‘Gerry told me to lift a Pfc shirt quick. I did, out of the barracks.’
‘I didn’t know a seventeen-year-old could get in and out of a barracks with a whole skin. Not a female type seventeen-year-old.’
‘I didn’t go in!’ she said. Hip shouted in sheer surprise as his own shirt was wrenched and twisted. The tails flew up from under his belt and flapped wildly in the windless dawn. ‘Don’t do that!’ he gasped.
‘Just making a point,’ she said, twinkling. ‘Gerry put on the shirt and leaned against the fence and waited for you. You marched right up to him and handed him the detector. „Come on, soldier,” you said. „You just volunteered for a picnic. You carry the lunch.”‘
‘What a little stinker I was!’
‘I didn’t think so. I was peeping out from behind the MP shack. I thought you were sort of wonderful. I did, Hip.’
He half laughed. ‘Go on. Tell me the rest.’
‘You know the rest. Gerry flashed Bonnie to get the files out of your quarters. She found them and threw them down to me. I burned them. I’m sorry, Hip. I didn’t know what Gerry was planning.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, that’s it. Gerry saw to it that you were discredited. Psychologically, it had to be that way. You claimed the existence of a Pfc no one had ever seen. You claimed he was the psychiatrist—a real danger sign, as any graduate medic knows. You claimed files, facts, and figures to back you up and they couldn’t be traced. You could prove that you’d dug something up, but there was nothing to show what it might have been. But most of all, you had a trained scientist’s mind, in full possession of facts which the whole world could prove weren’t so—and did. Something had to give.’