Some Will Not Die

Here is New York City, quite a few years earlier, and this is what happened:

I

Bob Garvin watched the Army go, his hands in his pockets, an odd light burning in his eyes. He waited until the last truck had swung off Fourteenth Street and turned toward the Lincoln Tunnel, until the last man had marched out of sight, until the flashes of sun on gun barrels had winked out. Then he stepped back, apologized to a citizen he bumped, and walked over to the group clustered around Brent Mackay.

“Morning, Mayor,” he said.

“Ah, good morning, counselor! Out here like all the rest of us, I see.” Mackay was an oddity. He looked as lean and hard as any man, but he was soft at the core—like a bag so full of wind that the cloth stretched drum-tight and strong; but, nevertheless, only full of wind.

“Have to wave bye-bye to the brave soldier boys, you know,” Bob said.

One of the Mayor’s retinue—a steely-eyed man named Mert Hollis—laughed metallically. A wave of sly chuckles swept over the group.

“Well,” Bob Garvin said, “let’s get back to work. There’s still a government in this city, even if the Crown Prince has gone a-hunting again.”

Mackay nodded hastily. “Of course. You’re quite right, counselor.” He turned to the rest of the members of the City Council and their assistants. “Let’s go, boys! Back to the salt mines. Got to get that sewer project in the works.”

“Ah—Mayor…” Garvin interceded softly.

“Yes, counselor?”

“I’d think that could wait a little. Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know. l’d like to get that question of voter eligibility straightened out this morning.”

“Why, certainly, counselor!” Mackay chuckled easily. “You know, that had slipped my mind. Thanks for reminding me.”

“You’re welcome, I’m sure.”

The Army of Unification took Trenton easily. It ran into a very strong defense in Philadelphia, and, for a moment, Berendtsen debated whether it might not have been a better idea to enter southern New Jersey, instead of by-passing it. But a flanking column finally battered its way up from Chester, and the city fell. Camden then fell with it, and the strategy of quick gain was justified. With a strong garrison in the Camden-Philadelphia district, southern New Jersey was bound to be gradually assimilated, with a far lower ratio of losses, and meanwhile weeks of time were gained.

The Army pushed south.

[Image]

Eating slowly, Bob Garvin savored his mother’s cooking. He smiled at her fondly as she spooned another portion of potatoes on his plate. “Thanks, Mom, but I’m just about full.”

“Don’t you like them?” his mother asked anxiously.

“No, no, they’re fine, Mom!” he protested. “But there’s only so much room, and I’ll want some of that pumpkin pie.”

Mary looked at him acidly. “Home life of the public figure,” she said. “Popular candidate for Councilman from the Sixth District enjoys home cooking. Goes home for one of Mom’s pies on night before municipal elections.”

“Mary!” Margaret Garvin looked at her daughter reproachfully.

Mary looked down at her plate. “Sorry, Mother.”

“I can’t understand what’s come over you lately,” Margaret Garvin was saying, her face troubled. “You never used to be this way.”

Mary shrugged. “Nobody’s the way they used to be.” She toyed with her knife. “But I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

Margaret Garvin looked anxiously at her son. Bob was smiling slightly, as he often seemed to be. Apparently, he was impervious to anything his sister might say.

“Well…” Margaret Garvin began irresolutely. She frowned as she realized she had no idea of what she was going to say next. She’d been this way more and more often, since Matt…

Matt was gone. There was no sense in hurting herself by thinking about it. He was gone, and she was here. And if she seemed to miss his strength more and more every day—well, everyone grew old, some time or the other.

“I’m going over to see Carol Berendtsen,” she said at last. “You children can manage your own dessert without any trouble. The poor woman’s worn down to a shadow.”

She missed Ted. Her boy had been her life, since Gus…

She would not think of death!

…Since Carol didn’t have Gus anymore. And no one knew where Ted was, beyond an occasional radio report about this city besieged, that town captured. And more than that. More than that—and the same thing that put the pain in Mary’s eyes. Wife and mother, both wondering what was happening inside the man one had borne and the other married, but neither understood.

Margaret Garvin stood up. Her own oldest boy, Jim, was with Ted. Perhaps she, too, should be worried. But she never worried about Jim. Jim was like seasoned timber, holding up a building. Nothing could hurt him, nothing could move him. Jim could take care of himself. Never worried? Well, no, not that. She knew that Jim was as weak as any man whom a bullet might strike down. But Jim was not the complex, delicate organism that Ted was, or that Bob was. It was impossible to believe of him, as one could easily believe of the other two, that one slight shock could jar the entire mechanism.

“Will you be here when I come back, Bob?” she asked.

Bob shook his head regretfully. “Afraid not, Mom. I need a good night’s sleep before tomorrow. Vote early and often, you know.” He chuckled easily.

She went over to him and kissed him good night. “Take care of yourself, Bob,” she said gently.

“Always do, Mom.”

Bob shot a glance at Mary after his mother had left. Mary Berendtsen was staring distantly at her teacup, her eyes lost.

“Worried about Ted?” Bob asked softly.

Mary did not look at him. Her mouth twitched into a thin line.

“I have no quarrel with you,” he said sincerely.

“You’ve got one with my husband.”

Bob shook his head violently. “Not with him. With his ideals. His social theories, if you will.”

Mary looked up, smiling thinly. “You tell me where the one leaves off and the other begins.”

Bob shrugged. “That’s what makes it look like I hate him personally. But I don’t! You know that.”

“You’d have him killed if you could get away with it. If you could have gotten him killed, you’d have done it two years ago, when he came back from the north.”

Bob nodded. “I’ll admit that. But not because I hate him—or don’t admire him, for that matter. Because he stands for the reigning social theory. A theory that’s going to drive us back to the caves and snipers if it keeps on.”

“Don’t campaign around me!” Mary snapped. “Don’t fog your pretty speeches at me! What it boils down to is that, despite Mackay, despite Chief of Police Merton Hollis, despite the City Council in your pocket, you know damned well that if Ted comes back to stay you’ll be on the outside in two bounces! And then all the pretty plans and fat jobs won’t be worth this!” She snapped her fingers.

Bob shook his head. “No, Mary,” he said gently. “You’re mad at me, but you know that’s not true. Mackay’s a tool, true, and not a clean one, either. Neither are the things I’m forced to do. But you know why I want to control the government. And it’s not the fat jobs.”

Her anger spent, Mary nodded grudgingly. “I know,” she sighed. “You’re sincere enough.” She laughed shortly. “Heaven protect the human race from the sincere idealist”

“And what’s Ted?”

Mary winced. “Touche.”

Bob shook his head. “No, not touche. It’s not a new point. What makes it hurt is that you’ve been driving yourself insane with it all along.”

This time, Mary’s face went white, and a mask slipped tightly down over her features as she fled into the shelter of herself.

“Look, Mims, you know what I believe—what I’ve believed ever since I can remember. We were born equal. We were born with a heritage of personal weapons to enforce our equality, and it is the personal weapons, in the hands of free men, which should ensure that each man will not be trespassed against—that no one, ever, will be able to regiment, to demand, to tithe, to take from another man what is rightfully his. If we are each equally armed, what man is better than his neighbors? If we are all armed, who dares to be a thief, whether he steals liberty or possessions?

“And what is Ted Berendtsen’s belief? That men should band together in a group for the purpose of forcing other men to serve that group. How can I compromise to such a man? How can I sit still and let him enforce his tyranny upon us? How can I let him, or his beliefs, live in the same world with myself and my beliefs?”

For once, Bob’s cynical self-possession had deserted him. He found himself on his feet, his palms resting on the edge of the table, staring fiercely down at Ted Berendtsen’s wife.

Mary raised her head, her face blanched completely white.

“Have you been campaigning on that platform?” she demanded.

Bob Garvin shook his head. “No. Not yet.”

The Army of Unification took Richmond, Atlanta and Jacksonville. Berendtsen’s men moved south.

Someone threw a rotten cabbage at Mary Berendtsen in the street.

Newly-elected City Councilman Robert Garvin sat at one end of the long desk—at the head. Brent Mackay, Mayor of the City of New York, sat at the other end, at the foot.

Merton Hollis, the police chief, sat next to Bob Garvin.

“All right, then, boys,” Garvin was saying, “in this matter of the upcoming national elections, it breaks down like this. Under the Voters’ Eligibility Statute, any one specific member of the family can cast the vote of an absentee member of the Army of Unification, in addition to his own. Right?”

The City Council nodded.

“Okay. Now, technically speaking, that extra vote is to be cast in accordance with the expressed wishes of the absentee.”

He spreads his hands in a helpless gesture. “But with the Army on the move like it is, with no one knowing for sure exactly what it’s doing…Why, without casualty lists, no one even knows who’s dead and who isn’t.”

“But Robert, we do know—” Mackay began.

Garvin stopped him with a patient smile. “Please, Mr. Mayor. We’ve got radio reports, true. But they’re vague, and they’re garbled, and who’s to say Berendtsen isn’t concealing setbacks by ordering his operators to give false locations?”

He shook his head. “No, we can’t go by hearsay. We’ll simply have to accept those votes as if they’d been directed by the absentees. After all, we can’t prove they aren’t.”

There was a low chorus of suppressed chuckles of appreciation from the members of the City Council.

“But suppose those votes aren’t cast?” Mackay protested. “After all, the families know they haven’t been in touch with the men. How can they cast those votes, in all conscience?”

Garvin looked at him in cold amusement. “Mr. Mayor—have you ever heard of anyone, once he’s ready to vote at all, who wouldn’t vote as hard as he could?”

This time the chuckles were louder.

“What’s more,” Garvin said softly, “while the voters will not be able to get individual directions, I’m sure they can be made to know how the Army as a whole feels about Berendtsen, and his theories.”

Several heads along the table snapped to sudden attention.

“As you know,” Robert Garvin went on, still softly, “the garrison commander at Philadelphia, Commander Willets, is a staunch follower of Theodore Berendtsen’s. He has distinguished himself in following Berendtsen’s methods and policies exactly. His administration of the garrison, too, has been identical with the pattern laid down by his chief. In short, we have, in Philadelphia, a miniature Berendtsen, with a miniature Army of Unification, administering a miniature Republic. It follows that the reaction of the garrison, and of the people of Philadelphia, to Commander Willets, will be identical with the reaction of the Army as a whole to Theodore Berendtsen. There will also be the close parallel between the condition of the Philadelphians and the condition the citizens of the Republic may expect for themselves should Berendtsen ever become head of the Republic.”

Those members of the City Council who were closest to Garvin laughed aloud and looked at each other with triumphant grins on their faces.

Mackay looked down the length of the table in shock. “But—but that isn’t an AU garrison any more!” he protested. “Hollis took a draft of City policemen down there last year, and rotated the original garrison home.”

Garvin nodded. “Quite so. And the original garrison is now on constabulary duty in Maine. We know that. What’s your point, Mayor?”

Mackay licked his lips in confusion. “Well—” He shot a glance at Hollis, hesitated, but then pressed on. “You know what kind of men we sent down there. And you know we haven’t given Willets any support from here, when he’s demanded replacements and support. Good God, man, he’s been a virtual prisoner down there! Even his communications with Berendtsen are monitored. He’s no more responsible for what’s been going on down in Philadelphia than—than—”

He stopped, at a loss for a comparison.

“—Than Berendtsen is, Mr. Mayor?” Garvin smiled. “Of course. But who knows that, outside of ourselves?”

“Nobody. But it isn’t right! You can’t just rig something as cold-bloodedly as this!”

“And what did you think we were doing in Philadelphia, Mr. Mayor? Conducting an interesting social experiment?”

“No, no, of course not! But this—”

Garvin sighed and ignored him from that point on. He turned to the other members of the city’s government—and thereby, the Republic’s.

“Commander Willets will be recalled home to answer charges of oppression, misadministration, and treason. His trial will take place a week before elections. Our slate of candidates is as follows: for Commander-In-Chief, Merton Hollis.” There was a light spatter of applause from the Council, and Garvin shook the steely-eyed man’s hand vigorously. Then he continued: “For First Citizen—a new office, as you know, in place of the old designation of ‘President’: Robert Garvin.”

The applause was violent this time, and Hollis solemnly shook Garvin’s hand.

“And, for Mayor of the City of New York—” Garvin looked down the table at a smiling Councilman, “William Hammersby.”

Garvin’s look shifted, and Mackay found himself staring helplessly into the eyes of the end.

The man in the vaguely army-ish clothes clambered to the top of the wall in Union Square, gripping a lamp post for support. He waved the Army of Unification’s blue-and- silver pennant wildly over his head.

“Listen!” he shouted. “Listen, citizens! I was in Philadelphia. I was with Berendtsen for over three years! And I say to hell with the madman, and to hell with his flag!” He ripped away the silver stripe. “I’ve had enough of the color of bayonets!” He threw the tattered pennant away and waved another one over his head, this one colored blue and red. “This is the flag for me! Blue for honor, and red to remember the blood that Berendtsen has drunk!”

“But no white for purity,” Mary Berendtsen murmured to herself from the edge of the crowd. No one in that milling, election-eve crowd heard her. Luckily for her, no one recognized her, either.

Garvin smiled pleasantly down at the new communications officer. “I’m sure you understand your duties, Colonel. Now, here’s the text of your nightly report to Berendtsen.”

And Brent Mackay’s body drifted slowly down the Hudson, out to the broad and waiting ocean.

II

Jim Garvin stood with his hands deep in his pockets, listening to the wind-flapping in the sides of tents as it swept gloomily across the bivouac area. The wind was very cold, condensing his breath into an unpleasant brittle wetness on the thick pile of his collar. He shivered violently as a gust needled his tender right leg, still sensitive from the scattering of buckshot that had chipped its bones two years ago, during the occupation of Jacksonville. A thin light seeped from behind the stringy pines to the east. It was going to be a cold and miserable day.

He looked at his wristwatch and walked toward the nearest tent, glad to be moving. He unsnapped the flap, tightly sealed and stubborn to his numb fingers, and shook the head of the nearer of the two men who slept inside. “All right, Miller, let’s go!”

Miller grunted incoherently and then came awake, rolling over in his wadding of blankets. He found his helmet with a blind movement of his arm, jammed his head into it, and crawled out, nudging his tentmate with a boot as he came. Still bundled, he zipped up his jacket under the blankets before he pulled them off his shoulders, and threw them back into the tent. Begley, the tentmate, crawled out after him, mumbling a string of curses while he handed Miller the canvas flagbag.

“It’s a sonofabitch cold day,” Begley said spitefully as he picked up his bugle.

“Stinkin’ South sucked all the goddam blood out of us,” Miller agreed.

Garvin grunted. Whenever he’d bothered to think about it at all, he’d somehow assumed that the last days of this campaign would be the same as they had been when the still young Army of Unification had swung back down the Jersey palisades into New York—crisp, clear weather with a promise of winter. Instead, the winter was almost over now, and the ground was soaking with rain and molten frost. The raw wind clawed at a man’s insides. It would be a good month before the weather was fit for anything.

But, considering what the last-homecoming had been like, it was probably as good a thing for this one to be different as not. So, he merely grunted.

They walked across the bivouac area to Berendtsen’s trailer without further words. When they reached it, Miller snapped the AU pennant to the jackstaff shrouds while Begley twisted a mouthpiece into his bugle. Garvin stood motionless beside the trailer, his head stiff and erect under its gray helmet, the Senior Sergeant’s green swath dull under a coat of frost. His shoulders were taut, his boots at a forty-five-degree angle.

He looked at his watch again.

“Flag…” He counted to three. “Up!”

Miller sent the blue-and-silver pennant whipping up into the wind, and Garvin’s jacket stretched over his stiff back as Begley blew Assembly. He held to attention while the men kicked their way out of their tents and lined up for roll call.

“This is an army, now,” Berendtsen had said. “It represents a nation. And a nation must have a continuing army. The answer is a tradition of always having an army. Jim, I want you to see that it looks a little like an army.”

If Berendtsen wanted him to set examples of discipline, it was no skin off his nose one way or the other. The men had gradually gotten used to the idea, once they’d realized it made them a more efficient organization when held within reasonable limits. And this was only one of many changes that had come about while the AU was beating its way down the eastern seaboard.

The AU had come a long way, in distance and in time, from the rabble of men who couldn’t have stood before one platoon of this regiment which now made up Berendtsen’s army. Even the bloodied and organized force that had marched back to New York from the Northern Campaign would have been broken by one of the now existing specialist groups—Eisner’s armored cars, probably, that had prowled through the torrential rain of the siege of Tampa like fireclawed hounds—and left to be mopped up by infantry. The AU had learned a lot by the time the blue-and-silver pennant flew over Key West. Learned a lot, enlisted many, looted much. It had learned still more as it returned northwards, cleaning out pockets and dropping garrisons in the familiar strategy that Berendtsen had developed during the Northern Campaign.

So, everything east of the Alleghenies was Berendtsen’s now. Garvin’s gaze swung as he looked bleakly at the lines of silent men, waiting at attention.

The men were lean and hard in their uniforms—old Marine uniforms with helmets and belt buckles finished in crackle-gray paint from a business-machines factory. Most of them would probably have been a match for any soldier that ever walked the Earth, winnowed and weeded as they had been. As to why they fought…Three meals a day and a purpose in life were as good a reason as any. A soldier got his pick of loot—such loot as watches and cigarette lighters, less luxury than convenience—his choice of land to work after his discharge, and a chance to find himself a woman.

Garvin took the roll call report without taking his eyes off the men.

Only a few of them were personally loyal to Berendtsen, but all of them followed him. Garvin wondered how they’d feel when they were pushed across the Appalachians to the west. He wondered, too, how he’d feel personally—and discovered that his mind had been avoiding the subject.

He heard Berendtsen’s hand on the inside latch of the trailer’s door. “Tenn—hut,” he barked, and the men, already stiff, turned their waiting eyes on the door. In their tents, some of them swore they’d keep their eyes oblique the next morning when the trailer door opened. None of them did.

The door opened, and Garvin stepped aside and held it, then swung it back as Berendtsen took three steps forward into the bivouac area.

He was wearing a belted coverall that had been dyed black, and only Garvin, standing slightly behind and a few feet to one side, was in a position to notice that his stomach was heavier than it had been. He surveyed the regiment with his usual unrevealing expression, and today, for the first time and for no obvious reason, Garvin saw that the youthfulness of his face was no more than a mask. His facial skin was waxy, as though someone had taken a cast of young Ted Berendtsen’s features and put it against this older skull under the boyishly-combed but darkening hair, and let his weary eyes look through. His neck was girdled by deep creases.

“All men present, sir,” Garvin said.

Berendtsen nodded curtly. “Good morning, Jim.” His eyes did not change their impersonal and yet intense expression. His face did not lose whatever singleness of purpose it was that gave it its unvarying mold.

And now Garvin realized, in the wake of his sudden glimpse of a Berendtsen stripped of all youth, that Berendtsen had years ago closed the last door that opened from himself to the world, and that now the sound of it had finally reached Garvin’s ears.

“Dismiss the men, Sergeant. All companies messed down and ready to move out in an hour. I want you and Commanders Eisner and Holland in my quarters in five minutes.”

“Yes, sir.” Garvin saluted, issued the orders, and dismissed the men. He walked across the area to where the company commanders were standing in the dawn gloom, leaving the old-young stranger behind.

“We are here.” Berendtsen touched his finger to the contour map of Bucks County and then, characteristically, added a belated “As you know.” Garvin noted that Holland twitched his thin lips opposite him at the map table. Eisner, whose hands were permanently blackened by grease and gear-box dust, and who was completely withdrawn when away from his cars, kept his face expressionless.

“We will be in New York on the day after tomorrow,” Berendtsen went on. “That is—the main body will.” He removed the map and substituted another covering the lower part of New Jersey.

“Now. Our main line of communication between New York and the Philadelphia area, as well as our route to the south in general, cuts across northern New Jersey and across the Delaware at Trenton. Up to now, there has been no reason to enter southern New Jersey at all, with the Camden garrison there to guard our flank, because of the area’s peninsular nature. Which, I am sure, is obvious to all of us.

“Accordingly, A Company, under Commander Holland, will now detach itself from the main body, cross the river at any practicable point, and proceed to occupy southern New Jersey. Garvin, you will take over the First Platoon of A Company, and act as Commander Holland’s Aide-in-the-Field. You will be accompanied by as many armored cars, under the subsidiary command of whatever junior officer Commander Eisner appoints, as the commander feels such a detachment will require. You will draw supplies and support weapons within Commander Holland’s discretion, and will provision from the land, carrying a basic ration for emergencies. Is that clear?”

Holland and Eisner nodded. Garvin, as an NCO, said, “Yes, sir.” He kept his face blank, Berendtsen’s orders made him, in effect, superior in command to whoever the Armored officer would be. They also gave him the duties of a full Lieutenant. He had known, of course, that Berendtsen would someday make him an officer in spite of his many refusals to accept the rank. But now he wondered. Why had Berendtsen waited until now to exercise this elementary circumvention? Up to now, this had looked like a standard mop-up. Now a new factor had entered the circumstances, and Garvin wondered what it really was.

Berendtsen resumed. “Very well. You will send patrols into every town of significant size, and establish communications posts. Liaison is to be maintained by radio with the Camden-Philadelphia Garrison Office, for the purpose of transmitting regular reports. You will set up new garrisons at Atlantic City, Bridgeton, and in the former naval installations at Cape May.”

Berendtsen looked up from the map. “Those are your objectives. You will, of course, pursue our standard occupation and recruitment policies. As usual, hereditary officers in communities surviving around former military installations are to be handled carefully.”

He stopped, and something crossed his face briefly, too rapidly for Garvin to read.

“The Philadelphia garrison commander has reported that the area is only sparsely populated, no penetration having been made by any civilian groups since the dislocation of the old Philadelphia organization six years ago. 1 am told that there was never an opportunity for Philadelphia to conduct large-scale resettlements in the area.

“For this reason, I am sending only one company. However, the Philadelphia garrison had probed the area only lightly, in spite of whatever generalized conclusions the commander may have drawn. The commander, as you have no way of knowing, is a man sent out from New York to replace Commander Willets.” He smiled dryly. “For that reason, I am augmenting the company with the armored detachment, and staffing it with my best men. Commander Eisner, I’ll ask you to bear these remarks in mind when you detail your own officer.

“A few final orders, which I’ll confirm in writing as soon as my clerk has them typed. Be sure you have them before you leave, Commander Holland. As follows: You will maintain radio contact with Philadelphia and New York, but you are an entirely independent command until the area has been completely occupied and assimilated into the Republic. Once this has been accomplished, the Southern New Jersey Command will be subordinated to the Philadelphia Military District, and will be subject to orders from the Philadelphia garrison commander. Until such time, you are on record as a detached unit of the Army of Unification in the field, and are subject only to the orders of the Commander-in-Chief.”

Garvin tried to find something readable in either Berendtsen’s or Holland’s faces, but failed.

Berendtsen didn’t trust his Philadelphia commander, that was sure. And his third-person reference to himself as Commander-in-Chief seemed unnecessarily oblique.

More and more, Garvin began to suspect that there was something wrong. Perhaps the AU had grown to proportions which kept Berendtsen from personally supervising the entire organization, but the Philadelphia garrison was an important one, and it seemed inconceivable that an undependable man had gotten the post.

“Any questions?”

Garvin kept silent, as did the two commanders.

“Suggestions?”

“I’d like to take that detachment in myself, sir,” Eisner said. Life in New York, uneventful as it must inevitably be, held no attraction for him. The New Jersey operation offered an extra month’s action.

Berendtsen shook his head. “I’d considered sending you,” he said, “but I want you in New York too much.”

Eisner’s brows twitched, and the man’s face, unaccustomed to masking his thoughts, showed his plain doubt.

“I’m sorry,” Berendtsen said flatly.

“Yes, sir,” Eisner answered.

“All right, then,” Berendtsen concluded, “You’re dismissed—and good luck.”

Garvin followed the two commanders out of the trailer, while the clerk’s typewriter hammered an accompaniment from their orders—their disquieting official orders that plugged all possible loopholes…against what?

And the wind that keened between the tents seemed stronger now, and more piercing than it had been at reveille.

Berendtsen watched the company roll out, missing them already. He could feel the gap in the Army almost as surely as if a chunk had been cut out of his side. But there was no help for it.

Perhaps he should have gone in with the whole Army. He’d been tempted to. But the men were close to home—the New York ones, anyway—and they wanted to get back. The rest of them were looking forward to a spree in the city. For some of them it was the first real let-up in six years.

And he had no good reason, really, to be as much nagged as he was. Whatever was going on in Philadelphia was probably local political maneuvering. Holland’s company could handle anything New Jersey might have to put up. Especially with the cars along. And if they got into a serious jam, they could call on Philadelphia. No matter what was going on there, they’d have to turn out garrison on call, whatever they thought of it.

Perhaps he should have taken the Army into Philadelphia.

What for? Just because Willets had suddenly turned noncommunicative and finally gone back to New York? Willets was an old man by now. Old men developed odd quirks.

He wanted no part of politics. He’d decided that a long time ago, and he couldn’t change now. Under no circumstances could he begin dabbling with the internal affairs of the Republic. He had no desire to become a military dictator.

Why should there be any reason for him to be a military dictator?

What was going on in the back of his mind?

He turned away and went back into his trailer, throwing himself on his bunk and staring up at the ceiling.

He’d cut Holland loose. Given him a completely independent command. Why? What had made him decide he might not be in control of the Army much longer?

Was this it? Was this the end he had always somehow felt, waiting in the future, waiting for him to live as he had to, do what he had to, until he finally caught up to it?

Why had he kept Eisner with him?

Why was he Theodore Berendtsen?

The Delaware had picked up heat at its headwaters, and the warmth was running southward with the river. The last cold air mass of the year had spilled over the mountains in the west northwest to meet it, had been deflected slightly by the rising warmth to the north, and was now rolling into Delaware Bay like a downhill tide, picking up speed in its southwesterly mean direction while spinning slowly. Like a scooping hand, it gathered up condensed moisture from the warmer air above the bay, and hurled patches of fog and gusts of cold into the face of the marching column.

Akin to all the troop movements of the Earth’s long military history, the column moved forward at the pace of its slowest element—the 100 thirty-inch strides per minute of the rifle platoons. Garvin sat motionless atop one of the two armored cars spotted between the Second and Third Platoons, his boots braced against a cleat, watching the column’s forward half-snaking into the cold and fog, while his body vibrated gently to the labor of the car’s throttled- back motors. His hands and face were coldly slick, but he stayed where he was rather than drop into the car’s warm interior, where he would not be able to survey the entire column. Occasionally, he broke into short frenzies of shivering. But he did not climb down off his perch.

He looked back over his shoulder, and saw Carmody’s jeep coming up from the column’s rear, where four more of the total of ten cars were posted. He frowned slightly, turning his head to peer forward once more. Holland had kept the column clear of Philadelphia, pointing for the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge. Probably, they were about to make contact with the Philadelphian command post set up there.

Garvin bared his teeth in an uneasy grimace, and rose to an abrupt crouch. He waved to the jeep’s driver as the vehicle whined up close to the armored car, and scrambled over the turret. He clung momentarily to the rung of a step, then dropped off into the road, easily matching the car’s speed without a stumble. He caught a handhold on the jeep and swung himself into the back seat, behind Carmody, the Armored Lieutenant, a balding man descended from the remains of the old Marine colony at Quantico.

“Got a contact,” he said. “My lead car just radioed back—in Tampa code. There’s some sort of half-arsed CP at the bridge, all right, but my boy’s upset about something and Dunc doesn’t upset very easy.”

Garvin frowned. Tampa had been intercepting their communications, and they’d had to improve a code during the siege. Now Carmody’s man in the scouting armored car was using it again—which could only mean that he didn’t want Philadelphia to intercept his observations on the Philadelphian post.

“Think he expects them to give us any trouble?” he asked.

“Be a crazy thing to do, with our armor.”

“Might blow the bridge”’ Garvin pointed out.

Now, what’s making me think they’d do a thing like that? he wondered with a stab of illogical panic. “You think they’d feel that way?” Carmody asked, not quite incredulous enough for Garvin’s peace of mind.

“I don’t know,” Garvin said slowly, abruptly realizing that here, deep in the Republic’s territory, it was still as though they were moving into the silent lands to which they were accustomed, waiting for the crash and flame of hidden and unexpected dangers. It was as though they were on the verge of combat.

“But let’s get up there in a hurry,” he told Carmody.

The Command Post was a badly armored shack set beside the bridge approaches. An aerial projected from its roof, and there was a jeep with scabrous paint parked beside it. Someone had daubed a red-and-blue V of converging swaths on its hood.

“What the hell kind of army are you in?” Garvin barked at the man they had found there.

The man spat over his shoulder and stared grubbily up at Holland in the armored car’s forward hatch. “He ain’t Berendtsen, is he?”

“I asked you a question, mister!”

“I’m in the same goddamn army you are, I guess,” the man said irritably. “He ain’t Berendtsen, is he?”

“I’m Commander Holland, commanding A Company, Army of Unification,” Holland said impatiently. “Where’s the rest of your detail?”

“Ain’t none,” the man answered.

“What’s your rank, Bud?” Garvin asked, looking at the man’s grimy jumper.

“Sergeant, Philadelphia Military District,” the man answered, spitting again.

“Okay, Sarge,” Garvin said. “We’re going to cross your little bridge.” He could feel the veins pounding on the backs of his hands, and he could see mounded white crests bulging out the corners of Holland’s jaws.

“Not without a pass from Commander Horton, you’re not.”

“Who the hell’s he?”

“You kidding? He’s Philadelphia Command, and nothing goes over this bridge east without his pass.”

“You kidding?” Carmody said softly, and tracked his jeep’s machinegun around to bear on the man.

The man turned pale, but he cursed Carmody at the same time. “You still ain’t going over that bridge.”

“That settles it,” Garvin said to Holland. “They’ve got the bridge wired. Miler! Find anything like a detonator in that shack?”

“No soap, Jim,” the corporal called back from the CP’s door.

“Okay, sonny boy, let’s you and me go for a ride,” Jim said. He drew his Colt and aimed it at the man’s belly. “Up on the hood with you,” he said, motioning toward the CP’s jeep. The man climbed on sullenly. Jim climbed behind the wheel and kicked the starter. The motor turned over balkily, and he had to nurse it for minutes before it was running well enough to move. Then he pulled out into the highway and pointed the jeep over the bridge.

The man on the hood turned around, his eyes staring. “Hey!” he yelled back, “You wanna get killed?”

Garvin cut his speed. “Where’s she wired?”

The man licked his lips, but said nothing. Garvin gunned his motor.

“Okay, okay! There’s trips buried in the asphalt up ahead.” He was breathing heavily, scared to death. Not of the mine trips, though, Jim decided, but of what would happen to him now he’d given away their location. He wondered what sort of methods Commander Horton used to enforce orders.

They blew the CP to scrap and shot the jeep’s engine into uselessness. As they crossed the bridge, Garvin looked back and saw the black speck of the guard, half-running up the riverbank, away from Philadelphia. He looked at Jack Holland, and didn’t like what he saw in the commander’s eyes, because he knew the same expression was in his own. There was something wrong—something so wrong that it made him debate disregarding orders and recommending that the column turn toward New York at the fastest pace the men could march.

Holland looked at him and shook his head. “Berendtsen knew what he was doing when he sent us down here,” he said. “Let’s get to finding out what it was.”

The Army marched into a New York City turned sullen. Berendtsen, feeling the hate like a clammy fog, sucked in his breath.

A crooked smile edged the corners of his mouth He was almost always right. It was a feeling that prickled the back of his neck, each time he made a decision, apparently on the basis of no more than a feeling, and found that he had acted with almost prescient exactness.

Second sight? Or just a subconscious that worked immeasurably well?

There was no way of telling.

There were barricades up in the streets, and the people stayed behind them, kept there by squads of soldiery. There were armed men up on the housetops, and heavy weapons concentrated at strong points. And there was a flight of helicopters overhead, tagging them like whirling crows against the sky.

He could feel the Army growing apprehensive behind him. They had marched into enemy cities before.

He halted the first column in the familiar square in front of Stuyvesant Town, noticing, with a part of his mind, that the bare and rough-hewn outlines he had left were gone, furbished over, so that there was no sign that a block of buildings had once stood there.

The rest of the Army marched into the square and halted at attention, the sergeants’ commands echoing sharply and yet alone in the silence.

And still the people looked out of the windows.

What were they expecting? What were they waiting for, from him? Were they waiting for him to suddenly sweep the buildings with fire? Did they think he’d conquer this city as he’d defeated the others? Did they think somehow, that he had done all this, fought all those battles, killed all those good men, for any sake but theirs?

He turned toward his Army, seeing their white faces turn up to him, noting the men who stole glances at the building, seeing the fingers curled around the rifles, the bodies ready to twist and crouch, firing. Most of these men were not New Yorkers. And all of them were his. All he had to do was issue a command.

He felt a breeze, coming down the street from one of the rivers, touching the skin of his face.

“Dismissed!” he ordered.

Company A maintained routine contact with Philadelphia and Camden, learning nothing. Horton’s communications operators relayed their reports back into silence, and they heard nothing from Horton himself. Nor from Berendtsen. The fog that had hung over the Delaware seemed to have suddenly taken on far tougher substance, cutting them off from their commander, from the rest of the Republic, from the rest of the world. They learned nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. The company marched into nothing, and Jim and Holland found it difficult to look into each other’s eyes.

And yet, there had still been nothing to really disquiet them. The land at the other side of the bridge was bare, and they saw nothing. Philadelphia never mentioned the incident at the bridge, or even asked if they had seen the CP’s sergeant. It was as though none of that had happened.

But it had.

They swept out in a broad arc as they moved into the central part of the peninsula, maintaining a light skirmish line backed up by the cars, which quartered back and forth.

But the infection of disquiet had spread to the men. Garvin, riding with Carmody as they worked into position for a standard two-pronged envelopment of the first fair- sized town they had come to, slapped his hand irritably on the hatch coaming.

“Goddamn it, Bill, look at those riflemen! They’re all over the bloody terrain, exposed seven ways from breakfast, none of their heads down, nothing! They act like they’re on a walking tour.

“A vacuum. We’re slogging around in this freakin’ mental vacuum, and it’s turning a bunch of professional soldiers into milk maids!”

“Easy, Jim,” Carmody said, his own voice ragged. “That goes for officers, too, if we’re not careful!”

“You’re damn right it does! I almost wish something would happen to put the edge back on us.”

A sheet of corrugated iron, snapped out like a crumb- laden tablecloth, would have made the same sudden noise.

He caught a glimpse of soldiers tumbling while the harsh roar of controlled, heavy machinegun fire swept down upon them.

“Holy Jesus!” Carmody said. “You whistled one up that time!” and then the bazooka rocket crashed into the car and exploded.

Garvin crawled down the side of the flaming car somehow, dragging his legs, and tumbled into a ditch. He lay there, sobbing curses, while pain ate him.

It took three days to level the town, going systematically from house to stubborn house after losing a platoon of men to the machinegun emplacements. They found themselves fighting women and children as well as men, and when it was all over, they reformed into a scratch company of three understrength platoons and eight cars.

Jack Holland came to see Jim before they pulled out to continue the operation. He walked into the flimsy barn which had been virtually the only undefended structure in the town, picking his way among the other wounded men.

“How’s it going, Jim?” he asked first.

Garvin shrugged. “Wish I could shake it off as fast as it happened.” He grimaced. “What the hell, I had it coming to me after all these years. I don’t have a real kick.” He looked up quickly.

“Hear anything from Ted?”

Holland shook his head, and the creases bunched up tightly on his forehead. “No. Not from him, or anybody else. I sent in a report on this little place, with a special tagline for Horton, telling him what a crummy job of scouting he’d done. Hoped to get a rise out of him.” He squatted down beside Garvin’s cot and lowered his voice.

“Didn’t get one. I know why, too. Jim, this isn’t any no- man’s land down here. Horton’s men were all through here. They weren’t doing any fighting, though. They’ve spent three years telling these farmers what a bastard Ted is. They handed out a line of crap that’d make your blood run cold. Why do you think these boys were all set up for us? Why do you think they fought like they did? And where do you think they got their weapons?”

Jim whistled softly between his clenched teeth. “What the hell’s going on around here?”

Holland shook his head bleakly. “I don’t know for sure, yet. Listen, I asked for nursing volunteers from the survivors. There’ll be about eight or ten girls coming up here. Maybe they’re grateful for us not fulfilling some of the picturesque promises that were made for us. Maybe they’re not. I’m damned well sure there’s a grapevine in this territory that leads straight back to Horton, and the smart move would be for them to be on it. Well, maybe it can work in both directions. Anyway, take a crack at finding out what you can.”

Jim nodded. “Will do.” He looked up at Holland, who had gotten to his feet again. “What’re we messed up in, Jack? How did all this happen? What made Horton think he could get away with this?”

But there was no answer, of course. Not yet. Perhaps never, and if, perhaps, they did somehow find it out, it might be too late.

Holland’s look said the same. He gestured awkwardly. “Well, I’m about due to shove off.”

“Good luck. I’ll see you in about two weeks, huh?” Holland’s mouth twitched. “I hope so.”

“Well, so long,” Jim said, and watched Holland walking out between the rows of wounded men, saying goodbye to each of them.

His nurse was a girl of about eighteen, a pale, darkhaired shape in the barn’s gloom. Her name was Edith, and her voice was pitched so low that he sometimes had to strain to hear it.

“Hurt?” she asked as she shifted his blankets.

He grunted. “About as much as it should. But don’t worry about it, hon—it’s my department.”

He lay on his back, looking up at her as she filled a glass with water. She’d been coming to tend him regularly for the past five days, leaving the other men to the girls who came with her, concentrating on him alone.

He’d asked her about that. “Shouldn’t you be spending less time on me? I’m not that bad off.”

“But you’re an officer,” she’d answered.

He wondered where she’d picked up that philosophy, and thought of Horton’s men. It made interesting thinking.

“Is that why all you girls are up here? Because it’s your natural duty to tend wounded soldiers?”

“Well… Well, no, it’s just a—a thing you do, that’s all.”

He hadn’t liked that answer. It explained nothing. It was lame with vagueness. Now he looked up at her, and wondered if Holland had been right about the grapevine.

“You always live around here, Eadie?”

She shook her head and handed him the glass, helping him raise his shoulders so he could drink. “Oh, no. I came here from Pennsylvania with my folks. All of us did. There wasn’t anybody living here then.”

He digested that, and wondered how far Horton’s treason had gone.

“Sorry you came, now?”

“Oh, no! If we’d stayed where we were, Berendtsen would have gotten us.”

“But we’re Berendtsen’s men.”

“I know,” she said. “But you’re not anything like him.”

She sounded so gravely positive that he almost laughed, stopping himself just in time.

“Did you know he was married to my sister?”

“Your sister!” He seemed to have shocked her profoundly. “Is she—is she a good woman?”

This time he did laugh, while she buried her face in her hands.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that!”

He reached out and stroked her hair. “It’s all right. And yes, she’s a good woman.”

But he was beginning to understand what Holland had meant about propaganda. Somebody had been giving these people a near lethal dose.

“Now?”

Berendtsen nodded. “It’s the best time. The Army’s dispersed, but the men haven’t really had a chance to start talking yet. It’ll be days before the general public has more than a faint notion that there’s been something odd going on.”

“You shouldn’t have sent Eisner away,” Mary declared with sudden fierceness. “You convinced everybody that you were guilty. They were positive Eisner just didn’t want to face the consequences of what he’d been doing under your orders. So what will they think of the man who gave those orders?”

Berendtsen shrugged. “Does it make any difference what they think? Does it make any difference whether I’m the bloody butcher they think I am or not? Eisner and his men are free, and heading west.”

He smiled suddenly. “I just ordered him out. He turned west of his own accord.”

Mary jumped up. “And does that satisfy you? Does it make you happy to know that the great Master Plan is being carried out, that Berendtsen’s dream of unification goes marching on, even if only to that small extent?”

Berendtsen sighed as the knock fell on the door again. “I don’t care whose plan it is, or what it’s called. I do know that I gave Eisner an order I couldn’t possibly enforce. He carried it out anyway.”

He got up and went to the door, opening it. “How are you, Bob?” he said.

Robert Garvin looked at him silently for a moment. Then he exhaled loudly, as though sighing in relief at the long-delayed accomplishment of a complex and difficult task.

“You’re being called upon to answer charges of treason,” he said bluntly. “Your trial begins tomorrow.”

It was three weeks, not two, when Jack Holland came back with A Company, and Jim, sitting outside the barn with his legs in crude casts, winced as he saw them. There were four armored cars now, with wounded riding on their decks, and the last car was being towed by the one ahead. He ran his eyes over the marchers, counting, and didn’t believe the count until he saw Jack’s face.

“We’re done,” Holland said bluntly, dropping down beside him. “We couldn’t beat off an attack by archers, right now.”

“What’d you run into?” Jim asked, not knowing what else to say.

“The gamut. Bazookas, mortars, fragmentation grenades, antipersonnel mines…Name it, and we got it. And we’re not recruiting, Jim. We can beat ’em, but we can’t recruit ’em. They just aren’t interested. They’re scared white at first, and then they find out we won’t flay them alive for breathing in the wrong direction. Then some of them get sassy. But mostly they just sit and stare at us as if we were conquerors, or something. We gave them the offer every time before we moved in. We put up signs, we broadcast, we yelled. But they wouldn’t trust us enough to listen. Then we have to knock them over, and that makes us conquerors. The conquerors of South Jersey! I don’t know, Jim. It’s the creepiest goddamned feeling I’ve ever had. It’s nothing like it used to be.”

Jim nodded. “I’ve been getting my licks at it. They’re so full of this Bogeyman Berendtsen stuff that nothing’s going to penetrate. We’re all right, catch? Even if we are the monster’s men. But Berendtsen himself? Brr!”

“You know what kind of rifles they’re using, Jim?”

“M-16s.”

“The woods are full of them.”

“Horton’s been a busy boy around here, I see,” Jim said sourly. “I’ve been thinking about that bridge. That was awfully easy getting across.”

“Yeah,” Holland agreed. “One lousy little man playing roadblock. If we hadn’t found anybody, we’d have reported it to Ted. If we found too many, we’d have reported that. But we found just about what we expected to. We were suckered into this, all right.”

“You figure Ted wasn’t supposed to trust Philly?”

“Ahuh. Makes sense. He splits off a healthy piece of his army. He doesn’t go with the whole army, though—he’s not supposed to think it’s really going to be rugged, and do that, because whoever’s behind this knows damn well the AU can’t be stopped by anything this side of hell. If Ted went down here and smelled a rat, he’d turn around and knock Philly on its ear all over again. And if he got mad enough, he might come roaring into New York, instead of feeling his way like he’s doing now—or was doing, I guess.”

“Sounds like the kind of thing somebody with real brains would dream up.”

“A whole bunch of them, more than likely. I don’t think there’s any one man that can out-think Ted,” Holland said.

“I wonder what Bob’s doing these days,” Jim said half to himself, his eyes narrowing. “Anyway, here we sit, dying on the vine.”

“With the farmers hacking at the roots, yeah.”

Jim wet his lips. He asked the unnecessary question. “You tried to get ahold of Ted?”

“Sure.” Holland sighed. “I’ve been trying, for the last two weeks. All I get is some snotnose in New York. ‘Relay all messages through me, please!’ ” he mimicked viciously.

Jim closed his eyes, letting his head sink. “Ted knew what he was doing, making us an independent command.”

Even if we couldn’t get up even a rousing football scrimmage, the shape we’re in, he thought.

“He knew why he wanted Eisner in Manhattan with him, too,” Holland said. “Boy, can’t you just see those rolling roadblocks cleaning up Manhattan like nobody’s business?”

Suddenly they stopped and looked at each other, realizing the scale on which they had been thinking. This was more than just Horton, playing out some game of his own. This was New York and Philadelphia working together. This was a whole nation, suddenly aligned against them.

And that night, there was the first message from New York.

Holland looked at Garvin, who had been moved into the communications center the men had knocked together. “You ever heard of anyone named Hollis?” he asked.

Jim looked up. “I guess there are a lot of people in New York nowadays that we never heard of.” He stared hopelessly down at his immobilized legs. “I wonder what happened to Ted?” he asked, conscious of the lost note in his voice. But both of them knew that it no longer mattered. Somewhere in New York, the initiative of leadership had been taken up by other men, with other purposes. The AU was dead, and the purpose behind it had ended. Ted Berendtsen had kept some sort of appointment with history, and even if he lived, his time was over. And when the force that had been he and his work was ended, the arm that he had stretched out into this last territory was as powerless as all the rest.

They were finished. Cut off and finished.

“What do we do?” Jim asked.

“What can we do?” Holland answered. “We do what Boston and Tampa did. We’re licked. There’s nothing we have to say about it anymore. It’s still one nation—one organization. We don’t run it anymore, but we’ve still got to work in it, to keep it alive, just because it is an organization.”

He grinned crookedly. “Ted was right—again.”

But the messages had not ended. They listened to a general broadcast from New York, and, following orders, broadcast it over a public address system to the general population.

This is Robert Garvin, President of the Constitutional Council for the Second Free American Republic.

Once again, we are free. The power of the Army of Unification has been broken, and this nation, risen from the ash of dissolution and hopelessness, can once more grow, broad and prosperous, toward the sun. From Maine to Florida, we are one people, one union, inseparable and unyoked. We are a nation of free men armed, each equal to the other, each a brother to the other, each firm in his resolve that no one man shall again impose his twisted will on other men.

The right to bear arms is inherent in each of us. The right to subjugate is not. No man may say to another “You will do thus and so because I decree it, because I have gathered up an army to pillage your home and rob you of your substance.”

Soon, civil governors will be sent to you. They will establish an organization whereby a free election may be held. You will be asked to elect local officers to administer your territory under the general supervision of the governor.

People of the Second Free American Republic, we bring you liberty.

Holland spat. “We bring you civil governors, rather than an army,” he said bitterly. “Please excuse the fact that these officers have been appointed by us. Didn’t we do it in the name of liberty? And who the hell do they think gave them their precious union in the first place?”

Jim grinned sadly. “I guess Ted always knew that when the people chose a new government, it wouldn’t be one that approved of Berendtsen.”

“Did you notice something, though?” Holland pointed out. “No mention of Ted. Just a couple of passing references. They’re not sure yet—not sure at all that it’s safe to really go all-out and call him names. They’re nervous.”

“I wonder what’s going on in New York?” Jim Garvin asked. What he felt about Bob, he kept to himself.

III

Robert Garvin sat easily in his chair, flanked by the other judges, looking down at the man who stood below their rostrum.

Garvin smiled thinly, and a little regretfully. He felt the weight of what he had done. But he had done it nevertheless, because in doing it he had fulfilled his greater duty to freedom, to liberty from oppression, to liberty from such as Berendtsen.

He leaned forward. “Theodore Berendtsen, you have been found guilty of treason against the human rights of the citizens of the Second Free American Republic. Have you anything to say before sentence is passed upon you?”

It did not matter what he said, now. Whatever words Berendtsen might have were weightless now. He had no Army. He had no weapons.

Garvin touched the carbine resting against his chair. Weapons were the mark of a man’s freedom, and all free men carried them now. To be sure, some of them looked ludicrous, but, nevertheless, the symbol was there. Touch me not!

Berendtsen seemed to be hesitating, as though undecided whether to speak or not.

Berendtsen had no personal weapons.

He began to speak:

“I did not come here to defend myself,” he said. “For I am indefensible. I have burned, killed, and looted, and my men have done worse, at times…”

Robert Garvin hardly heard the words. He sat patiently, not listening, but nevertheless watching the man. Berendtsen was standing with his hands hanging loosely at his sides, his head up. It was impossible to tell, from this angle, what he might be looking at.

Garvin felt a ripple of excitement sweep momentarily over the small audience, even reaching the judges’ bench. He shrugged inwardly. Undoubtedly, his brother-in-law had scored some emotional point or other.

But emotional points were things you could score all day, and still not change the facts. Garvin had built his way to power on emotional points—what counted was the cold logical ideal behind them. You could sway a crowd with semantics. Make it do things for you. But this was not a crowd. These were Berendtsen’s judges, their verdict already delivered, their sentence a foregone conclusion.

“Robert Garvin!”

Garvin’s head snapped up, and his eyes re-focused on Berendtsen.

“You have given the people personal weapons,” Berendtsen was saying. “You have told them that, from this day onward, they were free to bear arms; that they were equal, one and several, with all other men. That, henceforth, no man might tell him what was theirs and what was not. That each man was inviolable, and that no man is master.”

Garvin nodded automatically, realizing only later that there was no need for him to do so.

“Well, then, Bob,” Berendtsen said softly, as though they were once more across a dinner table from each other, “who gave you the right to confer the right?”

Something jumped behind Garvin’s eyes.

“We bore arms, once. Each and every one of us. We had to. Gradually, we began to live so that we no longer had to. Despite the theories, some of us bore our arms uncomfortably, and were glad to lay them down when there were no longer snipers in the streets. Some of us were free to enter peaceful pursuits—such as politics.”

Despite the time, and place, there was a ripple of laughter that grated at Robert Garvin’s nerves before it died down.

Berendtsen smiled thinly up at Garvin. “You are where you are today because you did not bear arms—because there was an organization of free men, ready to return to the weapons if need be, but glad to have laid them down, who were cooperating in a civilization which had time to support an individual such as yourself. Those who bear arms are their own administrators. Those who do not, need others to administer to them.

“So you are here, an administrator elected by an organization, and you have given them their weapons back. You have practically forced those weapons on them, distributing them on streetcorners willy-nilly. But, once more, I’d like to know—who gave you the right?”

Berendtsen smiled wryly. “It would seem that I did. I built the organization that supports you. I built it without knowing what sort of society it would evolve. I never for a moment thought that any one man could be so wise, so foresighted as to impose his personal concept of the ideal society. I simply built a union, and left its structure to the people.”

He looked squarely up at Garvin. “You have given the people rifles, and thought that you were giving them weapons. But people have a deadlier weapon than anything a gunsmith could design.

“People want to be safe, and comfortable. If safety and comfort are to be found in guns, then they will take up guns—of their own accord, in their own need. And when safety and comfort are found in libraries, then the guns rust.”

The quiet, troubled and yet somehow untroubled eyes bored away at Garvin’s foundations.

“You think that men like yourself direct the people. Undoubtedly, you grant me that status, as well. You are wrong. We exist—we find our way into the pages of those history books which are written from the wrong viewpoint—because, for however long or short a time it is, the people think there is safety and comfort in us.”

He laughed shortly and finished. “They are often wrong. But they repair their errors.”

Garvin felt every eye in the room on his face. Probably, he had turned a little pale. It was only natural, with the strain of what he had to do.

“Theodore Berendtsen, you have been convicted of treason, and the citizens of this Republic are aware of your crime. You are sentenced to go about whatever pursuits you choose, unarmed.”

Berendtsen bowed his head. Garvin saw, for the first, startling time, that he was far older than he seemed—that his stomach bulged a little, and that his face was completely exhausted.

Then Berendtsen looked up for one last time, and Robert Garvin saw the underlying expression of his face, always there, no matter what superficial mood might flicker across it. He understood what had been giving him the constant impression that Berendtsen was still the same calm, somehow unassailable man who had taken so many meals on the other side of the table.

A running series of directives came into the communications shack in New Jersey:

Jim looked incredulously at Holland. “What do you think’s happened?”

Holland, his face grave, shook his head. “I’m not sure—but I think I know why Ted wanted Eisner with him. I’m pretty sure John’s last orders were to point his cars west.”

“You think Ted’s with him?”

Holland’s face held a queer expression for a moment. “Not in the flesh.”

The operator who read the message had a nervous voice.

Holland raised an eyebrow. “Berendtsenism?”

For a moment, a savage light gleamed in his and Jim’s eyes, washing out the dull resignation that had begun to settle there.

“Do you suppose Ted wasn’t as dumb as New York thought he’d be?” Jim asked. “It sounds just a little bit like things are going to pieces up there. Suppose he realized that he might want somebody to break out, and hung on to Eisner for that purpose? And maybe he threw us in here to hole up until New York worked itself into the ground?”

Holland shook his head in bafflement. “I don’t know. You could never tell with Ted. You could only wonder.”

Robert Garvin spun around as Mayor Hammersby came through the door.

“Well?” he snapped.

Hammersby shrugged. “Not yet.”

“What’s the matter with them!”

Hammersby gave him a sidelong look. “Easy, Garvin. It’ll happen.”

Robert Garvin stared at him through a film of over. powering rage. It almost seemed as though even Hammersby were drawing a sort of insolence out of the impossible situation.

“We can’t wait any longer. The old Army men have already delayed us with their talking. If we hold off much more, we’ll have a revolution on our hands.”

“Isn’t that the theory?” Hammersby asked dryly. “Armed freemen, choosing their own leaders? Why should you object?”

The words dashed themselves against Robert Garvin like cold surf. Hammersby was right, of course. The people had a perfect right to choose for themselves, to kill or not to kill.

“Berendtsen’s got to die!” he suddenly shouted. “Send out one of Hollis’s patented mobs.”

“The people will rule, eh? With an occasional nudge.”

“Damn it, Hammersby!”

“Oh, I’ll do it, all right. I’m just as worried about my neck as you are.” The Mayor turned and left, with Garvin staring angrily at his back.

He couldn’t shoot a man in the back, of course.

The last message from New York came metallically into the radio shack:

“To be re-broadcast to the general population at your discretion”:

This is what Theodore Berendtsen said to his judges. It is the only public speech he ever made, and he made it surrounded by men who had been his friends. He did not look at anyone when he said this. His eyes were on something none of us, in that room with him, could see. But I am sure he saw it, as I am sure that, when someone reads these words, a hundred years from now, he will know that a man living in our time was great enough to plan beyond his own life.

The voice was a completely unknown one, and trembled with feeling. It might be false, or it might be real. Almost certainly, the man speaking was in the grip of an overpowering emotion, and would grin sheepishly at himself when he remembered it later. But some obscure one of Berendtsen’s judges had performed that judgment better than had been expected of him. Jim felt a cold chill run along his hackles as he listened, and, when he touched a switch, heard the speakers echoing mournfully outside.

He got to his feet and swung himself carefully over to the window, leaning heavily on his crutches and watching the faces of the people as they listened. And then the tape-recorded voice cut in, and Garvin saw the people gasp.

“I am not here to defend myself,” Berendtsen said. “For I am indefensible. I have burned, killed, and looted, and my men have done worse, at times.

“I killed because some men would rather destroy than build—because their individual power was sweeter to them than the mutual liberty of all men. I killed, too, because I was born to a society, and men would not accept that society. For that, I am doubly guilty—but I could do nothing else. Some issues are not clear- cut. Whatever the evils of our society might be, I can only say that it was my firm conviction that it would have been intolerable to us had some outside way of life sup planted it. In the last analysis, I made few judgments. I am not a superhuman hero. I am a man.

“I burned as a weapon of war—a war not against individuals, but against what seemed to me to be darkness. I looted because I needed the equipment with which to kill and burn.

“I did these things in order to bring union to what had been scattered tribes and uncoordinated city-states. We stood on the bare brink of the jungle we had newly emerged from, and, left alone, it would have been centuries before the scattered principalities fought out such a bloody peace as would, at last, have given us civilization again—after it was too late, after the books had rotted and the machinery rusted.

“What binds an organization of people is unimportant. Political ideologies change. Purposes change. The rule of one man comes to an end. But the fact of organization continues, no matter what changes occur within that organization.

“I have committed my last crime against today. I leave you an organization to do with as you will. I have set my hand on today, but I have not presumed upon tomorrow.”

There was a moment’s crackling silence, and then the New York broadcaster cut off, but the name he signed to the message was completely devoid of title or military rank, and there was no mention of Hollis or the SFAR, or of Robert Garvin. Whatever had brewed in New York was over, and this, not the blank, deadly silence, was the proper end to Theodore Berendtsen’s time.

“What the hell is that thing?” Jim said, squinting up into the sun.

“Helicopter, I guess. Looks like the picture,” Holland answered. “You notice the cabin’s got a blue-red stripe on it?”

Garvin nodded. “Yeah, I saw it.” He leaned more heavily on his crutches.

There was a crowd of villagers around them, straining against the militiamen who were uncertain enough of their present authority to let the line bulge out raggedly.

“You notice that?” Holland said, pointing.

Jim looked at the ugly pockmarks of bullet scars on the cabin and nodded. Then the aircraft stormed over them, gargling its way downward until the landing skids touched the ground and the engine died. The cabin door opened.

“So that’s what happened to Bob,” Jim said softly. He smiled crookedly and began swinging toward the craft, Holland keeping pace with him. They were almost beside it when Holland suddenly touched Jim’s arm.

Another man had gotten out with Bob, and now both of them were turning around to help the other passenger out. The breath caught in Jim’s throat as he recognized his mother. Then he stopped and braced himself. When his mother looked at him, the shock of recognition in her eyes followed instantly by pain and indecision, he was ready.

“Hello, Mom,” he said. “Nothing big—I’ll be all right in a couple of weeks.” She looked at him uncertainly, and finally put her arm through Bob’s.

“Hello, Jimmy,” she said. She had grown much older than he remembered her, and needed Bob to support her after the long trip. Jim smiled and nodded reassuringly again.

“Hello, Holland,” Bob said, licking his lips nervously. “This is Merton Hollis,” he added, indicating the other man, who looked at the crowd uneasily, the arrogant lines of his face lost in the lax indecision of his face.

Holland raised his eyebrows.

“Can you—can you find us a place to stay here?” Bob asked.

Holland grinned crookedly. “Permanently, I take it? Exile is such a nasty word, isn’t it?”

Garvin winced, but said nothing.

“Hello, Bob,” Jim said.

“Hello, Jim,” his brother answered without looking at him.

“I guess there’s lots of room around here,” Holland said. He grinned savagely. “Just one thing—I’m staying around. There’s three sisters with a big farm and no man around. I kind of like one of them. One thing, like I said. Don’t trespass.” He patted the stock of his rifle.

“What happened to Mary, Mom?” Jim asked her.

Slow tears began to seep over Margaret Garvin’s face. “She’s dead, Jimmy. She and Ted. The—the people came and…and they…” She looked at Jim with complete bewilderment. “But now the people say they’re sorry. Now they say they love them, and they keep telling me they’re sorry…I don’t understand, Jimmy.”

Jim and Holland looked at Bob’s face, and found corroboration in it. Jim laughed at his expression. Then he swung himself forward and looked into the helicopter’s cabin. “Take a passenger back to New York, buddy?” he asked the pilot.

The man shrugged. “Makes me no never-mind. You’ll have to wait a couple of minutes, though.” He pulled a jackknife out of his pocket and jumped to the ground. He began to scrape out the blue-red stripe.

“Hey, don’t be an idiot, Jim.” Garvin cried. “They ask you what kind of a Garvin you are, nowadays.”

Jim looked at him wearily. “When you find out, let me know, huh?”

He happened to glance at the crowd, and saw Edith, pressed forward by the villagers.

“Why is he taking out the stripe?” she was saying excitedly to a militiamen. “Why is he doing that? That’s the freedom flag! He can’t do that.”

“Got a tip for you, Bob,” Jim said, smiling thinly. “You’ve got one friend here, anyway.” He wondered how that would work out.

He wondered, as the helicopter jounced northward, how a lot of things would work out. He wondered just exactly what legacy Ted Berendtsen had left the human race.

Had he died just in time, or too soon?

And Jim knew that no historian, probing back, could ever know, any more than he or Jack could know. Even now, even in the end, you had to trust Berendtsen’s judgment.

This happened many years after the plague, at about the same time things were beginning to run down in the Great Lakes region and the Seventh Republic there tried to buy time with a legend. But this happened toward the south:

I

Jeff Garvin moved through the loosened window like a darker shadow in the night, and his feet made no sound as he touched the floor. He grinned quietly as he closed the window behind him and adjusted his eyesight with near- animal ease to peer at the darkness of the room.

He was in the dining room. He took quick stock of the doorways and chose the one most likely to lead to the kitchen. He moved toward it without hesitation, holding his rifle with his right forefinger on the trigger while he nudged the door gently open. He’d been right—it was the kitchen, and he stepped noiselessly into it.

He located a storage cabinet, and began to fill his pack, grimacing because most of the food was home-canned in glass jars. He’d have to be careful with those, if he got in a fight. He packed them as carefully as possible, stopping to listen carefully after each barely audible tink! of their touching. When he had a full load, he slipped the pack onto his shoulders and picked up his rifle again. He crossed the kitchen, opened the door, and stepped back out into the dining room.

“Whoa, feller,” the voice said, and the rifle was jerked out of his hand. He saw the glint of faint light on the barrel of a shotgun, and stopped still, the spring of his muscles sagging into dissolution. He squinted at the shadowy figure, feeling a despair wash through him, and knew that was it, this was the end, a thousand miles and five years away from home. He had fought and tracked his way this far, over the cold plains and through the long nights, with men against him all the way, and this was where he had finally come to the end of it all.

A girl had caught him. A girl with a shotgun. He grinned at the thought and let her see the grin where she sat in the semicircle of people who were looking at him. He liked the way she didn’t try to avoid it, but kept looking at him—looking, not staring the way the rest of the women were doing at the wild outlaw.

“What’s your name, mac?” the man who seemed to be running things asked.

“Jeff Cottrell,” he said with the right amount of hesitation. He’d found out long ago that Garvin wasn’t a popular name in some places. He had no idea if it was the same way here, but there was no use taking chances with a dull knife or a slow fire.

“What were you doing in the Boston house?”

He looked at the man expressionlessly, wondering what sort of local quirk of justice demanded particulars of a man about to be executed out of hand.

“Stocking up,” he said, willing enough to play along.

The man nodded. “Been out on the plains a long time?”

That was a trick one. Nobody could do it very long without raiding a lot of towns, and a man who raided a lot of towns was bound to run into times when he didn’t come and go without leaving some of the citizenry bleeding. On the other hand, if he gave them some ridiculously short figure, they’d simply lose patience with him and get it over with now.

“Being cagey about it, huh?” the man said. “All right, we’ll let that one go.” He didn’t seem particularly disturbed.

“How many people have you killed?”

“My share,” he answered instantly. It was a foregone conclusion anyway.

The man took it without any surprise, and started another question, but the girl cut him off.

“Don’t see any point to carrying this business on any longer,” she said, standing up.

Whew! I didn’t think it’d be you that yelled for blood first, Jeff thought.

“Maybe you’re right, Pat,” the man admitted. He turned to the rest of the crowd—the town’s entire adult population, probably—and directed his next question at them. “How do you people feel about it?”

There was a scattering of nods, and a few people said “Pat’s right,” or things to the same effect. Jeff braced himself.

The man turned around and looked at him. “We’ve got a proposition.”

Jeff felt the air rush out of his chest. “You’ve got a what,” he asked completely astonished.

The man smiled tightly. “This is something we decided on a while ago. This is a farming town,” he explained. “Every one of us has enough to keep him busy all day and half the night. We can’t keep up any sort of adequate guard against people like you; and people like you are a nuisance. So we’ve got a standing offer to every one of you we catch that doesn’t flunk the little oral examination. Goes like this: we’ll let you draw food and clothing from the town supplies and give you a place to stay. In return, you keep the neighborhood cleaned out of light- fingered tramps like yourself.”

“I’ll take it,” Jeff said.

The man held up his hand. “Let’s not get hasty, feller. There’s a catch, far as you’re concerned. One of us goes with you everywhere you go around town. He carries a gun. You don’t. When you go out hunting, we take shifts and send two people with you. You get your rifle outside the town limits, and turn it back in before you get inside ’em again. If we catch you heading out, we shoot you down as a sort of generalized favor to all the other towns around here.”

“I’ll still take it.”

“Funny,” the man said, “they all do, at first.” There was a ripple of cold grins through the crowd, and Jeff didn’t waste a thought on wondering why the position was currently empty.

The man stepped up and held out his hand. “We might as well get to know each other. You’re bunking with me. My name’s Pete Drumm.”

Jeff nodded thoughtfully. It was a hard, tough hand.

“Ever ride a horse before?” Pat asked.

Jeff shook his head and looked carefully at the bay hitched to the porch upright.

The girl sighed. “Well, Mister, that’s a tired horse. He’s been tired for the past five years. So even if you’re lying, don’t expect to get very far very fast. Get aboard him.”

Jeff shrugged and walked over to the animal. He slipped the reins loose and climbed cautiously into the saddle, feeling his thigh muscles stretching into unaccustomed lengths and resigning himself to considerable—and probably laughable—soreness if he kept this up very long. Fortunately, the horse did no more than twitch his tail.

Pat looked up and grinned. “No, you’re never been on a horse before,” she said. “You look as though you expected to wet your pants any minute.”

He stared at her for a minute, then burst out laughing in the first genuine amusement he’d felt in weeks. Damn, he liked that girl!

She swung up into her own saddle, and they walked slowly through the town while Pat kept up a running commentary. “That’s Becker’s place. Got a wife, four kids. The kids sleep downstairs, so they can pretty much take care of themselves. That place next to them is Fritch’s. Old Fritch lives alone, but he’s a sly one. He’s got traps all around the place. Wouldn’t hurt to look up this way every once in a while, though.”

By the end of the afternoon, he had a fairly clear picture of the town’s layout. It was much like all the others he’d seen on the plains—the houses close together for protection, with fields running out in all directions. It was late fall now, and the fields were bare, but he could picture how it would look in the summer: green and prosperous, tough as the grass that constantly fought the prairie wind. He spotted a string of bare poles marching toward the horizon, and nodded at them.

“Telephone line,” the girl explained. “Branch out of Kansas City. Some easterners were through here last July, hooking up with the St. Louis exchanges. They’ll be stringing wire in the spring. All the old stuff blew down long ago, of course.” Abruptly, she turned in the saddle and looked at him. “What’s it like, back East?” she asked, laughing wryly. “Funny, how we’re all part of the same lousy mess, and there’s the big difference between city people and small-town farmers. But Pete tells me it was always like that.”

She seemed genuinely interested. To make conversation, at first, and then out of some long pent-up well of talk as he forgot himself, he began telling her about life back in New Jersey, about what the people were like, and about his family. She listened intently, asking a question here and there, occasionally making a surprisingly levelheaded comment. By the time they reined up in front of her house, she knew a great deal about him, and not even his screaming muscles and aching knees were enough to kill his odd feeling of relaxation.

But one thing he never quite let leave his mind; some way, somehow, he had to find a way to escape.

By the time he had been in Kalletsburg a week, he knew how he was going to do it. It was the only way that would work, with these people. It might take a year. Perhaps two. But when the time came, he would leave. And he found himself toying with the idea that it just might be possible to take Pat with him.

He rolled over in his bunk and clasped his hands behind his head, staring up at the lamplit ceiling.

There was no use trying to beat the system of watchers they had set up. Even when it was only Pat who was with him, there was a pistol holstered to her belt, and Drumm had meant what he’d said about his going unarmed. That had been an uncomfortable feeling to shake off in itself. His rifle was so much part of him that he had grown accustomed to its weight to balance him. He found himself misjudging the height of his shoulder, or overestimating the muscular effort needed to lift his arm. He’d felt awkward and clumsy without it, and in this short time, hadn’t quite gotten over it yet.

But he could get used to it, and get used to having it back, when the time came. Because the town’s weak spot was its smallness. He was in constant contact with everyone. In a while, they’d be completely accustomed to the sight of him. If he talked to them, and listened to what they had to say, he’d gradually become one of them. In time, too, he might start working a small field of his own. Perhaps he’d build a house. Give them a hundred signs that he was here to stay—tied to the town in the same way they were.

And then, one night, he’d disappear, and they’d be left to look for a new sheriff. And, as he’d considered before, it was just barely possible that Pat might be willing to go along with him by then.

He grinned quietly.

“What have you got to be happy about?” Drumm asked. Jeff’s grin widened. At the moment, everybody in town tacitly accepted, small-town fashion, that Pat was Drumm’s girl.

“Oh, nothing special,” he said. He lay awake for a few minutes longer, and then went quietly to sleep.

Winter came, and during its first weeks, as the plains outlaws were driven to stock whatever miserable shelters they had managed for themselves, Jeff was busy day and night. He’d spent his last winter in a cave cut into a riverbank, and he knew what the thought-processes were that rose from the sort of life. By October, he’d nailed four figurative hides to the barn door, and then the snow blocked everything off until the desperate, half- starved men began floundering toward the town in mid-December. Meanwhile, he spent his time talking to Pat or Drumm.

Drumm was as interested in his past as Pat had been, for an entirely different reason. He showed Jeff the boxed shears of paper covered by his father’s precise, economical handwriting.

“A Study of the Effects of Personal Arms on Conventional Theories of Modern Government, by Harvey Haggard Drumm, with a bow to Silas McKinley,” Jeff read, and looked up at Pete in curiosity. “A History of Theodore Berendtsen’s Northern Campaign,” he read from the label of another box, “With Additional Personal Notes.”

“Dad was in on that one,” Pete explained. “He was a corporal under one of Matt Garvin’s sons.”

Well I’ll be triple goddamned! Jeff thought. He looked at another box of manuscript, labeled The Care and Feeding of the Intellectual Militant.

“And you’re hanging on to these in hopes of getting them to a printing press sometime?” he asked.

“Better than that,” Pete said. “I’m trying to add to them. That’s why I’m so interested in your story. I want to write it down. I want to be able to have other people learn from it. See, we’re doing all right, down here. Things starting up, even without Berendtsen’s people having gone through here. Because my father came through here.”

“Just writing books?”

“Just writing books, and telling people what was in them, and about how in the East things were getting better. It makes a big difference when you know somebody’s found a way out of the hole, even if you haven’t, yet. You keep looking. You don’t just curl up and die. I guess that’s the best excuse for Berendtsen and his bully-boys. They had to live so my father could talk about the way things were getting started. But we’re past that time, now. And I’m damned glad.” Pete looked at Jeff with shrewd appraisal in his eyes. “I wouldn’t want to see any more gunmen trying to keep going, around here.”

“I guess not.”

“Yeah.”

“What ever happened to your father, anyway?” Jeff asked. He didn’t like the way the conversation was going.

Pete smiled softly. “I don’t know. I guess I was about ten or twelve when Ryder’s bunch came through here, heading for Texas. My mother had just died, and my older brother, Jim, was big enough to run our place with my help. Pop was a rotten farmer anyway, so he talked it over with us, and when Ryder’s bunch pulled out, he packed up all the blank paper he could carry and went off with them. I sort of wanted to tag along, but Pop stepped on that idea hard. He was right, I guess. Ryder wasn’t doing any fighting he could avoid, but it was still a hard life.

“Worked out best in the end, too, when Jim got killed by one of you boys. If I’d of gone, there wouldn’t have been anybody left to work the place.”

“What difference would that make, if you weren’t here to see it?”

Drumm shrugged uncertainly. “I know. But I’m here. It just—I don’t know, it just feels that way.”

Jeff tried to imagine that trait of character that would make a man think in those terms about a tract of land much like any other tract, anywhere. But he had to give up on that.

Bit by bit, he told Drumm the story of what his life had been like, beginning with his father’s death and carefully ending with Alister’s marriage to Barbara, and his departure from home. He had to watch himself to make sure he didn’t let his real name slip, but otherwise he was able to let the story run almost automatically.

For some reason, a comment that Pete made on Cot’s death stayed with him. He found himself thinking about it at unexpected times and places.

“I’m sorry he died,” Pete said, “because I’m sorry for anybody who dies. But I’m glad for his sake he did. A man shouldn’t outlive his times.” He looked up and speared Jeff with his glance. “Once he’s decided for certain on what his times really are.”

Jeff couldn’t seem to shake the words loose.

When he’d been there a year, his patient plan reached its first goal. He had kept up his duties faithfully, and had stayed away from the telephone wire crew, talking to them only when he encountered them by accident, and not trying to send out any messages or ask for help of any kind. It would have been a futile move in any case, for his kind of man had no friends, and no hope of help, but, more important, he had known the townspeople were watching.

They gave him credit on a small plot of land, and he found time enough during the day to work it. He had to be awake most of the night, but he worked his land as hard as anyone worked theirs, while Pat showed him how. His face pinched while his shoulders broadened, and the thin layer of winter fat ran off him in muddy streams of perspiration. When he caught a raider stealing his young corn, he shot him through the elbow of his gun-arm.

That complete unpremeditated move tipped the scales in his favor, he realized later. The one man who still rode out with him was confidently careless about enforcing the original rules, and if he hadn’t wanted Pat so much by then, he could have shot him and left any time he chose. He debated it briefly, but realized that Pat would never go with him on that basis, and stuck to his original plan.

Wait a year, he told himself. In a year, they’d practically let him carry the town out on his back.

That fall, he started building his house. Left to himself, he might have thrown up a one-room shack of some kind, but he had enough offers of help to make a bigger project possible. Moreover, if he built a place large enough for a family, there was something as good as a display poster to advertise his intention of settling down. He realized how right he’d been when he caught Pat’s mother and father looking at the two of them over the dinner table and exchanging sly glances.

It seemed to help in his long campaign to wear Pat down, too.

And finally, when the next spring came, he knew it was time. He slept in the house alone, riding in and out of town with his rifle in his saddle boot any time he chose. He called everybody in the town by their first names, and he seldom had to eat his own cooking. The people of Kalletsburg had forgotten he was a raider, an outlaw.

Even Pete Drumm had forgotten, for he was as sour toward him as he would have been toward any other equal who was winning the contest over Pat.

Only me, he thought. I haven’t forgotten.

He waited until the moon died, and picked a night when it was cloudy enough to rain, piling packs on one of his two horses and working on his rifle until even its slowly deteriorating barrel shone without a trace of pitting. Then he waited patiently, until he was sure Pat’s parents would be asleep. He sat in his darkened house and counted slow time. Finally, he moved.

He walked his horses quietly to a stand of cottonwood near the Bartons’ house and hitched them there, moving the rest of the way on foot. Without a trace of having lost his old skill, he went into the shed and saddled Pat’s horse, and then circled the house.

And he came, inevitably, to the dining room window, which was still the easiest. Well, he thought, it’s a full circle.

Grinning with cold mirth, he slid through the loose window and stood once more in the Bartons’s dining room at night.

He fumed inwardly in response to a by now automatic reflex. He’d told Arnold a dozen times if he’d told him once to fix that window. But the old man just smiled and insisted that Jeff was all the protection he needed.

He shook his head angrily. Well, this’d teach him.

“Look boy,” Pat said from the darkness, “the only bathroom in this house is still next to the dining room. Can’t you learn?”

He sagged against the wall.

Pat came over to him and took his hand. “You must want something awful bad to keep sneaking in here. I hope it’s me.”

“I—” And all of a sudden, he couldn’t say it. He felt foolish, caught here, and somehow awkward, and completely ridiculous.

“I—” he began again, and felt something break open inside him. “Damn it,” he said bewilderedly, “I was going to ask you to take off with me. But I can’t do it! I can’t leave this goddamn town!”

Pat reached out and held him, her hand tousling his hair fondly. “You damn fool,” she said, “of course you can’t! You’re civilized.”

II

And this happened in the north:

Joe Custis stepped out of the dead commander’s hut into the flickering shadows from the cookfires. There was a rifleman posted about ten yards away, and Custis looked at him thoughtfully. Then he called, in a voice pitched to reach the man and no farther. “Hey—the boss wants some light in here!”

The man grunted and went to one of the near fires for a sliver of burning wood. He carried it back, shelding it carefully with his hands. “First no lights, and now lights,” he grumbled as he stepped through the doorway. He reached up to a shelf where an oil lamp was sitting, and stopped dead as he dimly saw Henley on the floor and the commander lying across the desk. “Now, who the hell’d be dumb enough to kill the commander right in camp…”

Custis whipped the flat of his hand across the side of the man’s neck. He caught the burning light carefully, crushed it out on the floor. Then he stepped outside again, gently closing the door behind him. He walked slowly away until he was fifty feet away from the huts, in the shadows, and then he turned toward the fire where he had seen Jody working. He had the knife in his belt under his shirt, and as he walked he rolled up his bloody sleeves. His skin gathered itself into gooseflesh under the night wind’s chill.

When he was fairly close to the fire, he changed his pace until he was simply strolling. He walked up to the fire, listening for the first sounds from the hut on the other side of the camp. “Jody.”

She looked up, wiping the wet hair off her forehead with the back of a hand. “Hi, soldier! Come for supper?”

He shook his head. “Still want to come to Chicago?”

She straightened up. “Just a minute.”

She stirred the food in the pot, let the spoon slide back into it, and picked up her water pail. “Ready,” she said.

“Let’s go.”

They walked toward the spring. Out of the firelight, she touched his forearm. “You’re not kidding me?”

“No. You know how to get down to where the car is?

“Yeah.” She put the water pail down. “Come on.”

As they walked up the rise to the galley entrance, she gripped his hand. “Anything go wrong, Joe? You get hurt, or something?”

“No.”

“There’s blood on your shirt.”

“Henley’s.”

“You sure?”

“He spilled it. It belongs to him.”

She took a deep breath. “There’s gonna be hell to pay.”

“Can’t help it. It worked out that way.” He was trying to remember the exact positions the grenadiers had been in.

They came to where the two machinegun pits covered the trail into the valley, and one of the men there heard them walking. “Who’s that?”

“Me. Jody.”

The man chuckled. “Hey, Jody! You bringin’ me my supper?” The other man laughed out of the darkness.

“Not right now, Sam,” Jody answered. “I got somebody with me.”

There was more laughter in the shadows among the rocks, and then they were past. They made their way down the mountainside, walking as quietly as they could on the loose rock, and then Custis heard a man’s shoes scrape as he settled himself more comfortably in his position.

“We’re there,” Jody whispered.

“Okay.” Custis oriented himself. After a minute, he was pretty sure where he was in relation to the car, and where everyone else would be.

“What now, Joe?”

“You walk on down. Let ’em hear you. Talk to ’em.”

“You sure, Joe?”

“Yeah. It’ll be okay.”

“You’re not gonna leave me?”

“I told you I’d take you, didn’t I?”

“All right, Joe.” Her fingers trailed over his forearm. “Be seeing you.”

“Give me twenty minutes,” he said, and slipped off among the rocks.

He moved as noiselessly as he knew how, the knife ready in his hand. Once he stumbled over a man. “Scuse me, Buddy,” he mumbled.

“Okay, pal,” he man answered. “Take one for me.”

Farther down the mountains, he heard somebody say loudly: “Hey, it’s Jody! C’mere, Jody, gal.” He could feel the ripple of attention run through the men among the rocks. Equipment rattled as men leaned forward, sick of this duty and glad of something to watch, and maybe join in on.

Now he was behind one of the grenade teams. He inched forward, found them, and after a minute he was moving on.

The men where Jody was were laughing and tossing remarks back and forth. He heard her giggle.

He found the next team craning forward to look down into a cup behind some rocks where a small fire had been built on the side away from the car. When he was through, he looked over the edge and saw Jody standing in the middle of a bunch of men. Her head was thrown back, and she was laughing.

When he’d left the third emplacement, and was working toward the fourth, he heard the sound of a slap. A man yelled: “Hey, girl, don’t you treat me like that!” The rest of the men were laughing harshly.

The fourth team was easy to handle.

Working on the fifth, he missed the last man. It was a tricky business, getting the first with one sure swing and then going for the other before he could yell. This time the man rolled sideways, and there was nothing for Custis to do but kick at his head. He hit the man, but didn’t even knock him out. The man slid off the rock, yelling, and Custis scrambled as fast as he could to throw the box of grenades one way, the rifle another, and jumped for the car.

“Lew! Open up! I’m coming in!” he bellowed as the night broke apart.

Rifle fire yammered toward him as he ran, ricochets screaming off the rocks. The car’s motors began to wind up. It was still as dark as the bottom of a bucket, and then Hutchinson fired the car’s flare gun. The world turned green.

Custis slammed into the starboard track cover, threw himself on top of it, and clawed his way over the turtledeck. He rapped his knuckles quickly on the turret hatch, and Robb flung it back. Custis teetered on the edge of the coaming. The car’s machineguns opened up, hammering at the rocks. Custis heard a man screaming: “Where’s the damned grenades?”

Then he heard the girl shouting: “Joe.”

He stopped. He looked back toward the sound of her voice. “Oh, Christ!” he muttered. Then he sighed. “What the hell.” and shouted down into the turret: “Cover me!”

He jumped down off the battlewagon, his boots resounding on the foreplates before he hit the ground. He pitched forward, smashing into the gravel, then threw himself erect and ran toward the spot.

Rifle fire chucked into the ground around him. He weaved and jumped from side to side, floundering over the rocks. Hutchinson fired the next flare in the rack, and now the world was red, laced by the bright glow of the car’s tracers as the machineguns searched back and forth in their demiturrets. He heard the tracks slide and bite on the gravel, and the whole car groaned as the bogeys lurched it forward.

The girl was running toward him, and there were men back in the rocks who were sighting deliberately now, taking good aim.

“Joe!”

“All right, damn you!” He scooped her up and flung her toward the car ahead of him, feeling a crack of fire lace across his back. And then the car was practically on top of them. Lew had his driver’s hatch open, and Custis pushed the girl through. Then he was clambering up the side of the turret and into the command seat. “All right,” he panted into the command microphone. “Let’s go home.”

The hatch dropped shut on top of him. He fell into the car, landing very hard on his side. Lew locked a track and spun them around. The inside of the car sounded like a wash boiler being pelted with stones.

Robb looked at him, patting the breeches of his .75s. “Open fire, Joe?”

“No! No—leave the poor bastards alone.”

He looked over toward the girl. “Hey, Jody,” he grinned.

The halfback lumbered down the last slope, spraying stones out from under its tracks as it took a bite of the prairie grass. Custis jammed his hands against the sides of the hatch and scowled out at the plains ahead, where Chicago lay beyond the edge of the green horizon. He didn’t turn his head back. He was through with the mountains.

He was going to Chicago. He thought about the jagged holes in State Street’s asphalt. He shivered a little.