"What the hell can Taylor do? Christ, you're better off than he is.
Once every ship is back here and busted up, he won't even have a job.
Maybe not even a head."
"Every ship. They're all there, Mr. Sweeney. Positives and negatives
double-wound on every reel."
"They better be. Or _you_ won't have a damn head!"
Sweeney turned and steamrollered out of the office, with every existing
record past and present of General Taylor's New U. N. World Space Force
under one beefy arm. For security reasons, Manning realized, there had
been made but a single copy and negative for each of its units.
His desk was an old one, practically an antique dating back to the
1940's, and his sonotyper was buried deep in its insides on a wooden
shelf that folded out to meet you in an awkward manner when you pushed
the desk-top up, over and down.
Manning pushed, and with a couple of bronchial grunts produced the
sonotyper. He fed in a continuous paper spool, turned on the current,
unhooked the compact microphone from the machine's side, and began
dictating the rest of his day's work.
Something got kicked viciously out of the key-bed. Black, shiny squares
of something. All he needed was for the sonotyper to go haywire and
start shooting its complex insides all over.
He stopped dictating to remove his glasses and dry his streaming eyes.
His vision cleared, and for an instant settled on the shiny things
that had landed near the front edge of his desk.
Hunks of microfilm.
He picked them up, held one to the light. Words. He fished in a drawer,
found a magnifying glass that was used for half-obliterated old files.
He could see the words better, but they were backwards. He had the
negative. Impatiently, he grabbed the other square. And read it.
And shivered. And again, it wasn't his cold that was bothering him. He
would have to call Sweeney right away--
... _Light Space Brigade, Experimental. Temporary outpost, Callisto.
Force: 20 Lancer-type J-88 destroyers. Complement: 600. Commanding:
Col. Geofferey Steele_--
He felt his insides turning to cold jelly. He would have to call
Sweeney. God! Sweeney would skin him alive. Somehow, the tail ends
of one of the double-wound reels must have stuck out a little, got
sliced neatly off when he'd hastily jammed its pan-cover back on after
inspecting it. Then the severed squares of microfilm had slipped down,
unnoticed, through one of the desk-top cracks where the sonotyper
fold-away unit was. And landed in the key-bed. Only Sweeney wouldn't
understand it that way. And the Joint Chiefs--
Oh God no!
He had to think.
And he thought of that other name. On the microfilm record--Steele, it
was, who commanded 600 men, twenty J-88s....
He thought of forty years of slavery.