"There's another one," said Rube, pointing toward the desert. Sure enough, there was a faint but plainly visible light there-plain to Tusk-anini's night-adapted eyes, in any case. It moved slowly left to right, staying a more or less constant distance above the desert floor, then suddenly winked out.
"Well, Tusk, now you seen it. You think we ought to go out and look where it was?" asked Slayer, deferring to Tusk-anini as the most experienced legionnaire present.
"I don't know," said Tusk-anini. "Looks undangerous, but who knowing? I go back to Comm Central soon and see if sensors pick up anything. Armstrong is OD tonight-is the one who ought to decide whether to look closer or not."
"Yeah, I guess so," said Slayer, clearly relieved that he wasn't going to be sent out in the desert to investigate-at least not yet.
Tusk-anini thought a moment more, then said, "Whatever Armstrong say, tomorrow I ask Qual if any animal on Zenobia acts like that. He going to know, if anybody do."
"Good idea," said Rube, nodding. "You want me to come along when you tell Armstrong?"
"Sure, nobody attacking camp," said Tusk-anini. "I go back on duty-you come now." But when the two legionnaires described what they had seen to Lieutenant Armstrong, he emphatically denied that the Comm Center's instruments had detected any activity in the desert.
"I'm glad you spotted this," the lieutenant said. "I'm not sure what to make of it. I'll twiddle with the instruments and see if there's any signal on some energy band I haven't been monitoring. You keep an eye on those lights, Rube, and if you see anything that looks like a threat to the camp, sound the alarm right away. But for now, my gut instinct is to watch it and wait. If anything changes, let me know right away, and I'll decide whether or not to wake up the captain. Until then, keep a sharp lookout and be ready to respond."
"Yes, sir," said Rube, and he returned to guard duty. But whatever the lights were, they turned out to be undetectable on the base's electronic sensors-and after an hour or so, even the Gambolt reported that they had gone away.
Several parsecs distant, at the Legion's Hickman Training Center on Mussina's World, four dozen raw recruits waited anxiously in their bunkhouse. Just as some of them had begun to gripe that the threatened inspection was another ploy to cheat them out of a night's sleep, the barracks room door burst open. "TENN-HUT!' bellowed Sergeant Pitbull. "GENERAL BLITZKRIEG WILL NOW INSPECT THE BARRACKS!" he added, unnecessarily, as General Blitzkrieg blustered into the bunkroom. He was followed by a female human major bearing a clipboard and a bored expression. The recruits, forewarned, were all lined up at the foot of their bunks, wearing their best uniforms and trying" (for the most part without success) to conceal their nervousness.
Nothing resembling a senior officer had ever deigned to appear on the post during their brief time as legionnaires. Even the colonel who nominally commanded Hickman Training Center might as well have been on another planet entirely-the recruits weren't even sure whether their post commandant was male, female, or even human.
On the other hand, there was no doubt at all that General Blitzkrieg was human. Thumper had sniffed him out even before he'd entered the barracks. Thumper had grown up on a planet with a high enough human population that he knew the race well, and was even fond of a fair number of the sophonts from Earth. But he also came from a race with a highly developed sense of smell, and he knew the odor of humans well. Especially human males who ate meat, smoked tobacco, drank distilled alcohol, and sloshed their faces and armpits with aromatic concoctions as part of their morning ablutions. No question at all, General Blitzkrieg was one of those humans. He entered with a scowl that had been known to make strong legionnaires quake in their boots. That, in fact, was its main purpose, and on most of the recruits it worked quite well.
But as much as Thumper thought he knew about humans, he had learned very little about human psychology, and so the little Lepoid had no clue that the general might want to scare him. I've done- my job right, so he can't find fault with me, thought Thumper. He stood at perfect attention, his uniform immaculate, his bunk made with exacting care to every detail. In fact, Thumper's bunk was even more perfectly made than the sample illustration of a correctly made bunk in the Legion Drill Instructor's Manual. His trunk was equally a paragon of exactness. Whatever else the general might find wrong with this recruit company-and Sergeant Pitbull had made it clear that he didn't expect much to be right-there wasn't going to be anything for him to criticize about Thumper.
Sergeant Pitbull had his mouth open, ready to issue another order, when someone hissed, "Now!" and all hell broke loose. As Thumper tried to turn his head to see who had spoken, the lights went out, and he heard the sound of several pairs of running feet. There was an incoherent roar from the front of the room, about where General Blitzkrieg stood, then someone rushed up to Thumper and put something into his hand. "Hold this!" they whispered, and before he could say a word, he found. himself holding something. Even as he realized it was some kind of bucket, and that the outside of the bucket was dripping something wet on his uniform pants, the lights came back on.
Even then Thumper didn't quite realize what kind of trouble he was in. Granted, the sight of General Blitzkrieg splattered head to toe with some sort of brownish sludge, foul-smelling brownish sludge, Thumper immediately realized-was the first thing that drew his attention. The next thing was the row of wet footprints and drips leading away from the general-toward where Thumper stood.
Only then did he recognize that the same foul smell that emanated from the general was also coming from the bucket he was holding. And, most curious of all, the sludge, covered footprints stopped right at his feet.
"WHAT THE FARKING HELL IS GOING ON HERE?" roared Sergeant Pitbull, instead of whatever else he had been about to roar when the lights went out. Then he saw the general, and his eyes grew to the size of dinner plates. "Oh, golly," he said, in a voice the recruits had to strain to hear-the first time in Thumper's memory that one of Pitbull's statements hadn't threatened to shatter his highly sensitive eardrums.
By now, every sophont in the room had managed to grasp that something dreadfully wrong had happened that fact was probably within the intellectual grasp of the pea-sized AI that regulated the water level in the toilets.
Likewise, even the dullest-witted recruit's eyes had managed to trace the damning chain of evidence that led from the general's ruined dress uniform to the odoriferous bucket in Thumper's hands. In fact, it slowly dawned on Thumper that every eye in the barracks was staring directly at him.
"I didn't do it," he managed to sputter as Sergeant Pitbull advanced toward him, mayhem in his eyes. But by then it was way too late.