She shot a quick glance at Joe Mauser, formerly of Category Military, formerly Rank Major, now an unemployed Mid-Middle who slouched in the bucketseat next to her. He noticed neither speed nor direction.
Nadine called, above the wind, "Zen, Joe! Where did you ever acquire such a car? It must have been built entirely by hand, and by Swiss watchmakers."
Joe stirred and shrugged. Newly from the hospital, he was still deep in the gloom of his recent loss of the dream, the defeat of his life-long ambitions. He said, "A buff gave it to me."
She slowed down, the better to frown at him in amazement. "Gave it to you? Why the thing is priceless."
Joe sighed and told her the salient details. "Quite a few mercenaries manage to acquire a private fracas-buff." He defined the term for her. "He makes a hobby of your career. Winds up knowing more about it than you, yourself can possibly remember. He follows every fracas you get into. Knows every time you cop one, how serious it was, how long you were in hospital. He glories each time you get a promotion, is in gloom each time your side loses a fracas. He's got pictures of you in various poses taken from the fracas-buff magazines, and files away all articles in which your name appears."
"Zen!" Nadine laughed in deprecation.
"That's just the beginning. After a while he starts writing you fan letters, wanting autographed portraits, wanting a souvenir—sometimes nothing more exciting than a button off your uniform. More often they want a gun, sword or combat knife, particularly one they saw you using in some fracas or other. They usually offer to pay for such, sometimes quite fabulous amounts. Other times they want a bit of bloody uniform, your own true blood from a time when you were in the dill and managed to cop one."
Nadine was astonished. Antagonistic as she was, herself, to the fracases, she wasn't particularly knowledgeable about all their ramifications. She said, repelled, "But doesn't such morbidity disgust you? This fawning, this slobbering—"
Joe grunted. "All part of the game. A mercenary without buffs to boost him, to form fracas-buff clubs and such, hasn't much chance of promotion. So far as disgust is concerned, you'd have to see one of the really far-out ones. The gleam in an ordinarily fishlike eye when he recounts the time you killed three men in hand-to-hand combat, equipped only with an entrenching tool, when they came at you with bayonets. The trace of spittle, running down from the side of his mouth."
"And this buff of yours. Why did he give you this perfectly marvelous car?"