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we're going to see a priest, dammit!"
    "Yes, Mickolai."
    "One last thing. Why have you told me all of this? I mean, you took a risk in doing it. I could have gotten so angry that I refused to have anything to do with any of you ever again. It would have been safer for you to keep me believing your damn lies."
    "Well, in the first place, please believe that I really do love you, Mickolai, and it hurts me to have to lie to you. Also, from a military standpoint, it is important for a soldier to know the true situation around him, so that he can accurately evaluate his best course of action."
    "Fine, but we are not really in a military situation here. This is a construction project, and I am not even involved in the engineering of it. There is no war, just one of the biggest con games in history."
    "That was the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. There are some indications that there is a real war on the horizon, one that we can't make disappear by faking it."
    "Shut up. Don't say another word. I'm not going to get involved in a God damned thing, not for my God, not for my country, and sure as Hell not for my God damned Uncle Wlodzimierz ! I am not going to do anything for anybody or to anybody except for myself and my only true love, not for at least six months after Kasia and I see that damned priest, and get properly married!"
    "Yes, Mickolai."
     

CHAPTER THREE
Life Outside of a Tank
    Kasia and I didn't try the sex-in-a-canoe thing that night. We just held each other in Dream World, and talked and swore and talked and made love and talked and cried, sometimes, but in the end, well, she has always been the more practical one. Probably the smarter one, too.
    I said, "So the first thing to do, is we go and find a real priest."
    "Soon. But the very first thing we have to do once we get out of these tanks is to clean up and go clothes shopping! Do you realize that we have both been stark naked for four and a half years?"
    "Six years, counting the time on New Kashubia. But hey! On you, it looks good!"
    "You're not so bad-looking yourself, stranger, but that's not the point! God. What would my mother say?"
    "She'd probably wonder what had happened to you for all of these years," I said.
    "I've already checked on that. It seems that for the past four and a half years, the world thinks that we have been writing to our friends, our parents, and to all our other relatives on a very regular basis. Our tanks saw to it that nobody was worried about us. Everybody back home thinks that we are wonderful war heroes. My kid brother went and saw the movie they made about us more than twenty times!"
    "Those dirty, filthy bastards. So now what? When we go home, do we put on phony officer's uniforms, or something?"
    "That's exactly what the people in public relations want us to do, Mickolai. They want a presence around to let the people know that they are being well protected, but the real Powers That Be want our actual command structures hidden, and in their Combat Control Computers, in case of emergencies. Having you and me out there pretending to be in charge is the compromise they came up with."
    "Damn them! They want us to be targets for enemy snipers, local lunatics, and suicidal maniacs, that's what they really want! Well, I won't do it!"
    "We will be well protected. And have you thought it out, love? Being famous might be a very nice thing. We'd get the very best service in the restaurants, in the hotels, and in the shops."
    "We've already been getting the best service, for eight years, subjectively, in Dream World, and it's no big thing. What we'd also get is mobbed by every newscaster, social climber, and autograph hunter on thirty planets. Really famous people all need bodyguards. Have you ever thought about why?"
    "If it gets to be tiresome or dangerous, we can always crawl back into our tanks. Nobody can bother us in here, without our wanting them to."
    "We won't have our tanks. We'll be on leave, remember?" I said.
    "Oh, yes