Some Will Not Die

PROLOGUE

The ground in the foothills was rocky, covered by loose gravel, and treacherous. The car heaved itself up over a sharp ridge with torturous slowness and pancaked down on the other side with a hard smash. The steering levers whipped back and forth just short of the driver’s kneecaps, and the motors raced.

“No more seeing, Joe,” the driver told Custis. “Lights?”

“No. Bed ’er down, Lew.”

The driver locked his treads, and cut the switches. The damper rods slammed home in the power pile, and the motors ground down to a stop. The car lay dead.

Custis slid down out of the turret. “All right, let’s button up. We sleep inside tonight.”

The driver dogged his slit shutters and Hutchinson, the machinegunner, began stuffing rags into the worn gasproof seal on his hatch. Robb, the turret gunner, dogged down the command hatch. “Load napalm,” Custis told him, and Robb pulled the racks of fragmentation shells he’d been carrying in the guns all day. He fitted new loads, locked the breeches, and pulled the charging handles. “Napalm loaded,” he checked back in his colorless voice.

“Acoustics out,” Custis said, and Hutchinson activated the car’s listening gear.

Henley, standing where the twin .75s could pound his head to a pulp with their recoiling breeches, asked: “What’re you going to do now, Custis?”

“Eat.” Joe broke out five cans of rations, handed three to the crew and one to Henley. “Here.” He squatted down on the deck and peeled back the lid of the can. Bending it between his fingers, he scooped food into his mouth. His eye sockets were thick with black shadow from the overhead light. His face was tanned to the cheekbones, and dead white from there to the nape of his recently shaved skull. The goggles had left a wide outline of rubber particles around his eyes. “We’ll see all the bandits you want in the morning.”

“You mean you’ve made us sitting ducks on purpose?”

“I mean if I was a bandit I wouldn’t talk to nothin’ but a sitting duck, and I’m under contract to let you talk to some bandits.”

“Not from a position of weakness!”

Custis looked up and grinned. “That’s life, Major. Honest, that’s the way life is.”

“There’s somebody,” Custis said at daybreak. He stepped away from the periscope eyepiece and let Henley take his look at the soldiery squatted on the rocks outside.

There were men all around the battlewagon, in plain sight, looking at it stolidly. They were in all kinds of uniforms, standardized only by black-and-yellow shoulder badges. Some of the uniforms dated two or three Republics back. All of them were ragged, and a few were completely unfamiliar. West Coast, maybe.

Or maybe even East.

The men on the rocks were making no moves. They waited motionless under the battlewagon’s guns. At first glance, the only arms they seemed to have were rifles that had to be practically smoothbores by now—and it had taken Custis a while to find out why these men, who looked like they’d known what they were doing, were trusting in muskets against a battlewagon. There were five two-man teams spread in a loose circle around the car. Each team had an rifle fitted with a grenade launcher. The men aiming them had them elevated just right to hit the car’s turtledeck with their first shots.

“Black-and-yellow,” Henley said angrily.

Custis shrugged. “No blue-and-silver, that’s true,” he answered, giving Henley the;needle again. “But that was thirty years ago. It might still be Berendtsen.”

Custis went back to the periscope eyepiece for another look at the grenadiers. Each of them had an open, lead-lined box beside him with more grenades in it.

Custis grunted. Napalm splashed pretty well, but it would take one full traverse of the turret to knock out all five teams. The turret took fifteen seconds to revolve 360 degrees, while a grenadier could pull a trigger and have a grenade lofting in, say, one second’s time. A few seconds later the grenade would have covered the outside of the car with radioactive dust that would make it death to stay inside, or death to get out. Nor could the battlewagon get out of the grenade’s way in time—the basis of an interdictory weapon like this was that it would be used as soon as you made the slightest move, but, you could believe, no sooner than that.

“Stalemate,” Custis grunted. “But no worse than that. Generous of ’em.” He unbuckled his web belt and took off his .45. He walked under the command hatch and unclogged it.

“What’re you doing?” Henley demanded.

“Starting.” He threw the hatch back and pulled himself up, getting a foothold on the saddle and climbing out on top of the turret. He flipped the hatch shut behind him and stood up.

“My name’s Custis,” he said carefully as the men raised their rifles. “Hired out to the Seventh Republic. I’ve got a man here who wants to talk to your boss.”

There was no immediate answer. He stood and waited. He heard the hatch scrape beside him, and planted a boot on it before Henley could lift it.

“What about, Custis?” a voice asked from off to one side, out of range of his eyes. The voice was old and husky, kept in tight check. Custis wondered if it might not tremble, were the old man to let it.

He weighed his answer. There was no sense to playing around. Maybe he was going to get himself killed right now, and maybe he wasn’t, but if he played games here he might never get a straight answer to anything.

“Theodore Berendtsen,” he said. “About him.”

The name dropped into these men like a stone. He saw their faces go tight, and he saw heads jerk involuntarily. Well, the British had stood guard over Napoleon’s grave for nineteen years.

“Turn this way, Custis,” the same worn voice said.

Custis risked taking his eyes off the grenadiers. He turned toward the voice.

Standing a bit apart from his troops was a thin, weather-burned man with sharp eyes hooded under thick white eyebrows. He needed a shave badly. His marble-white hair was shaggy. There were deep creases in his face, pouches under his eyes, and a dry wattle of skin under his jaw.

“I’m the commander here,” he said in his halting voice. “Bring out your man.”

Custis stepped off the hatch and let Henley come out. The political officer gave him a savage look as he squirmed up and got to his feet. Custis ignored it. “Over there—the white-haired one,” he said without moving his lips. “He’s the local boss.” He stepped a little to one side and gave Henley room to stand on the sloping turret top, but he kept watching the old commander, who was wearing a pair of faded black coveralls with that black-and-yellow shoulder badge.

Henley squinted up toward the thin figure. The back of his neck was damp, even in the chill morning breeze, and he was nervous about his footing.

“I’m Major Thomas Henley,” he finally said, “direct representative of the Seventh North American Republic.” Then he stopped, obviously unable to think of what to say next. Custis realized, with a flat grin, that his coming out cold with Berendtsen’s name hadn’t left the major much room to work in.

“You’re out of your country’s jurisdiction, Major,” the commander said.

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

“That’s a matter of fact,” the commander said flatly. “You and Custis can come down. I’ll talk to you. Leave the rest of your men here.”

Henley’s head turned quickly. “Should we go with him?” he muttered to Custis.

“Lord, Major, don’t ask me! But if you’re plannin’ to get anywhere, you better talk to somebody. Or do you expect Berendtsen to plop down in your lap?”

Henley looked back at the thin figure on the hillside. “Maybe he already has.”

Custis looked at him steadily. “They shot Berendtsen in New York City thirty years ago. They threw what was left of his body on a garbage heap. And a year later there was a tomb over where they threw it.”

“Maybe, Captain. Maybe. Were you there?”

“Were you?”

Custis felt annoyed at himself for getting so exercised about it. He glared at the major. Then his common sense came trickling back, and he turned away to give Lew his orders about keeping the car sealed and the guns ready until he and Henley got back.

Thirty years dead, Berendtsen was. Judged for treason, condemned, killed—and men still quarreled at the mention of his name. Custis shook his head and took another look at the old, dried-out man on the hill, wearing those patched, threadbare coveralls.

Most of the commander’s men stayed behind, dispersed among the rocks around the silent battlewagon. Ten of them formed up in a loose party around the commander and Henley, and Custis walked along a few yards behind the two men as they started off into the mountains.

It was turning into a bright but cool day. Looking up into the west, Custis could see the mountaintops pluming as high altitude gales swept their snow caps out in banners. The track they were walking on wound among boulders higher than Custis’s head, and he felt vaguely uncomfortable. He was used to the sweeping plains where his father had raised him; where, except for the spindly trees along the sparse creeks, nothing stood taller than a man.

The commander’s base was a group of low, one room huts strung out along the foot of a butte, with a cook-fire pit in front of each one. Their outlines were broken by rocks and boulders piled around them. There were prepared slit-trenches spotted around the area, two machinegun pits covering the approach trail, and a few mortar batteries sited on reverse slopes. From the size of the place and the depth of the organization, Custis judged the commander had about four hundred people in his outfit.

Custis wondered how he could keep them all supplied, and the answer he got from looking around was that he couldn’t do it very well. The huts were dark and dingy, with what looked like dirt floors. A few wan-looking women were carrying water up from a spring, balancing pails made out of cut-down oil cans. They were raggedly dressed, and the spindly-legged children that trotted beside them were hollow-eyed. Here and there, among the rocks, there were a few patches of scraggly garden. Up at one end of the valley, a small herd of gaunt cows was grazing on indifferent grass.

Custis nodded to himself It confirmed something he’d been thinking for a couple of years; the bandits were still crossing the plains to raid into Republican territory, but they’d never dared set up their own towns on the untenable prairies. It was an impossible thing to have every man’s hand against you and still try to make the change to a settled life.

But with women and children, the bandits needed a permanent camp somewhere. So now they were pulled back all the way into the mountains, trying to make a go of it, but with their weapons wearing out. They were dying on the vine, something left behind, and by the time the cities started spreading out their holdings again, there’d be little here to stop them. If the cities could ever get themselves organized. Maybe everything was dying. The legendary East and South were too far away to count. Maybe everything that counted was dying.

“In here,” the commander said, gesturing into a hut. Henley and Custis stepped inside, followed by two men with rifles and then the commander. The hut was almost bare except for a cot and a table with one chair, all made out of odd pieces of scrap lumber and weapons crates. The commander sat down facing them with his veined, brown-mottled hands resting on the stained wood.

Custis spread his feet and stood relaxed. Henley’s hands were playing with the seams along his pant legs.

“What about Berendtsen, Major?” the commander asked.

“We’ve heard he’s still alive.”

The commander snorted. “Fairy tales!”

“Possibly. But if he’s still alive, these mountains are the logical place for him to be.” Henley looked at the commander meaningfully.

The commander’s narrow lips twitched. “My name isn’t Berendtsen, Major. I don’t use his colors. And my men don’t call themselves The Army of Unification.”

“Things change,” Henley answered. “I didn’t say you were Berendtsen. But if Berendtsen got away from New York, he’d have been a fool to stay near there, or use his own name anywhere. If he’s in these mountains, he might not care to advertise the fact.”

The commander grimaced. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. What do you want from me?”

“Information, then, if you have it. We’ll pay for it, in cash or supplies, whatever you say, within reason.”

“In weapons?”

Henley paused for a moment. Then he nodded. “If that’s what you want.”

“And to blazes with what we do to the people in the independent towns? I suppose so. What about your own people in the outlying areas, once we’re re-armed?”

“It’s important that we have this information.”

The commander smiled coldly. “There’s no pretense of governing for anyone’s benefit but your own, is there?”

“I’m loyal to the Seventh Republic. I follow my orders.”

“No doubt. All right, what do you want to know?”

“Do you know of any groups in this area that Berendtsen might be leading?”

The commander shook his head. “No. There aren’t any other groups. I’ve consolidated them all. You can have that news gratis.”

“I see.” Henley smiled for the first time Custis had ever seen. It was an odd, spinsterish puckering of the lips. The corners of his eyes twinkled upward, and gave him the look of a sly cat. “You could have made me pay to find that out.”

“I’d rather not soil myself. A few rusty rifles pulled out of the old armories aren’t worth that much to me.”

Henley’s mouth twitched. He looked at the austere pride on the commander’s face, gathered like a mask of strength and youth on the gray stubbled cheeks, and then he said: “Well, if I ever do find him, I’m empowered to offer him the presidency of the Eighth Republic.” His eyes glittered and fastened like talons on the old commander’s expression.

Custis grunted to himself. He couldn’t say Henley had exactly surprised him.

And the old man was looking down at the tabletop, his old hands suddenly clenched. After a long time, he looked up slowly.

“So you’re not really working for the Seventh Republic. You’ve been sent up here to find a useful figurehead for a new combination of power.”

Henley smiled again, easily, blandly—and looked like a man who has shot his animal and only has to wait for it to die. “I wouldn’t put it that way. Though, naturally, we wouldn’t stand for any one-man dictatorships.”

“Naturally.” One corner of the commander’s lip lifted, and suddenly Custis saw Henley wasn’t so sure. Custis saw him tense, as though a dying tiger had suddenly lashed out a paw. The commander’s eyes were narrowed. “I’m through talking to you for the moment,” he said, and Custis wondered how much of his weakness had been carefully laid on. “You’ll wait outside. I want to talk to Custis.” He motioned to the two waiting riflemen. “Take him out—put him in another hut and keep your eyes on him.”

And Custis was left alone in the hut with the old commander.

The commander looked up at him. “That’s your own car out there?”

Custis nodded.

“So you’re just under contract to the Seventh Republic—you’ve got no particular loyalty to the government.”

Custis shrugged. “Right now, there’s no tellin’ who I’m hired out to.” He was willing to wait the commander out and see what he was driving at.

“You did a good job of handling things, this morning. What are you—about twenty-nine, thirty?”

“Twenty-six.”

“So you were born four years after Berendtsen was killed. What do you know about him? What have you heard?”

“Usual stuff. After the plague, everything was a mess. Berendtsen put an army together, took over the territory, made the survivors obey one law, and strengthened things out that way.”

The commander nodded to himself—an old man’s nod, passing judgment on the far past. “You left out a lot of people between the plague and Berendtsen. And you’ll never imagine how bad it was. But that’ll do. Do you know why he did it?”

“Why’s anybody set up a government? He wanted to be boss, I guess. Then somebody decided he was too big, and cut him down. Then the people cut the somebody down. But I figure Berendtsen’s dead, for sure.”

“Do you?” the commander’s eyes were steady on Custis.

Custis tightened his jaw. “Yeah.”

“Do I look like Berendtsen?” the commander asked softly.

“No.”

“But hand-drawn portraits thirty years old don’t really mean anything, do they, Custis?”

“Well, no.” Joe felt himself getting edgy. “But you’re not Berendtsen,” he growled belligerently. “I’m sure Berendtsen’s dead.”

The old commander sighed. “Of course. Tell me about Chicago,” he said, going off in a new direction. “Has it changed much? Have they cleaned it up? Or are they simply abandoning the buildings that’re really falling down?”

“Sometimes. But they try and fix ’em up, sometimes.”

“Only sometimes.” The commander shook his head regretfully. “I had hoped that by this time, no matter what kind of men were in charge…”

“When’s the last time you were there?”

“I was never there. But I’ve seen a city or two.” The commander smiled at Custis. “Tell me about this car of yours. I used to be quite fond of mechanized equipment, once.” Now he was an old man again, dreaming back into the past, only half-seeing Custis. “We took a whole city once, with almost no infantry support at all. That’s a hard thing to do, even with tanks, and all I had was armored cars. Just twenty of them, and the heaviest weapons they mounted were light automatic cannon in demiturrets. No tracks—I remember they shot our tires flat almost at once, and we went bumping through the streets. Just armored scout cars, really, but we used them like tanks, and we took the city. Not a very large city.” He looked down at his hands. “Not very large, no. But still, I don’t believe that had ever been done before.”

“Never did any street fighting,” Custis said. “Don’t know a thing about it.”

“What do you know, then?”

“Open country work. Only thing a car’s good for.”

“One car, yes.”

“Hell, mister, there ain’t five cars runnin’ in the Republic, and they ain’t got any range. Only reason I’m still goin’ is mine don’t need no gasoline. I ran across it in an old American government depot outside Miles City. Provin’ grounds, it was. My dad, he’d taught me about runnin’ cars, and I had this fellow with me, Lew Gaines, and we got it going.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Seven years.”

“And nobody ever tried to take it away from you?”

“Mister, there’s three fifty-caliber machineguns and two 75s on that car.”

The commander looked at him from head to foot. “I see.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “And now you’ve practically handed it to me.”

“Not by a long shot, I ain’t. My crew’s still inside, and it’s kind of an open question whether you’re ready to get your troops barbecued just for the sake of killing us and making the car no good to anybody.”

The commander cocked an eyebrow at him. “Not as open as all that.”

“Open enough. You set it up so we can both pull back from each other if that turns out best; if we come to some kind of agreement.”

“You’re here. Your crew’s down the mountain.”

“My crew’s just as good without me, Mister.”

The commander let it ride, switching his tack a little. “You’ll admit you’ve come to a peculiar place for a man who only knows open country work.”

Custis shrugged. “Car needed shopwork. Chicago’s the only place with the equipment. If I use their shops, I do their work. That’s the straight up and down of it. And it’s one more reason why gettin’ the car’d be more work than it was worth to you. Anything you busted on it would stay busted for good. And you know it. You’re so fond of cars, where’s yours? Wore out, right? So now you’re walkin’.”

“Horses.”

“Horses!”

The commander smiled crookedly. “All right. It takes a good deal to budge you, doesn’t it, Custis?”

“Depends on the spot I’m in. My dad taught me to pick my spot careful.”

The commander nodded again. “I’d say so. All right, Custis, I’ll want to talk to you again, later. One of my men’ll stay close to you. Other than that, you’re free to look around as much as you want to. I don’t imagine you’ll ever be leading any expeditions up here—not if Henley’s plans work out. Or even if they don’t.”

He turned away and reached under the cot for a bottle, and Custis hadn’t found out what the old commander was driving at.

Outside, they were cooking their noon meal. The camp women were huddled around the firepits, bent shapeless as they stirred their pots with charred, long wooden spoons, and the smell of food lay over the area near the huts in an invisible cloud that dilated Custis’s nostrils and made his empty stomach tighten up. Whatever these people ate, it was hot and smelled different from the sludgy meat in the car’s ration cans.

Then he shrugged and closed his mind to it. Walking upwind, he went over to a low rock and sat down on it. One of the commander’s riflemen went with him and leaned against a boulder fifteen feet away, cradling his rifle in the crook of one thin arm and looking steadily at Custis through coldly sleepy eyes.

A bunch of kids clustered around the fires, filling oil cans that had crude handles made out of insulated wire. When they had loaded up they moved out of the little valley with a few riflemen for escort, carrying food out to the men who were in position around the battlewagon. Custis watched them for a while, then ignored them as well as he could.

So Henley was working for a group that wanted to set up the next government. It wasn’t particularly surprising that the Seventh Republic was financing its own death. Every government was at least half made up of men from the one before. They played musical chairs with the titles—one government’s tax collector was the next government’s chief of police—and whoever wasn’t happy with the graft was bound to be figuring some way to improve it the next time the positions moved around.

It looked a helI of a lot like, however the pie was cut, Custis wasn’t going to get paid. The Seventh wouldn’t pay him if he didn’t come back with Berendtsen, and if he did find him the Eighth wouldn’t hold to the last government’s contract.

Custis twitched his mouth. Anyhow, the car was running as well as you could expect. If he got out of here, Kansas City might have a job for him. He’d heard rumors things were happening down there. It wasn’t familiar territory, and there were always rumors that things were better somewhere else, but he might try it. Or he might even head east, if the highways over the mountains were still any good at all. That could be a real touchy business all around, with God knew what going on behind the Appalachians, and maybe an organization that had plenty of cars of its own, and no use for half-bandit plains people. Going there wouldn’t be the smart thing to do. As a matter of fact, he knew, inside, that he’d never leave the northern plains, no matter how he reasoned. It was too risky, heading for some place where they were past needing battlewagons.

He wondered how the boys in the car were making out. He hadn’t heard any firing from over there, and he didn’t expect to. But it was a lousy business, sitting cooped up in there, not knowing anything, and looking out at the men on the rocks as time went by.

When you came right down to it, this was a lousy kind of life, waiting for the day you ran into a trap under the sod and the last thing you ever did was try to climb out through the turret while the people who’d dug the hole waited outside with their knives. Or wondering, every time you went into one of the abandoned old towns on the far prairie, where supposedly nobody lived, if somebody there hadn’t found some gasoline in a sealed drum and was waiting to set you on fire.

But what the hell else could a man do? Live in the damned cities, breaking your back in somebody’s jackleg factory, eating nothing that couldn’t be raised or scavenged right on the spot—and not much of that—living in some hole somewhere that had twelve flights of stairs before you got to it? Freezing in the winter and maybe getting your throat cut for your coat in some back alley?

Custis shivered suddenly. To hell with this. He was thinking in circles. When a man did that, he licked himself before he got started.

Custis slid off his rock, stretched out on the ground, and went to sleep thinking of Berendtsen.

CHAPTER FOUR

This is what happened to Theodore Berendtsen when he was young, having grown up in the shadow of a heap of rubble with a weathering sign on top of it. That was all he had in the way of a portrait of his father. And this is what he did with it.

Ted Berendtsen opened the hatch and shouted down over the growl of the PT boat’s engines. “Narrows, Jack.”

Holland nodded, typed the final sentence of his report with two bobbing fingers, and got up. “What’s the latest from Matt?”

“Nothing new. I just checked with Ryder, on radio watch.”

Holland scrambled up on deck, stretching his stiff muscles. “Man, next time Matt sends out a mission, somebody else can go. I’ve had PT’s.”

Ted nodded sourly. “I’ve had Philadelphia, too,” he growled in conscious imitation of Jack’s voice. For the hundredth time, he caught the faint smile on Jack’s lips, and resolved, for the hundredth time, to stop his adolescent hero-worship. Or at least to tone it down. “Brotherly love. Wow!”

He flushed. Boyish excitability was no improvement.

Holland grunted and ran his eyes over the bright machine-gunned scars in the deck plywood. He shook his head. “That’s a tough nut down there.”

Ted nodded solemn agreement, instantly stabbed himself with the realization of solemnity, flushed again, and finally shrugged his mental shoulders and, for the hundredth time, gave up on the whole problem of being sixteen. Instead, he watched the shoreline slip by, but soon found himself unable to resist Manhattan’s lure. The skyscraper city bulked out the horizon in front of him, windows flashing in the sun.

He knew Holland was watching the look on his face, and he cursed himself for being conscious of it just because Holland had gotten him his first man- size rifle and taught him how to use it.

“Damn, it’s big,” he said.

Jack nodded. “Big, all right. Wonder how much more of it’s joined up since we left?”

“Not the West Side, that’s for sure.”

“Those boys aren’t ever likely to budge,” Holland said.

Ted nodded. Too solemnly, again.

Matt Garvin put the report down and sighed. Then he looked past Ted at Jack Holland with the quick sharpness of a man who knows that the other will understand him perfectly. “People in Philadelphia aren’t any different, are they?”

Jack smiled thinly, and Ted felt envy, as he always did whenever Jack and old Matt communicated in these sentences and short gestures that represented paragraphs of the past. He ruthlessly stifled a sigh of his own. When he and Jack had boarded the PT boat, a month before, he had vaguely hoped that something—some uncertain ordeal by fire or inconcise overwhelming experience—would give him that intangible which he recognized in Holland as manhood. He had hoped, as the PT growled slowly down the Jersey coast, that some sort of antagonist would put out from the shore or rise from the sea, and that, at the conclusion of the harrowing struggle, he would find himself spontaneously lean of cheek and jaw, carelessly poised of body, with automatically short and forceful sentences on his lips. But nothing had changed.

“What do you think?” Matt asked him.

The question caught him unaware. He realized he must have looked ridiculous with his absent gaze snapping precipitously back to Matt Garvin.

“About Philadelphia?” he said hastily. “I think we’ll have a hard time with them, Matt.”

Garvin nodded. “Which would mean you think we’re bound to run into those people sometime, right?”

“Ahuh.” He caught the smile on Jack’s lips again, and cursed inwardly. “Yes, I do,” he amended. Damn, damn, damn!

“Any special reason why you think so?”

Ted shrugged uncomfortably. He thought about his father less than he should have, probably. He only vaguely remembered the big man—bigger than lifesize, doubtless, in a child’s eyes—who had been so friendly. If he had seen his death, perhaps, he would have that missing thing to fill out his inadequacy—a cause, passed down, to be upheld and to which he could dedicate himself. But he had not seen his father die. Of it all, he remembered only his mother’s grief, still vaguely terrifying whenever too closely thought of.

He stood hopeless before Matt Garvin, with only reasoning to justify him. “I don’t know exactly, Matt,” he stumbled. “But they’re down there with Pennsylvania and New Jersey in their laps whenever they need them. They’re going to be crowding up this way in another twenty-five, thirty years. All we’ve got’s Long Island, and it’s not going to be enough to feed us by them. We’re stuck out here on this island. They could pinch us off easy.” He stopped, not knowing whether he’d said enough or too much.

Garvin nodded again. “Sounds reasonable. But this report doesn’t show any organization down there. How about that?”

Ted glanced quickly at Jack. If Holland hadn’t covered that in his report, it could only have been because he shared Ted’s opinion that the true situation was self-evident. The thought occurred to him that Garvin was testing his reasoning.

He felt even more unsure of himself now.

“Well,” he said finally, “I can’t think of anything about Philadelphia that would make people down there much different from us. I don’t see how they could have missed setting up some kind of organization. Maybe it works a little different from ours, because of some local factor, but it’s bound to be basically the same.” He stopped uncertainly. “I’m not making myself clear, am I?” he asked.

“It’s all right so far, Ted. Go on,” Garvin said, betraying no impatience.

“Well, it seems to me,” Ted went on, some of his inward clumsiness evaporating, “that you’d have a tough time spotting our kind of organization if you just took a boat into the harbor, like we did in Philly. Chances are, you wouldn’t run across our radio frequency. If you landed on the West Side, you’d run into the small outfits in the warehouses. Even if you happened to pick the organized territory—I don’t know; if somebody came chugging up the river, I wouldn’t be much likely to trust him, no matter what he tried to say. It’s the same old story. You can’t join up with anybody, anymore, unless it’s on your own terms. There’s been too much of our hard work and fighting done to keep our organization going. It doesn’t really matter whether they’ve had to do the same for themselves. Each of us is in the right, as far as we’re separately concerned. And it’d be a lot nicer, for us, if we were the ones who came out running things, because that’s the only way we could be sure all that work of ours hadn’t been for nothing.”

He stopped, thinking he’d finished, but as he did, another thought came to him.

“It’d be different, if there were a lot of things to negotiate about. Then there’d be room to talk in. I guess, maybe, if we keep organizing, we’ll work our way up to that point. But right now, it’s a pretty clear-cut thing, one way or the other. Nobody’s any better off than anybody else—if somebody was, we’d of heard from them by now. Looking at it from our viewpoint, then, it’s a lot better for our organization if we do all the deciding on who joins up with us. So, if somebody from outside comes nosing around, the best thing to do is just discourage him.” He broke off long enough to grin crookedly. “They sure discouraged us down at Philly.

“All we ever saw of Philadelphia itself was the waterfront. I’d say that almost anything could be going on down there, and we couldn’t spot it. You’d have to go deep into the town itself, into the residential area. The same way that somebody coming into Manhattan would have to get to the lower East Side. And I guess we’re pretty sure no stranger’s going to get that chance.”

“Hmmm.” Garvin was grinning at Jack, and Holland was smiling back. Ted stood awkwardly, looking from one to the other.

“All right, Ted,” Garvin said, turning back to him. “Looks to me like you kept your eyes open and your brain working.”

Faintly surprised, Ted acknowledged to himself that he probably had. But he’d devoted no special effort to it, and he’d certainly done nothing else to distinguish himself. The brief engagement in Philadelphia’s harbor had offered none of the many hoped-for opportunities to shed his adolescence. All in all, he didn’t know how to answer Matt now, and he was deeply grateful that no answer seemed to be expected.

“I guess that’s it, Ted. You might as well go home. Margaret’ll have supper going by now. Tell her I’ll be along in a while, will you? You and Jack take it easy for a day or two. I’ll be giving you something else to do pretty soon.”

“Right, Matt. See you tonight.” That, too, he thought, had been too crisply casual. He noticed that Jack had started to say something himself—probably the same thing, in effect, and had stopped abruptly, with that same half-concealed, knowing smile at Garvin. Damn, damn, God damn!

“Well, that’s that,” Holland said outside Matt’s headquarters. He stretched luxuriously, his eyes grinning. He slapped Ted’s shoulder lightly. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, and walked off, his stride catlike, easily holding his slung rifle straight up and down with the heel of his hand against its butt.

Ted smiled. Jack had been cooped up on the boat for a month. The adjective “catlike” was as easily applied to his frame of mind as to his walk. Ted smiled again. Ruefully.

He hitched his own rifle sling higher up on his shoulder and walked determinedly toward the Garvins’ apartment.

Ever since his father’s death, Ted and his mother had more or less been staying with the Garvins. Their apartments adjoined, and up to the time that Ted had earned the right to carry his own rifle, both families had been equally under Matt’s protection. Ted had been raised with Jim and Mary Garvin—discounting Bob, who was five years younger than Ted, and therefore even more useless than Mary as a companion. Recently, of course, Mary had been acquiring greater significance, even if she was only thirteen. She seemed to him admittedly more mature of mind than other girls her age, most of whom Ted ignored completely.

He bent over and tightened the mounting screws on his rear sight with careful concentration.

“You mean they had a machinegun?” Mary asked breathlessly.

“Ahuh.” He shrugged casually, and made sure the windage adjustment was traveling freely but precisely. “Had a bad time for a couple of minutes there.” He pulled out the bolt assembly and squinted at the already immaculate walls of the chamber.

“What did you do then? I’d have been awfully scared.”

He shrugged again. “Turned around and ran. It looked like only a couple of guys, but it smelled like more. No telling what they might have backing them up.” He slipped the bolt back in and worked it a few times, spreading the lubricant evenly. “Tell you the truth, I kept thinking about those mortars Matt’s got down by the river. No reason for them not to be set up the same way. Anyway, we pulled out. Ryder was on the portside turret—that’s the left—and he hosed them down a little. Knocked them out, I guess, because we were still in range and they didn’t do anything about it.” He ran the lightly oiled rag over all of the rifle’s exposed metal, set the safety, and slid in a freshly loaded clip. As he looked up, Jim caught his eye and winked, looking sidelong at Mary. Ted’s cheeks reddened, and he shot a steely glance at his friend.

“Well, I guess I’ll turn in,” he said lightly. His mother had gone inside a few moments before. He stretched and yawned. He slung the rifle on his shoulder. “Good night, everybody.”

“Good night, Ted,” Mrs. Garvin smiled, looking up from her sewing. “G’nite, Ted,” Jim said cuttingly.

“Good night, Ted,” Mary said. He raised his hand in a short, casual wave to her and walked through the connecting doorway, the heel of his hand resting easily against his rifle’s butt.

“Ted?”

He winced faintly as he closed the door behind him. “Yes, Mom,” he said quickly, before the apprehension in her voice could multiply itself.

She came into the room, standing just inside. “Of course it’s you,” she said with a nervous smile. “I don’t know who I thought it’d be.”

“Well, there’s the bogeyman, and then there’s ghoolies and ghosties…” He let his mock gravity trail off into a smile, and her face smoothed a little.

“Can I get you some tea or something?” he asked, putting the rifle up on the rack he’d hung beside the door.

“Why, yes, thanks. Are you going to sleep now?”

“I guess so. I’m pretty tired,” he said on his way to the kitchen.

“I made your bed. Your room’s just the way you left it.”

“Thanks, Mom,” he said, letting himself smile with tolerant tenderness, in the kitchen where no one could see him.

He brought the cupful of tea out to her, and she took it with a grateful smile. “It’s good to have you home again,” she said. “I rattled around in here, all by myself.”

“There’s all those Garvins next door,” he pointed out.

She smiled lightly. “Not as many for me as there are for you. The kids get a little noisy sometimes, for my taste. Matt’s busy all day, and he goes to sleep almost as soon as he eats. And Margaret’s not as good company as she used to be.” Her smile grew worried. “She’s getting awfully gloomy, Ted. Matt’s in his forties, and he’s still carrying his rifle with the rest of the men. What would happen if he died?”

“I guess he’s got to, Mom. It’s his responsibility. If he couldn’t handle it, somebody else would be running things. He’s doing a good job, too. I haven’t heard many complaints about it.”

“I know, Ted. Margaret knows too. But that doesn’t help, does it?”

“No, I suppose not. Well, there isn’t anything we can do about it, the way things are.” He bent over and kissed her cheek. “Going to stay up for a while?”

She nodded. “I think so, Ted. Good night.”

“Good night, Mom.”

He went down the hall to his room, undressed, and blew out the lamp. He lay awake, his eyes closed in the darkness.

It was a hard life, for the women. He wondered if that was why Jack Holland wasn’t married. He was twenty-nine already.

Damn. Thirteen more years.

Matt was either forty-two or three. Old Matt, who wouldn’t be so old in any other time and place. Old Matt must have been young, nineteen-year-old Matt sometime, trying to stay alive in the first few months after the plague. The vague plague, that nobody knew much about because he could only know what had happened to him or those with him, and had no idea what it had been like all over the world.

All over the world. There must be thousands of places like Manhattan, scattered out among the cities, with men like Matt and Jack in them, trying to organize, trying to get people together again. And, more than likely, there were thousands of guys like Ted Berendtsen, who ought to cut out this pointless mental jabbering and get some sleep, right… now.

“Man, I’m not going to like this,” Jim Garvin said as they loaded up their packs and jammed extra clips into their bandoliers.

Ted shrugged, smoking up his foresight to kill glare. “Be crazy if you did. But it’s got to be done faster than we figured, I guess.”

“Pop say anything to you about it?”

Ted shook his head. “Nope. But that report Jack and I brought back from Philly is what did it. We’ve got to have this area squared away in case they move up on us. They know where we came from.” He settled his pack snugly onto his shoulders, and twisted his belt to get the Colt’s holster settled more comfortably. He didn’t usually carry a pistol, but this was going to be close-range work, once they flushed their men out from cover. The thing weighed a ton.

“S’pose you’re right,” Jim admitted.

Ted frowned slightly. Jim should at least have thought of the obvious question, as long as he was in a questioning frame of mind. He’d wondered about it himself, until he realized that the attempt to take all of the lower West Side in one operation had to be made. Just perhaps, the slow process that had worked on the East Side could be modified to fit, and there was time enough, more than likely, but that territory had been completely impenetrable for twenty years. The men in it knew every alley and back yard. Any attempt to take it piecemeal would mean an endless series of skirmishes with infiltrators.

Of course, he had a year and some months on Jim.

“Set?” Jack Holland came up to them, his pack bulging with ammunition, dynamite, and gasoline bombs, his rifle balanced in his hand. Ted nodded shortly, and was vaguely surprised to hear Jim say, “Yes, sir.” He looked from Jim to Jack, and barely twitched an eyelid. Jack grinned faintly.

“Okay, then, let’s get formed up. Matt’s taking the financial district, swinging up from the Battery. We go straight across town. Bill McGraw and another bunch are going in just below Forty-second Street.” He grinned and gestured perfunctorily and ribaldly. “That’s us—Lucky Pierre.”

Jim laughed, and Ted chuckled, winking at Jack again. The kid had been showing his nerves a little.

The three of them crossed the street to where the rest of the men in their group were waiting, scattered inconspicuously among the cars and doorways from old, vital habit. Ted looked up at the sky. It was growing dark. They’d move out pretty soon.

Jack dropped back and walked beside him. “Make sure Jim sticks pretty close to you, huh?” he said in a low voice. “I won’t be able to keep much of an eye on him myself.”

“Sure,” Ted answered. “I’ll take care of him.”

For two nights and three days, what had once been the lower half of Hell’s Kitchen had been tearing itself open. From that first cold morning when they had come out of their positions and dynamited their way into a packing plant, the slap of rifle fire and the occasional bellow of heavy sidearms had swept and echoed down the cluttered streets and wide, deadly avenues. Building by heavy building, they had blown gaps in walls, smashed windows, and shot their way from room to room in the first rush of surprise. Here and there, a firebomb had touched off a column of smoke that twisted fitfully in the breeze and light rain that had begun falling on the second day and was still coming down. A steady stream of runners was carrying ammunition up to them, and they supplied themselves from whatever miserable little they found, while scavenger squads cleaned up the weapons and ammunition left behind by corpses.

Two days, three nights. They had started on the uptown side of Fourteenth Street, with covering squads to clean out the downtown side and leave them a clear supply route.

They had reached Eighteenth Street by nightfall of the third day.

Ted slumped his head back against a wall and fed cartridges into a clip. “How’s it, Jim?”

Jim Garvin rubbed his hand over his face and shook his head in a vague attempt to clear out some of the weariness. “It stinks.”

Ted put the full clip in his bandolier and started on another. He grinned faintly. “Yeah,” he agreed. “You see Jack today?”

“Nope. Think he’s still around?”

“Chances are. He was doing house-to-house when we were just tads, remember?” He opened his pack and threw Jim a can of meat. “Tie into this, huh? I’ve been saving some. The slop they’ve been eating here is enough to make you sick.”

Jim shuddered and exhaled through his clenched teeth. “God, isn’t it just? All these bloody warehouses around here, too.” He opened the can and dug into it gratefully.

“A stinking set-up. Everybody just hung on to what they had, and to hell with you, buddy. Remember that bunch that’d been gettin’ no vitamins except out of canned fruit?”

“No organization at all,” Jim agreed, “What the hell’s wrong with these people?”

Ted shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. But they had a bunch of forts all ready made for them. These freakin’ warehouses were built to take it. And besides, they were warehouses. Up to the roof in supplies. Guess it looked like the simple way out.”

“How long d’you think we’ll be at this mess?”

“Depends. If Matt cleans up his end, we’ll get a push from him. If McGraw comes down, we’ll have ’em squeezed. I’d like it best if both happened, but I don’t know—that Greenwich Village is a rat-trap, from what I hear, and McGraw’s bound to be having it just as tough as we are. I wish I knew how this whole operation was going.”

“So long as Pop’s all right, I don’t give a hoot and a whoop for the rest of the operation. The part I worry about is right here.”

“Yeah, but the whole thing ties together,” Ted explained.

“That’s for somebody else to worry about,” Jim said.

Ted looked at him thoughtfully. “Yeah. Guess you’re right.” For the first time, the thought struck him that it didn’t look as if Jim was going to take over when his father left off. He was a good man with a rifle, and he never stopped after he started. But he didn’t do his own worrying.

That jarred him, somehow. He didn’t like the thought, because Jim was a friend of his, and because he was a first-grade fighting man, just like his father.

Only being a fighting man wasn’t good enough any more. It was a bigger sphere of operations now. New factors were coming into the picture all the time. This entire move against the West Side was not a foraging expedition, or an organizing process, though both would result. It was primarily a strategic maneuver against the day when Philadelphia began to move up the coast. Matt had started out a rifleman and learned, bit by bit, at the same pace with which the world grew more complicated. But Jim wouldn’t have that time to learn by practice what he didn’t understand by instinct. He was too young, and Matt was too old to give him that time.

What the hell, this was supposed to be a republic, wasn’t it? A republic lived by developing different kinds of leaders as it needed them.

But he didn’t like the idea, nevertheless. He’d have to think it over, think it out, before he could accept it.

“Might as well get some sleep, Jim,” he said. “Looks like we’ve closed up the big shop for the night. I’ll take the first watch.”

“Okay.” Jim rolled over gratefully, and pillowed his head on his arms. Ted checked the action on his .45, which had jammed on him twice already. He handled the truckhorse of a gun distastefully. The only good thing about it was the same thing that was good about Matt’s magnum rifle, which he wouldn’t handle either. The things kicked like bombs, burned out their barrels, took nonstandard ammunition, were nuisances to maintain, and had all the subtlety of a club. But hit a man anywhere at all on his body with a bullet from one of them, and hydrostatic shock would knock him out, if not kill him. Which, to Ted’s mind, was rarely an advantage. There was no point in killing a potentially good man if you could put him out of action some other way.

None of which instruction-manual thinking, Ted reflected, was really effective in keeping him from worrying about his big problem. He was beginning to understand why Jack Holland had never really teamed up with Jim on any job. Once you considered things in the proper light, all sorts of evidence began turning up.

Jack Holland. He hoped it would be Jack Holland who would be taking over from Matt, when the inevitable time came.

A week, now. Jack had finally had to abandon the planned straight-forward sweep, block by parallel block, and had sent his right flank out to clean up as many of the uptown blocks east of Ninth Avenue as it could. On that side of what had become the border of the warehouse gangs’ territory, the Republic’s men had made contact with McGraw’s group—Ryder’s now—which had executed a duplicate movement. But, effectively, as far as the warehouse gangs were concerned, Garvin’s forces were bogged down at Nineteenth Street and Thirty-first Street, with only minor penetrations into the periphery west of Ninth Avenue. Matt’s personal forces were moving slowly out of Greenwich Village, with isolated pockets still to be mopped up in the almost ideal defensive positions that twisted alleys and cross-streets provided. But there, too, the actual core of resistance had hardly been bruised, for almost all the heavily built docks, warehouses, and docked ships were still holding out.

Somehow, Ted had acquired a squad of his own from men who had fallen in with him. They were apparently willing to follow his suggestions without debating them, and, as long as he didn’t seem to be making costly mistakes, he was perfectly willing to let it ride that way. They certainly weren’t hindering him and Jim any. All of them were heavily stubbled and ragged by now, and none of them had had much sleep. The latter probably fogged their judgment, and the former operated in his favor as well, since his own beard, augmented by grime, was enough to hide the boyish roundness of his face.

But the ammunition was running low.

His head dropped forward and he jerked it up again, coming out of his doze. Jack twisted a grin at him. “Kinda tiresome, ain’t it?”

Ted grunted. “What d’you hear on the box?” he said, motioning toward the radio.

“Ryder’s coming down, Matt’s coming up. We’re going west. Speed: six inches per hour.”

“They tried that stunt with the PT’s?”

Holland snorted. “Ever try to torpedo a warehouse? They knocked out most of the freighters in the channel, which doesn’t help us a goddamned bit.”

“We’ve got to crack those birds soon, Jack.”

“I know. We’ll be firing Roman candles at them if this keeps up. You got any ideas?”

“No.” He dozed off again, leaning on a garbage can.

Ten days, and he reached his conclusion. It was not an idea, he recognized, no more than Austerlitz or the shelling of Monte Cassino were ideas. It was a calculated decision based on the problem before him, reached in the light of the urgent necessity for the problem’s solution. Again, as with many of his recent decisions, he did not like it when he came to it. But it was the product of logical extrapolation, based on rational thinking and personal knowledge which he could honestly believe he had analyzed completely. Once he recognized this last, he knew he had given himself no choice.

“Problem is to get in close enough to dynamite the warehouses, right?” he said to Jack.

“Ahuh. Been that way for some time, now. They’ve got those boys on the roofs of the houses all around them. They can cover them, and the lads in the houses keep us back. We clean out a house, they toss dynamite down and blow the house to shreds, leaving an exposed area we can’t cross anyway. Can’t go in at night, because this is their territory, booby-trapped. So?”

“Wait for an east wind. Get one, and burn the houses. Go in under the smoke. Blow your way into the first floor, sit back, and wait for them to come out. They don’t come out, blow the second floor.”

Holland whistled. He looked at Ted thoughtfully. “Kind of mean, isn’t it? The guys in those houses get it either way—they come out while we’re waiting in the street, or they burn.”

“Jesus Christ!” Jim said, staring at Ted.

Berendtsen swayed wearily on his feet. Suddenly, he realized that he had done something neither Jack Holland nor Matt Garvin’s son were capable of. He had reached a decision he hated, but would carry out, given the opportunity, because he knew that whether it was right or wrong on some cosmic balance scale, he believed it to be right. Or, not right—necessary. And he could trust that belief because he trusted himself.

“All right,” he said, his voice calm, “let’s get on that radio and talk to Matt. We’ve got an old precedent for all this, you know,” he added dryly.

He led his sooty, weary men back along the broad length of Fourteenth Street, his left hand lost in a bulbous wrapping of bandage, his empty pack flapping between his shoulder blades. He and Jim and the rest of his squad were lost in the haphazard column of Matt Garvin’s men, but his mind’s eye separated his own from the rest. All the men were shuffling wordlessly up the street, weary past the bone, but he tried to read the faces of his squad. There had been many more men in the firing and dynamiting parties, but these had been the ones he led.

He tried to discover whether the men who followed him thought he was right or wrong. But their faces were blank with exhaustion, and he could not let his own expression disclose the slightest anxiety. And then he realized what the hard part of being a man was.

When they reached Stuyvesant at last, he found Matt Garvin. They looked at each other, he with his wounded hand and Matt with a shoulder almost dislocated by the magnum’s repeated detonations. He drew one corner of his mouth up crookedly, and Matt nodded and smiled faintly.

Now I know, Berendtsen thought.

Silently, Ted Berendtsen walked up the stairs while Jim hung back. He ran his hand over his jaws, and his cheeks, under their temporary gauntness, were just as soft. His feet stumbled on the steps.

Jesus Christ, I’m only sixteen! he thought. He grimaced faintly, at this last, illogical protest. Matt had a few more years.

CHAPTER FIVE

Matt Garvin had grown old, for his time. His oldest son, Jim, was twenty-two, and his daughter, Mary, was twenty. His youngest son, Robert, was a little past fifteen. And the civilization he had seen re-established now held all of Greater New York.

It was enough. He could sit at his window, looking out over Stuyvesant Town where the building generators had put lights back in the windows, and nod slowly to himself. It was done. Up and down the coast, where his scouting boats had wandered, he knew there were other cities shining once more beside the broad ocean. In those cities there must be other men like himself, satisfied with what they had accomplished. Soon, now, the cities would spill over—the pocket civilizations would touch and coalesce, and the plague would be forgotten, the land and the people whole again.

Out in the inlands, each isolated by the broken strands of transportation and communication, there would be other cities, all flickering back to life. And in the farmlands between them, where life had not really changed, there would be other men waiting to join hands with them.

He spoke about it, hesitantly, during a meeting with his most important lieutenants. And Ted Berendtsen looked up.

“You’re right, Matt. It’ll happen, and soon. But have you thought about what’s going to happen when it does?”

Jim Garvin looked up sharply. No, his father hadn’t thought about it. Not in detail. Neither had he.

Berendtsen was finishing his point. “We’re not just going to puddle up by osmosis, you know. Somebody’s going to have to build pipelines. And when we get that puddle—who’s going to be the big frog? Somebody’ll have to. We can’t just all live happily ever after. Somebody still has to lead. What guarantee do we have that we’ll enjoy it?”

Jim sighed. Berendtsen was right. They were not one people, separated, now reuniting. They were half-a-hundred, perhaps more, individual civilizations, each with its own society, each with its own way of life. It would not be an easy, or a happy, process.

Matt Garvin looked at Jack Holland and shrugged his shoulders heavily. “Well, what’s your answer to it all, Jack?”

Jim Garvin saw Jack Holland’s side-glance at Ted before he said anything, and nodded quietly to himself. It wasn’t Holland who was really second in command, it was Berendtsen, young as he was.

“I don’t know,” Holland said. “Seems to me that it’s about time for a lot of outfits like ours to be spilling over into the surrounding territory, yeah. But it’s going to be a long time before whatever happens around Boston or Philadelphia makes itself felt up here. They’re doing the same thing we are—pushing out and looking for land to grow food on. We’re out on Long Island, busy farming. Philly’ll be doing the same thing in its own corner. So will Boston and Washington. It’ll be years before we grow up to the size where we’ll need more territory. They’re even smaller. They’ll take more time. By then, we’ll be farther along. We’ll always be stronger than they are.”

Berendtsen shook his head, and the gesture was enough to draw everyone’s attention. “Not quite the whole problem,” he said.

Matt sighed. “No, I guess it isn’t. How do you read it?”

“Our scouting reports from Boston indicate that New England’s having the same old problem. You can’t farm that country worth a damn. There’s a good reason why that was all manufacturing country up there—you can’t feed yourself off the land. There’s nowhere near the population up there that there used to be, of course, but they’re still going to be spreading out faster than anybody else. They’ll have to. They need four acres to our one.

“Now—Philly’s in a bad spot. They’re down on the coast with Baltimore, Washington, and Wilmington right on their necks. That’s besides Camden. They won’t move up here until they’re sure of being safe from a push coming up from below. They can handle that three ways—lick the tar out of those people, bunch up with them in some loose alliance against us, or—and this is what I’m afraid of—start building up for a fast push in this direction before those other cities get set. Once they’ve got a lock on us, they can concentrate on holding off anybody else.”

He leaned forward. “Now. We’ve already assumed that whatever happens, we want our side on top.”

Something jumped in Jim Garvin’s solar plexus. They had, hadn’t they? It had already become a question of “How do we get them to do things our way?” But what other way was there? A man worked for himself, for what was his. A society—an organization of men—did the same. You fought for what was yours.

“All right, then,” Berendtsen said. “If Philly moved up here, and took over, I’d join them. So would everybody else. It wouldn’t be our society any more, but at least it would be a society. We’d get used to it in time, if we had to.

“The same thing works in our favor. If we take over another outfit, their citizens’ll join up with us. They may not like it. Some individuals will be holdouts to the bitter end. But, as a whole, that group will become part of us.

“Think it over.”

Berendtsen’s voice and expression had been completely neutral. He spoke as though he were reading off a column of figures, and when he stopped he settled back in his chair without any change of manner.

Matt nodded slowly. “I think you’re right. In general, and about Boston and Philadelphia. Both those outfits are being pushed. They’ll be moving faster than we will.”

Jim looked around again. Holland was nodding softly, and he himself had to agree.

He looked at Berendtsen, once again trying to understand what made his brother-in-law tick. There didn’t seem to be a fast answer, even though they had grown up together. He could guess what Ted would do in a particular circumstance, but he could never really get down to the basic motivation that made him do it. Somehow, he doubted if Mary could do any better. Both of them could penetrate his calm, withdrawn shell along certain fronts, but the whole Theodore Berendtsen—the man who lived in the whipcord body with the adding-machine mind—escaped them with unconscious elusiveness.

What does it? he thought. What was there hidden behind his brooding eyes that pulled each problem apart and allowed him to say “Hit it here, here, and there. Get that, and this part’ll collapse and let you get at the rest of it,” as coldly as though it were a piece of physical machinery to be stripped down and rebuilt until it functioned smoothly and without effort.

And now there was something new in the wind. Jim shot a fresh glance at his father. Matt was halftwisted in his chair, racked by arthritis. His right hand was almost completely useless. And if his mind was still clear, his eyes tired but alert, Ted’s thinking was just as straight, and he was out in the city every day, directing Ryder in the absorption of the neighboring New Jersey cities, while he himself cleaned out the Bronx and lower Westchester.

Jim looked up and caught Jack Holland’s eye. They grinned wryly at each other and then turned their attention back at Ted.

“There’s only one thing to do,” Berendtsen said, still not raising his voice. “No matter how fast they get set, down in Philadelphia, it’ll be two years at least before they come up this way. There’s no sign that Trenton’s anything but an independent organization yet.

“We need supplies. We need heavier weapons, more tools, more machinery. We need men who’re used to handling them. And we’ve got to nip Boston in the bud. We can’t stand to get caught between two forces.”

Holland stiffened in his chair. “You want to push up into New England now?”

Ted nodded. “We’ve got the men. They’re used to the idea of fighting aggressively, instead of just defending their personal property. They’ve got it through their heads that the best security lies in putting as much distance as possible between our frontier and their families. They’ve learned that a cooperative effort gets them more food and supplies than individual foraging.

“We’ll pick up more recruits as we go along. I don’t care what kind of set-up they’ve had up to now, ours is bigger. We can feed ’em and take care of their families better than anyone else.”

“That’s an awful lot of fighting,” Matt said.

“It doesn’t have to be,” Ted answered. “We’ll make the usual try at getting them to join us peacefully.”

Matt looked steadily at Gus Berendtsen’s son and said nothing, but Ted nodded slowly back, with a crooked smile on his face. “We’ll make the attempt, Matt.”

Jim looked at Holland, and Jack looked thoughtfully back. He was right, again. They’d have to make examples of the first few local organizations, but after that they’d be able to progress smoothly until they reached Boston. And, by then, their forces would have grown large enough to carry out the plan. Once they had New England to back them up, Philadelphia was no menace.

They both looked up and saw Matt’s eyes searching their faces. Jim saw Holland nod slowly, and then he nodded himself, because Ted was right.

Yes, Jim thought, he was right. Again. He had the answer, and there was no denying it.

“There’s going to be a lot of killing,” Jim said, but it was just for the record. What record, he didn’t know.

Berendtsen’s face softened, and for one moment Jim thought he had somehow managed to learn how to read minds. “I know,” he said gently, and it took a few seconds for Jim’s flash of irrationality to pass and for him to realize that Ted had been answering his spoken question.

“Well, what’d the great young white father come up with this time,” Bob asked him, his voice sarcastic.

Jim looked at his younger brother wearily. “Just a couple of ideas on what we’re going to do next.”

But the vagueness of the answer didn’t discourage Bob, and Jim realized that all he’d done was to offer him bait.

“Yeah? When’s he taking over?”

“For Sweet Willie’s sake, will you get off this kick and leave me alone!” Jim exploded.

“No,” Bob said, “I will not leave you alone.” The back of his own neck was red, but his eyes were snapping with some sort of perverse joy at having gotten under Jim’s skin. “You may not enjoy thinking, but I’m going to force your daily quota down your throat anyway. Berendtsen’s moving in on Dad as fast as he can, and you know it. He got his smell of power when he butchered his way through the West Side and he’s been aching for a chance to repeat the performance on a bigger scale. And you and Jack just sit there and let him push Dad around as much as he damn well likes!”

Jim sucked in a breath and looked steadily at Bob for a full minute before he trusted himself to speak. In the back of his mind, he admitted that he was a little afraid of these increasing verbal battles with his brother. Bob had read a lot of books, and he was constantly poking and prying around the city, camping in libraries for weeks at a time, or bringing the books home in his pack, carefully wrapped and handled more tenderly than his carbine. When Bob talked, words fit smoothly into words, building nets of step-by-step assertions that could snare a man in his own fumbling until he found himself running down into foolish silence while Bob just stood there and gibed at him with his eyes, cutting him with the slash of his grin.

“In the first place…” he began, forcing the words out against the barrier of Bob’s obvious patient waiting until he left an opening to be attacked through, “Ted’s brains are what gives him the right to sit in on meetings. He belongs there a hell of a lot more than I do, let me tell you! In the second place, Ted did not butcher his way through the West Side—he helped to take care of one small part of it. And I know damn well he didn’t enjoy himself, because I was with him—which you weren’t, sonny. And if he gets an idea that’s going to make life safer for all of us, we’re damn well going to follow it. Dad’s getting old and we might as well face it. He listens to Ted, and so does Jack Holland. Personally, if Ted wants to push north—”

He stopped and stared helplessly at Bob, whose eyes had widened and who was half-laughing at him for giving himself away.

“All right, so he does intend to lead a force toward Boston. So what? His reasons are damn good ones!” Jim blurted, trying to bolster his position.

“I’ll bet they are,” Bob said, and turned away as though he had won the argument conclusively, leaving Jim standing there fighting off the unfounded conviction that he really had.

“James Garvin, I’ll thank you to stop cursing at your brother,” his mother said angrily from the doorway.

“I was not…” Jim began, and then blew the breath out of his throat and shrugged hopelessly. “All right, Mom,” he said, and went past her into the apartment with an apologetic look that was strongly tinged with frustration. He hung up his rifle and went to his room, where he sat down on the bed and stared angrily at the wall until dinner time.

Ted and Mary were eating with them that night, and through the first part of the meal, Jim sat uncomfortably between his father and Bob, hoping the present silence would continue but knowing that this was extremely unlikely with Bob in the mood he was. Ted was eating quietly, and Mary, sitting beside him, was her usual controlled self.

Jim bit off a piece of cornbread viciously, drawing an amused side-glance from Bob, who, as usual, missed nothing going on around him and who was probably enjoying the situation considerably.

Finally his father pushed his plate awkwardly away and looked up. “Jim, I suppose you’ve told your mother and Bob about what we decided at the meeting today?”

Jim grimaced. “I didn’t get a chance to tell Mom. Bob’s got it all figured out for himself, of course.”

His father shot him a quick, surprised, yet understanding look which was gone immediately as he turned to look inquiringly at Bob. Jim noticed that Ted was still eating with even, wasteless motions, finishing the last of his supper, and not looking up.

“Well, what do you think, Bob?” Matt asked.

Bob raised an eyebrow and twitched his eyes to Ted before he looked back at his father. “Are you sure it’s all right for me to think while Big Chief’s here to do it for me?”

Oh, no! Jim thought, wishing a thunderclap would come to erase the entire scene. Even his mother looked at Bob with complete astonishment. Jim didn’t dare look at his father.

Ted looked up without seeming to be surprised at all. “Sounds like that’s been building up a long time, Bob,” he said quietly. “Want to tell me about it?”

Jim sighed as quietly as he could, feeling the shocked tension drain out of his father’s body beside him. His mother, too, relaxed, and Mary, who had put down her fork and looked evenly at Bob, started eating again.

He took over, Jim thought. Ted had absorbed the force of Bob’s explosion and removed its impact from them all, and now it was his responsibility, and his alone. And while Matt Garvin held his eyes riveted on his younger son, and no matter what he might feel, he did not speak.

Bob held his eyes level with Ted’s, but Jim could see it was an effort. Finally, he said, “Yes, it has.” His voice was low, but taut and desperate, and for one brief moment Jim caught a flash of what he must be feeling. He had thrown a stone into a pond, made an unexpectedly insignificant splash, and was now somehow in over his head. Jim wanted to smile grimly, but realized that this was no time for it.

“Yes, it has,” Bob repeated, his voice rising. “I’ve been sitting here watching you take over in all directions, and I think it stinks!” His breathing was harsh, his face scarlet. He had put himself in an impossible position, and there was no direction in which to go but forward.

Ted nodded slowly. “I think you’re right.”

And, once again, Bob was helpless.

“I think you’re right because I don’t think anybody should be in my position,” Ted continued, still without changing the quiet level of his voice. “Unfortunately, I seem to have grown into it.”

“With a lot of force-feeding!” Bob shot back, recovering.

Ted shrugged, letting an uncharacteristic sigh seep out between his closed lips. “That’s the nature of the times, Bob. If you’re implying that I’m exercising some sort of pressure, I’d like to ask you where you think I got the authority to back it with. Rather than accept that premise, I’d say that the times are such that they produce the pressure which forces one man to make more decisions than another man. There’s a certain step-by-step logic, inherent in human nature and the peculiarities of human psychology, which ensures that Man will always organize into the largest possible group. Civilization is inevitable, if you want a pat phrase. It so happens that, at this stage, we are in transition from a city-state to a national culture. Such a move always requires that the separate elements be welded into one by force. I’d like to remind you that Greece was nothing but a collection of enlightened but small, ineffectual, and squabbling city-states until the advent of Philip of Macedon.”

Bob saw his opening. His mouth curved into its characteristic thin crook of a smile, and his voice gathered confidence again.

“Heil Berendtsen!”

Ted nodded. “If you want it that way, yes. Though I’d prefer—if that’s the word—an analogy to Caesar. And if you think I enjoy the thought—” His voice hardened for the first time, and Jim paled as he saw something of the restless beast that prowled Ted’s mind of nights, “—then, Bob, I’d suggest that you read your Gibbon more thoroughly.”

“Very pretty,” Bob answered. “Very pretty. Destiny has chosen a son, and all the stars point to Berendtsen! Thank you, I’ll stick to Hitler.”

“I’m afraid you’re stuck with me,” Ted said, and finished his peas.

“Why, you egocentric—”

“Robert, you’ll go to your room and stay there!” his mother exclaimed, half-rising, her cheeks flushed. “Ted, I’m very sorry about all this. I don’t know what to say.”

Ted looked up. “I wasn’t simply being polite when I said he was right, you know.”

Margaret Garvin looked as bewildered as Bob had. “Well. Well,” she fumbled, “I don’t know…”

“Suppose we just finish supper,” Matt said, and for a moment Jim hoped he would be obeyed. But Bob pushed his chair farther back and stood up.

“I don’t think I particularly care to eat here right now,” he delivered, and strode out of the apartment.

“Forgot his carbine,” Jim commented, glad of the opportunity to say something at last.

Ted looked at him, his lips twitching into a thin smile. “Wouldn’t go too well with his attitude right now, would it?”

“Guess not,” Jim admitted. He dropped his eyes to his plate, realizing that he had learned something about Ted Berendtsen today, but was still unable to see what it was that let him project the force of his calm authority as though it were a physical strength.

Jim looked up again, and saw Ted staring across the room at the blank wall, his eyes as old as Matt’s, who was trying to reach across the length of the table and silently explain to Margaret with his expression alone.

“You ought to give him a district to run, pretty soon, Matt,” Berendtsen said unexpectedly. He smiled at Matt’s astonished look. “He uses his head.”

Matt snorted—a somehow painful sound. The sound a man makes when he condemns something dear to him.

“It’s still a republic,” Ted reminded him. “I’d rather have him argue with me than have him sit there nodding dumbly. Right now, he’s learning to think. Give him a little practice, and he’ll be ready to learn how to think past his emotions. Don’t forget, we’re going to need administrators by the dozens.”

Matt nodded slowly, some of his lost pride in his son returning. “I’ll see.”

“Do you suppose he was right?” Mary asked, looking gravely at her husband.

Jim turned his glance toward his sister. Her remark was completely characteristic. She sat quietly for hours, watching and listening, and what went on in her mind, perhaps Ted Berendtsen alone could guess. Perhaps not even he. And then finally, she said a few words much as she had now.

“Heil Berendtsen? I don’t know,” Ted admitted. “I don’t think so—but then, a man can’t tell when he’s going paranoid, can he?”

And Jim caught another glimpse of the special hells that Berendtsen reserved for himself.

Boston was easy, by the time they came to it. They occupied the suburbs, isolating the city proper, and Matt sent a light naval force to control the harbor. The news of how Providence had fallen must have reached the city, for the opposition was light. It was not so much the overwhelming weight of Berendtsen’s men that forced the surrender—it was the far more crushing power of the past year’s bloody history. By the time they reached Boston, it was the dead, more than the army’s living, who fought Berendtsen’s battles.

An army they were, by now; The Army of Unification, no longer simply “the New York bunch.” Men from Bridgeport and Kingston marched with them, beside others, now, from Lexington and Concord.

James Garvin, Sergeant-Rifleman, stood on a hilltop with his corporal, a lean-jawed, pipe-sucking man named Drumm, and watched the men forming up.

“The Army of Unification,” Drumm said, his face reflective. “Another one of your brother-in-law’s casually brilliant ideas. No regional tag, and a nice idealistic implication. No disgrace to be beaten by it, since it’s an ‘army,’ and much easier to convince yourself into joining, since it has the built-in ideal of ‘unification’ to recommend it. You know, I’m more and more convinced that Berendtsen is one of your rare all-around geniuses.”

Jim grunted and stuffed his own pipe full of the half-cured Connecticut tobacco he was gradually becoming accustomed to. He liked Drumm. He’d been a good man ever since he’d joined up, and he was somehow comfortable to talk to. “He does all right,” Jim agreed.

Drumm smiled slightly. “He does a shade better than that.” A reflective look crossed his face, and he turned his head to focus on the knot of officers clustered around Berendtsen’s figure as he passed out orders. “I wonder, sometimes, what a man like that thinks of himself. Is he his own hero, or does he feel some gospel burning inside him? Does he perhaps think of himself as nothing more than a man doing a job? Does he shut out the signs that tell him some of his men hate him, and some love him? Does he understand that there are men, like us, who stand to one side and try to analyze every move he makes?”

“I don’t know,” Jim said. It was an old topic, and they found themselves bringing it up again and again. “My kid brother has a theory about him.”

Drumm spat past his pipestem. “Had a theory—he’s developed a dozen since, or he’s false to type.” He sighed. “Well, I suppose we have to have young intellectuals, if we’re ever to survive to be middleaged philosophers. But I wish some of them, at least, would realize that they themselves encourage the high mortality rate among them.” He grinned wryly. “Particularly in these peculiar times. Well—” he nodded down at the men, “time to put it on the road again. Maine, here we come, ready or not.”

Jim walked down the hill toward his platoon. Maine, here we come, he thought. And then back down the coast again, and home. And after that, out again, southward. The dirty, bitter, smoking frontier, and behind it, union. More and more, he could feel his own motives shifting from expediency to a faith in the abstract concept of a new nation, and civilization pushing itself upward again. But the dirt and the bitterness went first, and he and Harvey Drumm walked with it, following Ted Berendtsen.

They were deep in Connecticut on the backward swing, cleaning out a few pockets that had been missed, when Jack Holland, who was Jim’s company commander now, came up to him.

Jack was still the same self-contained, controlled, fighting man he had been. His face, like Jim’s, was burned a permanent brown, and he wore an old Army helmet, but he hadn’t changed beyond that. His rifle was still slung from his shoulder at the same angle it had always held, and his eyes were steady. But his expression was set into a peculiar mask today, and Jim looked at him sharply.

“Ted wants to talk to you, Jim,” he said, his voice unreadable. “You free?”

“Sure.” Jim waved a hand to Drumm, and the corporal nodded.

“I’ll keep their pants dry,” he said, raising a chorus of derisive comments from the men.

“Okay, let’s go,” Jim said, and walked back beside Holland, who remained silent and gave him no opening to learn what had happened. They reached Berendtsen, who was standing alone without his usual group of officers waiting for instructions, and, once again, Jim frowned as he saw that even Berendtsen’s mask was more firm than usual. There was something frightening in that.

“Hello, Jim,” Berendtsen said, holding out his hand.

“How’s it going, Ted?” Jim said. The handshake was firm, as friendly as it ever had been, and Jim wondered if it had been his own attitude that made him think they were far more apart than they once had been.

Berendtsen let a grim smile flicker around the corners of his mouth, but when it was gone his face was sadder than Jim ever remembered seeing it.

“Bob just called me on the radio,” he said gently. “Matt died yesterday.”

Jim felt the chill stretch the skin over his cheekbones, and he knew that Jack had put his hand on his shoulder, but for those first few seconds, he could not really feel anything. He could never clearly remember, through the rest of his life, exactly what that moment had been like.

Finally he said, “How’d it happen?” because it was the only thing he could think of to say that would sound nearly normal and yet not snowball within him into more emotion than he could hide.

“He died in bed,” Berendtsen said, his voice even softer. “Bob couldn’t know what it really was. There are so many things to go wrong with a man that could be handled easily, if we had any trained doctors. But all we have are some bright young men who’ve read a lot of medical books and are too proud to admit they’re plumbers.”

It was a sign of how much he’d thought of Matt, that Ted should be openly bitter.

All the way back along the Hudson, Harvey Drumm was the most important thing on Jim Garvin’s mind. Harvey Drumm, and something he’d said and done.

They had been bivouacked outside Albany. Jim and Harvey had been leaning their backs against a tree and smoking quietly in the darkness.

“Well,” Drumm said at last, “you won’t be seeing me in the morning, I guess. That Sawtell boy in the third squad’ll make a good corporal. You can replace Miller with him, and move Miller up into my spot. How’s it sound?”

“Sounds fine for Miller and Sawtell,” Jim answered. “I’m not sure I like it. You going over the hill?”

Drumm sucked on his pipe. “Yes and no. You might say I was going out to do missionary work.”

That didn’t make much sense. “You’re crazy,” Jim said perfunctorily.

Drumm chuckled. “No. The only thing insane about me is my curiosity. Trouble is, it keeps getting satisfied, and then I have to take it somewhere else. That, and my mouth. My mouth wants to satisfy other people’s curiosity whether they want it or not. It’s time to take ’em both over the hill. Over the next range of hills, maybe.”

“Look, you know I’m your superior officer and I could have you shot.”

“Shoot me.”

“Oh, God damn it! What do you want to get out now, for? Ted’s going to be taking the army lots of new places. Don’t you want to be along, if you’re so curious?”

“I know Ted’s story from here on. I think maybe he does, too.” Drumm’s voice no longer had anything humorous in it. “I think maybe he read the same books I did, after he realized what his job was. Not that we go about it in the same way, but the source books are the same.

“See, you can learn a lot from books. They’ll tell you simple, practical things. Things like what relationship a wrench has to a bolt, and what a bolt’s function is. They won’t tell you what the best way for you to hold a wrench might be, so you can do the best job. If you’re any good, you can figure it out for yourself And it’s the same way with much more complicated things, too.

“You know, just before the plague, the United States was almost sure it was going to have a war with a country called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. At first they thought the principal weapons would be bombs. But after a while, the best opinion was that rather than wreck all the useful machinery, and poison the countryside for centuries, the weapons used would be bacteriological ones. Diseases. Short-term plant poisons. And crippling chemicals. To this day, nobody knows for sure whether the plague that hit us wasn’t something designed to evade all the known antibiotics and bacteriophages—something that got away from somebody’s stockpile, by accident. Everyone denied it, of course. I don’t suppose that part of it matters.

“But just suppose somebody had written a book about what it would be like —really be like—for the people who lived through it. And suppose thousands of copies of that book had been lying around, out in the open in thousands of stores, for people to find after the plague.

“Think of the mistakes it might have saved them.

“That’s what books are for. Books, and mouthy, curious people like me. We soak up a lot of stuff in our heads, while other people are too busy doing practical things. And then we go out, and give it to them as they need it.

“So I think I’m due to go off. There must be people out in the wide world who need somebody to tell ’em what a bolt does, and what a wrench does to a bolt.”

“They’ll shoot you as soon as you show up, most likely.”

“So they’ll shoot me. And then they’ll never know. Their tough luck.”

Jim Garvin sighed. “All right. Harv, have it your way.”

“Almost always do.”

“Where you headed?”

“South, I guess. Always hated the cold rain. South, and over the mountains. I don’t figure Berendtsen’ll have time to get to New Orleans. Shame. I hear it’s a beautiful place.”

“Well, if you’re going, you’re going,” Jim said, passing over the Berendtsen part of what Harv had said. He’d be there himself to see about that. “I wish you weren’t. For a mouthy guy, you make a good noncom.”

“Sorry, Jim. I’d rather conquer the world.”

They’d shaken hands in the darkness, and the last Jim Garvin ever saw of Harv Drumm, the long-legged man was walking away, whistling an old song Drumm used to sing around campfires, now and then. It was an old Australian Army marching song, he’d said: “Waltzing Matilda,” it was called, and some of the words didn’t make much sense.

“Well, what’re you going to do?” Bob Garvin demanded, his mouth hooked to one side. The passage of a handful of years had not changed him.

Berendtsen looked at him coldly. “Take the army south. As soon as possible. Trenton’s been taken over by the Philadelphia organization. You’re more aware of that than I am. You got the original report.”

Bob smiled thinly, and Jim, looking at him, winced. He tried to find some sort of comfort in his mother’s expression, but she simply sat with her hands in her lap, her face troubled.

“Still a few worlds left to conquer, eh? Well, go and good riddance to you.”

Mary looked up. “I don’t think you should, Ted. You know as well as I do what he’s up to. He got this man, Mackay, elected to Mayor. He’s got half the minor administrative posts in his pocket. The reason he’s so anxious to see you out of New York is because then he’ll be able to take over completely.”

Ted, like Mary, ignored Bob completely, and Jim smiled at his brother’s annoyance.

“I’m sorry, Mary,” Berendtsen said gently, “but this is a republic. Bob has every right to try and bring his group into a position of leadership. If the people decide they want him in, I have no right to block him with whatever prestige the Army might give me.

“And I do have to go out again. It’s become increasingly clear to me that as much of the country has to be unified as possible. I do not especially like the techniques necessary to that unification, but the important thing—the one, basic, important thing—is the union. Everything else follows after. After that, it’s up to the people to decide how that union’s going to function internally. But first the unification must be made.”

Mary shook her head in angry frustration, and, for the first time, Jim saw all the emotion she controlled beneath her placid surface.

“Aren’t you sick of killing? Why do you hide behind these plans and purposes for tomorrow? Can’t you, sometime, think in terms of now, of the people you are killing now?”

Ted sighed, and for one stark moment the mask fell away entirely, until even Bob Garvin turned pale.

“I’m sorry, darling. But I’m not building something for just now. And I can’t think in terms of individual people—as you’ve said, I kill too many of them.”

A silence that seemed to last for hours settled over them. Bob held the unsteady sneer on his face, but kept quiet. Jim looked at Berendtsen, who sat with his gaze reaching far beyond the open window.

Finally, Mary stood up awkwardly, her hands moving as though to grasp something that constantly turned and twisted just in front of her, there but unreachable.

“I—I don’t know,” she said unsteadily. “That’s the kind of thing you can’t answer.” She looked at Ted, who turned his face up to her. “You’re the same man I married,” she went on. “Exactly the same man. I can’t say, now, that I’ve changed my mind—that I’m backing out of it all. You’re right. I’ve always thought you were right. But it’s a kind of rightness that’s terribly hard to bear. A man shouldn’t—shouldn’t look so far. He shouldn’t work in terms of a hundred generations when he’s only got his own to live. It’s more than his own generation should be asked to bear.”

“Would you like to call it off between us?” Ted asked gently.

Mary avoided his eyes, then bit her lip and faced him squarely. “I don’t know, Ted.” She shook her head. “I don’t know myself as well as you do.” She sat down, finally, indecisively, and looked at none of them.

“Well,” Bob said. “What’s your move, Jim?”

He’d been waiting for someone to get around to that, hoping illogically that the question would not be raised, knowing that it must. And he discovered that he was still afraid of his younger brother.

“What do you think, Mom?” he asked.

She looked helplessly at her two sons, her eyes uncertain. Her hands twisted in her lap.

“I wish I knew,” she finally said. Her voice trembled. “When your father was alive,” she burst out, “it was so easy to decide. He always knew what to do. I could understand him.” She looked around helplessly again. “I don’t understand any of you.” She began to cry softly. “Do anything you like,” she finished hopelessly, too bewildered to cope with the problem any longer.

So, in the end, the decision was given to him to face, without help from anyone. He braced his shoulders and met Bob’s sardonic gaze. “I guess I’ll follow Ted,” he said.

The sun shone with a fierce, biting glare that stabbed from a thousand windows. Jim squinted up the column, the added reflection of the ranks of upraised rifles needling his eyes. He swung his head and looked up at the window where Mary and his mother were watching. Bob was somewhere in the crowd that stood on the sidewalks.

Through all the nights that he and Ted had spent in Berendtsen’s old apartment, alone except for Ted’s withdrawn, shadowlike mother, they had never talked. It had been as though one of the two of them had been a ghost, barely visible and never within reach.

Was it me, or was it Ted? he thought now. Or was it both of them, each locked in the secret prison of his body, each haunted in turn, each unable to share?

A whistle shrilled, and the truck engines raised their idling cough to a roar that seemed incredibly loud, here between the tall brick buildings.

“All right, move out!” Jim yelled to his men, and the first crash of massed footsteps came from the lines of men.

The army moved south.