1632

The interior of the truck bed, enclosed by welded quarter-inch steel plate, was dark and gloomy. But there was enough light coming through the firing slits to allow Mike to see the faces of his companions. They responded to his cheerful grin with their own smiles, which were nervous in every case but one.

The nerveless-say better, insouciant-smile was actually quite wicked. The eyes above it gleamed with amusement and glee.

"You hear that, Frank?" the smile's owner demanded. "'Familiarity breeds contempt!' "

Frank turned his head and glowered through the back window. At the nerveless smile, first; then, at the others.

"I still say girls have got no business here!" he snapped.

"'Girls'?" snorted Gayle Mason. "I'm thirty-two, you old geezer. I remember you saying the same thing the first day I showed up at the mine. What was that-ten years ago?"

Frank glared; Gayle glared back. Gayle was an attractive enough woman, in a stocky and muscular manner. Her face was too plain to be considered pretty, but no one had ever suggested she was ugly. Still-excepting the absence of jowls-when she glared, Gayle bore a fair resemblance to a pugnacious bulldog.

"What I say," she continued, "is that broken-down old farts have got no business on a battlefield."

"Now, Gayle," murmured Mike. "Be nice."

Frank's eyes moved away from Gayle, and focused on the other women in the truck. "Gayle's hopeless," he growled. "She's doing this just to spite me. But you other-you girls-should have more sense."

The young women in the truck abandoned their nervous smiles, in favor of stubborn jaws. Except for Gayle, they were in their late teens or early twenties. The youngest of them, Julie Sims, managed a fair imitation of Gayle's glare.

"This is a hell of a time to bring up that argument, Uncle Frank!" she snapped. "We've already been through it, and it's settled." Unkindly: "You're just pissed because I'm a better shot than you are, and you know it!"

Grumbling: "I'm tired of being a cheerleader."

"Beats being dead," came Frank's immediate reply.

"You were quick enough to put my boyfriend in the front line!"

Frank was just as stubborn as his niece. "That's different. He's a guy. And I'll tell you something else, young lady. If that stupid damned boyfriend of yours breaks ranks 'cause he's worried about you, there'll be hell to pay! That's one of the reasons I don't want-"

"Chip?" demanded Julie. "Ha! I already told him what'd happen if he did. He's hunted with me too, you know. I'll nail him before he takes a step."

Watching the interplay, Mike's grin faded. In truth, despite his genuine amusement at his older friend's knee-jerk outrage, Mike was uneasy himself with the arrangement. Mike thought he possessed little of any traditional "male chauvinism"-and what little there was had long ago been beaten out of him by his spunky sister-but he could still recognize a certain crude reality to Frank's opposition. It was a simple fact that, by and large, women were not as physically suited for infantry combat as men.

By and large…

Mike remembered a phrase from a play he had just seen two weeks ago. Shakespeare's Hamlet, staged by the high school's drama class in front of a packed audience in the school's auditorium, and then rebroadcast on TV. (They had kept the author's name. Balthazar had not objected; he had even had kind words to say about the performance, which, as was his custom, he had seen on the opening night.)

By and large…

Ay, there's the rub. What happens to the individual, when they get locked within that dangerous "by and large"? Generality is a slippery slope.

Mike studied the women in the pickup's bed, steadying himself with a hand against the truck's jolting progress down the dirt road.

Julie Sims, for all her cheerleader prettiness, had the physique of someone who was as well trained athletically as any of the boys she cheered on. Mike didn't doubt for a minute that she was in better physical shape than ninety-five percent of the men in the American/German army. Not as strong, no doubt, as many of them. But He eyed the rifle held casually in her hands. By universal acknowledgement, Julie Sims was the best rifle shot in Grantville. In all of Marion county, for that matter. Maybe even in the whole state. There had been talk of sponsoring her for the Winter Olympics biathlon. The talk had been serious enough that Julie had taken up cross-country skiing, and applied herself to it with her usual energy. Her skill on skis would be her downfall, she was convinced. Certainly not the shooting!