What finally moved him was not the power.
It was that he could see tomorrow with complete clarity. He would go up these stairs and sleep for three hours and get up, and there would be dispatches, and he would read them first because he always read them first.
And one day, not soon, perhaps, but one day, there would be another four-page report in that same format, with another unaccounted column, and he would read all of it including the equipment inventory, and then he would go and say everything correctly to his father and be refused.
And he would bow.
Two years of being right had bought him a room full of boxes and the privilege of reading the casualty lists before anybody else did.
"Yes," Baldwin said.
---
It was not spectacular, and he was grateful for that afterward in a way he never examined.
