Empire (Empire 1)

Finally they were alone in the room.

“Major Reuben Malich,” Torrent said. “It’s not so much that I like the way you think, it’s that I like the fact that you think at all.”

“We all think, sir.”

“No, my good soldier, we do not all think. Thinking is rare and growing rarer, especially in the universities. Students succeed here to the degree they can convince idiots that they think just like them.”

“The professors aren’t all idiots.”

“Grad school is like junior high: You learn to get along. That’s half of who ends up in grad school in the first place—the suck-ups and get-alongs. You’re only here because you were ordered to come. You’d rather be in the Middle East. Leading troops in combat. Yes?”

Reuben didn’t answer.

“Very careful of you,” said Torrent. “I have just one question for you. If I told you that the civil war I’m talking about were being planned right now, just how far would you go?”

“I’d do nothing to help either side, and anything to prevent it from happening.”

“But those are the two sides, before the fighting starts—the hotheads on one side, the rational people on the other, trying to rein them in.”

“Soldiers don’t have the power to prevent wars, sir, except by being so invincible that no enemy would dare to engage.”

“Are you willing to trust your life—the lives of your family—on that belief—that civil war is impossible?”

“Exactly, sir. I already trust my family’s life to that belief. It’s like an asteroid colliding with Earth. It certainly will happen, someday. But right now, there’s no urgency about figuring out how to avoid it.”

“And when an asteroid does come toward Earth, how will you know? See it yourself?”

“No, sir, I’ll trust astronomers to let us know. And I know where you’re going—you believe you’re the astronomer who’s warning us about a social and political collision.”

“More like a weatherman, tracking the storm and watching it grow to hurricane strength.”

“Standing in front of the camera in the rain, strapped to a lightpole?”

Torrent grinned. “You understand me perfectly.”

“What are you proposing, sir?” said Reuben. “You were proposing something, right?”

“There are those who are trying to prevent the civil war. People who are in a position to share key information, to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of those who would use them to provoke this war that nobody wants.”

“Working on a doctorate at Princeton isn’t exactly a key position.”

“But you graduate after this semester, n’est-ce pas?”

“And go back into the Army, sir. I already have my assignment, protecting American interests abroad.”

“Yes, I know,” said Torrent. “Special Ops. Nice work in that country-we-cannot-name.”

Reuben had run into this before—people pretending to have inside information in order to try to get the information from him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir. I’m not in Special Ops.”

“I think you were dead right to open fire when you did, and you should have gotten the Oscar for the way you wept over that dead old man.”

So maybe he did know something. That didn’t mean Reuben could trust him. “I’m not much of a weeper, sir.”

“You’d be the first person ever to win an Oscar for a performance that actually saved lives.”

“I believe you’re trying to compromise me, sir, and I won’t do it.”