Command Decision Read Free Page B

was normal; it was also normal for them to think they were fooling a man who didn’t care. The click of the phone probably meant he had been phoning his girl in the village, but it might not.
    “Was that for me?”
    “No, sir,” said Evans blandly.
    Dennis was already crossing the room for a hurried look through the window at the sky he had not now studied for a full thirty seconds. He fired another question over his shoulder.
    “Any word since the strike signal?”
    “No, sir.”
    Dennis’s eyes were lost in the sky. Gently Evans placed the partly smoked cigar in the ash tray on the desk. He made it safely, and then scrutinized the General at the window with a curiosity he had never felt about him until this afternoon. The idea that the General, like other mortals, could be fired reduced him to the kind of estimate used for human beings.
    Evans saw a wiry, almost fragile figure, immaculately trim and erect with half a lifetime’s habit of perfect posture. A lingering trace of shaving soap by the left ear almost matched the pallor of that bony face, with tight skin furrowed ten years deeper than its rightful forty. Not until this moment had Evans observed that Dennis always looked deeply, permanently tired. The sharpness of those deep-set gray eyes and the alertness of that trim figure camouflaged this fatigue most of the time. Seeing him in comparative repose now Evans was struck with the resemblance of his deep inner weariness to that he had noticed in older crew members toward the end of a tour. Without waiting to be asked he poured a cup of coffee and placed it on the desk.
    Abruptly Dennis dismissed a sky he could not change and strode back to the desk. Evans held his breath. The General looked about him with a little frown of perplexity and then lifted the cigar to his mouth and inhaled deeply. The General was all business now as he reached for the coffee.
    “Ask Colonel Haley to step in, alert the weatherman, and have the guard bring Captain Jenks.”
    Evans vanished into the Ops room. Dennis reached into the top drawer of the desk and pulled out a Manila-covered file an inch thick. It was filled with orders, reports, certificates, judgments, records, qualifications; everything the Army of the United States considered worth remembering about Jenks, Lucius Malcolm, Capt. A. C., from its original satisfaction about the proportions of sugar and albumin in his urine right down to that ghastly moment this morning. Dennis had read the file through before sleeping. Now he only stared at it as if the cover might show him something the contents had not until Haley entered the room, saluting at the door.
    The very sight of his Chief of Staff comforted Dennis but it was scarcely a personal emotion. Haley was solid gold and, like many forms of that substance, somewhat lumpy. He was painstaking about his uniforms but his appearance always suggested troublesome adenoids. Dennis leaned heavily on his tireless phlegmatic capability, but the relationship between them was more the product of custom than of written regulations.
    These latter made Haley in fact Dennis’s professional wife, who did multitudinous essential chores with skill and force, creating a serene efficient background which freed the commander’s concentration for problems beyond the household. It was custom that could make this intimacy a brotherhood or a bondage. These two had served together only a relatively short time. Haley’s own notions of propriety and decorum kept the service rigid. Dennis had wondered at times if Haley, like himself, did not privately regret that the relationship was so inescapably functional. If so he never showed it. He never showed anything. He waited now, dutiful and attentive, for the moment when Dennis should be ready to give thought to the handful of papers he had brought. He always brought papers.
    “Anything from the mission?”
    “Just the strike signal I woke you for, as ordered, sir.”
    “Read it