfit."

Curran smiled, and shook his head. "Makes no difference. I've got my orders and I follow them."

"Sure." You couldn't argue with that.

"If it starts to act up, you'll be right back in the hospital."

"I've got a question," Strange said.

"Shoot."

"Say it did start to act up. Say, while I'm still on this side. In the East someplace. Where would they send me?"

Curran shrugged. "Theoretically, to the nearest hospital that had a good hand-surgery man. In actual practice, to your post hospital and if you refused to let some joker there play around with it and operate on it himself for fun, then you'd go to the nearest general hospital. Whether they had a good hand-surgeon man or not. And they would operate on it there."

"What if it happened right here, at O'Bruyerre?"

"Then you would come back here."

"And you would handle it."

Curran didn't answer for a moment. "No. I wouldn't."

"Well, Jesus. Why not?"

"Because we're undergoing a reorganization here. We're expanding. We're getting ready for D-Day and the European campaign." Curran shrugged. "The surgery department is being doubled. That means Col Baker and myself are going to become the administrators of two whole new surgery sections. We're being pulled off the operating tables, to do it. We're being kicked upstairs. You know the phrase? I doubt if either of us will have the time to handle any operations at all.

"Well, Christ. Then whatever I do or don't do isn't going to make that much difference anyway, is it?" Strange was angry.

"No, I suppose not, in reality. At least you have learned enough here so that you can say no to some eager young wise-ass who wants to operate on you."

"You know how far that will get me."

Curran had grinned. "I'm not even supposed to be telling you this much. There are no bad surgeons in the Army. You know that."

He had stood up from his big black swivel chair Strange had become so familiar with, and thrust out his hand. "Of course, if you do come back here, I'll see that you get everything I can get for you."

"Sure, of course," Strange said, and shook the delicate strong hand. "But I don't expect we'll be seeing each other again, Colonel."

Curran had looked at him a long moment. "No, I expect not," he said. "Not in this war."

And it seemed to happen like that with all of Strange's loyalties. When he left Kilrainey for O'Bruyerre, they all were cut. Precisely, sharply. Even his relationship with Winch, which had been mostly by telephone and about Landers for some time now, seemed to diminish and be cut when he moved to O'Bruyerre.

But of course Landers was already on his way out then, his final decision made. Or so they had thought.

His last, his only visit with Landers in the prison ward had been just a day or two after his conference with Curran. And Strange hadn't moved to O'Bruyerre yet. As usual in the Army, everything was a week later than calculated. Even then Landers had looked so peaked, and pale, with such huge circles under his eyes that Strange should have known something wasn't right.

Then his own move to O'Bruyerre had gone through and he had been so busy getting himself oriented and settled in that he hadn't had time to go back up to see Landers and talk to him.

Strange, of course, in his move to O'Bruyerre had passed through Winch's office too, like everybody else. And Winch had come out to meet him, also.

Landers had told him about the hidden whiskey bottle. Now he got the chance to see it for himself. He accepted the drink Winch offered, with alacrity.

"Well, what kind of an assignment do you want, Johnny Stranger?" Winch said expansively. "I'm in a position to give you just about anything you want."

Strange had grinned. "Well it don't really make much of a difference, old First Sarn't."

"It's likely to," Winch said thinly, "in a very short time. Now, listen.

"If you're willing to take a bust from staff to buck sergeant, I've got a place I can put you here, in my outfit. As a first cook. But I can't very well take you on as my mess sergeant. I've already got one. That will take two or three months. Will you take the bust?"

Strange hadn't even had to think. "No, I don't think so, First Sarn't." He grinned again.

"Then you mean to follow it right on through." Winch's eyes narrowed, and got a mad green glint in them. "All the way."

"I aint got nothing much else to do," Strange heard himself say. "And I aint never seen Europe."

Winch said no more, didn't argue. He sat down in his big chair and punched a button on his intercom phone. He asked into it for all the reassignment request forms for a mess/sgt in full grade of staff/sgt. There were only four of them, when the clerk brought them in. Together, the two of them went over all four. The communications unit was one of them.

"That's not a bad outfit," Winch said when Strange held the paper up. "At least it's not a rotten one."

"Then that ought to be just fine," Strange said.

Winch called outside for another file and, when the clerk brought it, leafed through the sheets in the folder. "They're due to go out on some field maneuvers some time soon. Then, not too long after that, they'll be shipping out. For England."

"That sounds perfect."

"Then I guess that's your slot. Is all your gear here?"

"Two barracks bags. They're out there in that big barn you call a clerks' office."

"Well I guess they're safe there," Winch said dubiously. He looked outside through the curtained window. "Just sit down there for a minute and have yourself another drink. I'll call the outfit for you. They can send a jeep up. For a man of your stature."

"Why, thank you, First Sarn't."

They talked about Landers a little. Winch seemed to feel Landers was getting exactly what he wanted. And needed. "He's come all apart at the seams," Winch said. "A discharge is the only thing will help him. Otherwise. If he stayed in. Hell, he'd be no good to nobody.

"Besides," Winch added, "a discharge is what he's asked for. That was the way he told his company officers to slant their reports.

"How did you find that out?"

"From the officer. Who went up to talk to him."

"Then I guess you got everything pretty well lined out for him."

"I tried to. I hope so. Now, what about you?"

"What about me?"

"Have you told your wife? Have you told Linda Sue about what you're doing?"

"No," Strange said. "I haven't."

"Well, don't you think you ought to?"

"No. Not especially."

"Has she still got your GI insurance?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Are you still married?"

"Yes. Still married. Legally. Officially."

"You're not divorced yet. Then it would seem to me that you owe it to her to tell her what you're doing, what to expect."

"I'll decide that," Strange said. Then, because he felt that sounded too harsh, he added, "Maybe I'll drop her a little note. Before I pull out."