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Or the cheery efficiency of Cadet "Dots" Lambert, juggling student and instructor schedules with teenage energy. Valentine laid down circuitous paths so he could pass her desk and say hi between his early duties with Zulu Company, class, and meals. He'd never worked up the courage to so much as ask her to a barbecue-he'd been a scruffy young Wolf, a breed apart from the well-tailored guards and cadets who undoubtedly dazzled as they whirled the girl around the floor at military mixers that Valentine, with patched trousers, collarless shirts, and field boots always managed to miss.
He hoped Lambert hadn't been hung from the clock tower at the university. Or shipped off in a cattle car.
Which brought him back to his reason for the trip to Pine Bluff. The Miskatonic.
Valentine refreshed himself with a hotdog in heartroot at the diner, then wandered southward along the tracks to the old SEARK campus, now listed on the town map as the "HPL Agricultural and Technical Resource Center." The entire SEARK campus was now surrounded by two rows of fencing topped with razor wire on either side of the streets surrounding the campus, enclosing as it did the war college, cadet school, and military courthouse.
Valentine showed his ID at the gate, surrendered his weapons, and signed in as a visitor.
"Have a fine one," the gun-check said, handing him a locker key on a pocket lanyard.
He heard distant gunfire from the other side of the railroad tracks as he entered, the spaced-out popping of a practice range. The cadets probably had a range day-it was a Friday and it would be just as well to stink them up on a day when they'd be a smelly nuisance to friends and family rather than their instructors-as most of the students looked to be in their late teens or early twenties. They looked so young. Elaborate razor-cut sideburns reminiscent of a bull's horns looked to be the new standard with the boys, and the girls were showing tight ringlet curls dangling from their little envelopelike caps.
Valentine, now closer to thirty than twenty, with three long trips into the Kurian Zone behind him that aged a man more than years or mileage, could shrug and disparage them as children. Except that the children had each been more or less handpicked and was studying morning, noon, and night in an effort to win their first brass tracks. Children didn't make PT at four A.M. and fall asleep on a pile of books at midnight.
There wouldn't be any old instructors to visit-frontline officers took a year or two off to teach, sometimes, but only the cadet school had permanent faculty and Valentine had ventured onto that campus only to take qualification tests. He took the sidewalk bordering the inner fence straight to the Miskatonic.
Their new building looked a good three times the size of the old one. Perhaps Southern Command had finally decided to take the scholars seriously. The Miskatonic researched how the Kurians and other dangerous fauna they'd "brought over" interacted and thought, instead of simply cataloging and quantifying threats.
Valentine had visited the "oddballs" inside now and then as a student at the war college, and had constant contact since in the form of debriefings every time he came back from the Kurian Zone. The debriefings were always by a variegated trio; a young student who served as stenographer, an intellectual-looking questioner, and then an older man or woman who silently listened, almost never asking a question him or herself, but sometimes calling the other two off into another room before the trio returned with a new line of questioning. He'd gotten to know a couple of the "oldsters"-by their faces, anyway-enough so that he hoped he could run down Post's mystery letter.
A pair of workmen bent over an addition to the entryway, adding a small brick blister next to the doorway. Valentine passed through a layer of glass doors. A second layer was in place, but the glass was missing.
The whole institution had a fresh-scrubbed smell to it. Valentine caught a whiff of wet paint from one of the halls.
Six feet of neatly uniformed muscle stood up from his desk. "Can I help you?"
Valentine wondered if the hand casually dangling at the edge of the desk had a sidearm in reach, or was hovering over the alarm button. Two more guards watched from a balcony on the second floor.
Procedures had changed since he was a student. The last time he'd just walked into the building and wandered around until he heard sounds of activity.
Valentine reached for his ID again, feeling a bit like he was still in the KZ. "David Valentine, for a follow-up to my 18 August debriefing."
The soldier made a pretense of checking a list.
"I don't have-"
"Sorry, Corp," Valentine said smoothly. "A few months ago I got a request for another interview. I'm just back from Dallas, and the creeps told me that whenever duties allowed, I was to report. Duties allow, so here I am."
"Could I see the request, sir?"
"It was in the regimental file cabinet, which fell victim to a 122 during the Dallas siege, and was buried with honors by every soldier with a drunk-and-disorderly charge pending. You want to phone the old man and unclog the pipes at your end, or should I hit the Saenger for the afternoon matinee and work on my complaint letter? Maybe I can get reimbursed for my hotel and expenses from your paycheck."
"Sorry, sir," the corporal said. "It's these pointy heads. They'd run this place like a fruit stand. You'd think security was the enemy. Could you wait a moment?"
"Why the new security?"
"Kurian agent. Six men shot each other running him down."
Valentine looked around for a chair in the foyer, but the only two in evidence held up an improvised coffee station for the workmen set up on one of the missing glass door panes. He settled for sitting on a windowsill.
"I'll wait. I think it was signed O'Connor. David O'Connor," Valentine said, dredging the name from his memory.
"Doubt it," the corporal said, a rugged military phone to his ear. "He bought it when they dropped Reapers on the campus."
"My mistake," Valentine said.
"His. He tried to capture one." The corporal connected with someone and turned ninety degrees away from Valentine to speak.
