The Ninth Configuration by William Peter Blatty Page A

half-ass computer must have goofed.” The adjutant pointed to some wording. “See? Your serial number’s wrong, and it gives your MOS as ‘Psychiatrist.’
    There must be another Colonel Kane.”
    “Yes,” murmured Kane. He nodded his head. Then he took the TWX from Robinson and stared at its contents. His eyes were alive with struggle. Finally, he crumpled the TWX in his hand and went out into the rain again and walked until he disappeared from view. Robinson kept staring into the torrent. His heart was heavy. Kane’s recent behavior had been anomalous. It had not gone unwatched.
    Night fell suddenly. The adjutant paced in his quarters, chain-smoking
    nervously. Kane had been gone for hours. What should he
    do? Send out a patrol? He would like to avoid it if he could; avoid the necessity of explaining that “Colonel Kane took a walk in the rain without a hat, without a coat, but I thought it in keeping with his recent behavior, which has generally seemed unglued.” He was protective about the colonel. Everyone else regarded Kane with a mixture of awe, dislike and fear; but he had treated Robinson gently, sometimes even with fondness, and had let him glimpse, from time to time, the sensitivity trapped within him.
    Robinson crushed out a cigarette, picked up his pipe and chewed on the stem. Then he saw Kane standing drenched in the open doorway. He was smiling faintly at his adjutant. “If we could scrub away the blood, do you think we could find where we’ve hidden our souls?” he asked. Before Robinson could answer, Kane had walked away and down the hall to his room. The adjutant listened to his footsteps, the opening and muted closing of his door.
    The following morning Kane told Robinson that in spite of the discrepancies in the orders, he thought them correct with respect to their substance. He would go to Washington.
    Robinson knew he would have to report it.
    “By the time he hit the States, they’d caught the mistake.” Fell sat against the edge of the clinic examining table. He popped a cigarette from a packet and with shaking hands struck a match. He inhaled smoke and then blew it out. “By then it was clear that he meant to go through with it.” Fell cupped the burned-out match in his hand and stared at an ad on the crumpled match-book, a technical training school promising employment; then he slowly turned his gaze on each of the grave, bewildered faces of the men he had gathered together in the clinic:
    Groper, Krebs, Christian, the medical orderlies-and Gilman. “They’d heard a lot of stories about him cracking. He seemed on the edge of a very bad breakdown. When he took the assignment, though, that was it. We knew that he’d had it.” Fell shook his head, and then continued. “But how do you tell a man with a record like that?”
    Groper looked down at a set of orders in his hand. He shookhis leonine head, amazed; then he thrust the orders out toward Fell.
    “These orders of yours,” he said to him. “They’re for real?”
    Fell nodded. “You can put it in the bank,” he said firmly. Then he pulled at the cigarette. “Kane didn’t pick his line of work.” The words came out softly, with exhaled smoke. “In World War II he was a fighter pilot. Then one time he bailed out behind enemy lines and had to fight his way back. That time he killed an even six. It happened again. And he killed five more. So headquarters figured he had a talent. And they made him a specialist. They’d drop him behind the lines on clandestine missions and let him get back as best he could. He always did. And he wasted a lot of the enemy. A lot. With a knife. With his hands. Most times with a wire. And it ripped him apart. He was good. A good man. We stuck that wire in his hands and said, ‘Get ‘em, boy! Get ‘em for God and country! It’s your duty!’ But part of him didn’t believe it; the good part. That’s the part that pulled the plug. Then some computer dropped a stitch and gave the poor bastard