Federations

“You can’t possibly read any secret meanings into this letter,” Graff had said. Did that mean that there was a secret meaning? Mazer read it over again, and now what he said in the third sentence took on another possible meaning. “To live in the presence of a computer that reports everything you do to us.” At first he had read it as if it meant “reports to us everything you do.” But what if he literally meant that the computer would report everything Mazer did to them.

That would mean they had detected his undetectable reprogramming of the computer.

Which would explain the panel of shrinks and the sudden new urgency about finding a replacement for Mazer as commander.

So the cat was out of the bag. But they weren’t going to tell him they knew what he had done, because he was the volatile one who had done something insane and so they couldn’t believe he had a rational purpose and speak to him openly.

He had to let them see him and realize that he was not insane. He had to get control of this situation. And in order to accomplish that, he had to trust Graff to be what he so obviously wanted Mazer to think he was: An ally in the effort to find the best possible commander for the IF when the final campaign finally began.

Mazer looked in the mirror and debated whether to clean up his appearance. There were plenty of insane people who tried, pathetically, to look saner by dressing like regular people. Then again, he had let himself get awfully tangle-haired and he was naked all the time. At least he could wash and dress and try to look like the kind of person that military people could regard with respect.

When he was ready, he rotated into position and told the computer to begin recording his visual for later transmission. He suspected, though, that there would be no point in editing it—the raw recording was what the computer would transmit, since it had obviously reported his earlier reprogramming.

“I have reason to believe that you already know of the change I made in the onboard computer’s programming. Apparently I could take the computer’s navigational system out of your control, but couldn’t keep it from reporting the fact to you. Which suggests that you meant this box to be a prison, but you weren’t very good at it.

“So I will now tell you exactly what you need to know. You—or, by now, your predecessors—refused to believe me when I told them that I was not the right man to command the International Fleet during the final campaign. I was told that there would be a search for an adequate replacement, but I knew better.

“I knew that any ‘search’ would be perfunctory or illusory. You were betting everything on me. However, I also know how the military works. Those who made the decision to rely on me would be long since retired before I came back. And the closer we got to the time of my return, the more the new bureaucracy would dread my arrival. When I got there, I would find myself at the head of a completely unfit military organization whose primary purpose was to prevent me from doing anything that might cost somebody his job. Thus I would be powerless, even if I was retained as a figurehead. And all the pilots who gave up everything they knew and loved on Earth in order to go out and confront the Formics in their own space would be under the actual command of the usual gang of bureaucratic climbers.

“It always takes six months of war and a few dreadful defeats to clear out the deadwood. But we don’t have time for that in this war, any more than we did in the last one. My insubordination fortunately ended things abruptly. This time, though, if we lose any battle then we have lost the war. We will have no second chance. We have no margin of error. We can’t afford to waste time getting rid of you—you, the idiots who are watching me right now, the idiots who are going to let the human race be destroyed in order to preserve your pathetic bureaucratic jobs.

“So I reprogrammed my ship’s navigational program so that I have complete control over it. You can’t override my decision. And my decision is this: I am not coming back. I will not decelerate and turn around. I will keep going on and on.

“My plan was simple. Without me to count on as your future commander, you would have no choice but to search for a new one. Not go through the motions, but really search.

“And I think you must have guessed that this was my plan, because you started letting me get messages from Lieutenant Graff.