Once Lansdale felt Lett was ready, he broke down the incident on his first day and helped Lett understand his episode. That gargantuan zipper Lett heard was no MG 42 but just a dumbo recruit gone a little too happy with a jackhammer—they were still building here in camp, after all. The thunks Lett heard? Not enemy artillery of course. Just a motorized pile driver. Meanwhile, a crew had been burning trash and it had old tires in it. And no bodies were decomposing, for that matter. Some goldbricker hadn’t sorted the barrels of trash, which happened to contain carcasses of small island animals, which mixed up with the rest of it, and when the breeze carried that smell it was just horrid. So Lett got a whiff at just the wrong time.

“You triggered it all,” Lett protested, tightening up.

Lansdale clucked his tongue, a tsk-tsk sound. “No, that we did not. Now, I know what you’re thinking. I can see it on your face. That you had failed. It had been your first test, certainly, but don’t think that you had failed it. You can only learn from this.”

Lett nodded along, loosening up again. “What about the incoming? The attacker, I mean.”

“That was fantastic. As I said. You really walloped him. Nice job.”

“Oh. I didn’t mean to.”

“But you did—you did. You really impressed us with it.”

“That wasn’t my intention. You said he was a Marine.”

“Yes. Jock Quinn. Unfortunate.” Lansdale added one of those sneers of his and wiped at his mustache. “He’d been undergoing his own treatment. But he managed to go off on his own for a while. That was him finding his way back. The rain didn’t help. You didn’t. And that was no German Luger pistol in his hand, son, just a lava rock.”

“Aw. Gee. I hope I get to tell him sorry.”

“You will. Now, those MPs you saw were actually there, and they were armed as it happens, which was regrettably the first weapons here that you’d seen—and it didn’t help one iota that MPs present a trauma for you owing to your war service.”

No one had ever called his deserting a service before. He had served heroically, after all. Lett told himself this was progress, too. “What about my back, Doc? I took one in the back.”

“You did indeed, Wendell.” By the end of the first day, Lansdale had taken to calling him by his first name. “I must apologize for that. Certain sentries had been trying out a new tranquilizer gun, and one got a little eager with the clumsy thing.”

“A dart gun?” Lett remembered his muscles had gone weak and he could not breathe and he’d dropped.

“I’m afraid so, yes.” Lansdale added a shake of his head. “It was curare. Our weapons team was working on something new.”

“You were experimenting with me?”