Chapter 5
“Scooch over.” A large young man insinuated himself between Carl and Tom on the bench. Carl felt oddly irritated by this. Todd Berkeley, of course, he thought, who was not a cadet in the Corps, but a final-year trainee in the OS Marines—quite a different career stream. But he was a friend of Tom’s, and tended to hang out with the Corps cadets.
This offended Carl’s sense of the distinctness of the Time Corps itself, a breach of etiquette. Sometimes he even wondered whether it rose to the level of being some sort of breach of security. But everyone else, possibly due to the fact that Tom was involved, accepted Todd totally. He was friendly, if slightly overbearing. The latter was not just his behavior, but his mere presence. There was something oversized about the man; he seemed to take up more space—andhe kept pushing in, as he just had, where there wasn’t enough room.