25 Short Stories and Novellas Part 61

Russia with a fall offensive and d.a.m.ned if he didn't get within eighty

miles of Moscow before the Russkies could stop him, and then-then-"

Uncle James looked up. There was a stunned expression on his face. All

his indicators were flas.h.i.+ng in the caution zone. His cheeks were flushed

and he was breathing hard.

Carlotta let her hand rest lightly on the little stack of bank notes.

"He's very overexcited," she explained. "This has been a big day for

him. He hasn't been in San Francisco for forty-three years, you know."

"Wait," Uncle James said. He stretched a hand toward the Brazilian.

"There's something that I need to say."

There was an unfamiliar note in his voice suddenly, a forcefulness, a

strange clarity. The cloudiness was gone from it, the husky senile

woolliness. It sounded now like the voice of someone else entirely,

someone a hundred years younger than Uncle James.

The Brazilian nodded vigorously. "Yes, tell us everything, General!

Everything."

Uncle James smiled. There was an eerie look on his face. "I wasn't a

general, for one thing. I was a programmer. I never fought an actual battle.

I certainly never killed anybody. Not anybody. It's all a lie, that I was

any kind of hero. It was just an error in the computer records and I

never said anything about it to anybody, and now it's so long ago that

n.o.body remembers what was what. n.o.body but me. And most of the time

I don't even remember it myself."

Uh-oh, Carlotta thought.

As secretively as she could manage it, she slid the bills from the table

into her purse. The Brazilian didn't appear to notice.

Uncle James said, "It was only a two-bit war, anyway. A lot of miserable

skirmishes between a bunch of jerkwater towns gone wild with envy of

what they each thought the other one had, and in fact n.o.body had

anything at all. That was what ended the war, when we all figured out

that there was nothing anywhere, that we were wiped out from top to

bottom." He laughed. "And there I sat in the command center at the

university the whole time, writing software. That was how I spent the

war. A hundred G.o.dd.a.m.n years ago."