Rusty angrily backed down -- even a second lieutenant isn't stupid enough to put such orders in writing. I wasn't happy either as Rusty was my roommate and was then still my tutor in math, but we held the sight inventory. I got chewed out by Lieutenant Warren for being stupidly officious but he opened his safe and let me check his registered publications. Captain Blackstone opened his with no comment and I couldn't tell whether he approved of my sight inventory or not.

Publications were okay but accountable property was not. Poor Rusty! He had accepted his predecessor's count and now the count was short—and the other officer was not merely gone, he was dead. Rusty spent a restless night (and so did I!), then went to Blackie and told him the truth.

Blackie chewed him out, then went over the missing items, found ways to expend most of them as "lost in combat." It reduced Rusty's shortages to a few days' pay—but Blackie had him keep the job, thereby postponing the cash reckoning indefinitely.

Not all "George" jobs caused that much headache. There were no courts-martial; good combat teams don't have them. There was no mail to censor as the ship was in Cherenkov drive. Same for welfare loans for similar reasons. Athletics I delegated to Brumby; referee was "if and when." The troopers' mess was excellent; I initialed menus and sometimes inspected the galley, i.e., I scrounged a sandwich without getting out of dungarees when working late in the armory. Correspondence courses meant a lot of paperwork since quite a few were continuing their educations, war or no war -- but I delegated my platoon sergeant and the records were kept by the PFC who was his clerk.

Nevertheless "George" jobs soaked up about two hours every day—there were so many.

You see where this left me—ten hours O & A, three hours math, meals an hour and a half, personal one hour, military fiddlework one hour, "George" two hours, sleep eight hours total, twenty-six and a half hours. The ship wasn't even on the twenty-five-hour Sanctuary day; once we left we went on Greenwich standard and the universal calendar.

The only slack was in my sleeping time.

I was sitting in the cardroom about one o'clock one morning, plugging away at math, when Captain Blackstone came in. I said, "Good evening, Captain."

"Morning, you mean. What the deuce ails you, son? Insomnia?"

"Uh, not exactly."

He picked up a stack of sheets, remarking, "Can't your sergeant handle your paperwork? Oh, I see. Go to bed."

"But, Captain—"

"Sit back down. Johnnie, I've been meaning to talk to you. I never see you here in the cardroom, evenings. I walk past your room, you're at your desk. When your bunkie goes to bed, you move out here. What's the trouble?"

"Well... I just never seem to get caught up."

"Nobody ever does. How's the work going in the armory?"

"Pretty well. I think we'll make it."

"I think so, too. Look, son, you've got to keep a sense of proportion. You have two prime duties. First is to see that your platoon's equipment is ready -- you're doing that. You don't have to worry about the platoon itself, I told you that. The second -- and just as important—you've got to be ready to fight. You're muffing that."

"I'll be ready, Captain."

"Nonsense and other comments. You're getting no exercise and losing sleep. Is that how to train for a drop? When you lead a platoon, son, you've got to be on the bounce. From here on you will exercise from sixteen-thirty to eighteen hundred each day. You will be in your sack with lights out at twenty-three hundred—and if you lie awake fifteen minutes two nights in a row, you will report to the Surgeon for treatment. Orders."

"Yes, sir." I felt the bulkheads closing in on me and added desperately, "Captain, I don't see how I can get to bed by twenty-three— and still get everything done."

"Then you won't. As I said, son, you must have a sense of proportion. Tell me how you spend your time."

So I did. He nodded. "Just as I thought." He picked up my math "homework," tossed it in front of me. "Take this. Sure, you want to work on it. But why work so hard before we go into action?"

"Well, I thought—"

" ‘Think' is what you didn't do. There are four possibilities, and only one calls for finishing these assignments. First, you might buy a farm. Second, you might buy a small piece and be retired with an honorary commission. Third, you might come through all right... but get a downcheck on your Form Thirty-One from your examiner, namely me. Which is just what you're aching for at the present time—why, son, I won't even let you drop if you show up with eyes red from no sleep and muscles flabby from too much chair parade. The fourth possibility is that you take a grip on yourself... in which case I might let you take a swing at leading a platoon. So let's assume that you do and put on the finest show since Achilles slew Hector and I pass you. In that case only -- you'll need to finish these math assignments. So do them on the trip back.

"That takes care of that—I'll tell the Skipper. The rest of those jobs you are relieved of, right now. On our way home you can spend your time on math. If we get home. But you'll never get anywhere if you don't learn to keep first things first. Go to bed!"

A week later we made rendezvous, coming out of drive and coasting short of the speed of light while the fleet exchanged signals. We were sent Briefing, Battle Plan, our Mission & Orders—a stack of words as long as a novel—and were told not to drop.

Oh, we were to be in the operation but we would ride down like gentlemen, cushioned in retrieval boats. This we could do because the Federation already held the surface; Second, Third, and Fifth M. I. Divisions had taken it—and paid cash.

The described real estate didn't seem worth the price. Planet P is smaller than Terra, with a surface gravity of 0.7, is mostly arctic-cold ocean and rock, with lichenous flora and no fauna of interest. Its air is not breathable for long, being contaminated with nitrous oxide and too much ozone. Its one continent is about half the size of Australia, plus many worthless islands; it would probably require as much terra-forming as Venus before we could use it.

However we were not buying real estate to live on; we went there because Bugs were there—and they were there on our account, so Staff thought. Staff told us that Planet P was an uncompleted advance base (prob. 87+-6 per cent) to be used against us.

Since the planet was no prize, the routine way to get rid of this Bug base would be for the Navy to stand off at a safe distance and render this ugly spheroid uninhabitable by Man or Bug. But the C-in-C had other ideas.

The operation was a raid. It sounds incredible to call a battle involving hundreds of ships and thousands of casualties a "raid," especially as, in the meantime, the Navy and a lot of other cap troopers were keeping things stirred up many light-years into Bug space in order to divert them from reinforcing Planet P.

But the C-in-C was not wasting men; this giant raid could determine who won the war, whether next year or thirty years hence. We needed to learn more about Bug psychology. Must we wipe out every Bug in the Galaxy? Or was it possible to trounce them and impose a peace? We did not know; we understood them as little as we understand termites. To learn their psychology we had to communicate with them, learn their motivations, find out why they fought and under what conditions they would stop; for these, the Psychological Warfare Corps needed prisoners.

Workers are easy to capture. But a Bug worker is hardly more than animate machinery. Warriors can be captured by burning off enough limbs to make them helpless—but they are almost as stupid without a director as workers. From such prisoners our own professor types had learned important matters—the development of that oily gas that killed them but not us came from analyzing the biochemistries of workers and warriors, and we had had other new weapons from such research even in the short time I had been a cap trooper. But to discover why Bugs fight we needed to study members of their brain caste. Also, we hoped to exchange prisoners.