Basic Training Read Free Page A

soft, from getting one-sided. Now spruce up for supper. People with dirty fingernails don’t get to eat around here.”
     

II .
    At 2 a.m., Central Standard Time, as reckoned by the parlor mantle clock in the home of Brigadier General William Cooley, retired, a light beam left the burning Sun. At 2:08 it glanced from the lip of a Moon crater, and a second later died on Earth, in the staring eyes of Haley Brandon.
     
    Haley lay sleepless between cool sheets, his thin arms folded behind his head, his eyes fixed on the window through which the wistful moonlight streamed. He felt wholly a stranger. None of the old, seemingly sweetly reasonable patterns of the past now applied. He was not actively melancholy — it was too soon for that. Rather, he was like a settler on his first day in a foreign land, bemused by his initial contacts with unfamiliar customs; not yet ready to admit that it would be those customs instead of his own that would enable him to remain and prosper.
     
    “We’ll see to it that you earn your way as best you can — with good, old-fashioned work. Sounds harsh, maybe, but you’ll thank us for it in later years. We’ll put some meat on you, too,” the General had said at supper. The sweat and sinew-worship that seemed to pervade life at Ardennes Farm was a great curiosity to Haley.
Robust
was the password. As a Manhattan cliffdweller, he had won the loyalty of his small circle of friends — most of them adults and fellow musicians — with the cleverness of his fingers on a piano keyboard, with his promise as a concert pianist. Now, he reflected, the emphasis had been changed to the cleanliness of his fingers, and to whether or not he could move a piano.
     
    Haley thought about the peculiar man into whose hands he had been delivered for guidance. The General, he knew from having heard his mother talk about him, was a competent manager, a brave soldier, and well off financially, though not given to exhibiting the last-named quality. He had taken over management of the old Cooley farmstead, run by tenants for nearly a generation, after his retirement from the Army. Haley remembered a few discussions between his mother and father as to the truth of his mother’s contention that the General, “down deep,” had a heart of gold. His mother had never been able to produce much evidence for the affirmative. His father, on the other hand, had always had dozens of incidents to recall, which seemed to back up his opinion that the General was a “pompous, selfish old teddy bear with sawdust for brains.” As he lay abed for his first night in his new home, Haley thought he liked the General. The man was gruff, certainly, but he always gave sound reasons for the things he did.
     
    Haley flexed his fingers and recalled the dream-like quality his music had given his life in the past; and a pleasurable shudder passed over him as he reminded himself that that part of his life would begin anew in thirty days — for the General had promised that he might go to Chicago to resume his studies then. That was all that really mattered, Haley decided. Knowing that that much of the future was assured, he decided that he could adjust to any of the new order’s rigors, and get along with just about anyone.
     
    It was certainly to the General’s credit as a man of compassion that he should understand the importance of music to his new charge, Haley thought, for the man was as tone-deaf as a sparrow, and so were two of his three daughters. Judging from the whistling and humming they did, only Hope was able to carry a tune. Haley had heard that this was a hereditary trait. His mother, or, as Annie had reminded him, his foster mother, had been similarly afflicted. In this thought Haley found some consolation for his not being a blood relative of the Cooleys. There were apparently no instruments on the farm, and the evening’s choice of radio programs had indicated that the General and his family found homicide far more