Use of Weapons

Epilogue

Dust, as usual, followed them, though the young man said several times he thought it might rain. The old man disagreed and said the clouds over the mountains were deceptive. They drove on through the deserted lands, past blackened fields and the shells of cottages and the ruins of farms and the burned villages and the still smoking towns, until they came to the abandoned city. In the city they drove resoundingly through the wide empty streets, and once took the vehicle crashing and careering up a narrow alley crammed with bare market stalls and rickety poles supporting tattered shade-cloths, demolishing it all in a fine welter of splintering wood and wildly flapping fabric.

They chose the Royal Park as the best place to plant the bomb, because the troops could be comfortably accommodated in the Park’s wide spaces, and the high command would likely take to the grand pavilions. The old man thought that they’d want to occupy the Palace, but the young man was convinced that in their hearts the invaders were desert people, and would prefer the spaces of the Park to the clutter of the Citadel.

So they planted the bomb in the Great Pavilion, and armed it, and then argued about whether they’d done the right thing. They argued about where to wait things out, and what to do if the army ignored the city altogether and just went on by, and whether after the prospective Event the other armies would retire in terror, or split up into smaller units to continue the invasion, or know the weapon used had been unique, and so maintain their steady progress, doubtless in an even more ruthless spirit of vengeance than before. They argued about whether the invaders would bombard the city first, or send in scouts, and — if they did shell — where they would target. They had a bet on that.

About the only thing they agreed on was that what they were doing was a waste of the one nuke their side — indeed either side — possessed, because even if they had guessed correctly, and the invaders behaved as they’d anticipated, the most they could hope to do was wipe out one army, and that would still leave three more, any one of which could probably complete the invasion. So the warhead, like the lives, would be wasted.

They radioed their superiors and with a code-word told them what they had done. After a little while they received the blessing of the high command, in the form of another single word. Their masters didn’t really believe the weapon would work.

The older man was called Cullis, and he won the argument about where they ought to wait, and so they settled into their high, grand citadel, and found lots of weapons and wine and got drunk and talked and told jokes and swapped outrageous stories of derring-do and conquest, and at one point one of them asked the other what happiness was, and received a fairly flippant reply, but later neither could remember which one had asked and which one had answered.

They slept and they woke and they got drunk again and they told more jokes and lies, and a light shower of rain blew softly over the city at one point, and sometimes the young man would move his hand over his shaved head, through long, thick hair that was not there any more.

Still they waited, and when the first shells started to fall they found they’d picked the wrong place to wait, and so went scrambling out of it, down the steps and into the courtyard and into the half-track and then away, out into the desert and the wasteland beyond, where they camped at dusk and got drunk again and stayed up specially that night, to watch the flash.