A Boy and His Tank (33 page)

Then we drove home to the victory party!

The war wasn't over, of course, but from now on, it would be fought on Serbian turf, not Croatian!

My colonels and I were fêted at a dozen banquets, loaded down with medals, and even permitted to retain the ranks that we had assumed.

We were given considerable sums of money, honorary (and tax-free!) Croatian citizenship, and some major tracts of good land to go with it. Together, Kasia and I got eleven square kilometers of land as our private estate, and most of it was good for farming.

And at the urging of all concerned, Kasia and I repeated our vows, got married again, this time in the flesh.

The wedding went on for a week, with all of our relatives brought over from New Kashubia, and even Uncle Wlodzimierz was there to kiss the bride. He told me that our salesmen had just sold six divisions of empty armor to the Serbians at a price that would put them in debt for fifty years!

They even made a movie about my life.

"That was quite a story, Rupert. It's easy to see why Dream World was made so illegal, throughout civilized space. To think that a man could spend more than four years of his life living a lie! How horrible!"

A SPECIAL NOTE TO THOSE DECENT, HEROIC, AND TRULY NOBLE FANS WHO, BESIDES BUYING THIS PAPERBACK EDITION, ALSO SHELLED OUT THE $21.00 TO BUY THE HARDCOVER:

THANK YOU!

Now, you will probably have noticed that something is different here, namely that I have changed the ending. It happened this way:

I had originally planned to have the book end, as it does in this paperback, in a fairly upbeat way. After all, that's the basic formula for an enjoyable adventure story. You drop your hero (a decent person that your reader can identify with) into a large crock of shit, and by dint of hard work, adventurous actions, and dumb luck he works his way upward into the light.

But this was my first book for the very nice people at Baen Books, my contract said that I was to write 90,000 words, and I didn't yet know what I could get away with. Finishing the story but finding myself a few pages short, rather than going back and padding in something that I hadn't planned to pad in, I simply continued the story on a bit, adding a chapter into what I planned for the next book in the series.

Anyway, I told myself, it would be nice to win an award for something, and history proves that the best way to do that is to write something with a sad, tragic, or futile ending. It's that, or making your hero a black, handicapped, homosexual lady who, while confined to a wheelchair, goes around rescuing Jews from the Nazis.

Well, nobody suggested that I was deserving of a Nobel Prize for Literature, but while there were no actual death threats, a lot of people said that ending a book with " . . . and then the little boy fell out of bed and discovered that it was all just a bad dream!" was a shitty stunt to pull on your readers.

And, you know, they were right. I asked Jim Baen if I could change it, and he's letting me do it, despite the added costs.

So the paperback now has one less chapter in it than the hardcover. Don't worry about it. It will be resurrected as one of the opening chapters of the sequel, providing the next large crock of shit.

Waste not, want not, after all.

—Leo Frankowski,

October 5, 1999