Dylan nodded.
"They got a franchise, dammit. They got to deliver as long as they's a colony here."
When Dylan didn't answer, he said almost appealingly: "Some of those guys would walk barefoot through hell for a buck."
"Maybe," Dylan said. After all, why not let him hope? There were four long hours left.
Now he began to look down into himself, curiously, because he himself was utterly without hope and yet he was no longer really afraid. It was a surprising thing when you looked at it coldly, and he guessed that, after all, it was because of the thirty years. A part of him had waited for this. Some crazy part of him was ready—even after all this time—even excited about being in a fight. Well, what the hell, he marveled. And then he realized that the rest of him was awakening too, and he saw that this job was really his ... that he had always been, in truth, a soldier.
Dylan sat, finding himself in the snow. Once long ago he had read about some fool who didn't want to die in bed, old and feeble. This character wanted to reach the height of his powers and then explode in a grand way—"in Technicolor," the man had said. Explode in Technicolor. It was meant to be funny, of course, but he had always remembered it, and he realized now that that was a small part of what he was feeling. The rest of it was that he was a soldier.
Barbarian, said a small voice, primitive. But he couldn't listen.
"Say, Cap," Rush was saying, "it's getting a mite chilly. I understand you got a bottle."
"Sure," he said cheerfully, "near forgot it." He pulled it out and gave it to Rush. The colonist broke the seal and drank, saying to Dylan half-seriously, half-humorously: "One for the road."