"Exactly what I said. As long as you're alive a soldier or a sailor might as well be a Zulu; useful for the length he can throw a spear or shoot an arrow, but useless as he now stands. There is no army, apparently, right now that is worth more than its body weight-again, as long as you live."
"Do you have to harp on that?"
"Why not? Do you want to live forever, or do you expect to?"
He had me there. You bet I wanted to live forever. "Well?"
He yanked pensively at his upper lip. "Two solutions; one, announce you to the world with a clang of cymbals and a roll of drums. Two, bury you someplace. Oh, figuratively speaking," he added hastily as he saw my face.
"Solution one sounds good to me," I told him. "I could go home then."
He made it quite clear that Solution One was only theoretical; he was firm about that. "Outside of rewriting all the peace treaties in existence, do you remember how our Congress huddled over the Bomb? Can you see Congress allowing you, can you see the General Staff agreeing to share you with, for example, a United Nations Commission? Can you?"
No, I couldn't.
"So," with a regretful sigh, "Solution One leaves only Solution Two. We'll grant that you must be kept under cover."
I wondered if Stein was somewhere at the earphones of a tape recorder. For someone with as big a job as the old man likely had, it seemed that we were talking fairly freely. He went on.