A Company of Heroes Book Five: The Space Cadet Read Online Free Page A

agreed the third old man. “My house is under it. If that ain’t a curse, I’d like to know what is.”
    “I seen your house,” argued the innkeeper, “and I would of dropped a mountain on it if I coulda. I’d say it’s a blessing you got a volcano on top of it.”
    “There you go!” cried the first man, caught up in an ecstasy of vindicated logic. “There you go! If you can have blessings, then you gotta have curses! Just like you can’t have good without there being some evil.”
    “That’s right,” said old man number two, “it’s a question of balance.”
    “And contrast. You gotta have contrast.”
    “Yeah,” agreed the innkeeper sourly, “like you three make me feel young, smart and handsome.”
    “Now that ain’t showing much respect, Master Thwern!”
    “Yeah? Well, you can’t have respect unless you got some disrespect. Chew on that there contrast a while, you old fart.”
    “Why don’t you show me my room?” asked Gerber. “And have my meal sent up to it.”
    “Certainly, sir,” replied the innkeeper, glaring murderously at the three old men, who were, in fact, too blinded by the smoke to notice. He led the broker up a stairway almost as narrow as Gerber’s thin shoulders. It made two sharp turns before it opened onto the second floor. There was a hallway, barely wide enough for one man to pass, with only three doors; the innkeeper opened one, squeezing aside to allow his guest to enter. The room was dark, its only window a small, square, shuttered hole. The only furniture was a bed, a chair and a small, square table. Like the rest of the inn, the woodwork was unpainted and unvarnished: grey and splintery where it wasn’t stained black with grease.
    He heard footsteps on the stairs behind him . “I hope that’s my dinner finally arriving,” he said.
    “I’m sure it is, sir.”
    “Good. I’ll leave the dishes outside the door when I’ve finished. I don’t want to be disturbed for the rest of the evening.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    The girl, carrying a cloth-covered tray, appeared behind her father who turned to her and said, gruffly: “About time! Go ahead now! Give the poor, starving man his dinner! What’re you waiting for?”
    “I can’t get to him, Dad, you’re in the way.”
    “Well, go around me, girl! Go around! Do I have to tell you how to do everything?”
    “No, Dad,” she said, though it was obvious she thought he did.
    The innkeeper pressed his back against the wall outside the door, but his stomach still nearly spanned the space. His daughter, a two-thirds scale model of her father, tried to sidle past him, her back against the opposite wall, but the overlap of several inches of flesh confounded her. She had to hold the tray directly above her head where, atop her stumpy arms, it was pretty much on a level with Gerber’s eyes. He lifted it from her hands and stepped back into his room.
    “Miss?” he said.
    “Yeff?” she replied as best as she could with her breasts pressed against her face by her father’s stomach.
    “This reminds me—will you see to the brats in the caravan? Clean ‘em up as best you can—hose ‘em down en masse if you want—the bottom of the wagon has a drain—and give ‘em something to eat—milk, if you have it, I suppose. But be sure to cut it in half with water if you do.”
    “Yeff fir,” she answered as Gerber closed the door on her and her father. The broker hoped they would not be there in the morning, still jammed in the hallway.
    He placed the tray on the table and removed the cloth. His already thin lips compressed into invisibility at the grim sight of pale gristly meat of unidentifiable origin embedded in a greenish aspic of already-congealing grease, a single boiled potato that looked no larger than nor more appealing than someone’s big toe, a half dozen watery-looking cabbage leaves, a chunk of stale, grey bread and a glass of thin beer that looked disturbingly like a urine sample. He ate as much as his stomach