A Wizard in Midgard

1

Magnus walked down the road, swinging his staff in time to his footsteps and surveying the countryside. It was a neat patchwork of green and gold, even an oblong of red here and there, depending on which crop was growing where.

But as he’d seen from orbit, most of the workers in the fields seemed to be very big—six and a half feet or taller—or else very short—less than five feet or even smaller. There were children in the field, some stooping to hoe like the adults, some running around in play. If it hadn’t been for their games, Magnus might have thought them to be dwarves, too. As it was, he had to look closely to see if the short people had the proportions of adult dwarves or of ordinary children. They were all dressed in worn, patched tunics and leggins, most of which were gray or tan. Some of the garments had once had some color, but were now worn almost as gray as the others.

As he watched, an overseer spoke sharply to one of the tall men, hefting a cudgel in a threatening manner. The tall man cringed and nodded quickly, then turned back to work, stooping and hoeing with renewed vigor.

Magnus was outraged. Bad enough that any man should have to fear another that way, but worse when the slave was so much bigger and stronger, and easily the master in an even fight! But he realized that was his own bias, projecting his own situation into them, for he was seven feet tall himself. Something hard cracked on the side of his head.

Pain wracked his skull, and Magnus stumbled and fell to his knees, the whole world swimming about him even as he realized he’d let himself become distracted, lowered his vigilance—but his staff snapped up to guard position by sheer reflex. He hadn’t even seen his attacker approach, hadn’t heard his footsteps coming up from behind! Another stick swung at him, but he felt it coming and managed to swing his staff to deflect the worst of it. A fist hooked into his face, snapping his head up, and rage broke loose. Magnus surged to his feet, roaring. The world still wobbled, but he lashed out with his staff blindly. It connected, someone shouted with pain, and Magnus snapped back to guard, head clearing, pivoting about, ready for the next blow.

There were a dozen of them who had come up cat footed behind him, all about five and a half feet tall, all grim and hard, dressed in tunics and bias-hosen of bright colors and stout cloth, each with a staff or a cudgel, three at the back with swords, two with bows.

Magnus read their intent by their armament alone—to capture him if they could and kill him if they could not. Half a dozen of them stepped in, sticks slashing. Magnus caught one on his staff, another, a third, but two more struck his shoulders and one his head, hard. The world swam again, panic churned up from the depths, and Magnus realized he was fully justified in using his psi powers. He projected raw emotion broadcast, a numbing fear, and swung his staff like a baseball bat. It struck one man in the ribs, knocking him into another; both fell, bringing down a third, and the rest ran, howling with fear. But pain exploded on the back of Magnus’s head, a thud resounded through his skull, and as he fell, he realized that one of the hunters was a man of true courage who hadn’t let his fear stop him. Then midnight claimed him.

In the darkness, one single thought rose: that he should have realized the depth of these people’s hatred for anyone bigger than themselves. The thought brought a dream of memory, of watching from above as a double rank of Vikings bellowed their battle cry and charged a row of giants, four of them to each titan. The giants met them with roars and quarterstaves—steel quarterstaves, to judge by the way the Vikings’ axes and swords glanced off them.

The giants fought back to back, staves whirling as they fended off blows from three sides at once, striking downward at men only two-thirds their height. The Vikings used their size to advantage, though, leaping in under the giants’ guards to slash and chop at their legs. Here and there, a giant went down, and the Vikings leaped in to butcher him quickly before other giants could come to his rescue—which they did, for those steel quarterstaves cracked the Vikings’ helmets and drove their blades back against their own bodies.

Suddenly it was over, and the Vikings were leaping away, retreating back to their own side, forming a ragged line that turned and fled. One or two giants roared and started after them, but their mates caught them and pulled them back. Watching them on his viewscreen, Magnus guessed, “The giants have fallen for that trick before—chased the Vikings to their own doom.”

“No doubt,” said a voice from thin air—or from the concealed loudspeakers in the spaceship’s lounge. “I suspect the Vikings led them into swamps, where they floundered, easy prey for spears and arrows.”

“Or led them under trees thick with spearmen.” Magnus nodded. “The giants have learned their lesson. They’re holding their line.”

On the viewscreen, the giants were indeed standing firm, breathing hard and waiting for the smaller men to come back. Their mouths moved as they called to one another, but of course Magnus couldn’t hear what they were saying. “I wonder if they’re speaking Terran Standard.”

“We can send down a probe with an audio pickup,” the voice offered.

“Now, Herkimer,” Magnus reproved, “you know I’m not rich.”

Herkimer was the name he had given his ship’s computer and, therefore, the ship itself. It navigated and operated the vessel, monitored his life support systems, cooked his meals, cleaned the ship, and to top it off, dredged up an amazing variety of facts from its vast memory.

“I’m happy enough with pictures,” Magnus told the computer. “In fact, I’m amazed the electronic telescope can zoom in tightly enough to show a close-up of a human face from an orbit twenty thousand miles above the planet’s surface.”

The world was listed by the name of “Siegfried” in the atlas of colonized stars. That alone had been enough to send Magnus to searching it out. There had been a record of a colonizing expedition and the general direction in which they intended to search for a habitable home, but none of where they had landed or whether they had survived. It had been an interesting search.

“It is impressive.” Being a computer, Herkimer couldn’t really be impressed by anything. “But a microphone that could reach so far is completely out of the question.”

“No need, when all we’re trying to do is gain an overview of the situation.”

The giants waited a long time as the Vikings retreated, step by step. Even when they were out of sight, half the giants stayed on guard. The other half turned to tend the wounded.

“Do you suppose some of those giants could be women?” Magnus asked.

“Quite possibly,” Herkimer answered, “but it is difficult to say. They’re all wearing the same armor, over similar tunics and cross-gartered leggins.”

“But some of them don’t have beards,” Magnus pointed out, “and the ones who don’t, have breastplates that bulge outward more than the men’s do.”

“It is possible,” the computer admitted. “Odd that their men would not object to risking them, though.”

“Maybe not, when they’re so badly outnumbered,” Magnus said, “and when any one of them is big enough to be a match for three of the Vikings. Of course, they come at the giants in squads of four…”

“We must count it a hypothesis to be examined more closely,” Herkimer cautioned. “We need more data.”

“How strange those giants look.” Magnus couldn’t help thinking of them as anything but giants, when they were half again as tall as the Vikings and five times as massive. Their thighs looked to be two feet thick, and their upper arms more than a foot. Their hips were four feet wide, and their shoulders five. “They’re so broad and thick that they seem short.”

“Perhaps they are,” Herkimer suggested. “We really have no artifact by which to judge their scale.”

“True enough,” Magnus admitted. “I’m assuming that the Vikings are of normal size for human beings—somewhere between five and six feet tall. If they are, the giants are nine feet tall on the average. I suppose they need such thick legs to support all the weight that goes with that extra height.”

“Still, we are only assuming,” the computer reminded him. “For all we know, the ones you call Vikings may be only two feet tall.”

“Well, yes,” Gar admitted. “But they have the proportions of normal men, and if they were shorter, they should also be more delicate—so I’m betting they’re of normal size. Oh, I and by the way, yes, I know they aren’t really Vikings.”

The Vikings of Terra’s past had been ordinary Scandinavian citizens at home who had gone raiding the shores of richer countries to supplement their incomes—or, in some cases, for their whole incomes. A great number of Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes stayed home and farmed—but when they went to war, they wore the same armor and carried the same shields and weapons as the Vikings did.

“They do dress like medieval Scandinavians,” Herkimer admitted, “and most people associate horned helmets, beards, and war-axes with Vikings.”

“Yes, you’d almost think they had stepped off the screen of a dramatic epic,” Magnus said. “Of course, they’re probably very ordinary farmers and tradesmen at home, not medieval pirates. They’ve simply been called up for war.”

There certainly was no sea in evidence, except for the coastline hundreds of miles to the south. Only one central area of a small continent had been Terraformed; the rest was desert or tundra. This battle had taken place on the eastern border of the land, assuming that the mountain range on the photographed map before Magnus was indeed a border. “Zoom out,” he told Herkimer, and as the giants dwindled in the viewscreen, the Vikings came back into sight. Sure enough, they were out of the foothills where they had fought the battle and into the meadows and marshlands beyond, carrying their dead and wounded.

“The mountains do seem to be the borderland,” Herkimer said. “I think we can infer that they are the giants’ homeland.”

To the east, the giants finally broke their formation and , brought out stretchers to carry home their dead.

“They must have scouts in the last foothills near the flatland, and some way of signaling back to the army,” Magnus guessed. “How many lost their lives in this skirmish, Herkimer?”

“Ninety-eight, counting the dead on both sides,” the computer reported. “Judging by the severity of their wounds, I estimate that sixteen more will die within a few days.”

Magnus scowled, the sunlight of discovery and investigation dimmed by the shadow of death. “I wonder how frequent these battles are?”

“We found this one by only an hour’s search,” Herkimer replied. “Probability analysis indicates an almost constant state of border clashes.”

“Yes,” Magnus said, brooding. “If they were rare, the odds of chancing upon such a battle would have been extremely small. At least their wars seem to be confined to small battles.” Then agony seared through Magnus, and the dream fled.

Awareness returned in the form of the racking ache in his head. Then a sudden sharp pain exploded in his side, and a voice commanded, “Up with you, now! I saw you twitch! You’re awake!”

The accent was strong, but it was still Terran Standard. That was bad; if the language hadn’t drifted much from its origin, it meant that the government was strict, harsh, and stonily conservative. Magnus struggled to rise, but the effort made the pain spear from temple to temple, and he fell back with a groan, thinking, Concussion…

The sharp pain jabbed at his side again, and the voice shouted, “Up, I said! By Loki, you’ll do as you’re told, or you’ll die for it!.”

Anger overrode the pain, and Magnus forced his eyes open. Light tore at his brain, and he squeezed his eyelids to slits as he rolled, trying to ignore the agony in his head and the nausea in his stomach, looking for his tormentor.

The man stood above him with a yard-long wooden stick capped with a metal point—for all the stars, a cattle prod! “Up!” he bellowed. “Into the field with you!” He jabbed again. “That for your arrogance, walking down the road in broad daylight like a real man! Into the field with you, half-giant, and learn your place!”

Through the raging in his head, all Magnus could think was, Half?

Then he remembered what he had seen from orbit—from orbit, safe in Herkimer’s cozy, luxurious lounge.

Magnus pored over one photograph, then compared it with another and another. “There’s a pattern here.”

“Of what sort?” the computer asked. Its injured tone had to be Magnus’s imagination; Herkimer couldn’t really be feeling miffed that Magnus had discovered something that it hadn’t. In fact, Herkimer couldn’t be feeling, period. It was a machine.

“Some form of slavery,” Magnus said. “In every picture showing people working, the real drudgery is being done by the biggest and the smallest.”

“Stronger people would naturally do the heavier work,” the computer noted.

“It isn’t always heavy.” Magnus leafed through the pictures. “They’re chopping wood, drawing water, mucking out pigpens, that sort of thing. The medium-sized women are feeding the chickens, sweeping the steps, and tending the gardens. The medium-sized men are making barrels, driving wagons, forging iron implements—crafts and trades. The big ones and the small ones do the unskilled labor. More medium-sized men are watching them with sticks in their hands.”

The computer was silent a moment, then answered, “I have correlated all the pictures we have taken, including close-ups of photographs we had not previously examined in detail. Your analysis holds.”

“Some sort of slavery? Or a caste system?” Magnus shook his head. “We need more information.”

Well, he was getting that information now, and there didn’t seem to be much doubt about the slavery. What a fool he had been to leave that nice, safe spaceship just because he thought other people were being oppressed!

The prod goaded him again, and the overseer roared, “Up, monster! Or I’ll stab you half to death!”

The tide of anger almost overwhelmed Magnus—but people were most definitely being oppressed, and his own mistreatment was proof of that. He fought down the anger and stumbled to his feet. By sheer bad luck and his own stupidity, he had fallen into the perfect situation to study their suffering—and to take a look at this society from the inside. He could play the obedient slave until he had a clear idea of what was going on. Then he could escape—he had no doubt of that; for a projective telepath, it only took thinking sleepy thoughts at the guards.

Though he might stop to beat up this particular overseer a bit on the way out…

Looking down, he was amazed to see that he wore the same sort of worn gray tunic and leggins as the field slaves. “What did you do with my clothes!”

“Gave ‘em to somebody who deserves ‘em,” the overseer grunted. “His wife will cut them down for him, never you fear. Half-giants have no business wearing such finery!”

Finery? The cloak and tunic had been of stout, close-woven wool, good hardy black travelling clothes, and the boots had been carefully scuffed and worn, but still sound and waterproof. Instead, he wore sandals, scarcely more than soles strapped to his feet.

“I am Kawsa, overseer to Steward Wulfsson,” the smaller man snarled. “You’ll have cause to remember my name, you great hulk, and my prod too! Now get moving, or you’ll wish you were dead!”

Magnus was tempted to split the man’s head with the same agony he felt—but he couldn’t be sure of his telepathic abilities until the concussion healed. He turned to shuffle toward the field, fighting dizziness and nausea.

The prod whacked him across the back of the knees. Magnus cried out as he fell.

“What do you say when an overseer speaks to you, boy?” Kawsa growled.

“My mother taught me not to say such things,” Magnus groaned.

The stick cracked into his buttock. Magnus managed to strangle the shout of pain.

“You say, ‘yes, sir!’ ” Kawsa bellowed. “No smart talk to me, boy! And it doesn’t matter what I say, the only answer is ‘yes, sir!’ You understand that now?”

“Gotcha,” Magnus affirmed.

The stick cracked across his buttocks again. “What?” Magnus steeled himself to the degradation and reminded himself that he needed to study these people up close, witnessing how badly they oppressed their slaves and how they chose who was to be a slave and who free. “Yes, sir.” He nearly choked on the words, but he got them out.

“That’s better. Into that field with you, now, and grub weeds!”

Magnus tried to push himself to his feet, but his leg nerves hadn’t recovered yet.

“Aw, can’t get up?” the overseer crooned, than snapped, “Crawl, then! That will remind you what a worm you really are!”

Magnus told himself that the slaves needed the kind of sympathy that can only come from shared suffering, and crawled into the field. Other slaves glanced up at him, then quickly glanced away.

“Well, you’re close enough to the ground that you don’t need a hoe,” Kawsa told him. “Grub with your hands!”

He watched while Magnus pulled a dozen weeds, then walked on down the row, but glanced back frequently.

A very short man in the next row spoke out of the side of his mouth, carefully not looking at Magnus. “Whatever possessed you to go marching down the high road dressed like a freeman in broad daylight, poor lad?”

“I’m from far away,” Magnus told him, “very far, beyond the borders of this land. I didn’t know.”

“From the North Country?” The man looked up, surprised, then remembered the overseer and turned his gaze back to his hoe. “Then your parents must have been slaves who escaped, and should have told you what it was like here! I thought everyone knew how things were in Midgard!”

“I’m from farther than that,” Magnus told him, but registered the name of the country well, to remember it. Midgard? Well, it did go with the horned helmets…

Again the man stared at him, but only for a second. Then studying his hoe blade, he muttered, “Didn’t know there were people farther away.”

“I’m real,” Magnus assured him. “I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

And that, he decided, was nothing but the honest truth. At least he had expected to see dwarves, too. He had seen them in the pictures from orbit, after he and Herkimer had explored Midgard’s eastern border.

“Let’s see how the western border compares with this one, Herkimer.”

“Initiating acceleration,” the computer replied, but the artificial gravity within the ship was so excellent that Magnus felt no change. “Should we examine the northern border on the way?”

“No point,” Magnus said. “Your photographs show it to be a wasteland with only a few small settlements.” He looked down at the pictures on the table before him, aerial photos of the planet’s one inhabited continent.

Some were large-scale, some small; some showed the country as a whole, some only single villages, some even close-ups of just a few people. “Wattle and daub huts, thatched roofs, wooden wheels on their wagons, clothing limited to tunics and bias-hosen for the men, blouses and skirts for the women, hooded cloaks for both … yes, it looks very much like the Scandinavian Middle Ages.”

“Too much so?” the computer supplied.

“Definitely. Someone set about a deliberate imitation, but wasn’t a stickler for historical accuracy.” Magnus couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that he was looking at a gigantic stage set.

“We have come to the dawn line,” Herkimer reported. “Good.” Magnus turned back to the viewscreens. “Is there a natural border?”

“Yes, a river, and the land beyond it is thickly forested.”

“Scan it for signs of battle—there!”

The view on the screen steadied, showing a bird’s-eye view of two straggling lines of dots facing three rings of other dots, smooth with geometric precision. Behind and between the circles were lines of dots, again straight as though drawn with a ruler. The two sets of lines faced one another between the river and the forest.

“Hold this view on one screen and have the other zoom in,” Magnus directed.

On the right-hand screen, the dots swam closer. The ends of the lines swept out, and the dots resolved themselves into Vikings on one side, charging with waving axes and mouths open to shout. Across from them were three circles of armored warriors with crossbows, marching around and around. The ones in front aimed and discharged their weapons as they paced along the front arc, then wound back their bows and reloaded as they marched along the back arc. Between them stood other warriors with long shields and short swords. Long spears thrust out between sword-wielders from the second line of warriors.

As the Vikings came closer, the crossbowmen kept up a continuous field of fire. The Vikings charged straight into their storm, horn-helmeted men falling left and right, but the rest running on, shouting. Half their number survived to reach the striding warriors. They pushed the spears up with their shields so that they could chop at the swordsmen—whose heads were scarcely waist high.

Magnus stared in amazement. “The spearmen are dwarves!”

“Relative to the Vikings, yes,” Herkimer agreed.

Looking more closely, Magnus could see that the warriors in the formation had legs and arms that were shorter in proportion to their bodies than those of the. Vikings—but their shoulders were almost as wide, and their heads almost as large, as those of their bigger opponents.

Magnus gave a long, low whistle. “No wonder they’re fighting with such iron discipline! It’s the only way they can stand against men twice their size!”

“And who outnumber them,” Herkimer pointed out. There did seem to be twice as many Vikings as dwarves—but that appearance changed as the taller men tried an outflanking maneuver. On the left-hand screen, the overview of the battle, Magnus saw the ends of the second line of Vikings split and swing out, to try to catch the circles of dwarves from the flanks—but as they did, archers rose from the bushes at the sides and filled the air with arrows. A number of Vikings fell, and the rest retreated back to the battle line. They found themselves racing the center, who were fleeing from the crossbow fire. The dwarves, apparently moved by a chivalrous impulse their larger foes lacked, held their fire. They seemed to feel no need to kill as long as their enemies were retreating.

“Reserves hidden in ambush.” Magnus stared. “Some of them are almost as big as the Vikings!”

“They would seem to be traitors,” Herkimer commented. “They must certainly seem that way to the Vikings! Of course, I suppose they could be fugitives given sanctuary by the dwarves—or even political dissidents.” Magnus compared the two screens. “Still, the Vikings outnumber them by half.”

“At least,” Herkimer agreed.

The dwarves held their ground, not taking the bait to chase—but a final flight of crossbow bolts filled the air, hurtling toward the fleeing Vikings. Several more of them fell. Their comrades scooped them up and carried them back to the river. There, they slowed to cross a bridge made up of low boats with decking laid across their centers. The Vikings tramped over those decks, carrying their dead and wounded, and as soon as the last one passed, the sections of bridge broke away and began rowing back to the eastern bank of the river. The water was indeed a border.

The dwarves held their formation until the last boat was well out from shore, then turned to embrace one another, slap each other’s backs, and even break into an impromptu dance here and there.

Magnus stared at the close-up. “Some of them are beardless…”

“And their cuirasses are very pronounced about their gender,” Herkimer finished. “Many of those warriors are women.”

“No wonder, when they’re so badly outnumbered, and so small into the bargain! We’re looking at a military society, Herkimer.”

“Ii would seem so,” the computer agreed. “Holding so tight a formation under the stress of battle speaks of long training.”

“Yes, from childhood, probably.” Magnus frowned. “And as with the giants, if we could find a battle so quickly, they have to be common—another part of life, like plowing and reaping.”

“A time to sow, a time to reap, and a time for war,”—the computer agreed.

But the dwarf slaves in these fields hadn’t learned to fight, and the only time for them was a time to suffer.

When the sun neared the horizon, Kawsa and half a dozen other overseers lined them up with shouts and insults, then started them off in a shuffling line back to the farmstead. They went down through rows of barley and hops to a broad farmyard of clean tan gravel. Another file of slaves was driving cows into a milking barn, and three others were pouring swill into the troughs of a huge pigsty. Gar’s file shuffled past them all to a long ramshackle shed of unpainted boards, and inside.

There the silence ended. Half of the slaves dropped down onto pallets of moldy straw with moans of relief. Others only sat down on rude benches, but everyone breathed sighs of relief. Even the older children sat down with groans, their dusty little faces lined with weariness. The younger children had been able to nap in the field, though, and still frolicked and quarrelled. Magnus expected some of the tired adults to snap at the little ones, but they only sighed with philosophic patience—and a surprising number of them watched the children with doting smiles. Even in the midst of such misery, they found pleasure in the innocent squabbles and joys of their children.

Magnus noticed a great lack of water, and a greater need for it.

A tall young woman came up to him with a bucket from which she lifted a dripping ladle. “Drink, lad, for you’ll need it!”

“Thank you,” Magnus said sincerely, and drank the ladle dry, thinking it was the sweetest drink he had ever had during peacetime—if you could call this peace. He handed it back to the woman with a sigh of relief. “I needed that.”

“I’m sure you did,” she said, then reached out to touch his forehead, frowning anxiously. Magnus forced himself to hold still, though the touch of her fingers hurt. “You’ve a right ugly bruise there,” she told him, “and a few more I can’t see, I don’t doubt.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Magnus told her. “I’ve a dozen aches at least. Believe me, I’ve had hours to count them.” “Don’t I know it!” she said. “My name’s Greta.”

“I’m honored to meet you, Greta.” Magnus inclined his head gravely. “My name is Gar Pike.”

She stared at him in surprise, then gave him a wan smile. “A gar pike, are you? Gar I don’t doubt, and you’re a poor fish indeed, to let yourself be caught like this. But why take such a name for yourself?”

The question brought a sudden wave of longing for his nice, safe spaceship lounge, and a memory of Herkimer saying, only hours before, “Why do you insist on using that abominable alias when you go planetside to start a revolution, Magnus?”

Magnus shrugged. “You never can tell when there are going to be secret agents around, from SCENT or some other Terran government agency. I’d just as soon they didn’t recognize me by name.”

“Surely the name of Gar Pike must be almost as famous as that of d’Armand, by now.”

“Not to SCENT, fortunately—unless they’ve had agents on every planet I’ve visited.” Magnus’s mouth tightened at the thought of his own brief stint as a SCENT agent, and his disillusionment with their methods. His father, Rod Gallowglass, whose real name was Rodney d’Armand, was one of the most famous agents of the Society for the Conversion of Extraterrestrial Nascent Totalitarianisms—famous because he had discovered Magnus’s home planet of Gramarye with its potentially explosive population of espers. For three decades now, he had been holding the planet secure against the schemes and plots of two futurian organizations, one trying to subvert Gramarye to some form of totalitarian government so that its telepaths would be at the service of its interstellar dictatorship, the other trying to subvert the planet to anarchy so that the telepaths would help spread its unrealistically idealistic form of chaos throughout the human-colonized planets. Rod Gallowglass had short-circuited all their schemes with the help of his native-born wife Gwendylon and their four children—three, since Magnus had taken to the stars, unable to accept his father’s imposing of democracy on a people who might not want it. He had joined SCENT under an assumed name, become even more disenchanted with its methods than with his father’s, and gone off on his own to bring about social change in a way about which he could feel right—which meant that he sought out planets where the majority were really miserably oppressed, and the only solution was revolution.

So here he was, talking to another miserable one, and trying to explain, “The name was given me as much as I chose it.” He realized he had better think of himself as “Gar Pike” for the rest of his time on this planet.

Greta’s wan smile warmed a little. “Don’t you ever talk like a proud lord, though!”

“Is he all right?” asked another woman anxiously, coming up to them. Gar looked down and saw she wasn’t even five feet tall.

“He seems well enough,” Greta answered her. “He walks fairly straight, and his limp’s almost gone.”

“I’m past the worst of it,” Gar confirmed.

“This is Rega.” Greta gestured to the smaller woman. “Honored to meet you, Rega.”

Rega smiled up at him. “No wonder the overseers set about you so hard, with your courtly ways. Where did you escape from, lad? I know Groi says you’re from far away, but that can’t be, can it?”

Groi, Gar decided, must be the small man who had talked to him out in the field. “It’s quite true. I wanted to see something of the world before I settled down.”

“Seen enough yet?” Greta asked with a sardonic smile. They were very surprised when Gar said, “Too much—but not enough.”