Dearest Enemy — Context and Discussion

Knight was exaggerating his own Alabama accent. "Expect report once each turn...."

He would not have needed the recording or even words twice. Each of Knight's directions was graven into him as it was spoken.

To cease all scientific observation and recording at once; to begin military observation of the Enemy and his puppet-states, and all possibly-discernible activities, immediately. To remember that as the coast of California appeared on his horizon he was to begin transmitting in code, and that he would finish transmitting before the Atlantic coast disappeared over the horizon behind him. To remember that his stores of fuel were for orbit-correction only, to be used for effecting an Earthside landing only upon explicit and properly-coded order, or upon threat of otherwise unavoidable destruction. To calculate present stores of food concentrate and air to the hour if possible, not forgetting that with Streeter gone the time-lapse between rendezvous with the supply rocket should be at least doubled. To remember a thousand things; things he already knew by rote ... but the tape and card-punch units clicked softly away, recording, recording....

"... and Mrs. Grundy here's a morsel for you--you may have a new neighbor in your block but not like you at all--there's probably a world between you--don't take any wooden nickels baby. Say good-bye to Daddy-o baby, over...."

"Home Plate this is Mrs. Grundy sees all and heard everything, out."

The whole transmission had taken less than two minutes. Now the UHF was off and there was one break, anyway. If, somehow, the Enemy had succeeded in getting up a satellite of his own, he had at least--according to Knight--sacrificed the ability to directly monitor Thorn's radio for invisibility. Vanguard-I was aloft for geophysical purposes only, according to the propaganda-pitch back home. But as far as Big Red knew, it was loaded to the locks with as much armament as a thing of its comparatively tiny size could carry.

And as far as Thorn himself knew, nobody making geophysical observations had ever needed to do it through the tubes of missile-launchers like the ones that were cuddled snugly in Vanguard-I's blunt forehull....

Such little thoughts whipped quickly through his mind as he tried to make it regain balance for the immediate tasks besetting him, because they were little and simple and easy to grasp and discard. They could keep him from going crazy. It was the bigger thoughts--the bigger ones that might come later--they were the kind he had to keep out of his head.

Major Joshua Thorn began his work with the equipment, to modify it for use as Daddy-o had told him.

He could do it automatically, do it in his sleep, do it blind. Couldn't watch and do it, though. Watch later. Think of the little things now that were easy while the equipment got automatically modified. Little things to keep the big ones like what was happening down there from tipping him over into the whirlpool of madness that was trying so hard to pull at him.

"Please be seated, Major Thorn."

"This will be your Final Security interrogation. To be followed, upon its favorable completion, by Final Briefing. Before we begin, do you have any questions, Major?"

The thick lenses of the glasses reflected the interrogation cubicle's harsh lighting and would not let him see accurately into the pale eyes that blinked behind them. But it was almost as though he and Brigadier Robert McQuine, USAF, Intelligence, were old friends. And the sweating faces of the three G-2 psychiatrists that gleamed at McQuine's left on the opposite end of the big oval-shaped conference-table--they were more than familiar. They had never thought he, Thorn, was really sane. What really sane man who had flown twice too many missions in one war would volunteer to fly in the next that followed? What sane man would go begging for military flight-test assignments in weird ships that had never been flown anywhere but in a wind-tunnel and on computer-tapes. And what sane man--God help him--what man in his senses would ask to be fired a thousand miles off the Earth with only the knowledge that a thing the size of a basketball had circled the planet successfully for almost a year before it fell back and burned up?

Had the Major ever had thoughts of--well, of doing away with himself? Had the Major hated his father when he was young? Been afraid of girls? (Oh, is that a fact, Major? Well! Well, now....)

Only the faces of the three Senate Committee members were different. But they usually were.

"Yes sir, one question. It was my understanding--and Captain Streeter's, I'm sure--that Final Security and Briefing had been scheduled for about nine weeks from now. There has been no acceleration in the final phases of our program, so--"