No Truce with Kings

“Charlie! Give’s a song!”

“Yeah, Charlie!”

The whole mess was drunk, and the junior officers at the far end of the table were only somewhat noisier than.their seniors near the colonel. Rugs and hangings could not much muffle the racket, shouts, stamping boots, thump of fists on oak and clash of cups raised aloft, that rang from wall to stony wall. High up among shadows that hid the rafters they hung from, the regimental banners stirred in a draft, as if to join the chaos. Below, the light of bracketed lanterns and bellowing fireplace winked on trophies and weapons.

Autumn comes early on Echo Summit, and it was storming outside, wind-hoot past the watchtowers and rain-rush in the courtyards, an undertone that walked through the buildings and down all corridors, as if the story were true that the unit’s dead came out of the cemetery each September Nineteenth night and tried to join the celebration but had forgotten how. No one let it bother him, here or in the enlisted barracks, except maybe the hex major. The Third Division, the Catamounts, was known as the most riotous gang in the Army of the Pacific States of America, and of its regiments the Rolling Stones who held Fort Nakamura were the wildest.

“Go on, boy! Lead off. You’ve got the closest thing to a voice in the whole goddamn Sierra,” Colonel Mackenzie called. He loosened the collar of his black dress tunic and lounged back, legs asprawl, pipe in one hand and beaker of whisky in the other: a thickset man with blue wrinkle-meshed eyes in a battered face, his cropped hair turned gray but his mustache still arrogantly red.

“Charlie is my darlin’, my darlin’, my darlin’,” sang Captain Hulse. He stopped as the noise abated a little. Young Lieutenant Amadeo got up, grinned, and launched into one they well knew.

“Colonel, sir. Begging your pardon.”

Mackenzie twisted around and looked into the face of Sergeant Irwin. The man’s expression shocked him. “Yes?”

“Message just come in, sir. Major Speyer asks to see you right away.”

Speyer, who didn’t like being drunk, had volunteered for duty tonight; otherwise men drew lots for it on a holiday. Remembering the last word from San Francisco, Mackenzie grew chill.

The mess bawled forth the chorus, not noticing when the colonel knocked out his pipe and rose.

All right-thinking Catamounts maintained that they could operate better with the booze sloshing up to their eardrums than any other outfit cold sober. Mackenzie ignored the tingle in his veins; forgot it. He walked a straight line to the door, automatically taking his sidearm off the rack as he passed by. The song pursued him into the hall.

Lanterns were far apart in the passage. Portraits of former commanders watched the colonel and the sergeant from eyes that were hidden in grotesque darknesses. Footfalls clattered too loudly here.

Mackenzie went between it pair of fieldpieces flanking a stairway—they had been captured at Rock Springs during the Wyoming War, a generation ago—and upward. There was more distance between places in this keep than his legs liked at their present age. But it was old, had been added to decade by decade; and it needed to be massive, chiseled and mortared from Sierra granite, for it guarded a key to the nation. More than one army had broken against its revetments, before the Nevada, marches were pacified, and more young men Mackenzie wished to think about bad gone from this base to die among angry strangers.

But she’s never been attacked from the west. God, or whatever are, you can spare her that, can’t you?

The command office was lonesome at this hour. The room where Sergeant Irwin had his desk lay so silent: no clerks pushing pens, no messengers going in or out, no wives making a splash of color with their dresses as they waited to see the colonel about some problem down in the Village. When he opened the door to the inner room, though, Mackenzie heard the wind shriek around the angle of the wall. Rain slashed at the black windowpane and ran down in streams which the lanterns turned molten.

“Here the colonel is, sir,” Irwin said in an uneven voice. He gulped and closed the door behind Mackenzie.

Speyer stood by the commander’s desk. It was a beat-up old object with little upon it: an inkwell, a letter basket, an interphone, a photograph of Nora, faded in these dozen years since her death. The major was a tall and gaunt man, hooknosed, going bald on top. His uniform always looked unpressed, somehow. But he had the sharpest brain in the Cats, Mackenzie thought; and Christ, how could any man read as many books as Phil did! Officially he was the adjutant, in practice the chief adviser.

“Well?” Mackenzie said. The alcohol did not seem to numb him, rather make him too acutely aware of things: how the lanterns smelled hot (when would they get a big enough generator to run electric lights?), and the floor was hard under his feet, and a crack went through the plaster of the north wall, and the stove wasn’t driving out much of the chill. He forced bravado, stuck thumbs in belt and rocked back on his heels. “Well, Phil, what’s wrong now?”

“Wire from Frisco,” Speyer said. He had been folding and unfolding a piece of paper, which he handed over. “Huh? Why not a radio call?”

“Telegram’s less likely to be intercepted. This one’s in code, at that. Irwin decoded it for me.”

“What the hell kind of nonsense is this?”

“Have a look, Jimbo, and you’ll find out. It’s for you, anyway. Direct from GHQ.”

Mackenzie focused on Irwin’s scrawl. The usual formalities of an order; then:

Thunder went off in the mountains like artillery. It was a while before Mackenzie stirred, and then merely to lay the paper on his desk. He could only summon feeling slowly, up into a hollowness that filled his skin.

“They dared,” Speyer said without tone. “They really did.”

“Huh?” Mackenzie swiveled eyes around to the major’s face. Speyer didn’t meet that stare. He was concentrating his own gaze on his hands, which were now rolling a cigarette. So the words jerked from him, harsh and quick:

“I can guess what happened. The warhawks have been hollering for impeachment ever since Brodsky compromised the border dispute with West Canada. And Fallon, yeah, he’s got ambitions of his own. But his partisans are a minority an he knows it. Electing him Vice helped soothe the warhawks some, but he’d never make Judge the regular way,.because Brodsky isn’t going to die of old age before Fallon does, and anyhow more than fifty percent of the Senate are sober, satisfied bossmen who don’t agree that the PSA has a divine mandate to reunify the continent. I don’t see how an impeachment could get through an honestly convened Senate. More likely they’d vote out Fallon.”

“But a Senate had been called,” Mackenzie said. The words sounded to him like someone else talking. “The newscasts told us.”

“Sure. Called for yesterday ‘to debate ratification of the treaty with West Canada.’ But the bossmen are scattered up and down the country, each at his own Station. They have to get to San Francisco. A couple of arranged delays—hell, if a bridge just happened to be blown on the Boise railroad, a round dozen of Brodsky’s staunchest supporters wouldn’t arrive on time—so the Senate has a quorum, all right, but every one of Fallon’s supporters are there, and so many of the rest are missing that the warhawks have a clear majority. Then they meet on a holiday, when no cityman is paying attention. Presto, impeachment and a new Judge!” Speyer finished his cigarette and stuck it between his lips while he fumbled for a match. A muscle twitched in his jaw.

“You sure?” Mackenzie mumbled. He thought dimly that this moment was like one time he’d visited Puget City and was invited for a sail on the Guardiaii’s yacht, and a fog had set in. Everything was cold and blind, with nothing you could catch in your hands.

“Of course I’m not sure!” Speyer snarled. “Nobody will be sure till it’s too late.” The matchbox shook in his grasp.

“They, uh, they got a new Cinc too, I noticed.”

“Uh-huh. They’d want to replace everybody they cant trust, as possible, and De Barros was a Brodsky appointee.” The match flared with a hellish scrit. Speyer inhaled till his cheeks collapsed. “You and me included, naturally. The regiment reduced to minimum armament so that nobody will get ideas about resistance when the new colonel arrives, You’ll note he’s coming with a battalion at his heels just the same, just in case. Otherwise he could take a plane and be here tomorrow.”

“Why not a train?” Mackenzie caught a whiff of smoke and felt for his pipe. The bowl was hot in his tunic pocket.

“Probably all rolling stock has to head north. Get troops among the bossmen there to forestall a revolt. The valleys are safe enough, peaceful ranchers and Esper colonies. None of them’ll pot-shot Fallonite soldiers marching to garrison Echo and Donner outposts.” A dreadful scorn weighted Speyer’s words.

“What are we going to do?”

“I assume Fallen’s take-over followed legal forms; that there was a quorum,” Speyer said, “Nobody will ever agree whether it was really Constitutional ... I’ve been reading this damned message over and over since Irwin decoded it. There’s a lot between the lines. I think Brodsky’s at large, for instance. If he were under arrest this would’ve said as much, and there’d have been less worry about rebellion. Maybe some of his household troops smuggled him away in time. He’ll be.. hunted like a jackrabbit, of course.”

Mackenzie took out his pipe but forgot he had done so, “Tom’s coming with our replacements,” he said thinly.

“Yeah. Your son-in-law. That was a smart touch, wasnt it? A kind of hostage for your good behavior, but also a back-hand promise that you and yours won’t suffer if you report in as ordered. Tom’s a good kid. He’ll stand by his own.”

“This is his regiment too,” Mackenzie said. He squared his shoulders. “He wanted to fight West Canada, sure. Young and ... and a lot of Pacificans did get killed in the Idaho Panhandle during the skirmishes. Women and kids among ’em.”

“Well,” Speyer said, “you’re the colonel, Jimbo. What should we do?”

“Oh, Jesus, I don’t know. I’m nothing but a soldier.” The pipestem broke in Mackenzie’s fingers. “But we’re not some bossman’s personal militia here. We swore to support the Constitution.”

“I can’t see where Brodsky’s yielding some of our claims in Idaho is grounds for impeachment. I think he was right.”

“Well—”

“A coup d’état by any other name would stink as bad. You may not be much of a student of current events, Jimbo, but you know as well as I do what Fallon’s Judgeship will mean. War with West Canada is almost the least of it. Fallon also stands for a strong central government. He’ll find ways to down the old bossman families. A lot of their heads and scions will die in the front lines; that stunt goes back to David and Uriah. Others will be accused of collusion with the Brodsky people—not altogether falsely—and impoverished by fines. Esper communities will get nice big land grants, so their economic competition can bankrupt still other estates. Later wars will keep bossmen away for years at a time, unable to supervise their own affairs, which will therefore go to the devil. And thus we march toward the glorious goal, of Reunification”

“If Esper Central favors him, what can we do? I’ve heard enough about psi blasts. I can’t ask my men to face them.”

“You could ask your men to face the Hellbomb itself, Jimbo, and they would. A Mackenzie has commanded the Rolling Stones for over fifty years.”

“Yes. I thought Tom, someday—”

“We’ve watched this brewing for a long time. Remember the talk we had about it last week?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I might also remind you that the Constitution was written explicitly ‘to confirm the separate regions in their ancient liberties.’ ”

“Let me alone!” Mackenzie shouted. “I don’t know what’s right or wrong, I tell you! Let me alone!”

Speyer fell silent, watching him through a screen of foul smoke. Mackenzie walked back and forth a while, boots slamming the floor like drumbeats. Finally he threw the broken pipe across the room so it shattered.

“Okay.” He must ram each word past the tension in his throat. “Irwin’s a good man who can keep his lip buttoned. Send him out to cut the telegraph line a few miles downhill. Make it look as if the storm did it. The wire breaks often enough, heaven knows. Officially, then, we never got GHQ’s message. That gives us a few days to contact Sierra Command HQ. I won’t go against General Cruikshank ... but I’m pretty sure which way he’ll go if he sees a chance. Tomorrow prepare for action. It’ll be no trick to throw back Hollis’ battalion, and they’ll need a while to bring some real strength against us. Before then the first snow should be along and we’ll be shut off for the winter. Only we can use skis snowshoes, ourselves, to keep in touch with the other units and organize something. By spring—we’ll see what happens.”

“Thanks, Jimbo.” The wind almost drowned Speyer’s words.

“I’d ... I’d better go tell Laura.”

“Yeah.” Speyer squeezed Mackenzie’s shoulder. There were tears in the major’s eyes.

Mackenzie went out with parade-ground steps, ignoring Irwin: down the hall, down a stairway at its other end, past guarded doors where he returned salutes without really noticing, and so to his own quarters in the south wing.

His daughter had gone to sleep already. He took a lantern off its hook in his bleak little parlor, and entered her room. She had come back here while her husband was in San Francisco.

For a moment Mackenzie couldn’t quite remember why he had sent Tom there. He passed a hand over his stubbly scalp, as if to squeeze something out ... oh, yes, ostensibly to arrange for a new issue of uniforms; actually to get the boy out of the way until the political crisis had blown over. Tom was too honest for his own good, an admirer of Fallon and the Esper movement. His outspokenness had led to friction with his brother officers. They were mostly of bossman stock or from well-to-do protectee families.. The existing social order had been good to them. But Tom Danielis began as a fisher lad in a poverty-stricken village on the Mendocino coast. In spare moments he’d learned the three R’s from a local Esper; once literate, he joined the Army and earned a commission by sheer guts and brains. He had never forgotten that the Espers helped the poor and that Fallon promised to help the Espers ... Then, too, battle, glory, Reunification, Federal Democracy, those were heady dreams when yea were young.

Laura’s room was little changed since she left it to get married last year. And she had only been seventeen then. Objects survived which had belonged to a small person with pigtails and starched frocks—a teddy bear loved to shapelessness, a doll house her father had built, her mother’s picture drawn by a corporal who stopped a bullet at Salt Lake. Oh, God, how much she had come to look like her mother.

Dark hair streamed over a pillow turned gold by the light. Mackenzie shook her as gently as he was able. She awoke instantly, and he saw the terror within her.

“Dad! Anything about Tom?”

“He’s okay.” Mackenzie set the lantern on the floor and sat himself on the edge of the bed. Her fingers were cold where they caught at his hand.

“He isn’t,” she said. “I know you too well.”

“He’s not been hurt yet. I hope he won’t be.”

Mackenzie braced himself. Because she was a soldier’s daughter, he told her the truth in a few words; but he was not strong enough to look at her while he did. When he had finished, he sat dully listening to the rain.

“You’re going to revolt,” she whispered.

“I’m going to consult with SCHQ and follow my commanding officer’s orders,” Mackenzie said.

“You know what they’ll be ... once he knows you’ll back him.”

Mackettzie shrugged. His head had begun to ache. Hangover started already? He’d need a good deal more booze before he could sleep tonight No, no time for sleep—yes, there would be. Tomorrow would do to assemble the regiment in courtyard and address them from the breech of Black Hepzibah, as a Mackenzie of the Rolling Stones always addressed his men, and—. He found himself ludicrously recalling a day when he and Nora and this girl here had gone rowing on Lake Tahoe. The water was the color of Nora’s eyes, green and blue and with sunlight flimmering across the surface, but so clear you could see the rocks on the bottom; and Laura’s own little bottom had stuck straight in the air as she trailed her hands astern.

She sat thinking for a space before saying flatly: “I suppose you can’t be talked out of it.” He shook his head. “Well, can I leave tomorrow early, then?”

“Yes. I’ll get you a coach.”

“T-t-to hell with that. I’m better in the saddle than you are.”

“Okay. A couple of men to escort you, though.” Mackenzie drew a long breath. “Maybe you can persuade Tom—”

“No. I can’t. Please don’t ask me to, Dad.”

He gave her the last gift he could: “I wouldn’t want you to stay. That’d be shirking your own duty. Tell Tom I still think he’s the right man for you. Goodnight, duck.” It came out too fast, but he dared not delay. When she began to cry he must unfold her arms from his neck and depart the room.

Spring in the high Sierra is cold, wet, snowbanks melting away from forest floor and giant rocks, rivers in spate until their canyons clang, a breeze ruffling puddles in the road. The first green breath across the aspen seems infinitely tender against pine and spruce, which gloom into a brilliant sky. A raven swoops low, gruk, gruk, look out for that damn hawk! But then you cross timber line and the world becomes tumbled blue-gray immensity, with the sun ablaze on what snows remain and the wind sounding hollow in your ears.

Captain Thomas Danielis,.Field Artillery, Loyalist Army of the Pacific States, turned his horse aside. He was a dark young man, slender and snub-nosed. Behind him a squad slipped and cursed, dripping mud from feet to helmets, trying to get a gun carrier unstuck. Its alcohol motor was too feeble to do more than spin the wheels. The infantry squelched on past, stoop-shouldered, worn down by altitude and a wet bivouac and pounds of mire on each boot. Their line snaked from around a prowlike crag, up the twisted road and over the ridge ahead. A gust brought the smell of sweat to Danielis.

But they were good joes, he thought. Ditty, dogged, they did their profane best. His own company, at least, was going to get hot food tonight, if he had to cook the quartermaster sergeant.

The horse’s hoofs banged on a block of ancient concrete jutting from the muck. If this had been the old days ... but wishes weren’t bullets. Beyond this part of the range lay lands mostly desert, claimed by the Saints, who were no longer a menace but with whom there was scant commerce. So the mountain highways had never been considered worth repaving, and the railroad ended at Hangtown. Therefore the expeditionary force to the Tahoe area must slog through unpeopled forests and icy uplands, God help the poor bastards..

God help them in Nakamura, too, Danielis thought. His mouth drew taut, he slapped his hands together and spurred the horse with needless violence. Sparks shot from iron shoes as the beast clattered off the road toward the highest point of the ridge. The man’s saber banged his leg.

Reining in, he unlimbered his field glasses. From here he could look across a jumbled sweep of mountainscape, when cloud shadows sailed over cliffs and boulders, down into the gloom of a canyon and across to the other side. A few tufts of grass thrust out beneath him, mummy brown, and a marmot wakened early from winter sleep whistled somewhere in the stone confusion. He still couldn’t see the castle. Nor had he expected to, as yet. He knew this country ... how well he did!

There might be a glimpse of hostile activity, though. It had been eerie to march this far with no sign of the enemy, of anyone else whatsoever; to send out patrols in search of rebel units that could not be found; to ride with shoulder muscles ... tense against the sniper’s arrow that never came. Old Jimbo Mackenzie was not one to sit passive behind walls, and the Rolling Stones had not been given their nickname in jest.

If Jimbo is alive. How do I know he is? That buzzard yonder may be the very one which hacked out his eyes.

Danielis bit his lip and made himself look steadily through the glasses. Don’t think about Mackenzie, how he outroared and outdrank and outlaughed you and you never minded, how he sat knotting his brows over the chessboard where you could mop him up ten times out of ten and he never cared, how proud and happy he stood at the wedding ... Nor think about Laura, who tried to keep you from knowing how often she wept at night, who now bore a grandchild beneath her heart and woke alone in the San Francisco house from the evil dreams of pregnancy. Every one of those dogfaces plodding toward the castle which has killed every army ever sent against it—every one of them has somebody at home and and hell rejoices at how many have somebody on the rebel side. Better to look for hostile spoor and let it go at that.

Wait! Danielis stiffened. A rider—He focused. One of our own. Fallon’s army added a blue band to the uniform. Returning scout. A tingle went along his spine. He decided to hear the report firsthand. But the fellow was still a mile off, perforce riding slowly over the hugger-mugger terrain. There was no hurry about intercepting him. Danielis continued to survey the land.

A reconnaissance plane appeared, an ungainly dragonfly with sunlight flashing off a propeller head. Its drone bumbled among rock wails, where echoes threw the noise back and forth. Doubtless an auxiliary to the scouts, employing two-way communication. Later the plane would work as a spotter for artillery. There was no use making a bomber of it: Nakamura was proof against anything that today’s craft could drop, and might well shoot the thing down.

A shoe scraped behind Danielis. Horse and man whirled as one. His pistol jumped into his hand.

It lowered. “Oh ... Excuse me, Philosopher.”

The man in the blue robe nodded. A smile softened his face. He must be around sixty years old, hair white and lined, but he walked these heights like a wild goat. The Ying and Yang symbol burned gold on his breast.

“You’re needlessly on edge, son,” he said. A trace of Texas accent stretched out his words. The Espers obeyed the laws wherever they lived, but acknowledged no country their own: nothing less than mankind, perhaps ultimately all life throughout the space-time universe. Nevertheless, the Pacific States had gained enormously in prestige and influence when the Order’s unenterable Central was estblished in San Francisco at the time when the city was being rebuilt in earnest. There had been no objection—on the contrary—to the Grand Seeker’s desire that Philosopher Woodworth accompany the expedition as an observer. Not even from the chaplains; the churches had finally gotten it straight that the Esper teachings were neutral with respect to religion.

Danielis managed a grin. “Can you blame me?”

“No blame. But advice. Your attitude isn’t useful. Does nothin’ but wear out. You’ve been fightin’ a battle for weeks before it began.”

Danielis remembered the apostle who had visited his home in San Francisco—by invitation, in the hope that Laura might learn some peace. His simile had been still homelier: “You only need to wash one dish at a time.” The memory brought a smart to Danielis’ eyes, so that he said roughly:

“I might relax if you’d use your powers to tell me what’s waiting for us.”

“I’m no adept, son. Too much in the material world, I’m afraid. Somebody’s got to do the practical work of the Order, and someday I’ll get the chance to retire and explore the frontier inside me. But you need to start early, and stick to it a lifetime, to develop your full powers.” Woodworth looked across the peaks, seemed almost to merge himself with their loneliness.

Danielis hesitated to break into the meditation. He wondered what practical purpose the Philosopher was serving on this trip. To bring back a report, more accurate than untrained senses and undisciplined emotions could prepare? Yes, that must be it. The Espers might yet decide to take a hand in this war. However reluctantly, Central had allowed the awesome psi powers to be released now and again, when the Order was seriously threatened; and Judge Fallon was a better friend to them than Brodsky or the earlier Senate of Bossmen and House of People’s Deputies had been.

The horse stamped and blew out its breath in a snort. Woodworth glanced back at the rider. “If you ask me, though,” he said, “I don’t reckon you’ll find much doing around here. I was in the Rangers myself, back home, before I saw the Way. This country feels empty..”

“If we could know!” Danielis exploded: “They’ve had the whole winter to do what they liked in the mountains, while the snow kept us out. What scouts we could get in reported a beehive—as late as two weeks ago. What have they planned?”

Woodworth made no reply.

It flooded from Danielis, he couldn’t stop, he had to cover the recollection of Laura bidding him good-by on his second expedition against her father, six months after the first one came home in bloody fragments:

“If we had the resources! A few wretched little railroads and motor cars, a handful of aircraft; most of our supply trains drawn by mules—what kind of mobility does that give us? And what really drives me crazy ... we know how to make what they had in the old days. We’ve got the books, the information. More, maybe, than the ancestors. I’ve watched the electrosmith at Fort Nakamura turn out transistor units with enough bandwidth to carry television, no bigger than my fist. I’ve seen the scientific journals, the research labs, biology, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics. And all useless!”

“Not so,” Woodworth answered mildly. “Like my own Order, the community of scholarship’s becoming supranational. Printin’ presses, radiophones, telescribes—”

“I say useless. Useless to stop men from killing each other because there’s no authority strong enough to make them behave. Useless to take a farmer’s hands off a horse-drawn plow and put them behind the wheel of a tractor. We’ve got the knowledge, but we can’t apply it.”

“You do apply it, son, where too much power and industrial plant isn’t required. Remember, the world’s a lot poorer in natural resources than it was before the Hellbombs. I’ve seen the Black Lands myself, where the firestorm passed over the Texas oilfields.” Woodworth’s serenity cracked a little. He turned his eyes back to the peaks.

“There’s oil elsewhere,” Danielis insisted. “And coal, iron, uranium, everything we need. But the world hasn’t got the organization to get at it. Not in any quantity. So we fill the Central Valley with crops that’ll yield alcohol,, to keep a few motors turning; and we import a dribble of other stuff along and unbelievably inefficient chain of middlemen; and most of it’s eaten by the armies.” He jerked his head toward that part of the sky which the handmade airplane had crossed. “That’s one reason we’ve got to have Reunification. So we can rebuild.”

“And the other?” Woodworth asked softly.

“Democracy—universal suffrage—” Danielis swallowed. “And so fathers and sons won’t have to fight each other again.”

“Those are better reasons,” Woodworth said. “Good enough for the Espers to support. But as for that machinery you want—” He shook his head. “No, you’re wrong there. That’s no way for men to live.”

“Maybe not,” Danielis said. “Though my own father wouldn’t have been crippled by overwork if he’d had some machines to help him ... Oh, I don’t know. First things first. Let’s get this war over with and argue later.” He remembered the scout, now gone from view. “Pardon me, Philosopher, I’ve got an errand.”

The Esper raised his hand in token of peace. Danielis cantered off.

Splashing along the roadside, he saw the man he wanted, halted by Major Jacobsen. The latter, who must have sent him out, sat mounted near the infantry line. The scout was a Klamath Indian, stocky in buckskins, a bow on his shoulder. Arrows were favored over guns by many of.the men from the northern districts: cheaper than bullets, no noise, less range but as much firepower as a bolt-action rifle. In the bad old days before the Pacific States had formed their union, archers along forest trails had saved many a town from conquest; they still helped keep that union loose.

“Ah, Captain Danielis,” Jacobsen hailed. “You’re just in time. Lieutenant Smith was about to report what his detachment found out.”

“And the plane,” said Smith imperturbably. “What the pilot told us he’d seen from the air gave us the guts to go there and check for ourselves.”

“Well?”

“Nobody, around.”

“What?”

“Fort’s been evacuated. So’s the settlement. Not a soul.”

“But—but—” Jacobsen collected himself. “Go on.”

We studied the signs as best’s we could. Looks like non-combatants left some time ago. By sledge and ski, I’d guess, maybe north to some strong point. I suppose the men shifted their own stuff at the same time, gradual-like, what they couldn’t carry with ’em at the last. Because the regiment and its support units, even field artillery, pulled out just three-four days ago. Ground’s all tore up. They headed downslope, sort of west by northwest, far’s we could tell from what we saw.“

Jacobsen choked. “Where are they bound?”

A flaw of wind struck Danielis in the face and ruffled the horses’ manes. At his back he heard the slow plop and squish of boots, groan of wheels, chuff of motors, rattle of wood and metal, yells and whipcracks of muleskinners. But it seemed very remote. A map grew before him, blotting out the world.

The Loyalist Army had had savage fighting the whole winter, from the Trinity Alps to Puget Sound—for Brodsky had managed to reach Mount Rainier, whose lord had furished broadcasting facilities, and Rainier was too well fortified to take at once. The bossmen and the autonomous tribes rose in arms, persuaded that a usurper threatened their damned little local privileges. Their protectees fought beside them, if only because no rustic had been taught any higher loyalty than to his patron. West Canada, fearful of what Fallon might do when he got the chance, lent the rebels aid that was scarcely even clandestine.

Nonetheless, the national army was stronger: more matérial, better organization, above everything an ideal of the future. Cinc O’Donnell had outlined a strategy—concentrate the loyal forces at a few points, overwhelm resistance, restore order and establish bases in the region, then proceed to the next place—which worked. The government now controlled the entire coast, with naval units to keep an eye on the Canadians in Vancouver and guard the important Hawaii trade routes; the northern half of Washington almost to the Idaho line; the Columbia Valley; central California as far north as Redding. The remaining rebellious Stations and towns were isolated from each other in mountains, forests, deserts. Bossdom after bossdom fell as the loyalists pressed on, defeating the enemy in detail, cutting him off from supplies and hope. The only real worry had been Cruikshank’s Sierra Command, an army in its own right rather than a levy of yokels and citymen, big and tough and expertly led. This expedition against Fort Nakamura was only a small part of what had looked like a difficult campaign.

But now the Rolling Stones had pulled out. Offered no fight whatsoever. Which meant that their brother Catamounts must also have evacuated. You don’t give up one anchor of a line you intend to hold. So?

“Down into the valleys,” Danielis said; and there sounded in his ears, crazily, the voice of Laura as she used to sing. Down in the valley, valley so low.

“Judas!” the major exclaimed. Even the Indian grunted as if he had taken a belly blow. “No, they couldn’t. We’d have known.”

Hang your head over, hear the wind blow. It hooted across cold rocks.

“There are plenty of forest trails,” Danielis said. “Infantry and cavalry could use them, if they’re accustomed to such country. And the Cats are. Vehicles, wagons, big guns, that’s slower and harder. But they only need to outflank us, then they can get back onto Forty and Fifty—and cut us to pieces if we attempt pursuit. I’m afraid they’ve got us boxed.”

“The eastern slope—,” said Jacobsen helplessly.

“What for? Want to occupy a lot of sagebrush? No, we’re trapped here till they deploy in the flatlands,” Danielis closed a hand on his saddlehorn so that the knuckles went bloodless. “I miss my guess if this isn’t Colonel Mackenzie’s idea. It’s his style, for sure.”

“But then they’re between us and Frisco! With damn near our whole strength in the north—”

Between me and Laura, Danielis thought.

He said aloud: “I suggest, Major, we get hold of the C.O. at once. And then we better get on the radio.” From some well he drew the power to raise his head. The wind lashed his eyes. “This needn’t be a disaster. They’ll be easier to beat out in the open, actually, once we come to grips.”

The rains which fill the winter of the California lowlands were about ended. Northward along a highway whose pavement clopped under hoofs, Mackenzie rode through a tremendous greenness. Eucalyptus and live oak, flanking the road, exploded with new leaves. Beyond them on either side stretched a checkerboard of fields and vineyards, intricately hued, until the distant hills on the right and the higher nearer ones on the left made walls. The freeholder houses that had been scattered across the land a ways back were no longer to be seen. This end of the Napa Valley belonged to the Esper community at St. Helena. Clouds banked like white mountains over the western ridge. The breeze bore to Mackenzie a smell of growth and turned earth.

Behind him it rumbled with men. The Rolling Stones were on the move. The regiment proper kept to the highway, three thousand boots slamming down at once with an earthquake noise, and so did the guns and wagons. There was no immediate danger of attack. But the cavalrymen attached to the force must needs spread out. The sun flashed off their helmets and lance heads.

Mackenzie’s attention was directed forward. Amber walls and red tile roofs could be seen among plum trees that were a surf of pink and white blossoms. The community was big, several thousand people. The muscles tightened in his abdomen. “Think we can trust them?” he asked, not for the first time. “We’ve only got a radio agreement to a parley.”

Speyer, riding beside him, nodded: “I expect they’ll be honest. Particularly with our boys right outside. Espers believe in non-violence anyway.”

“Yeah, but if it did come to fighting—I know there aren’t very many adepts so far. The Order hasn’t been around long enough for that. But when you get this many Espers together, there’s bound to be a few who’ve gotten somewhere with their damned psionics. I don’t want my men blasted, or lifted in the air and dropped, or any such nasty thing.”

Speyer threw him a sidelong glance. “Are you scared of them, Jimbo?” he murmured.

“Hell, no!” Mackenzie wondered if he was a liar or not. “But I don’t like’em.”

“They do a lot of good. Among the poor, especially.”

“Sure, sure. Though any decent bossman looks after his own protectees, and we’ve got things like churches and hospices as well. I don’t see where just being charitable—and they can afford it, with the profits they make on their holdings—I don’t see where that gives any right to raise the orphans and pauper kids they take in, the way they do: so’s to make the poor tikes unfit for life anywhere outside.”

“The object of that, as you well know, is to orient them toward the so-called interior frontier. Which American civilization as a whole is not much interested in. Frankly, quite apart tn the remarkable powers some Espers have developed, I often envy them.”

“You, Phil?” Mackenzie goggled at his friend.

The lines drew deep in Speyer’s face. “This winter I’ve helped shoot a lot of my fellow countrymen,” he said low. “My mother and wife and kids are crowded with the rest of Village in the Mount Lassen fort, and when we said good-by we knew it was quite possibly permanent. And in the past I’ve helped shoot a lot of other men who never did me any personal harm.” He sighed. “I’ve often wondered what it’d be like to know peace, inside as well as outside.”

Mackenzie sent Laura and Tom out of his head.

“Of course,” Speyer went on, “the fundamental reason you—and I, for that matter—distrust the Espers is that they represent something alien to us. Something that may eventually choke out the whole concept of life that we grew up with. You know, a couple weeks back, in Sacramento I stopped in at the University research lab to see what was going on. Incredible! The ordinary soldier would swear it witchwork. It was certainly more weird than ... than simply reading minds or moving objects by thinking at them. But to you or me it’s a shiny new marvel. We’ll wallow in it.

“Now why’s that? Because the lab is scientific. Those men work with chemicals, electronics, subviral particles. That fits into the educated American’s world-view. But the mystic unity of creation ... no, not our cup of tea. The only way we can hope to achieve Oneness is to renounce everything we’ve ever believed in. At your age or mine, Jimbo, a man is seldom ready to tear down his whole life and start from scratch.”

“Maybe so.” Mackenzie lost interest. The settlement quite near now.

He turned around to Captain Hulse, riding a few paces behind. “Here we go,” he said. “Give my compliments to| Lieutenant Colonel Yamaguchi and tell him he’s in charge till we get back. If anything seems suspicious, he’s to act at his own discretion.”

“Yes, sir.” Hulse saluted and wheeled smartly about. There had been no practical need for Mackenzie to repeat what had long been agreed on; but he knew the value of ritual. He clicked his big sorrel gelding into a trot. At his back he heard bugles sound orders and sergeants howl at their platoons.

Speyer kept pace. Mackenzie had insisted on bringing an extra man to the discussion. His own wits were probably no match for a high-level Esper, but Phil’s might be

Not that there’s any question of diplomacy or whatever. I hope. To ease himself, he concentrated on what was real and present—hoofbeats, the rise and fall of the saddle beneath him, the horse’s muscles rippling between his thighs, the creak and jingle of his saber belt, the clean odor of the animal—and suddenly remembered this was the sort of trick the Espers recommended.

None of their communities was walled, as most towns and every bossman’s Station was. The officers turned off the highway ..and went down a street between colonnaded buildings. Side streets ran off in both directions. The settlement covered no great area, though, being composed of groups that lived together, sodalities or superfamilies or whatever you wanted to call them. Some hostility toward the Order and a great, many dirty jokes stemmed from that practice. But Speyer, who should know, said there was no more sexual swapping around than in the outside world. The idea was simply to get away from possessiveness, thee versus me, and to raise children as part of a whole rather than an insular clan.

The kids were out, staring round-eyed from the porticos, hundreds of them. They looked healthy and, underneath a natural fear of the invaders, happy enough. But pretty solemn, Mackenzie thought; and all in the same blue garb. Adults stood among them, expressionless. Everybody had come in from the fields as the regiment neared. The silence was like barricades. Mackenzie felt sweat begin to trickle down his ribs. When he emerged on the central square, he let out his breath in a near gasp.

A fountain, the basin carved into a lotus, tinkled in the middle of the plaza. Flowering trees stood around it. The plaza was defined on three sides by massive buildings that could be for storage. On the fourth side rose a smaller temple-like with a graceful cupola, obviously headquarters and meeting house. On its lowest step were ranked half a dozen blue-robed men, five of them husky youths. The sixth was middle-aged, the Yang and Yin on his breast. His features, ordinary in themselves, held an implacable calm.

Mackenzie and Speyer drew rein. The colonel flipped a soft salute. “Philosopher Gaines? I’m Mackenzie, here’s Major Speyer.” He swore at himself for being so awkward about it and wondered what to do with his hands. The young fellows he understood, more or less; they watched him with badly concealed hostility. But he had some trouble meeting Gaines eyes.

The settlement leader inclined his head. “Welcome, gentlemen. Won’t you come in?”

Mackenzie dismounted, hitched his horse to a post and removed his helmet. His worn reddish-brown uniform felt shabbier yet in these surroundings. “Thanks. Uh, I’ll have to make this quick.”

“To be sure. Follow me, please.”

Stiff-backed, the young men trailed after their elders, through an entry chamber and down a short hall. Speyer looked around at the mosaics. “Why, this is lovely,” he murmured.

“Thank you,” said Gaines. “Here’s my office.” He opened a door of superbly grained walnut and gestured the visitors through. When he closed it behind himself, the acolytes waited outside.

The room was austere, whitewashed walls enclosing little more than a desk, a shelf of books, and some backless chairs. A window opened on a garden. Gaines sat down. Mackenzie and Speyer followed suit, uncomfortable on this furniture.

“We’d better get right to business,” the colonel blurted. Gaines said nothing. At last Mackenzie must plow ahead:

“Here’s the situation.. Our force is to occupy Calistoga, with detachments on either side of the hills. That way we’ll control both the Napa Valley and the Valley of the Moon, from the northern ends, at least. The best place to station our eastern wing is here. We plan to establish a fortified camp in the field yonder. I’m sorry about the damage to your crops, but you’ll be compensated once the proper government has been restored. And food, medicine—you understand this army has to requisition such items, but we won’t let anybody suffer undue hardship and we’ll give receipts. Uh, as a precaution we’ll need to quarter a few men in this community, to sort of keep an eye on things. They’ll interfere as little as possible. Okay?”

“The charter, of the Order guarantees exemption from military requirements,” Gaines answered evenly. “In fact, no armed man is supposed to cross the boundary of any land by an Esper settlement. I cannot be a party to a violation of the law, Colonel.”

“If you want to split legal hairs, Philosopher,” Speyer said, “then I’ll remind you that both Fallon and Judge Brodsky have declared martial law. Ordinary rules are suspended.”

Gaines smiled. “Since only one government can be legitmate,” he said, “the proclamations of the other are necessarily null and void. To a disinterested observer, it would appear that Judge Fallon’s title is the stronger, especially when his side controls a large continuous area rather some scattered bossdoms.”

“Not any more, it doesn’t,” Mackenzie snapped.

Speyer gestured him back. “Perhaps you haven’t followed the developments of the last few weeks, Philosopher,” he said. “Allow me to recapitulate. The Sierra Command stole a march on the Fallonites and came down out of the mountains. There was almost nothing left in the middle part of California to oppose us, so we took over rapidiy. By occupying Sacramento, we control river and rail traffic. Our bases extend south below Bakersfield, with Yosemite and Kink’s Canyon not far away to provide sites for extremely strong positions. When we’ve consolidated this northern end of our gains, the Fallonite forces around Redding will be trap between us and the powerful bossmen who still hold out in the Trinity, Shasta, and Lassen regions. The very fact of our being here has forced the enemy to evacuate the Columbia Valley, so that San Francisco may be defended. It’s an open question which side today has the last word in larger territory.”

“What about the army that went into the Sierra against you?” Gaines inquired shrewdly. “Have you contained them?”

Mackenzie scowled. “No. That’s no secret. They got through the Mother Lode country and went around us. They’re down in Los Angeles and San Diego now.”

“A formidable host. Do you expect to stand them off definitely?”

“We’re going to make a hell of a good try,” Mackenzie said. “Where we are, we’ve got the advantage of interior communications. And most of the freeholders are glad to slip us word about whatever they observe. We can concentrate at any point the enemy starts to attack.”

“Pity that this rich land, must also be torn apart by war.”

“Yeah. Isn’t it?”

“Our strategic objective is obvious enough,” Speyer said. “We have cut enemy communications across the middle, except by sea, which is not very satisfactory for troops operating this far inland. We deny him access to a good part of his food and manufactured supplies, and most especially to the bulk of his fuel alcohol. The backbone of our own side is the bossdoms, which are almost self-contained economic and social units. Before long they’ll be in better shape than the foodless army they face. I think Judge Brodsky will be back in San Francisco before fall.”

“If your plans succeed,” Gaines said.

“That’s our worry.” Mackenzie leaned forward, one fist doubled on his knee. “Okay, Philosopher. I know you’d rather see Fallon come out on top, but I expect you’ve got more sense than to sign up in a lost cause. Will you cooperate with us?”

“The Order takes no part in political affairs, Colonel, except when its own existence is endangered.”

“Oh, pipe down. By ‘cooperate’ I don’t mean anything but keeping out from under our feet.”

“I am afraid that would still count as cooperation. We cannot have military establishments on our lands.”

Mackenzie stared at Gaines’ face, which had set into granite lines, and wondered if he had heard aright “Are you ordering us off?” a stranger asked with his voice.

“Yes,” the Philosopher said.

“With our artillery zeroed in on your town?”

“Would you really shell women and children, Colonel?”

O Nora—“We don’t need to. Our men can walk right in.”

“Against psi blasts? I beg you not to have those poor boys destroyed.” Gaines paused, then: “I might also point out that losing your regiment you imperil your whole cause. You are free to march around our holdings and proceed to Calistoga.”

Leaving a Fallonite nest at my back, spang across my communications southward. The teeth grated together in Mackenzie’s mouth.

Gaines rose. “The discussion is at an end, gentlemen,” he said. “You have one hour to get off our lands.”

Mackenzie and Speyer stood up too. “We’re not done yet,” the major said. Sweat studded his forehead and the long nose. “I want to make some further explanations.”

Gaines crossed the room and opened the door, “Show these gentlemen, out,” he said to the five acolytes.

“No, by God!” Mackenzie shouted. He clapped a hand to his sidearm.

“Inform the adepts,” Gaines said.

One of the young men turned. Mackenzie heard the slap of his sandals, running down the hall. Gaines nodded. “I think you had better go,” he said.

Speyer grew rigid. His eyes shut. They flew open and he breathed, “Inform the adepts?”

Mackenzie saw the stiffness break in Gaines’ countenance. There was no time for more than a second’s bewilderment. His body acted for him. The gun clanked from his holster simultaneously with Speyer’s.

“Get that messenger, Jimbo,” the major rapped. “I’ll keep these birds covered.”

As he plunged forward, Mackenzie found himself worrying about the regimental honor. Was it right to open hostilities when you had come on a parley? But Gaines had cut the talks off himself—

“Stop him!” Gaines yelled.

The four remaining acolytes sprang into motion. Two of them barred the doorway, the other two moved in on either side. “Hold it or I’ll shoot!” Speyer cried, and was ignored.

Mackenzie couldn’t bring himself to fire on unarmed men. He gave the youngster before him the pistol barrel in hit teeth. Bloody-faced, the Esper lurched back. Mackenzie stiff-armed the one coming in from the left. The third tried to fill the doorway. Mackenzie put a foot behind his ankles and pushed. As he went down, Mackenzie kicked him in the temple, hard enough to stun, and jumped over him.

The fourth was on his back. Mackenzie writhed about to] face the man. Those arms that hugged him, pinioning his gun, were bear strong. Mackenzie put the butt of his feed left hand under the fellow’s nose, and pushed. The acolyte must let go. Mackenzie gave him a knee in the stomach, whirled, and ran.

There was not much further commotion behind him, Phil must have them under control. Mackenzie pelted along hall, into the entry chamber. Where had that goddamn runner gone? He looked out the open entrance, onto the square. Sunlight hurt his eyes. His breath came in painful gulps, there was a switch in his side, yeah, he was getting old.

Blue robes fluttered from a street. Mackenzie recognized the messenger. The youth pointed at this building. A gabble of his words drifted faintly, through Mackenzie’s pulse. There were seven or eight men with him—older men, nothing to their clothes ... but Mackenzie, knew a high-ranking when he saw one. The acolyte was dismissed. Those he had summoned crossed the square with long strides.

(Terror knotted Mackenzie’s bowels. He put it down. A Catamount didn’t, stampede, even from somebody who could turn him inside out with a look. He could do nothing about the wretchedness that followed, though. If they clobber me, so much the better. I won’t lie awake nights wondering how Laura is.

The adepts were almost to the steps. Mackenzie trod forth. He swept his revolver in an arc. “Halt!” His voice sounded tiny in the stillness that brooded over the town. They jarred to a stop and stood there in a group. He saw them enforce a catlike relaxation, and their faces became visors. None spoke. Finally Mackenzie was unable to keep silent.

“This place is hereby occupied under the laws of war,” he said. “Go back to your quarters.”

“What have you done with our leader?” asked a tall man. His voice was even but deeply resonant.

“Read my mind and find out,” Mackenzie gibed. No, you’re being childish. “He’s okay, long’s he keeps his nose clean, too. Beat it.”

“We do not wish to pervert psionics to violence,” said the tall man. “Please do not force us.”

“Your chief sent for you before we’d done anything,” Mackenzie retorted. “Looks like violence was what he had in mind. On your way.”

The Espers exchanged glances. The tall man nodded. His companions walked slowly off. “I would like to see Philosopher Gaines,” the tall man said

“You will pretty soon.”

“Am I to understand that he is being held a prisoner?”

“Understand what you like.” The other Espers were rounding the corner of the building. “I don’t want to shoot. Go on before I have to.”

“An impasse of sorts,” the tall man said. “Neither of us wishes to injure one whem he considers defenseless. Allow me to conduct you off these grounds.”

Mackenzie wet his lips. Weather had chapped them rough. “If you can put a hex on me, go ahead,” he challenged. “Otherwise scram.”

“Well, I shall not hinder you from rejoining your men. It seems the easiest way of getting you to leave. But I most solemnly warn that any armed force which tries to enter will be annihilated.”

Guess I had better go get the boys, at that. Phil can’t mount guard on those guys forever.

The tall man went over to the hitching post. “Which of these horses is yours?” he asked blandly.

Almighty eager to get rid of me, isn’t he—Ho1y hellfire! There must be a rear door!

Mackenzie spun on his heel. The Esper shouted. Mackenzie dashed back through the entry chamber. His boots threw echoes at him. No, not to the left, there’s only the office that way. Right ... around this corner—

A long hall stretched before him. A stairway curved from > the middle. The other Espers were already on it.

“Halt!” Mackenzie called. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

The two men in the lead sped onward.The rest turned and headed down again, toward him.

He fired with care, to disable rather than kill. The reverberated with the explosions. One after another they dropped, a bullet in leg or hip or shoulder. With such small targets, Mackenzie missed some shots. As the tall man, the last of them, closed in from behind, the hammer clicked on an empty chamber.

Mackenzie drew his saber and gave him the flat it of alongside the head. The Esper lurched. Mackenzie got past and bounded up the stair. It wound like something nightmare. He thought his heart was going to go to pieces.

At the end, an iron door opened on a landing. One man was fumbling with the lock. The other blue-robe attacked.

Mackenzie stuck his sword between the Esper’s legs. As his opponent stumbled, the colonel threw a left hook to the jaw. The man sagged against the wall. Mackenzie grabbed the robe of the other and hurled him to the floor. “Get out,” he rattled.

They pulled themselves together and glared at him. He thrust air with his blade. “From now on I aim to kill,” he said.

“Get help, Dave,” said the one who had been opening door. “I’ll watch him.” The other went unevenly down stairs. The first man stood out of saber reach. “Do you to be destroyed?” he asked.

Mackenzie turned the knob at his back, but the door was still locked. “I don’t think you can do it,” he said. “Not without what’s here.”

The Esper struggled for self-control. They waited through minutes that stretched. Then a noise began below. The Esper inflated. “We have nothing but agricultural implements,” he said, “but you have only that blade. Will you surrender?”

Mackenzie spat on the floor. The Esper went on down.

Presently the attackers came into view. There might be a hundred, judging from the hubbub behind them them, but because of the curve Mackenzie could see no more than ten or fifteen burly fieldhands, their robes tucked high and sharp tools aloft. The landing was too wide for defense. He advanced to the stairway, where they could only come at him two at a time.

A couple of sawtoothed hay knives led the assault. Mackenzie parried one blow and chopped. His edge went into meat and struck bone. Blood ran out, impossibly red, even in the poor light here. The man fell to all fours with a shriek. Mackenzie dodged a cut from the companion. Metal clashed on metal. The weapons locked. Mackenzie’s arm was forced back. He looked into a broad suntanned face. The side of his hand smote the young man’s larynx. The Esper fell against the one behind and they went down together. It took a while to clear the tangle and resume action.

A pitchfork thrust for the colonel’s belly. He managed to grab it with his left hand, divert the tines, and chop at the hand on the shaft. A scythe gashed his right side. He saw blood but wasn’t aware of pain. A flesh wound, no more. He swept his saber back and forth. The forefront retreated from its whistling menace. But God, my knees are made of rubber. I can’t hold out another five minutes.

A bugle sounded. There was a spatter of gunfire. The mob on the staircase congealed. Someone screamed.

Boots banged across the ground floor. A voice rasped: “Hold everything, there! Drop those weapons and come on. First man tries anything gets shot.”

Mackenzie leaned on his saber and fought for air. He hardly heard the Espers melt away.

When he felt a little better, he went to one of the small windows and looked out. Horsemen were in the plaza. Not yet to sight, but nearing, he heard infantry.

Speyer arrived, followed by a sergeant of engineers and several privates. The major hurried to Mackenzie. “You sir? You’ve been hurt!”

“A scratch,” Mackenzie said. He was getting back his strength, though no sense of victory accompanied it, only the knowledge of aloneness. The injury began to sting. “Not worth a fuss, look.”

“Yes, I suppose you’ll live. Okay, men, get that door open.”

The engineers took forth their tools and assailed the lock with a vigor that must spring half from fear. “How’d you guys show up so soon?” Mackenzie asked.

“I thought there’d be trouble,” Speyer said, “so when heard shots I jumped through the window and ran around to my horse. That was just before those clodhoppers attacked you; I saw them gathering as I rode out. Our cavalry got in almost at once, of course, and the dogfaces weren’t far behind.”

“Any resistance?”

“No, not after we fired a few rounds in the air.” Speyer glanced outside. “We’re in full possession now.”

Mackenzie regarded the door. “Well,” he said, “I feel better about our having pulled guns on them in the office. Looks like their adepts really depend on plain old weapons, huh? And Esper communities aren’t supposed to have arms. Their charters say so ... That was a damn good guess yours, Phil. How’d you do it?”

“I sort of wondered why the chief had to send a runner to fetch guys that claim to be telepaths. There we go!”

The lock jingled apart. The sergeant opened the door, Mackenzie and Speyer went into the great room under the dome.

They walked around for a long time, wordless, among shapes of metal and less identifiable substances. Nothing was familiar. Mackenzie paused at last before a helix projected from a transparent cube. Formless darkness swirled within the box, sparked as if with tiny stars.

“I figured maybe the Espers had found a cache of old-stuff, from just before the Hellbombs,” he said in a muffled voice. “Ultra-secret weapons that never got a chance to be used. But this doesn’t look like it. Think so?”

“No,” Speyer said. “It doesn’t look to me as if these were made by human beings at all.”

Promotion was fast that year, casualties being so high. Captain Thomas Danielis was raised to major for his conspicuous part in putting down the revolt of the Los Angelos station. Soon after occurred the Battle of Maricopa, when loyalists failed bloodily to break the stranglehold of the Brodsky rebels on the San Joaquin Valley, and he was brevetted lieutenant colonel. The army was ordered northward and marched wearily under the coast ranges, half expecting attack from ther East. But the Brodskyites seemed too busy consolidating their latest gains. The trouble came from guerrillas with the hedgehog resistance of bossman Stations. After one fairly stiff clash, they stopped near Pinnacles for a breather.

Danielis made his way through camp, where tents stood in neat rows between the guns and men lay about dozing, talking and gambling, staring at the blank blue sky. The air was hot, pungent with cookfire smoke, horses, mules, dung, sweat, and oil; the green of the hills that lifted around the site was edging toward summer brown. He was idle until time for the conference the general had called, but restlessness drove him. Now I’m a father, he thought, and I’ve never seen my kid. I’m lucky, he reminded himself. I’ve got my life and limbs. He remembered Jacobsen dying in his arms at Maricopa. You wouldn’t have thought the human body could hold so much blood. Though maybe one was up longer human when the pain was so great that one could do nothing but shriek until the darkness came.

And I used to think war was glamorous. Hunger, thirst, inaction, terror, mutilation, death, and forever the sameness of boredom grinding you down to an ox. ... I’ve had it. I’m going into business after the war. Economic integration, when the bossman system breaks up, yes, there’ll be a lot of ways for a man to get ahead, but decently, without a weapon in his hand—Danielis realized he was repeating thoughts that were months old. What the hell else was there to think about, though?

The large tent where prisoners were interrogated lay near his path. A couple of privates were conducting a man inside. The fellow was blond, burly, and sullen. He wore a sergeant’s stripes, but otherwise his only item of uniform was the badge of Warden Echevarry, bossman in this part of the coastal mountains. A lumberjack in peacetime, Danielis guessed from the look of him; a soldier in a private army whenever the interests of Echevarry were threatened; captured in yesterday’s engagement.

On impulse, Danielis followed. He got into the tent as Captain Lambert, chubby behind a portable desk, finished the preliminaries, and blinked in the sudden gloom.

“Oh.” The intelligence officer started to rise. “Yes, sir?”

“At ease,” Danielis said. “Just thought I’d listen in.”

“Well, I’ll try to put on a good show for you.” Lambert reseated himself and looked at the prisoner, who stood with hunched, shoulders and widespread legs between his guards. “Now, sergeant, we’d like to know a few things.”

“I don’t have to say nothing except name, rank, and town,” the man growled. “You got those.”

“Um-m-m, that’s questionable. You aren’t a foreign soldier, you’re in rebellion against the government of your own country.”

“The hell I am! I’m an Echevarry man.”

“So what?”

“So my Judge is whoever Echevarry says. He says Brodsky. That makes you the rebel.”

“The law’s been changed.”

“Your mucking Fallon got no right to change any laws. Especially part of the Constitution. I’m no hillrunner, Captain. I went to school some. And every year our Warden reads people the Constitution.”

“Times have changed since it was drawn,” Lambert. His tone sharpened. “But I’m not going to argue with you. How many riflemen and how many archers in your company?”

Silence.

“We can make things a lot easier for you,” Lambert said. “I’m not asking you to do anything treasonable. All I want is to confirm some information I’ve already got.”

The man shook his head angrily.

Lambert gestured. One of the privates stepped behind the captive, took his arm, and twisted a little.

“Echevarry wouldn’t do that to me,” he said through white lips.

“Of course not,” Lambert said. “You’re his man.”

“Think I wanna be just a number on some list in Frisco? Damn right I’m my bossman’s man!”

Lambert gestured again. The private twisted harder.

“Hold on, there,” Daniels barked. “Stop that!”

The private let go, looking surprised. The prisoner drew a sobbing breath.

“I’m amazed at you, Captain Lambert,” Danielis said. He felt his own face reddening. “If this has been your usual practice, there’s going to be a court-martial.”

“No, sir,” Lambert said in a small voice. “Honest. Only ... they don’t talk. Hardly any of them. What’m I supposed to do?”

“Follow the rules of war.”

“With rebels?”

“Take that man away,” Danielis ordered. The privates made haste to do so.

“Sorry, sir,” Lambert muttered. “I guess ... I guess I’ve lost too many buddies. I hate to lose more, simply for lack of information.”

“Me Too.” A compassion rose in Danielis. He sat down on the table edge and began to roll a cigarette. “But you see, we aren’t in a regular war. And so, by a curious paradox, we have to follow the conventions more carefully than ever before.”

“I don’t quite understand, sir.”

“Danielis finished the cigarette and gave it to Lambert: olive branch or something. He started another for himself. The rebels aren’t rebels by tbeir own lights,” he said. “They’re being loyal to a tradition that we’re trying to curb, eventually to destroy. Let’s face it, the average bossman is a pretty good leader. He may be descended from some thug who grabbed power by strong-arm methods during the chaos, but now his family’s integrated itself with the region he rules. He knows it, and its people, inside out. He’s there in the flesh, a symbol of the community and its achievements, its folkways and essential independence. If you’re in trouble, you ’t have to work through some impersonal bureaucracy, you go direct to your bossman. His duties are as clearly defined as your own, and a good deal more demanding, to balance his privileges. He leads you in battle and in the ceremonies that give color and meaning to life. Your fathers and theirs have worked and played together for two or three hundred years. The land is alive with the memories of them. You and him belong.

“Well, that has to be swept away, so we can go on to a higher level. But we won’t reach that level by alienating everyone. We’re not a conquering army; we’re more like the Householder Guard putting down a riot in some city. The opposition is part and parcel of our own society.”

Lambert struck a match for him. He inhaled and finished: “On a practical plane, I might also remind you, Captain, that the federal armed forces, Fallonite and Brodskyite together, are none too large. Little more than a cadre, in fact. We’re a bunch of younger sons, countrymen who failed, poor city-men, adventurers, people who look to their regiment for that sense of wholeness they’ve grown up to expect and can’t find in civilian life.”

“You’re too deep for me, sir, I’m afraid,” Lambert said.

“Never mind,” Danielis sighed. “Just bear in mind, there are a good many more fighting men outside the opposing armies than in. If the bossmen could establish a unified command, that’d be the end of the Fallon government. Luckily, there’s too much provincial pride and too much geography between them for this to happen—unless we outrage them beyond endurance. What we want the ordinary freeholder, and even the ordinary bossman, to think, is: ‘Well, those Fallonites aren’t such bad guys, and if I keep on the right side of them I don’t stand to lose much, and should even be able to gain something at the expense of those who fight them to a finish. You see?”

“Y-yes. I guess so.”

“You’re a smart fellow, Lambert. You don’t have to beat information but of prisoners. Trick it out.”

“I’ll try, sir.”

“Good.” Danielis glanced at the watch that had been given him as per tradition, together with a sidearm, when he was first commissioned. (Such items were much too expensive for the common man. They had not been so in the age of mass production; and perhaps in the coming age—) “I have to go. See you around.”

He left the tent feeling somewhat more cheerful than before. No doubt I am a natural-born preacher, he admitted, and I never could quite join in the horseplay at mess, and a lot of jokes go completely by me; but if I can get even a few ideas across where they count, that’s pleasure enough. A strain of music came to him, some men and a banjo under a tree, and he found himself whistling along. It was good that this much morale remained, after Maricopa and a northward march whose purpose had not been divulged to anybody.

The conference tent was big enough to be called a pavilion. Two sentries stood at the entrance. Danielis was nearly the last to arrive, and found himself at the end of the table, opposite Brigadier General Perez. Smoke hazed the air and there was a muted buzz of conversation, but faces were taut.

When the blue-robed figure with a Yang and Yin on the entered, silence fell like a curtain. Danielis was astonished to recognize Philosopher Woodworth. He’d last seen the man in Los Angeles, and assumed he would stay at the Esper center there. Must have come here by special conveyance, under special orders ...

Perez introduced him. Both remained standing, under the eyes of the officers. “I have some important news for you, gentlemen,” Perez said most quietly. “You may consider it an honor to be here. It means that in my judgment you can be trusted first, to keep absolute silence about what you are going to hear, and second, to execute a vital operation of extreme difficulty.” Danielis was made shockingly aware that several men were not present whose rank indicated they should be.

“I repeat,” Perez said, “any breach of secrecy and the whole plan is ruined. In that case, the war will drag on for months or years. You know how bad our position is. You also know it will grow still worse as our stocks of those supplies the enemy now denies us are consumed. We could even be beaten. I’m not defeatist to say that, only realistic. We could lose the war.

“On the other hand, if this new scheme pans out, we may break the enemy’s back this very month.”

He paused to let that sink in before continuing.

“The plan was worked out by GHQ in conjunction with Esper Central in San Francisco some weeks ago. It’s the reason we are headed north—” He let the gasp subside that through the stifling air. “Yes, you know that the Esper Order is neutral in political disputes. But you also know that it defends itself when attacked. And you probably know that an attack was made on it by the rebels. They seized the Napa settlement and have been spreading malicious rumors the Order since then. Would you like to comment on that, Philosopher Woodworth?”

The man in blue nodded and said coolly: “We’ve our own way of findin’ out things—intelligence service, you might say—so I can give y’all a report of the facts. St. Helena was attacked at a time when most of its adepts were away, helpin’ a new community get started out in Montana.” How did they move so fast? Danielis wondered. Teleport, or what? “I don’t know, myself, if the enemy knew about that or were just lucky. Anyhow, when the two or three adepts that were left came and warned them off, fightin’ broke out and the Adepts were killed before they could act.” He smiled. “We don’t don’t claim to be immortal, except the way every living thing is immortal. Nor infallible, either. So now St. Helena’s occupied. We don’t figure to take any immediate steps about that, because a lot of people in the community might get hurt.

“As for the yarns the enemy command been handin’ out, well, I reckon I’d do the same, if I had a chance like that. Everybody knows an adept can do things that nobody else can. Troops that realize they’ve done wrong to the Order are goin’ to be scared of supernatural revenge. You’re educated men here, and know there’s nothin’ supernatural involved, just a way to use the powers latent in most of us. You also know the Order doesn’t believe in revenge. But the ordinary foot soldier doesn’t think your way. His officers have got to restore his spirit somehow. So they fake some equipment and tell him that’s what the adepts were really usin’—an advanced technology, sure, but only a set of machines that can be put out of action if you’re brave, same as any other machine. That’s what happened.

“Still, it is a threat to the Order; and we can’t let an attack on our people go unpunished, either. So Esper Central has decided to help out your side. The sooner this war’s over, the better for everybody.”

A sigh gusted around the tattle, and a few exultant oaths. The hair stirred on Danielis’ neck. Perez lifted a hand.

“Not too fast, please,” the general said. “The adepts are not going to go around blasting your opponents for you. It was one hell of a tough decision for them to do as much as they agreed to. I, uh, understand that the, uh, personal development of every Esper will be set back many years by this much violence. They’re making a big sacrifice.

“By their charter, they can use psionics to defend an establishment against attack. Okay ... an assault on San Francisco will be construed as one on Central, their work! headquarters.”

The realization of what was to come was blinding to Danielis. He scarcely heard Perez’ carefully dry continuation:

“Let’s review the strategic picture. By now the enemy holds more than half of California, all of Oregon and Idaho, and a good deal of Washington. We, this army, we’re using the last land access to San Francisco that we’ve got. The enemy hasn’t tried to pinch that off yet, because the troops we pulled out of the north—those that aren’t in the field at present—make a strong city, garrison that’d sally out. He’s collecting too much profit elsewhere to accept the cost.

“Nor can he invest the city with any hope of success. We hold Puget Sound and the southern California ports. Our ships bring in ample food and munitions. His own sea power much inferior to ours; chiefly schooners donated by coastal bossmen operating out of Portland. He might overwhelm an occasional convoy, but hasn’t tried that so far because it isn’t worth his trouble; there would be others, more heavily escorted. And of course he can’t enter the Bay, with artillery and rocket emplacements on both sides of the Golden Gate. No, about all be can do is maintain some water communication with Hawaii and Alaska.

“Nevertheless, his ultimate object is San Francisco. It has to be—the seat of government and industry, the heart of the nation.

“Well; then, here’s the plan. Our army is to engage the Sierra Command and its militia auxiliaries again, striking out of San Jose. That’s a perfectly logical maneuver. Successful, it would cut his California forces in two. We know, in fact, that he is already concentrating men in anticipation of precisely such an attempt.

“We aren’t going to succeed. We’ll give him a good stiff battle and be thrown back. That’s the hardest part: to feign serious defeat, even convincing our own troops, and still maintain good order. Well have a lot of details to thresh out about that

“We’ll retreat northward, up the Peninsula toward Frisco. The enemy is bound to pursue. It will look like a God-given chance to destroy us and get to the city walls.

“When he is well into the Peninsula, with the ocean on his left and the Bay on his right, we will outflank him and attack from the rear. The Esper adepts will be there to help. Suddenly he’ll be caught, between us and the capital’s land defenses. What the adepts don’t wipe out, we will. Nothing will remain of the Sierra Command but a few garrisons. The rest of the war will be a mopping-up operation.

“It’s a brilliant piece of strategy. Like all such, it’s damn difficult to execute. Are you prepared to do the job?”

Danielis didn’t raise his voice with the others. He was thinking too hard of Laura.

Northward and to the right there was some fighting. Cannon spoke occasionally, or a drumfire of rifles; smoke lay thin over the grassland and the wind-gnarled live oaks which covered those hills. But down along the seacoast was only surf, blowing air, a hiss of sand across the dunes.

Mackenzie rode on the beach, where the footing was easiest and the view wildest. Most of his regiment were inland. But that was a wilderness: rough ground, woods, the snags of ancient homes, making travel slow and hard. Once this area had been densely peopled, but the firestorm after the Hell-bomb scrubbed it clean and today’s reduced population could not make a go on such infertile soil. There didn’t even seem to be any foremen near this left wing of the army.

The Rolling Stones had certainly not been given it for that reason. They could have borne the brunt at the center as well as those outfits which actually were there, driving the enemy back toward San Francisco. They had been blooded often enough in this war, when they operated out of Calistoga to help expel the Fallonites from northern California. So thoroughly had that job been done that now only a skeleton force need remain in charge. Nearly the whole Sierra Command had gathered at Modesto, met the northward-moving opposition army that struck at them out of San Jose, and sent it in a shooting retreat. Another day or so, and the white, city should appear before their eyes.

And there the enemy will be sure to make a stand, Mackenzie thought, with the garrison to reinforce him. And his positions will have to be shelled: maybe we’ll have to take the place street by street. Laura, kid, will you be alive at the end?

Of course, maybe it won’t happen that way. Maybe my scheme’ll work and we’ll win easy—What a horrible word “maybe” is! He slapped his hands together with a pistol sound.

Speyer threw him a glance. The major’s people were safe; he’d even been able to visit them at Mount Lassen, after the northern campaign was over. “Rough,” he said.

“Rough on everybody,” Mackenzie said with a thick anger. “This is a filthy war.”

Speyer shrugged. “No different from most, except that this time Pacificans are on the receiving as well as the giving end.”

“You know damn well I never liked the business, anyplace.”

“What man in his right mind does?”

“When I want a sermon I’ll ask for one.”

“Sorry,” said Speyer, and.meant it.

“I’m sorry too,” said Mackenzie, instantlycontrite, “Nerves on edge. Damnation! I could almost wish for some action.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised if we got some. This whole affair smells wrong to me.”

Mackenzie looked around him. On the right horizon was bounded by hills, beyond which the low but massive San Bruno range lifted. Here and there he spied one of his own squads, afoot or ahorse. Overhead sputtered a plane. But there was plenty of concealment for a redoubt. Hell could erupt at any minute ... though necessarily a small hell, quickly reduced by howitzer or bayonet, casualties light. (Huh! Every one of those light casualties was a man dead, with women and children to weep for him, or a man staring at the fragment of his arm, or a man with eyes and face gone in a burst of shot, and what kind of unsoldierly thoughts were these?)

Seeking comfort, Mackenzie glanced left. The ocean rolled greenish-gray, glittering far out, rising and breaking in a roar of white combers closer to land. He smelted salt and kelp. A few gulls mewed above dazzling sands. There was no sail or smoke-puff—only emptiness. The convoys from Puget Sound to San Francisco and the lean swift ships of the coastal bossmen were miles beyond the curve of the world.

Which was as it should be. Maybe things were working out okay on the high waters. One could only try, and hope. And ... it had been his suggestion, James Mackenzie speaking at the conference General Cruikshank held between the battles of Mariposa and San Jose; the same James Mackenzie who had first proposed that the Sierra Command come down out of the mountains, and who had exposed the gigantic fraud of Esperdom, and succeeded in playing down for his men the fact that behind the fraud lay a mystery one hardly dared think about. He would endure in the chronicles, that colonel, they would sing ballads about him for half a thousand years.

Only it didn’t feel that way, James Mackenzie knew he was not much more than average bright under the best of conditions, now dull-minded with weariness and terrified of his daughter’s fate. For himself he was haunted by the fear of certain crippling wounds. Often he had to drink himself to sleep. He was shaved, because an officer must maintain appearances, but realized very well that if he hadn’t had an orderly to do the job for him he would be as shaggy as any buck private. His uniform was faded and threadbare, his body stank and itched, his mouth yearned for tobacco but there had been some trouble in the commissariat and they were lucky to eat. His achievements amounted to patchwork jobs carried out in utter confusion, or to slogging like this and wishing only for an end to the whole mess. One day, win or lose, his body would give out on him—he could feel the machinery wearing to pieces, arthritic twinges, shortness of breath, dozing off in the middle of things, and the termination of himself would be as undignified and lonely as that of every other human slob. Hero? What an all-time laugh!

He yanked his mind back to the unmediate situation. Behind him a core of the regiment accompanied the artillery along the beach, a thousand men with motorized gun carriages, caissons, mule-drawn wagons, a few trucks, one precious armored car. They were a dun mass topped with helmets, in loose formation, rifles or bows to hand. The sand deadened their footfalls, so that only the surf and wind could be heard. But whenever the wind sank, Mackenzie caught the tune of the hex corps: a dozen leathery older men, mostly Indians, carrying the wands of power and whistling together the Song Against Witches. He took no stock in magic himself, yet when that sound came to him the skin crawled along his backbone.

Everything’s in good order, he insisted. We’re doing fine.

Then: But Phil’s right. The enemy should have fought through to a southward line of retreat, not let themselves be boxed.

Captain Hulse galloped close. Sand spurted when he checked his horse. “Patrol report, sir.”

“Well?” Mackenae realized he had almost shouted. “Go ahead.”

“Considerable activity observed about five miles northeast.”

Mackenzie stiffened. “Haven’t you anything more definite than that?”

“Not so far, with the ground so broken.”

“Get some aerial reconnaissance there, for Pete’s sake!”

“Yes, sir. I’ll throw out more scouts, too.”

“Carry on here, Phil.” Mackenzie headed-toward the radio truck. He carried a minicom in his saddlebag, of course, but San Francisco had been continuously jamming on all bands and you needed a powerful set to punch a signal even a few miles. Patrols must communicate by messenger.

He noticed that the firing inland had slaked off. There were decent roads in the interior Peninsula a ways further north, where some resettlement had taken place. The enemy, still in possession of that area, could use them to effect rapid movements.

If they withdrew their center and hit our flanks, where we’re weakest—

A voice from field HQ, barely audible through the squeals and buzzes, took his report and gave back what had been seen elsewhere. Large maneuvers right and left, yes, it did seem the Fallonites were going to try a breakthrough. Could be a feint, though. The main body of the Sierrans must remain where it was until the situation became clearer. The Rolling Stones must hold out a while on their own.

“Will do,” Mackenzie returned to the head of his columns. Speyer nodded grimly at the word.

“Better get prepared, hadn’t we?”

“Uh-huh.” Mackenzie lost himself in a welter of commands, as officer after officer rode to him. The outlying sections were to be pulled in. The beach was to be defended, with the high ground immediately above.

“Men scurried, horses neighed, guns trundled about. The scout plane returned, flying low enough to get a transmission through: yes, definitely an attack on the way hard to tell how big a force, through the damned tree cover and down in the damned arroyos, but it might well be at brigade strength.

Mackenzie established himself on a hilltop with his staff and runners. A line of artillery stretched beneath him, across the strand. Cavalry waited behind them, lances agleam, an infantry company for support. Otherwise the foot soldiers had faded into the landscape. The sea boomed its own cannonade, and gulls began to gather as if they knew there would be meat before long.

“Think we can hold them?” Speyer asked.

“Sure,” Mackenzie said, “If they come down H»e beach, we’ll enfilade them, as well as shooting up their front. If they come higher, well, that’s a. textbook example of defensible terrain. ’Course, if another troop punches jthrough the lines further inland, we’ll be cut off, but that isn’t our worry right now.”

“They must hope to get around our army and attack our rear.”

“Guess so. Not too smart of them, though. We can approach Frisco just as easily fighting backwards as forwards.”

“Unless the city garrison makes a sally.”

“Even then. Total numerical strengths are about equal, and we’ve got more ammo and alky. Also a lot of bossman militia for auxiliaries, wbo’re used to disorganized warfare in hilly ground.”

“If we do whip them—” Speyer shut his lips together.

“Go on,” Mackenzie said.

“Nothing.”

“The hell it is. You were about to remind me of the next step: how do we take the city without too high a cost to both sides? Well, I happen to know we’ve got a hole card to play there, which might help.”

Speyer turned pitying eyes away from Mackenzie. Silence fell on the hilltop.

It was an unconscjonably long time before the enemy came in view, first a few outriders far down the dunes, then the body of him, pouring from the ridges and gullies and woods. Reports flickered about Mackenzie—a powerful force, nearly twice as big as ours, but with little artillery, by now badly short of fuel, they must depend far more than we on animals to move their equipment. They were evidently going to change, accept losses in order to get sabers and bayonets among the Rolling Stones’ cannon. Mackenzie issued his directions accordingly.

The hostiles formed up, a mile or so distant. Through his field glasses Mackenzie recognized them, red sashes of the Madera Horse, green and gold pennon of the Dagos, fluttering in the iodine wind. He’d campaigned with both outfits in the past. It was treacherous to remember that Ives favored a blunt, wedge formation and use the fact against him ... One enemy armored car and some fieldpieces, light horse-drawn ones, gleamed wickedly in the sunlight.

Bugles blew shrill. The Fallonite cavalry laid lance in rest and started trotting. They gathered speed as they went, a canter, a gallop, until the earth trembled with them. Then their infantry got going, flanked by its guns. The car rolled along between the first and second line of foot. Oddly, it had no rocket launcher on top or repeater barrels thrust from the fire slits. Those were good troops, Mackenzie thought, advancing in close order with that ripple down the ranks which bespoke veterans. He hated what must happen.

His defense waked immobile on the sand. Fire crackled from the hillsides, where mortar squads and riflemen crouched. A rider toppled, a dogface clutched his belly and went to his knees, their companions behind moved forward to close the lines again. Mackenzie looked to his howitzers. Men stood tensed at sights and lanyards. Let the foe get well in range—There! Yamaguchi, mounted just rearward of the gunners, drew his saber and flashed the blade downward. Cannon, bellowed. Fire spurted through smoke, sand gouted up, shrapnel sleeted over the charging force. At once the gun crews fell into the rhythm of reloading, relaying, refiring, the steady three rounds per minute which conserved barrels and broke armies. Horses screamed in their own tangled red guts. But not many had been hit. The Madera cavalry continued in full gallop. Their lead was so close now that Mackenzie’s glasses picked out a face, red, freckled, a ranch boy turned trooper, his mouth stretched out of shape as he yelled.

The archers behind the defending cannon let go. Arrows whistled skyward, flight after flight, curved past the gulls and down again. Flame and smoke ran ragged in the wiry hill grass, out of the ragged-leaved live oak copses. Men pitched in the sand, like insects that had stepped on. The fieldpieces on the enemy left flank swiveled about, and spat return fire. Futile ... but, God, their officer had courage! Mackenzie saw the advancing lines waver. An attack by his own horse and foot, down the beach, ought to crumple them. “Get ready to move,” he into his minicom. He saw his men poise. The cannon belched anew.

The oncoming armored car slowed to a halt. Something within it chattered, loud enough to hear through the explosions.

A blue-white sheet ran over the nearest bill. Mackenzie shut half-blinded eyes. When he opened them again, he saw a grass fire through the crazy patterns of after-image, A Rolling Stone burst from cover, howling, his clothes ablaze. The man hit the sand and rolled over. That part of the beach lifted in one monster wave, crested twenty feet high, and smashed across the hill. The burning soldier vanished in the avalanche that buried his comrades.

“Psi blast!” someone screamed, thin and horrible, through the chaos and ground-shudder. “The Espers—”

Unbelievably, a bugle sounded and the Sierran cavalry lunged forward. Past their own guns, on against the scattering opposition ... and horses and riders rose into the air, tumbled in a giant’s invisible whirligig, crashed bone-break-to earth again. The second rank of lancers broke. Mounts reared, pawed the air, wheeled and fled in every direction.

A terrible deep hum filled the sky. Mackenzie saw the world through a blaze, as if his brain were being dashed back forth between the walls of his skull. Another glare ran across the hills, higher this time, burning men alive.

“They’ll wipe us out,” Speyer called, a dim voice that rose and fell on the air tides. “They’ll reform as we stampede—”

“No!” Mackenzie shouted, “The adepts must be in that car. Come on!”

Most of his horse had recoiled on their own artillery, one squealing trampling wreck. The infantry stood rigid, but about to bolt. A glance thrown to his right showed Mackenzie how the enemy themselves were in confusion, this had been a terrifying surprise to them too, but as soon as they got over the shock they’d advance and there’d be nothing left to stop them. ... It was as if another man spurred his mount. The animal fought, foam-flecked with panic. He shagged its head around, brutally, and dug in spurs. They rushed down the hill toward the guns.

He needed all his strength to halt the gelding before the cannon mouths. A man slumped dead by his piece, though there was no mark on him. Mackenzie jumped to the ground. His steed bolted.

He hadn’t time to worry about that. Where was help? “Come here!” His yell was lost in the riot. But suddenly another man was beside him, Speyer, snatching up a shell and slamming it into the breach. Mackenzie squinted through the telescope, took a bearing by guess and feel. He could see the Esper car where it squatted among dead and hurt. At this distance it looked too small to have blackened acres.

Speyer helped him lay the howitzer. He jerked the lanyard. The gun roared and sprang. The shell burst a few yards short of target, sand spurted and metal fragments whined.

Speyer had the next one loaded. Mackenzie aimed and fired.. Overshot this time, but not by much. The car rocked. Concussion might have hurt the Espers inside; at least, the psi blasts had stopped. But it was necessary to strike before the foe got organized again.

He ran toward his own regimental car. The door gaped, the crew had fled. He threw himself into the driver’s seat. Speyer clanged the door shut and stuck his face in the hood of the rocket-launcher periscope. Mackenzie raced the machine forward. The banner on its rooftop snapped in the wind.

Speyer aimed the launcher and pressed the firing button. The missile burned across intervening yards and exploded. The other car lurched on its wheels. A hole opened in its side.

If the boys will only rally and advance—Well, if they don’t, I’m done for anyway. Mackenzie squealed to a stop, flung open the door and leaped out. Curled, blackened metal framed his entry. He wriggled through, into murk and stenches.

Two Espers lay there. The driver was dead, a chunk steel through his breast. The other one, the adept, whimpered among his unhuman instruments. His face was hidden by blood. Mackenzie pitched the corpse on its side and pulled off the robe. He snatched a curving tube of metal and tumbled back out.

Speyer was still in the undamaged car, firing repeaters at those hostiles who ventured near. Mackenzie jumped onto the ladder of the disabled machine, climbed to its roof and stood erect. He waved the blue robe in one hand and the weapon he did not understand in the other. “Come on, you sons!” he shouted, tiny against the sea wind. “We’ve knocked them out for you! Want your breakfast in bed too?”

One bullet buzzed past his ear. Nothing else. Most of them, horse and foot, stayed frozen. In that immense stillness he could not tell if he heard sun or the blood in his own veins.

Then a bugle called. The hex corps whistled triumphantly; their tomtoms thuttered. A ragged line of his infantry began to move toward him. More followed. The cavalry joined man by man and unit by unit, on their.flanks. Soldiers ran down the smoking hillsides.

Mackenzie sprang to sand again and into his car. “Let’s get back,” he told Speyer. “We got a battle to finish.”

“Shut up!” Tom Danielis said.

Philosopher Woodworth stared at him. Fog swirled and dripped in the forest, hiding the land and the brigade, gray nothingness through which came a muffled noise of men and horses and wheels, an isolated and infinitely weary sound. The air was cold, and clothing hung heavy on the skin.

“Sir,” protested Major Lescarbault The eyes were wide and shocked in his gaunted face.

“I dare tell a ranking Esper to stop quacking about a subject of which he’s totally ignorant?” Danielis answered. “Well, it’s past time that somebody did.”

Woodworth recovered his poise. “All I said, son, was that we should consolidate our adepts and strike the Brodskyite center,” he reproved. “What’s wrong with that?”

Danielis clenched his fists. “Nothing,” be said, “except it invites a worse disaster than you’ve brought on us yet.”

“A setback or two,” Lescarbault argued. “They did rout us on the west, but we turned their flank here by the Bay.”

“With the net result that their main body pivoted, attacked, and split us in half,” Danielis snapped. “The Espers have been scant use since then ... now the rebels know they need vehicles to transport their weapons, and can be killed. Artillery zeroes in on their positions, or bands of woodsmen hit and run, leaving them dead, or the enemy simply goes around any spot where they’re known to be. We haven’t got enough adepts!”

“That’s why I proposed gettin’ them in one group, too big to withstand,”

“And too cumbersome to be of any value,” Danielis replied.

He felt more than a little sickened, knowing how the order had cheated him his whole life; yes, he thought that was the real bitterness, not the fact that the adepts had failed to defeat the rebels—by failing, essentially to break their spirit—but the fact that the adepts were only someone else’s cat’s paws and every gentle, earnest soul in every Esper community was only someone’s dupe.

Wildly he wanted to return to Laura—there’d been no chance thus far to see her—Laura and the kid, the last honest reality this fog-world had left him. He mastered himself and went on more evenly:

“The adepts, what few of them survive, will of course be helpful in defending San Francisco. An army free to move around in the field can deal with them, one way or another, but your ... your weapons, can repel an assault on the city walls. So that’s where I’m going to take them.”

Probably the best he could do. There was no word from the northern half of the loyalist army. Doubtless they’d withdrawn to the capital, suffering heavy losses en route. Radio jamming continued, hampering friendly and hostile communications alike. He had to take action, either, retreat southward or fight his way through to the city. The latter course seamed wisest. He didn’t believe that Laura had much to do with his choice.

“I’m no adept myself,” Woodworth said. “I can’t call them mind to mind.”

“You mean you cant use their equivalent of radio?” Danielis said brutally. “Well, you’ve got an adept in attendance. Have him pass the word.”

Woodworth flinched. “I hope,” he said, “I hope you understand this came as a surprise to me too.”

“Oh, yes, certainly, Philosopher,” Lescarbault said unbidden.

Woodworth swallowed. “I still hold with the Way and the Order,” he said harshly. “There’s nothin’ else I can do. Is there? The Grand Seeker has promised a full explanation when this is over.” He shook his head. “Okay, son, I’ll do what I can.”

A certain compassion touched Danielis as the blue robe disappeared into the fog. He rapped his orders the more severely.

Slowly his command got going. He was with the Second Brigade; the rest were strewn over the Peninsula in the fragments into which the rebels had knocked them. He hoped scattered adepts, joining him on his march through the San Bruno range, would guide some of those to him. But most, wandering demoralized, were sere to surrender to the first rebels they came upon.

He rode near the front, on a muddy road that snaked over the highlands. His helmet was a monstrous weight. The horse stumbled beneath him, exhausted by—how many days?—of march, countermarch, battle, skirmish, thin rations or none, heat and cold and fear, in an empty land. Poor beast, he’d see that it got proper treatment when they reached the city. That all those poor beasts behind him did, after trudging and fighting and trudging again until their eyes were filmed with fatigue.

There’ll be chance enough for rest in San Francisco. We’re impregnable there, walls and cannon and the Esper machines to landward, the sea that feeds us at our backs. We can recover our strength, regroup our forces, bring fresh troops down from Washington and up from the south by water. The war isn’t decided yet ... God help us.

I wonder if it will ever be.

And then, will Jimbo Mackenzie come to see us, sit by the fire and swap yarns about what we did? Or talk about something else, anything else? If not, that’s too high a price for victory.

Maybe not too high a price for what we’ve learned, though. Strangers on this planet ... what else could have forged those weapons? The adepts will talk if I myself have to torture them till they do. But Danielis remembered tales muttered in the fisher huts of his boyhood, after dark, when ghosts walked in old men’s minds. Before the holocaust there had been legends about the stars, and the legends lived on. He didn’t know if he would be able to look again at the night sky without a shiver.

This damned fog—

Hoofs thudded. Danielis half drew his sidearm. But the rider was a scout of his own, who raised a drenched sleeve in salute. “Colonel, an enemy force about ten miles ahead by road. Big.”

So we’ll have to fight now. “Do they seem aware of us?”

“No, sir. They’re proceeding east along the ridge there.”

“Probably figure to occupy the Candlestick Park ruins,” Danielis murmured. His body was too tired for excitement. “Good stronghold, that. Very well, Corporal.” He turned to Lescarbault and issued instructions.

The brigade formed itself in the formlessness. Patrols went out.Information began to flow back, and Danielis sketched a plan that ought to work. He didn’t want to try for a decisive engagement, only brush the enemy aside and discourage them from pursuit. His men must be spared, as many as possible, for the city defense and the eventual counteroffensive.

Lescarbault came back. “Sir! The radio jamming’s ended!”

“What?” Danielis blinked, not quite comphrehending.

“Yes, sir. I’ve been using a minicom—” Lescarbault lifted the wrist on which his tiny transceiver was strapped—“for very short-range work, passing the battalion commander their orders. The interference stopped a couple of minutes aga. Clear as daylight.”

Danielis pulled the wrist toward his own mouth, “Hello, hello, radio wagon, this is the CO. You read me?”

“Yes, sir,” said the voice.

“They turned off the jammer in the city for a reason. Get me the open military band.”

“Yes, sir.” Pause, while men mumbled and water runneled unseen in die arroyos. A wraith smoked past Danielis’ eyes. Drops coursed off his helmet and down his collar. The horse’s mane hung sodden.

Like the scream of an insect:

“—here at once! Every unit in the field, get to San Francisco at once! We’re under attack by sea!”

Danielis let go Lescarbault’s arm. He stared into emptiness while the voice wailed on and forever on.

“—bombarding Potrero Point. Decks jammed with troops. They must figure to make a landing there—”

Danielis’ mind raced ahead of the words. It was as if Esp were no lie, as if he scanned the beloved city himself and felt her wounds in his own flesh. There was no fog around the Gate, of course, or so detailed a description could not have been given. Well, probably some streamers of it rolled in under the rusted remnants of the bridge, themselves like snowbanks against blue-green water and brilliant sky. But most of the Bay stood open to the sun. On the opposite shore lifted the Eastbay hills, green with gardens and agleam with villas; and Marin shouldered heavenward across the strait; looking to the roofs and walls and heights that were San Francisco. The convoy had gone between the coast defenses that could have smashed it, an unusually large convoy and not on time: but still the familiar big-bellied hulls, white sails, occasional fuming stacks, that kept the city fed. There had been an explanation about trouble with commerce raiders; and the fleet was passed on into the Bay, where San Francisco had no walls. Then the gun covers were taken off and the holds vomited armed men.

Yes, they did seize a convoy, those piratical schooners. Used radio jamming of their own; together with ours, that choked off any cry of wanting. They threw our supplies overboard and embarked the bossman militia. Some spy or traitor gave them the recognition signals. Now the capital lies open to them, her garrison stripped, hardly an adept left in Esper Central, the Sierrans thrusting against her southern gates, and Laura without me.

“We’re coming!” Danielis yelled. His brigade groaned into speed behind iim. They struck with a desperate ferocity that carried them deep into enemy positions and then stranded them, in separated groups. It became knife and saber in the fog. But Danielis, because he led the charge, had already taken a grenade on his breast.

East and south, in the harbor district and at the wreck of the Peninsula wall, there was still some fighting. As he rode higher, Mackenzie saw how those parts were dimmed by smoke, which the wind scattered, to show rubble that had been houses. The sound of firing drifted to him. But otherwise the city shone untouched, roofs and white walls in a web of streets, church spires raking the sky like masts, Federal House on Nob Hill and the Watchtower on Telegraph Hill as he remembered them from childhood visits. The Bay glittered insolently beautiful.

But he had no time for admiring the view, nor for wonderinng where Laura huddled. The attack on Twin Peaks must be swift, for surely Esper Central would defend itself. On the avenue climbing the opposite side of those great humps, Speyer led half the Rolling Stones. (Yamaguchi lay dead on a pockmarked beach.) Mackenzie himself was taking this side. Horses clopped along Portola, between blankly shuttered mansions; guns trundled and creaked, boots knocked on pavement, moccasins slithered, weapons rattled, men breathed heavily and the hex corps whistled against unknown demons. But silence overwhelmed the noise, echoes trapped it and let it die. Mackenzie recollected nightmares when he fled down a corridor which had no end. Even if they don’t cut loose at us, he thought bleakly, we’ve got to seize their place before our nerve gives out.

Twin Peaks Boulevard turned off Portola and wound steeply to the right The houses ended; wild grasses alone covered the quasi-sacred hills, up to the tops where stood the buildings forbidden to all but adepts. Those two soaring, iridescent, fountainlike skyscrapers had been raised by night, within a matter of weeks. Something like a moan stirred at Mackenzie’s back.

“Bugler, sound the advance. On the double!”

A child’s jeering, die notes lifted and were lost. Sweat stung Mackenzie’s eyes. If he failed and was killed, that didn’t matter too much ... after everything which had happened ... but the regiment, the regiment—

Flame shot across the street, the color of hell. There went a hiss and a roar. The pavement lay trenched, .molten, stroking and reeking. Mackenzie wrestled his horse to a standstill. A warning only. But if they had enough adepts to handle us, would they bother trying to warn us off? “Artillery, open fire!”

The field guns bellowed together, not only howitzers but motorized 75s taken along from Alemany Gate’s emplacements. Shells went overhead with a locomotive sound. They burst on the walls above and the racket thundered back down the wind.

Mackenzie tensed himself for an Esper blast, but none came. Had they knocked out the final defensive post in their own first barrage? Smoke cleared from the heights and he saw that the colors which played in the tower were dead and that wounds gaped across loveliness, showing unbelievably thin framework. It was like seeing the bones of a woman murdered by his hand.

Quick, though! He issued a string of commands and led the horse and foot on. The battery stayed where it was, firing and firing with hysterical fury. The dry brown grass started to burn, as red-hot fragments scattered across the slope. Through mushroom bursts, Mackenzie saw the building crumble. Whole sheets of facing broke and fell to earth. The skeleton vibrated, took a direct hit and sang in metal agony, slumped and twisted apart.

What was that which stood within?

There were no separate rooms, no floors, nothing but girders, enigmatic machines, here and there a globe still aglow like a minor sun. The structure bad enclosed something nearly as tall as itself, a finned and shining column, almost like a rocket shell but impossibly huge and fair.

Their spaceship, Mackenzie thought in the clamor. Yes, of course, the ancients had begun making spaceships, and we always figured we would again someday. This, though ...

The archers lifted a tribal screech. The riflemen and cavalry took it up, crazy, jubilant, the howl of a beast of prey. By Satan, we’ve whipped the stars themselves! As they burst onto the hillcrest, the shelling stopped and their yells overrode the wind. Smoke was acrid as blood smell in their nostrils.

A few dead blue-robers could be seen in the debris. Some half-dozen survivors milled toward the ship. A bowman let fly. His arrow glanced off the landing gear but brought the Espers to a halt. Troopers poured over the shards to capture them.

Mackenzie reined in. Something that was not human lay crushed near a machine. Its blood was deep violet color. When the people have seen this, that’s the end of the Order. He felt no triumph. At St Helena he had come to appreciate how fundamentally good the believers were.

But this was no moment for regret, or for wondering how harsh the future would be with man taken entirely off the leash: The building on the other peak was still intact. He had to consolidate his position here, then help Phil if need be.

However, the minicom said, “Come on and join me, Jimbo. The fracas is over,” before he had completed his task. As he rode alone toward Speyer’s place, he saw a Pacific States flag flutter up the mast on that skyscraper’s top. Guards stood awed and nervous at the portal. Mackenzie dismounted and walked inside. The entry chamber was a soaring, shimmering fantasy of colors and arches, through which men moved troll-like. A corporal led him down a hall. Evidently this building bad been used for quarters offices, storage, and less understandable purposes ... There was a room whose door had been blown down with dynamite. The fluid abstract murals were stilled, scarred, and sooted. Four ragged troopers pointed guns at the two beings whom Speyer was questioning.

One slumped at something that might answer to a desk. The avian face was buried in seven-fingered hands and the rudimentary wing quivered with sobs. Are they able to cry, then? Mackenzie thought, astonished, and had a sudden wish to take the being in his arms and offer what comfort he was able.

The other one stood erect in a robe of woven metal. Great topaz eyes met Speyer’s from a seven-foot height, and the voice turned accented English into music.

“—a G-type star some fifty light-years hence. It is barely visible to the naked eye, though not in this hemisphere.”

The major’s fleshless, bristly countenance jutted forward as if to peck. “When do you expect reinforcements?”

“There will be no other ship for almost a century, and it will only bring personnel. We are isolated by space and time; few can come to work here, to seek to build a bridge of minds across that gulf—”

“Yeah,” Speyer nodded prosaically. “The light-speed limit. I thought so. If you’re telling the truth.”

The being shuddered. “Nothing is left for us but to speak truth, and pray that you will understand and help. Revenge, conquest, any form of mass violence is impossible when so much space and time lies between. Our labor has been done in the mind and heart. It is not too late, even now. The most crucial facts can still be kept hidden—oh, listen to me, for the sake of your unborn!”

Speyer nodded to Mackenzie. “Everything okay?” he said. “We got us a full bag here. About twenty left alive, this fellow the bossman. Seems like they’re the only ones on Earth.”

“We guessed there couldn’t be many,” the colonel said. His tone and his feelings were alike ashen. “When we talked it over, you and me, and tried to figure what our clues meant. They’d have to be few, or they’d’ve operated more openly.”

“Listen, listen,” the being pleaded. “We came in love. Our dream was to lead you—to make you lead yourselves-toward peace, fulfillment ... Oh, yes, we would also gain, gain yet another race with whom we could someday converse as brothers. But there are many races in the universe. It was chiefly for your own tortured sakes that we wished to guide your future.”

“That controlled history notion isn’t original with you,” Speyer grunted. “We’ve invented it for ourselves now and then on Earth. The last time it led to the Hellbombs. No, thanks!”

“But we know! The Great Science predicts with absolute certainty—”

“Predicted this?” Speyer waved a hand at the blackened room.

“There are fluctuations. We are too few to control so many savages in every detail. But do you not wish an end to war, to all your ancient sufferings? I offer you that for your help today.”

“You succeeded in starting a pretty nasty war yourselves,” Speyer said.

The being twisted its fingers together. “That was an error. The plan remains, the only way to lead your people toward peace. I, who have traveled between suns, will get down before your boots and beg you—”

“Stay put!” Speyer flung back. “If you’d come openly, like honest folk, you’d have found some to listen to you. Maybe enough, even. But no, your do-gooding had to be subtle and crafty. You knew what was right for us. We weren’t entitled to any say in the matter. God in heaven, I’ve never heard anything so arrogant!”

The being lifted its head. “Do you tell children the whole truth?”

“As much as they’re ready for.”

“Your child-culture is not ready to hear these truths.”

“Who qualified you to call us children—besides yourselves?”

“How do you know you are adult?”

“By trying adult jobs and finding out if I can handle them. Sure, we make some ghastly blunders, we humans. But they’re our own. And we learn from them. You’re the ones who won’t learn, you and that damned psychological science you were bragging about, that wants to fit every living mind into the one frame it can understand.

“You wanted to re-establish the centralized state, didn’t you? Did you ever stop to think that maybe feudalism is what suits man? Some one place to call our own, and belong to, and be part of; a community with traditions and honor; a chance for the individual to make decisions that count; a bulwark for liberty against the central overlords, who’ll always want more and more power; a thousand different ways to live. We’ve always built supercountries, here on Earth, and we’ve always knocked them apart again. I think maybe the whole idea is wrong. And maybe this time well try something better. Why not a world of little states, too well rooted to dissolve in a nation, too small to do much harm—slowly rising above petty jealousies and spite, but keeping their identities—a thousand separate approaches to our problem. Maybe then we can solve a few of them ... for ourselves!”

“You will never do so,” the being said. “You will be torn in pieces all over again.”

“That’s what you think. I think otherwise. But whichever is right—and I bet this is too big a universe for either of us to predict—we’ll have made a free choice on Earth. I’d rather be dead than domesticated.

“The people are going to learn about you as soon as Judge Brodsky’s been reinstated. No, sooner. The regiment will hear today, the city tomorrow, just to make sure no one gets ideas about suppressing the truth again. By the time your next spaceship comes, we’ll be ready for it: in our own way whatever that is.”

The being drew a fold of robe about its head. Speyer turned to Mackenzie. His face was wet. “Anything ... you want to say ... Jimbo?”

“No,” Mackenzie mumbled.. “Can’t think of. anything. Let’s get our command organized here. I don’t expect we’ll have to fight any more, though. It seems to be about ended down there.”

“Sure.” Speyer drew an uneven breath. “The enemy troops elsewhere are bound to capitulate. They’ve get nothing left to fight for. We can start patching up pretty soon.”

There was a house with a patio whose, wall was covered by roses. The street outside had not yet come back to life, so that silence dwelt here under the yellow sunset. A maidservant showed Mackenzie through the back door and departed. He.walked toward Laura, who sat on a bench beneath a willow. She watched him approach but did not rise. One hand rested on a cradle.

He stopped and knew not what to say. How thin she was!

Presently she told him, so low he could scarcely hear: “Tom’s dead.”

“Oh, no.” Darkness came and went before his eyes.

“I learned the day before yesterday, when a few of his men straggled home. He was killed in the San Bruno.”

Mackenzie did not dare join her, but his legs would not upbear him. He sat down on the flagstones and saw curious patterns in their arrangement. There was nothing else to look at.

Her voice ran on above him, toneless: “Was it worth it? Not only Tom, but so many others, killed for a point of politics?”

“More than that was at stake,” he said.

“Yes, I heard on the radio. I still can’t understand how it was worth it. I’ve tried very hard, but I can’t.”

He had no strength left to defend himself. “Maybe you’re right, duck. I wouldn’t know.”

“I’m not sorry for myself,” she said. “I still have Jimmy. But Tom was cheated out of so much.”

He realized all at once that there was a baby, and he ought to take his grandchild to him and think thoughts about life going on into the future. But he was too empty.

“Tom wanted him named after you,” she said.

Did you, Laura? he wondered. Aloud: “What are you going to do now?”

“I’ll find something.”

He made himself glance at her. The sunset burned on the willow leaves above and on her face, which was now turned toward the infant he could not see. “Come back to Naka-mura,” he said.

“No. Anywhere else.”

“You always loved the mountains,” he groped. “We—”

“No.” She met his eyes. “It isn’t you, Dad. Never you. But Jimmy is not going to grow up a soldier.” She hesitated, “I’m sure some of the Espers will keep going, on a new basis, but with the same goals. I think we should join them. He ought to believe in something different from what killed his father, and work for it to become real. Don’t you agree?”

Mackenzie climbed to his feet against Earth’s hard pull. “I don’t know,” he said. “Never was a thinker ... Can I see him?”

“Oh, Dad—”

He went over and looked down at the small sleeping form. “If you marry again,” he said, “and have a daughter, would you call her for her mother?” He saw Laura’s head bend downward and her hands clench. Quickly he said, “I’ll go now. I’d like to visit you some more, tomorrow or sometime, if you’ll have me.”

Then she came to his arms and wept. He stroked her hair and murmured, as he had done when she was a child. “You do want to return to the mountains, don’t you? They’re your country too, your people, where you belong.”

“Y-you’ll never know how much I want to.”

“Then why not?” he cried.

His daughter straightened herself. “I can’t,” she said. “Your war is ended. Mine has just begun.”

Because he had trained that will, he could only say, “I hope you win it.”

“Perhaps in a thousand years—” She could not continue.

Night had fallen when he left her. Power was still out in the city, so the street lamps were dark and the stars stood forth above all roofs. The squad that waited to accompany their colonel to barracks looked wolfish by lantern light They saluted him and rode at his back, rifles ready for trouble; but there was only the iron sound of horseshoes.