THE NEUTRON was a plump young man named Walter Chase, though what he thought he was was a brand-new Engineering graduate, sitting mummified and content with the other 3,876 in Eastern’s class of ‘98, waiting for his sheepskin.

The university glee club sang the ancient scholastic song Gaudeamus Igitur with mournful respect and creamy phrasing, for they and most of the graduates, faculty members, parents, relatives and friends present in the field house thought it was a hymn instead of the rowdy drinking song it was. It was a warm June day, conducive to reverence. Of Eastern’s 3,877 graduating men and women only three had majored in classical languages. What those three would do for a living from July on was problematical. But in June they had at least the pleasure of an internal chuckle .over the many bowed heads.

Walter Chase’s was bowed with the rest. He was of the Civil Engineering breed, and he had learned more about concrete in the four years just ended than you would think possible. Something called The Cement Research and Development Institute, whose vague but inspirational commercials were regularly on the TV screens, had located Walter as a promising high-school graduate. He was then considering the glamorous and expensive field of nuclear physics. A plausible C.R.D.I. field man had signed him up and set him straight. It took twelve years to make a nuclear physicist. Now, wasn’t that a hell of a long time to wait for the good things of life? Now, here was something he ought to consider: Four years. In four years he could walk right into a job with automatic pay raises, protected seniority, stock participation and Blue Everything, paid by the company. Concrete was the big industry of tomorrow. The C.R.D.I. was deeply concerned over the lack of interest in concrete engineering, and it was prepared to do something about it: Full four-year scholarship, tuition, living costs and pocket money. Well?

Walter signed. He was a level-headed eighteen-year-old. He had been living with a pinch-penny aunt and uncle, his parents dead; the chance of the aunt and uncle financing twelve years of nuclear studies for him he estimated to lie midway between the incredible and the impossible.

Two solid hours dwindled past in addresses by the Chancellor, the Governor of the State and a couple of other politicos receiving honorary degrees. Walter Chase allowed the words to slip past him as though they were dreams, although many of them concerned his own specialty: shelters. You knew what politician talk was. He and the 3,876 others were coldly realistic enough to know that C.S.B. was a long way from being enacted into law, much less concrete-and-steel Civilian Shelters in fact. Otherwise why would the Institute have to keep begging for students to give scholarships to? He drowsed. Then, as if with an absent-minded start, the program ended.

Everybody flocked away onto the campus.

In the hubbub was all the talk of the time: “Nice weather, but, Kee-rist! those speeches!” “Who d’ya like, in the All-Star?” “Nothing wrong with C.S.B. if it’s handled right, but you take and throw a couple thousand warheads over the Pole and-“ “My, feet hurt.” Chase heard without listening. He was in a hurry.

There was no one he wanted to meet, no special friend or family. The aunt and uncle were not present at his graduation. When it had become clear from their letters that they expected him to pay back what they had spent to care for him as soon as he began earning money, he telephoned them. Collect. He suggested that they sue him for the money or, alternatively, take a flying jump for themselves. It effectively closed out a relationship he loathed.

Chase saw, approaching him across the crowded campus, another relationship it was time to close out. The relationship’s name was Douglasina MacArthur Baggett, a brand-new graduate in journalism. She was pretty and she had in tow two older persons who Chase perceived to be her parents. “Walter,” she bubbled, “I don’t believe you were even looking for me! Meet Daddy and Mom.”

Walter Chase allowed his hand to be shaken. Baggett père was something in Health, Education and Welfare that had awakened Walter’s interest at one time; but as Douglasina had let it slip that Daddy had been passed over for promotion three years running, Walter’s interest had run out. The old fool now began babbling about how young fellows like Walter would, through the Civilian Shelters Bill, really give the country the top-dog Summit bargaining position that would pull old Zhdetchnikov’s cork for him. The mother simpered: “So you’re the young man! We’ve heard so much about you in Douglasina’s letters. I tell you, why don’t you come and spend the All-Star weekend with us in Chevy Chase?”

Walter asked blankly: “Why?”

“Why?” said Mrs. Baggett in a faint voice, after a perceptible pause. Walter smiled warmly.

“After all,” he said, shrugging, “boy-girl college friendships. . . . She’s a fine girl, Mrs. Baggett. Delighted to have met you, Mr. Baggett. Doug, maybe we’ll run into each other again, eh?” He clapped her on the shoulder and slipped away.

Once screened from the sight of their faces, he sighed. In some ways he would miss her, he thought. Well. On to the future!

In the dormitory he snapped the locks on his luggage, already packed, carried them down to be stowed in the luggage compartment of the airport bus and then circulated gently through the halls. He had in four years at Eastern made eleven Good Contacts and thirty-six Possibles, and he had an hour or two before his plane to joke with, shake the hand of, or congratulate the nine of those on the list who shared his dorm. He fooled the fools and flattered the flatterable, but in his wake a few of his classmates grimly said: “That young son of a bitch is going to go far, unless he runs out of faces to step on.”

Having attended to his nine he charitably spread some of his remaining tune among the couple dozen Outside Chances he ran into. To a sincere, but confused, servo-mech specialist he said, man-to-man, “Well, Frankie, what’s the big decision? Made up your mind about the job yet?”

The servo-mech man clutched him and told him his tale of woe. “God no, Walt. I don’t know which way to turn. Missile R and D’s offering me a commission right away, captain inside of two years. But who wants to be a soldier all his life? And there’s nothing in private industry for inertial guidance, you know.

Damn it, Walt, if only they let you resign from the service after a couple years!” Chase said something more or less comforting and moved on. He was careful not to chuckle until he was out of sight.

Poor Frankie! Got himself educated in what amounted to a military speciality-who else could afford servo-mechanisms?-and discovered he hated the Army.

Still, Chase meditated while nodding, smiling and handshaking, thirty years as an Engineering Officer might not be so bad. As it was one of the alternatives open to himself-that was what C.S.B. was all about -he allowed his mind to drift over the prospects. It wasn’t like the bad old days of fighting. A flat and rigid policy of atomic retaliation had been U. S. military doctrine for fifty-three years, and backing it up was a large, well-trained U. S. military establishment of career men. And the regulations said career. The only way out short of thirty-year retirement was with a can tied to your tail and a taint to your name. He dismissed that thirty-year dead end with light contempt, as he had before.

The air-raid warning sirens began to howl their undulating hysteria.

Chase sighed and glanced at his watch. Not too bad. He should still be able to make his plane. Everyone around him was saying things like, “Ah, damn it!” or “Oh, dear,” or “Jeez!” But they were all dutifully following the arrows and the “S” signs that dotted the campus.

Chase trailed along. He was kind of annoyed, but nothing could really spoil his day. The first shelter he came to was full up. The freshman raid warden stood at the door-Chase had been a raid warden himself three years before-chanting: “Basement filled to capacity, folks. Please proceed to Chemistry building. Don’t block the exit, folks. Basement here filled-“

Because of the extra crowd caused by the graduation the Chemistry building basement was filled, too, but Chase got into the Administration building and sat down to wait. Like everybody else. Women fussed about their dresses-they always had, in every air raid drill he had taken part in, say, four a week for fifty-two weeks of each year for the nearly twenty years since he had been old enough to toddle alongside his late mother and father. Men grumbled about missing appointments. They always had. But for the most part the battery-fed air-raid lights gleamed equably on them all, the warden fussed with the air conditioner and the younger folk smooched in the corners.

It wasn’t a bad shelter, Walter Chase thought. The Law School basement was a mess-too high a pH in the mortar mix, and the aggregate showing hygroscopic tendencies” because of some clown not watching his rock crusher, so the walls were cracked and damp. Chemistry’s had been poured in a freeze. Well, naturally it began to sinter and flake. This was better; trust the Chancellor to make sure his own nest was downy! Of course, in a raid none of them would be worth a hoot; but there weren’t to be any real raids. Ever.

A jet plane’s ripping path sounded overhead.

Evidently this was going to be a full-dress affair, at least regional in scope. They didn’t throw simulated manned-bomber attacks for a purely local do. Walter frowned. It had suddenly occurred to him that with the air-transport flight lanes screwed up by military fighters on simulated missions everything within a thousand miles might be rerouted into stack patterns. What the devil would that do to his plane’s departure time?

Then he smiled forebearingly. He was, in a way, pleased to be annoyed. It meant he was entering into the adult world of appointments and passages. They said that when a raid drill began to be a damn interruption instead of a welcome break from classes and a chance to smooch, then, brother, you were growing up. He guessed he was growing up.

“Goddam foolishness,” growled the man who sat next to Chase on the bench, as though it were a personal attack. More jets shredded sound overhead and he glared at Chase. Walter inventoried his English shoes, seal ring and pale cigar and at once engaged him in conversation. The man was some graduate’s father; they had got separated in the raid drill, and Pop was sore as a tramped bunion. The whole drill thing was damned childishness, didn’t Walter see that? And vindictive damned childishness when they chose to throw one on graduation day of a major university. If only Crockhouse had been elected in ‘96 instead of Braden, with his packed ballots in Indiana and. Puerto Rico!

Here Walter Chase’s interest cooled, because Pop sounded like a politician, revealed himself to be a Nationalist and thus was out of power. But there was no escaping the bench. What Pop objected bitterly to was the multiple levels of expense. Here the drill was knocking men out of production, but the damn Middle-Road Congress said they had to be paid anyhow. And if the Defense Department was making it a full-scale simulated raid, did Walter know what that meant? That meant that there went thirty or forty Nineveh Abies at a hundred and fifty thousand dollars apiece, and was that enough? No. Then they sent up four or five Tyres at ninety thousand apiece to knock down the Ninevehs. Did that make sense? He paused to glare at Walter Chase.

Walter said, “Well, that’s the Cold War for you. Say, who d’you like in the All-Star-“ He didn’t get to finish the sentence.

“L.A.” snapped Pop, without losing a beat. “Get the damn monkey-business over with, that’s what I say. I’m a sneak-puncher and I’m proud of it. If we’d put our man in the White House instead of that psalm-singing Braden there wouldn’t be any Moscow or Peking or Calcutta by now and we wouldn’t be sitting here on our butts!”

Somebody clawed through from the bench in front; with horror, Chase recognized old man Baggett. But Douglasina’s Daddy did not recognize him. Flushed with rage and politics he had eyes only for the sneak-punch advocate. “You’re right it’s monkey-business, fat-mouth!” he snarled. “No thanks to you and your Crock-house we aren’t dead in this cellar instead of safe and secure! President Braden is a hundred percent pledged to the C.S.B., God bless it, and-“

The rest of his sentence and Sneak-Punch’s angry reply were drowned out by a further flight of jets overhead, and then the wham-wham-wham of interceptor missiles blowing simulated attackers out of the sky.

Somehow, heaven knew how, Walter Chase managed to sneak away, inching through the packed rows of benches. As soon as the All Clear siren toots began he was up and out, ignoring the freshman warden’s puppy-like yaps that they should remain in their seats until the front benches had been emptied-Routine. It was all strictly routine.

Out on the campus, Chase headed for the airport in earnest, and was delighted to find that his flight was still on time. How lucky he was, he thought, with more pride than gratitude. “What are you, sir?” asked the robot baggage-checker, and he said, “Washington,” with pleasure. He was on his way. He was headed for Washington, where Dr. Hujes of The Cement Research and Development Institute would assign him to his job, doubtless the first rung of a dizzying climb to wealth and fame. He was a young man on his way. Or so he thought. He did not know that he was only a neutron ambling toward events.

Arturo Denzer, in the same sense, was a nucleus. He knew no more about it than Walter Chase.

Denzer woke to the rays of a rising sun and the snarl of his wake-up clock. He took a vitamin capsule, an aspirin tablet, a thyroid injection; a mildly euphoric jolt of racemic amphetamine sulphate; caffeine via three cups of black coffee with sucaryl; and nicotine via a chain of nonfiltering filter-tip cigarettes. He then left his apartment for the offices of Nature’s Way Magazine, which he edited.

June’s blossom was in the air, and so was the tingle of the All-Star Game Number One. The elevator operator said to him respectfully, “Who d’ya like in the All-Star game, Mr. Denzer?” Denzer turned the operator’s conversation circuit off with a handwave. He didn’t feel like talking to a robot at least until the aspirin began to work.

Absent-mindedly he waved a cab to him and climbed in. Only after it took off did he notice, to his dismay, that he had picked a Black-and-White fleet hack. They were salty and picturesque-and couldn’t be turned off. The damned thing would probably call him “Mac.”

“Who ya like inna All-Star, Mac?” the cab asked genially, and Denzer winched. Trapped, he drummed his ringers on the armrest and stared at the Jefferson Memorial in its sea of amusement rides and hot-dog stands. “Who ya like inna All-Star, Mac?” it asked again, genially and relentlessly. It would go on asking until he answered.

“Yanks,” Denzer grunted. Next time he’d watch what he was doing and get a sleek, black Rippington Livery with a respectful BBC accent.

“Them bums?” groaned the cab derisively. “Watcha think Craffany’s up to?”

Craffany was the Yankee manager. Denzer knew that he had benched three of his star players over the last weekend-indeed, it was impossible to avoid knowing it. Denzer struck out wildly: “Saving them for the All-Star, I guess.”

The cab grunted and said: “Maybe. My guess, Fliederwick’s in a slump so Craffany benched him and pulled Hockins and Waller so it’d look like he was saving ‘em for the All-Star. Ya notice Fliederwick was 0 for 11 in the first game with Navy?”

Denzer gritted his teeth and slumped down in the seat. After a moment the cab grunted and said: “Maybe. My guess is Fliederwick’s in a slump so Craffany benched him and pulled. . . .” It went through it twice more before Denzer and his hangover could stand no more.

“I hate baseball,” he said distinctly.

The cab said at once, “Well, it’s a free country. Say, ya see Braden’s speech on the C.S.B. last night?”

“I did.”

“He really gave it to them, right? You got to watch those traitors. Course, like Crockhouse says, where we going to get the money?”

“Print it, I imagine,” snarled Denzer.

“Figgers don’t lie. We already got a gross national debt of $87,912.02 per person, you know that? Tack on the cost of the Civilian Shelters and whaddya got?”

Denzer’s headache was becoming cataclysmic. He rubbed his temples feverishly.

“Figgers don’t lie. We already got a gross national ...”

Desperate situations require desperate measures. “I hate p-politics too,” he said, stuttering a little. Normally he didn’t like smutty talk.

The cab broke off and growled: “Watch ya language, Mac. This is a respectable fleet.”

The cab corkscrewed down to a landing in North Arlington-Alex and said, “Here y’are, Mac.” Denzer paid it and stepped from the windy terrace of the Press House onto a crowded westbound corridor. He hoped in a way that the cab wouldn’t turn him in to a gossip columnist. In another way he didn’t care.

Around him buzzed the noise of the All-Star and the C.S.B. “. . . Craffany . . . $87,912.02, and at least $6,175.50 for Shelters ... Foxy Framish and Little Joe Fliederwick . . . well, this is next year . . . nah, you sneak-punch ‘em a couple thousand missiles over the Pole and... needs a year in the minors.”

“Hello, Denzer,” someone said. It was Maggie Frome, his assistant.

“Hello, Maggie,” he said, and added automatically: “Who do you like in the All-Star game?”

In a low, ferocious voice she muttered: “You can take the All-Star game, tie it up in a b-b-b-brassiere and dump it in a Civilian Shelter. I am sick of the subject. Both subjects.”

He flushed at her language and protested: “Really, Maggie!”

“Sorry,” she grunted, sounding as though she didn’t mean it. He contrasted her surly intransigence with his own reasoned remarks to the cab and tolerantly shook his head. Of course, he could have been taken the wrong way... He began to worry.

They stepped off together at the Nature’s Way offices. Sales & Promotion was paralyzed. Instead of rows of talkers at rows of desks, phoning prospects out of city directories and high-pressuring them into subscriptions, the department was curdled into little knots of people cheerfully squabbling about the C.S.B. and the All-Stars. Denzer sighed and led the girl on into Transmission. The gang should have been tuning up the works, ready to ,shoot the next issue into seven million home facsimile receivers. Instead, the gang was talking All-Stars and C.S.B. It was the same in Typography, the same in Layout, the same in Editorial.

The door closed behind them, isolating their twin office from the babble. Blessed silence. “Maggie,” he said, “I have a headache. Will you please work on the final paste-ups and cutting for me? There isn’t anything that should give you any trouble.”

“Okay, Denzer,” she said, and retreated to her half of the office with the magazine dummy. Denzer felt a momentary pang of conscience. The issue was way overset and cutting it was a stinker of a job to pass on to Maggie Frome. Still, that was what you had assistants for, wasn’t it?

He studied her, covertly, as she bent over the dummy. She was a nice-looking girl, even if she was a hangover from the administration of President Danton and his Century of the Common Woman. Maggie’s mother had been something of an integrationist leader in Sandusky, Ohio, and had flocked to Washington as one mote in Danton’s crackpot horde, bringing her subteenage daughter Maggie. No doubt there had been a father, but Maggie never mentioned him. The mother had died in a car crash that looked like suicide after Danton lost all fifty-four states in his bid for re-‘ election, but by then Maggie was a pert teenager who moved in with cousins in Arlington-Alex and she stayed on. Must just like Washington, Denzer thought. Not because of Female Integration, though. Danton’s Century of the Common Woman had lasted just four years.

He winced a little as he remembered her coarseness of speech. She was round and brown-haired. You couldn’t have everything.

Denzer leaned back and shut his eyes, the hubbub outside the office was just barely audible for a moment-some red-hot argument over the Gottshalk Committee’s Shelter Report or Fliederwick’s R.B.I. had swelled briefly to the shrieking stage-and then died away again. Heretically he wondered what the point was in getting excited over baseball or the building or nonbuilding of air-raid shelters capable of housing every American all the time. One was as remote from reality as the other.

“Sorry, Denzer.”

He sat up, banging his knee on his desk.

“Lousy staff work, I’m afraid. Here’s the Aztec Cocawine piece and no lab verification on the test results.” She was waving red-crayoned galleys in his face.

He looked at the scrawling red question-mark over the neat columns of type with distaste. Nature’s Way promised its seven million subscribers that it would not sell them anything that would kill them; or, at least, that if it did kill them nobody would be able to hang it on the product directly. At substantial expense, they maintained a facility to prove this point. It was called The Nature’s Way National Impartial Research Foundation. “So call the lab,” he said.

“No good, Denzer. Front-office memo last month. Lab verifications must be in writing -with notary’s seal on hand before the issue goes to bed.”

“Cripes,” he protested, “that means somebody’s got to go clear over to Lobby House.” He did not meet her eye. Going over to Lobby House was a worthwhile break in the day’s routine; the free snack-bar and free bar-bar the lobbies maintained was up to the best expense-account standards, and everyone enjoyed talking to the kooks in the lab. They were so odd.

“I’ll go if you want, Denzer,” she said, startling him into looking at her.

“But the issue-“

“Did most of it last night, Denzer. The Aztec story is all that’s left.”

“We’ll both go,” he said, rising. She had earned it; he needed a bromo and a shot of B-l vitagunk in the Lobby House snack-bar; and since there would be two of them in the cab he had a ruse for cutting out the cab’s talk about All-Stars and the C.S.B.

The ruse was this: As soon as the cab took off he flung his arms around her and bore her back against the arm rest.

The cab chuckled and winked at them with its rear-view lens, as it was programmed to do. They discussed proofreading, the vacation sked and the choice of lead commercials for the next issue of Nature’s Way in soft whispers into each other’s ears all the way to Lobby House, while the cab winked and chuckled at them every fifteen seconds.

The knocks on the 93^rd floor were under the care of a sort of half-breed race of semi-kooks. These were science majors who had minored in journalism... or in marrying rich . . . and thus wandered into press agentry for scientific concerns. As liaison men between Nature’s Way and the test-tube manipulators the semi-kooks occupied an uncertain middle ground. It sometimes made them belligerent. Denzer and the girl were let in to see the Director of Bennington’s Division, a Dr. Bennington, and Denzer said: “We came for the Aztec Cocawine certification.”

Dr. Bennington boomed: “Damn right! Coming right up! Say, who’s gonna take it in the Game?” He thumped a button on his desk and in a moment a tall, stooped youth with a proudly beaked nose swept in and threw a document on his desk. “Thanks, Valen-dora. Lessee here, um, yeah. Says it’s harmless to the nerves, ya-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta, all signed and stamped. Anything else today, Arturo? Gland extract, fake a heroin prescription, shot of Scotch?”

The beaked youth said loftily: “Our findings are set forth precisely, Dr. Bennington. The fluid contains an alkaloid which appreciably eroded the myelin sheaths of the autonomic nerve trunks.”

Denzer blanched, but the semi-kook administrator agreed carelessly, “Right, that’s what I said. It’s that word ‘appreciably.’ Anything less than ‘markedly,’ we write it down as negative.” He slipped it in an envelope that was already marked Confidential Findings, Aztec Wine of Coca Corporation, Sponsor, and sailed it across to Denzer. “Well, what about C.S.B., boy? They gonna get us dug in before it’s too late?” He made them promise to stop in at the snack-bar or bar-bar before leaving the building, then offered them a drink out of his private stock. They refused, of course. That was just his way of saying good-bye. It was the only way he knew to end a conversation.

With the certification in his pocket and the issue locked up, Denzer began to feel as though he might live, especially if he made it to the B-l vitagunk dispenser in the snack-bar. He took Maggie Frome by the arm and was astonished to feel her shaking.

“Sorry, Denzer. I’m not crying, really. If somebody’s going to sell crazy-making dope to the public, why shouldn’t it be you and me? We’re no better than anybody else, d-d-damn’it!”

He said uncomfortably, “Maybe a drink’s not such a bad idea. What do you say?”

“I’d love it,” she sobbed. But then the sirens began to wail and they said, “Damn it,” and “Oh, dear” -respectively, she did and he did-and they took their bearings by the signs and made for the shelters. Under Lobby House was nothing like enough space, so the air-raid shelter was the interior parts of the 10^th through 85^th floors, away from the flying glass of the curtain walls but not too near the elevator shafts. It was not a bad shelter, actually. It was proof against any bomb that the world had ever known, up to say, early 1943.

There was plenty of room but not enough benches. Maggie and Denzer found a place on the floor where they could put their backs against a wall, and he allowed her to lean against Ms shoulder. She wasn’t such a bad kid, he thought sympathetically, especially as the perfume in her hair was pleasant in his nostrils. There wasn’t anything really wrong with Female Integration. Maggie wasn’t a nut. Take baseball. Why, that was the Integrationist’s major conquest, when women demanded and got equal representation on every major-league team in spite of the fact that they could not throw or run on competitive terms with men. They said that if all the teams had the same number of women it wouldn’t matter. And it hadn’t. And Integrationists were still crowing over the victory; and yet Maggie had refused to fall into the All-Star hysteria.

A roar like an outboard motor in the crown of your hat shook the building; A. A. “carpet” cannon laying a sheet of sudden death for missiles across the sky above them. Denzer relaxed. His headache was almost gone. He inclined his head to rest his cheek against Maggie’s hair. Even with a hangover, it had been pleasant in the cab with his arms around her. He had been kind of looking forward to the return trip. If Denzer were indeed a nucleus, as in a way he was, he was beginning to feel a certain tugging of binding energy toward certain other nuclear particles.

As soon as the noise stopped, he thought he would speak to her.

The noise stopped. The voices of the men beside them bellowed into the sudden quiet: “-damned foolish idea of Therapeutic War was exploded ten years ago! And that’s what we’d be if your idiot Crockhouse was in-exploded!”

And the man next to him: “At least Crockhouse wouldn’t have us sitting ha these fool imitation shelters! He’d do something.”

“Whadya think Braden wants, for God’s sake? Not these things. He’s right on the record for C.S.B.”

And then Maggie Frome, breathing fire, her head no longer resting on Denzer’s shoulder: “What the hell is so great about C.S.B.? Shelters, no shelters, can’t you get it through your head that if this keeps up we’re dead? Dear God above, deliver me from fools, baseball players and p-p-politicians!”

Denzer tried to look as though he’d never met her; he was white-faced. Round, yes, sweet-smelling, yes, warm-but how could he ever get used to her dirty talk?

If Denzer was a nucleus and Walter Chase a neutron, what can we call the President of the United States? He played a part. Without him nothing could happen. Perhaps what he did was to shape the life of the neutron before fission happened; in that sense one could call him a “moderator.” This was an apt term for President Braden.

On this bright June morning in Washington-not Arlington-Alex or the bedroom municipalities in Maryland but the little old Federal District itself-the President of the United States held what was still called a “press” conference. He was late. The cathode-tube “newspapermen” grumbled a little as Secret Service men frisked them, but it was habit. They were used to being frisked, ever since that fanatic Alaskan nationalist publisher emptied a .32 at then-President Hutzmeyer in ‘83. And they were used to now-President Braden being late.

They rose when President Braden came in. As usual, he protested in his pleasant adopted border-South accent: “Please, ladies, please, gentlemen, don’t bother-“ So they sat down and smiled, and waited while Braden arranged some papers on his desk. He always did that. He never referred to them during the session, because he didn’t have to, but every week there was the minute or two of silence in the room while the President, his rimless glasses gleaming studiously, pursed his lips over the documents in their red, blue and cream-colored folders.

He looked up and beamed.

Unobtrusive camera-eyes mounted flush with the walls of the conference room began to record. The elephantine Giuseppe von Bortoski, N.B.C. Washington bureau chief, incomparably senior correspondent, was privileged to lead off. He did: “Good morning, Mr. President. Do you have a statement for us today?”

“Nothing prepared, Joseph. It’s been a quiet week, hasn’t it?”

Von Bortoski said solemnly, “Not for Craffany,” and everybody roared. Von Bortoski waited out his laugh and said: “But seriously, Mr. President, is there any comment on the radar picket situation?”

The President paused, then looked faintly surprised. “I didn’t know there was a ‘situation,’ Joseph. Our radar picket vessels off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts have been pulled in approximately two hundred miles. They all have the new microradar; they don’t have to be so far out. This gives us a gratifying economy, since the closer we can pull them in the fewer ships we need to stick out there on picket duty. Is that what you wanted to know, Joseph?”

“No, Mr. President. I was referring to Representative Simpson’s telecast yesterday. He alleged that the new radars haven’t been adequately field-tested. Said the move was premature and, well, dangerous.”

The President paused, then looked faintly angry. “I seem to recall that Illinois Simpson. A Democrat.” Everybody nodded. “I am surprised that you are taking up our time, Joseph, with the wild charges that emanate with monotonous regularity from the Party of Treason.” Everyone looked at the stout N.B.C. man with annoyance. The President turned toward a young lady correspondent, paused, and said, “Miss Banner-man, do you have a question?”

She did. What about the Civilian Shelters Bill?

The President paused, grinned and said, “I’m for it.” He got a small laugh.

“I mean, Mr. President, what is its status now? As the leader of your Party, is it going to go through?”

The President paused longer than usual. Everyone in the room knew what he was waiting for, though it was a convention of the Press Conference to pretend he was answering off the cuff. At last the other end of the transprompter circuit got its signals cleared and the President said levelly: “As the leader of my Party, Miss Bannerman, I can say this thing is being hammered out. Slower than some of us would wish, true. But it will be done. It is the platform of my Party; on that platform I was elected in ‘98; and I have not the reputation of going back on my pledges.” He inclined his head to an approving stir among the correspondents.

Von Bortoski made a mental calculation. He decided that the press conference had supplied enough matter for his upcoming newscast and to hell with the rest of them. “Thank you, Mr. President,” he said. The other reporters swore under their breaths once more at the tyranny of the senior-correspondent rule, the President rose smiling and the armed guards stepped away from the doors.

C.S.B., C.S.B., the President mediated. Someday he would have to ask a question himself and find out just what this C.S.B. was all about. No doubt the R & I desk that fed him answers or speeches via the transprompter could tell him. He promised himself he would get around to it first thing, say, Monday. Or wait, wasn’t Monday the first All-Star game?

A swift conveyor belt whisked him from the Annex to the Old White House and an escalator to the Oval Room. His personal secretary ventured to say: “You made good tune, Governor. There’s thirty-five minutes clear before the first appointment. How about a nap?”

President Braden snapped: “I see General Stan-dish has been talking to you again, Murray. Tell that quack when I want doctoring I’ll ask for it, and get me a drink.”

The President, who liked to think he was a hard-riding, hard-drinking southern gentleman, although he had been a New Jersey accountant until he was thirty, sipped a glass of mineral water lightly tinted with whiskey, decided he was refreshed and buzzed for the first appointment to start ahead of time.

The first appointment was with Senator Horton of Indiana. While he was coming in, the transprompter whispered into the President’s ear: “Call him David, not Dave. No wife. Ex-professor, for God’s sake. Watch him.”

The President rose, smiling, and gripped Horton’s hand with warmth and the pressure of an old campaigner. “It’s a great pleasure, David. How’s Indiana shaping up for next year? Lose all your best seniors?”

Senator Horton had a shock of gray hair, a mournful face and a surprisingly springy, lean body for a fifty-year-old ex-professor. He said abruptly: “I don’t follow the school’s football schedule. Mr. President, I want something.”

“Unto the half of my kingdom,” Braden said gaily, attempting to throw him off balance.

Horton gave him a meager smile. “I want you to bear down on the Civilian Shelters Bill. You are, after all, committed to it. It helped elect you. But twenty-two months have gone by and the bill is still in the Public Works Committee. I am on that committee, Mr. President, and it is my impression that I am the only member interested in seeing it enacted into law.”

The President said gravely, “That’s a mighty serious charge, David. One I cannot act on without the fullest-“

“Excuse me for interrupting, Mr. President, but your time is valuable and there are some things you needn’t bother explaining to me.” Deeply affronted, the President stared at him. “Believe me when I say that I’ve come to you as a last resort. I get only bland evasions from Harkness. The Interior Department-“

Harkness was the committee chairman and he had been Braden’s personal campaign manager in the ‘96 run. The President rose and said, “Excuse me, Senator, but I don’t permit people to speak about Jim Harkness like that in my presence.”

Senator Horton distractedly ran his hands through his shock of hair. “I didn’t mean to offend you. God knows I don’t mean to offend anyone. Not even the Secretary of Interior, though if he thinks- No, I won’t say that. All I want is to get the C.S.B. on the floor and get the construction work under way. Mr. President, how long can all this go on?”

The President remained standing, looked at his watch and said coolly, “All what, David?”

“We are in the fifty-third year of the Political War, Mr. President. Somehow, by a succession of last-minute, hairs-breadth accidents, we have escaped nuclear bombing. It can’t go on forever! If the missiles came over the Pole today they’d annihilate this nation, and I don’t give one juicy damn that China and Russia would be annihilated in the next forty minutes-“

He was trembling. The President’s earphone whispered tinnily: “Hospitalized one year; nervous breakdown. The guard-ports have him covered with sleep guns, sir.” That was a relief; but what about this Horton? He was Doane’s personal choice, chairman of the National Committee; had Doane put a raving maniac in the Senate? The President remembered, from those young, county-committeeman days when he remembered things clearly, that something like that had happened before. It had been during the Party of Treason’s first years-a lunatic from the Northwest got elected to Congress and was mighty embarrassing until he committed suicide. The President, then a schoolboy, had chuckled with the rest of the nation over Congressman Zioncheck; but now he was not chuckling. It was his Administration and in the Senate. And a member of, God help him, his party.

The President did not look toward the guard-ports and the riflemen behind them. He said quietly, “David, I want you to calm down. No pledges have been forgotten and no pledges are going to be violated. Ill speak to Jim Harkness about the Shelter Bill today. That’s a promise.”

“Thank you,” Horton said gratefully, and tried to smile. “I’ll hold you to that, sir. Good day.”

The President buzzed, not for his next appointment but to talk to his secretary. “Murray, get me Senator Harkness on the phone.” And to his chest microphone: “Trans-prompter desk? Get out of circuit. I’ll buzz you.” He heard the faint carrier tone in his ear die and the guard-ports’ click. For the first tune since he stepped out of his shower that morning, the President was able to say a word that no one but himself could hear. He said it. It had only one syllable, but it improved his mood very much.

Harkness’s voice was resonant and comforting. The President, sometimes nagged by a secret feeling that he was not very bright, knew damned well that he was brighter than Harkness.

He said: “Jim, I’ve got to wondering about this C.S.B. that you’ve got in Public Works. The day’s young yet and I’ve had two questions about it. I know we campaigned on it-what is it, exactly?”

Harkness said comfortingly: “It’s under control, Brad. That fellow Horton is trying to unbottle it, but we can keep him quiet. He doesn’t know the ropes.”

“Know that, Jim. I just had him in here, wailing and mad. What’s it all about?”

“Why,” said Senator Harkness, with something less of assurance in his voice, “it’s about building shelters, Brad. Against nuclear attack.” He pronounced it “nookyoular,” in the approved White House fashion.

“Not quite my point, Jim. I mean-“ the President searched for what it was he did mean-“I mean, I can find out the facts and so on, but what’s got people so stirred up? Put it this way, Jim: What’s your philosophy about the Civilian Shelters Bill?”

“Philosophy?” Harkness sounded vaguely scared.

“Well, I would not know about philosophy, Brad. It’s an issue, C.S.B. is, and we’re very fortunate to have got it away from the Nationalists. C.S.B.’s very popular.” The President sighed inaudibly and relaxed; Senator Harkness was clearly about to launch into one of his famous explanations of things that never needed to be explained. “You see, Brad, an issue is lifeblood to a party. Look over the field today. What’s to ‘argue about? Damn little. Everybody knows the Party of Treason is the Party of Treason. Everybody knows the Commies are crazy hoodlums, can’t trust ‘em. Everybody knows atomic retaliation is the only sound military policy. There, at one sweep, you knock domestic, foreign and military policy off the board and haven’t anything left to play with except C.S.B.” He paused for breath, but before the President could try to get him back on the track of the question he was rushing on: “It’s a godsend, Brad! The Nationalists guessed wrong. They turned C.S.B. down in the name of economy. My opinion, they listened too much to the Defense Department people; naturally the generals didn’t want to admit they can’t intercept whatever the Commies throw at us, and naturally they want the money for interception instead of shelters. Well, that’s all right, too, but the people say the last word. We Middle-Roaders guessed right. We slapped C.S.B. in our platform, and we won. What else is there to say about it? Now, we’re not going to turn loose of an issue like that. Fools if we did. The strategy’s to milk it along, get it on the floor just before we adjourn for campaign trips and if a Nationalist filibuster kills it, so much the better. That saves it for us for next year! You know, you never get credit in this game for what you’ve done. Only for what you’re going to do. And, hell, Brad,” he crowed, suddenly exultant as a child who has found a dime in the street, “this thing is good for years! There has to be a big conference committee with the House on financing C.S.B., we haven’t even set up liaison with Military Affairs. We’ve got four more years easy. How’s that sound, Brad, eh? Ride right in to reelection in Twenty Oh Oh, the first President of the twenty-first century!”

“Thanks, Jim,” said the President, “I knew I could get a straight answer out of you.” It was the only way to stop him. Otherwise he might go clear on to the C.S.B. and its effect on the Integrationists, the C.S.B. and Labor, the C.S.B. and Colorado water diversion or the C.S.B. as viewed in the light of Craf-fany’s benching of Little Joe Fliederwick.

And yet, pondered the President, he still didn’t know even the question, much less the answer. Why was C.S.B. a good issue? The missiles hadn’t hit in the past fifty-three years, why should a voting population march to the booths and elect its leaders because of their Shelter philosophy now?

Braden changed the subject. “What do you think of Horton, Jim?”

He could always count on Harkness being frank, at least. “Don’t like him. A boat-rocker. You want my advice, Brad? You haven’t asked for it, but it’s get rid of him. Get the National Committee to put a little money in his district before the primaries.”

“I see,” said the President, thanked his former campaign manager and hung up.

He took a moment before buzzing Murray for the next appointment to sip Ms lightly tinted soda water and close his eyes. Well, he’d wasted most of the thirty-five minutes he’d gained, and not even a nap to show for it. Maybe General Standish was right.

Once when Braden was younger, before he was governor of New Jersey, before he was state senator, when he still lived in the old Rumford house on the beach and commuted to Jersey City every day-once he had been a member of the National Guard, what he considered his obligation as a resigned West Pointer. And they had killed two of their obligatory four-hours-a-month one month watching a documentary film on nuclear attack. The arrows marched over the Pole and the picture dissolved to a flight of missiles. The warheads exploded high in ah-. Then the film went to stock shots, beautifully selected and paced: the experimental houses searing and burning on Yucca Flats, the etched shadows of killed men on the walls of Hiroshima, a forest fire, a desert, empty, and the wind lifting sand-devils. The narration had told how such-and-such kind of construction would be burned within so many miles of Ground Zero. It remarked that forest fires would blaze on every mountain and mentioned matter-of-f actly that they wouldn’t go out until the whiter snow or spring rams, and of course then the ground would be bare and the topsoil would creep as mud down to the oceans. It estimated that then, the year was no later than 1960, a full-scale attack would cost the world 90 percent of its capacity to support life for at least a couple of centuries. Braden had never forgotten that movie.

He had never forgotten it, but he admitted that sometimes he had allowed it to slip out of his mind for a while. This latest while seemed to have lasted quite a few years. Only C.S.B. had brought it back in his recollection.

Because that was the question, the President thought, sipping his tinted soda water. What was the use of C.S.B.? What was the use of any kind of shelters, be they deep as damn-all, if all you had to come out of them to was a burned-out Sahara?

Now that the simulated raid was over everybody was resuming their interrupted errands at once. Denzer was crammed in any-which-way with Maggie Frome wedged under an arm and that kook from the Institute-Venezuela?-gabbling in his ear about computer studies and myelin sheaths.

The elevator jollied them all along. “Don’t forget tomorrow, folks. Be a lot of grandmother’s buried tomorrow, eh?” It could not wink, but it giggled and, well, nudged them. Or at least it shook them. It was overloaded with the crowds from the shelter floors, and its compensators flagged, dropping it an inch below the sill of the lobby door, then lifting it. “Sorry, folks,” it apologized. “Good night, all!”

Denzer grabbed Maggie’s arm. The laboratory man called after him, but he only nodded and tugged the girl away through the crowds, which were mumbling to each other: “Foxy Framish . . . slip ‘em a couple thousand nookyoular ... caught off first... oh, hell.” The “oh, hells” became general as they reached the main lobby outside of the elevator bays.

Civilian Air Wardens formed chains across the exits. Like fish weirs they chuted the exiting civilians into lines and passed each line through a checkpoint.

“Denzer,” groaned Maggie, “I’m cooked. I never wear my dosimeter badge with this old green dress.”

The wardens were checking every person for his compulsory air-raid equipment. Denzer swore handily, then brightened. They did have their press cards; this was official business. Aztec Wine of Coca was a powerful name in industry, and didn’t they have a right to take care of its affairs even if they overlooked a few formalities that nobody really took very seriously anyway? He said confidently: “Bet I get us out of it, Maggie. Watch this.” And he led her forcefully to the nearest warden. “You, there. Important morale business; here’s my card. I’m Denzer of Nature’s Way. This’s my assistant, Frome. I-“

Briskly the warden nodded. “Yes, sir, Mr. Denzer. Just come this way.” He led them through the purse-seine of wardens, out of the building, into-why, Denzer saw, outraged, into a police cab.

“You fixed us fine, Denzer,” gloomed Maggie at his side as they got in. He didn’t have the spirit to listen to her.

The roundup had bagged nearly fifty hardened criminals, like Denzer and Maggie, caught flagrantly naked of dosimeters and next-of-kin tags. They were a surly lot. Even the C.S.B. adherents among them belligerently protested their treatment; the sneak-punchers were incandescent about the whole thing. Office girls, executives, errand boys, even one hangdog A.R.P. guard himself; they were a motley assortment. The research man, Valendora, was among them, and so was the girl from the Institute’s reception room. Valendora saw Denzer and slipped through the crowd toward him,  holding a manila envelope as though it contained diphtheria vaccine and he was the first man to arrive at the scene of an epidemic. “Mr. Denzer,” he said darkly, “I ask you to assist me. Eleven months of my tune and twenty-two computer hours! And this is the only copy. Statist. Analysis Trans. expects this by tomorrow at the latest, and-“

Denzer hardly heard. Statist. Analysis Trans. was not the only periodical expecting something from one of the fish in this net. With an inner ear Denzer was listening to what his Front Office would say. He was, he saw clearly, about to miss a deadline. Seven million paid-up subscribers would be complaining to the Front Office when their copies were late, and Denzer knew all too well who Front Office would complain to about that. He whimpered faintly and reached for an amphetamine tablet, but an A.R.P. cop caught his arm. “Watch it, Mac,” said the cop, not unkindly. “No getting rid of evidence there. You got to turn all that stuff in.”

Denzer had never been arrested before. He was in a semi-daze while they were waiting to be booked. Ahead of him in line a minor squabble arose-Valendora seemed to be clashing with a plump young fellow in a collegiate crew-cut-but Denzer was paying little attention as he numbly emptied his pockets and put all his possessions on the desk to be locked away for him.

It was not until Maggie Frome repeated his name for the fifth time that he realized she was talking to him. She indicated a lanky, homely woman talking into an autonoter, seemingly on terms of amiable mutual contempt with the police.

“Denzer,” Maggie hissed urgently, “that girl over there. The reporter. Name’s Sue-Mary Gribb, and I know her. Used to work with her on the Herald.”

“That’s nice. Say, Maggie,” he moaned, “what the devil are we going to do about the Aztec Wine of Coca piece? The Front Office’11 have our heads.”

“What I’m trying to tell you, Denzer! Give her the lab report. She’ll take it in for us!”

The sun rose in pink glory for Arturo Denzer.

Half blinded by the radiance of sudden, unexpected hope, he staggered back to the desk. Valendora and the plump youth were still at it, but he pushed past them, picked up the Nature’s Way National Impartial Research Foundation envelope and clawed his way back to Maggie. “Pencil!” he snapped. She produced one and Denzer scribbled a note to Joe, in Production:

Joe, we’re in a jam. Fix this up for us somehow. Run it pp 34-35, push it through soonest, I’ve       already got all okays so just jam it in. God bless you. If Front Office asks where I am I’m dead.

He thought of adding, “Will explain later,” but he wasn’t so very sure he could. He thought of kissing Sue-Mary Gribb; but she was another Female Integrationist, wearing slacks, carrying a corncob pipe; he only shook her hand briskly and watched her leave.

It was not until she was out the door that he realized why she had been there in the first place.

She was a reporter, gathering names. It was customary to run a list of A.R.P. violators in the newspapers. It was inevitable that someone who worked for Natures Way would see his and Maggie’s names on that list; and it was beyond hope that that someone would fail to show it to the Front Office.

With the help of Sue-Mary Gribb he might have made his deadline, but his troubles were not over. Front Office was solid C.S.B.

“Maggie,” he said faintly, “when you left the Herald, did you part friends? I mean, do you think they might give us a job?”

The next thing was that they had to wait for their hearing and, in the way of police courts, that took some tune. Meanwhile they were all jammed together, noisy and fretful.

The bull-pen roared: “Quiet down, you mokes! You think this is a debating society?” Denzer sighed and changed position slightly so as not to disturb Maggie Frome, again placidly dozing on his shoulder. (This could become a habit, he thought.)

Well, that was something else the Century of the Common Woman had accomplished. They had integrated the lockups, for better or for worse. Not that Maggie, asleep, was deriving the benefit she might from the integrated, but still very loud, yammering of the inmates of the bullpen.

They weren’t all A.R.P. violators. A sizeable knot in one corner were clearly common drunks, bellowing about the All-Star Game when they were not singing raucously. They were the chief targets of the bullpen’s repeated thunderings for quiet, as its volumetric ears registered an excessive noise level. They must wear out those tapes in a week, Denzer thought.

A diffident finger touched his arm. “Mr. Denzer?” It was the research fellow from the Institute.

Softly, to refrain from disturbing Maggie, he said: “Hello, Venezuela. Make yourself comfortable.”

“Valendora, Mr. Denzer.”

“Sorry,” said Denzer absently, inhaling Maggie’s hair.

“I ask you, Mr. Denzer,” Valendora said, choosing his words with as much care as though he were taping a question for his computers, “is it proper that I should be arrested for being twenty-six feet away from where I would not be arrested?”

Denzer stared at him. “Come again?” Maggie stirred restlessly on his shoulder.

“I was two floors below the Foundation, Mr. Denzer, no more,” said the research man. “We are not required to wear dosimeters in the Institute itself. Two floors is twenty-six feet.”

Denzer sighed. This was not a time when he had patience for nuts. The girl on his shoulder stirred and he said, “Good morning, Maggie.” Valendora swept on:

“Naturally, Mr. Denzer, it did not occur to me to go back for my dosimeter. My probably error was more than twenty-four hours minus, though zero plus, and it might have been the real attack. I was carrying a most important document and I could not endanger it.”

Maggie looked at him with faint curiosity and then twisted around to look at Denzer’s face. “The deadline, Denzer?” she muttered. He crossed his fingers and shrugged.

“Mr. Denzer,” cried Valendora, “you are a man of influence. Statist. Analysis Trans. is waiting for this study-and besides,” he added wonderingly, “I suppose if the attack is to come tomorrow someone should do something about it. Can you not secure justice for me in this matter?”

Rocked by the sudden vision of himself as a man of influence, Denzer hardly heard the rest of what the research man was saying. Maggie Frome pushed herself away from him and stared thoughtfully at Valendora.

“We’re all in the same boat, friend,” she said kindly.

Valendora scowled at the floor.

“But what’s this about an attack?”

With bitter sarcasm Valendora said, “Nothing at all, Miss Frome. Merely what I have spent eleven months of my tune on. And twenty-two computer hours.”

“I’m impressed, friend. You said something about an attack?”

Valendora said, “You would not understand single-event prediction, Miss Frome. It is a statistical assessment of probabilities. Oh, nothing in itself that has not previously been studied, true; but it is in the establishing of quantitative values for subjective data that I have, I do know, made a contribution.” He shrugged moodily. “And by tomorrow? The event, you see. If I have not published before the event it is only a mathematical statement. The test of a theory is the predictions that can be made from it; I have made my prediction. During the All-Star Game, you see-“

“There you are!” cried a new voice.

It was the plump youth who had been quarreling with Valendora at the booking desk. He was still angry. “Baseball,” he snapped, “that’s all I hear. Can’t I make anyone understand that I am a special investigator on Senator Horton’s personal staff? The senator is waiting to interview me right now! And this man has stolen my thesis!” He put a hand out and briskly pumped Denzer’s. “Walter Chase, sir. M.A., C.E., and all the rest of that nonsense,” he twinkled, for he had made a quick estimate of Denzer’s well-cut clothes and hangdog look and pigeonholded him at once as second-string executive, subject to flattery.

“Denzer. Nature’s Way,” he mumbled, trying to let go of the hand, but Chase hung on.

“I’m in cement, Mr. Denzer,” he said. “Did a bit of research-my dissertation, actually-just received another degree-and Senator Horton is most taken by it. Most taken, Mr. Denzer. Unfortunately I’ve just the one copy, as it happens and it’s, well, rather important that it not be lost. It concerns cement, as it affects our shelter program-and, after all, what is a shelter but cement? Eh? Probably should’ve been classified at the start, but-“ He shrugged with the faint amused distaste of the man of science for the bureaucrat. “Anyway, I must have it; the senator must see it with his own eyes before he’ll give me the j- before making final arrangements. And this man has stolen it.”

“Stolen!” screamed Valendora. “Man! It is your fault, man! I was only-“

“Be careful!” commanded Chase furiously. “Don’t blame me! I was merely-“

Denzer felt a tug on his arm. Maggie Frome winked and led him away, near the group of singing drunks. They sat down again. “Quieter here!” she shouted in his ear. “Put your shoulder back, Denzer! I want to go back to sleep!”

“All right!” he yelled, and helped her settle her head against him; but in a moment she raised it again.

“”Denzer!” she asked over the singing of the group, “did you hear what your friend from the Institute was saying? Something about an attack? I had the funny idea he meant missile attack-a real one, I mean.”

“No,” he shouted back, “it was only baseball! All-Star Game, you know.”

And he hardly heard the raucous bellowing of the drunks for the next half hour, inhaling the fragrance of her hair.

They were released at last, Denzer making bail; the bail corresponded to the amount of their fines for A.R.P. violation, and small print at the bottom of their summons pointed out that they could forfeit it if they chose, thus paying their fines, simply by failing to appear at the magistrate’s trial. They got out just in time to get the bulldog edition of Nature’s Way from a sidewalk scriber.

They looked at once on the spread, pages 34 and 35, expecting anything, even blank pages.

Tragically, the pages were not blank at all.

Pages 34 and 35 had nothing to do with Aztec Wine of Coca. It was a straight news story, headlined:

U. S. MISSILE VULNERABILITY TOTAL IN

ALL-STAR GAME, SAYS GOVERNMENT

             STATISTICS EXPERT

From there it got worse. Maggie screamed faintly over Denzer’s shoulder as she read parts of it aloud: “ ‘The obsessive preoccupation of the American public with baseball stems from a bread-and-circuses analogy with ancient Rome. Now, as then, it may lead to our destruction.’ Denzer! Does this maniac want us to get lynched?”

“Read on,” moaned Denzer, already several laps ahead of her. Neatly boxed on the second page was a digested, sexed-up version of something Denzer recognized faintly as the study of cement in the shelter program Chase had mentioned. What the Nature’s Way semantic-digester had made of it was:

SHELTERS DEATH TRAPS

Study of the approved construction codes of all American shelter projects indicates that they will not withstand even large chemical explosives.

“I think,” sobbed Arturo Denzer, “that I’ll cut my throat.”

“Not here, Mac,” snapped the news-scribing machine. “Move on, will you? Hey! Late! Whaddya read?”

Shaking, the couple moved on. “Denzer,” Maggie gasped, “where do you think Joe got this stuff?”

“Why, from us, Maggie,” Denzer tried to swallow, but his throat was dry. “Didn’t you hear Chase before? That was the mix-up at the desk; we must have got his papers, and I suppose what’s his-name’s, Venezuela’s, and bundled them off to Joe. Nice job of rush typography, though,” he added absently, staring into space. “Say, Maggie. What Venezuela was talking about. You think there’s any truth to it?”

“To what, Denzer?”

“What it says here. Optimum time for the Other Side to strike-during the All-Star Game, it says. You think-?”

Maggie shook her head. “I don’t think, Denzer,” she said, and they walked on for a moment.

They heard their names called, turned, and were overtaken rapidly by Valendora and the cement engineer. “You!” cried Chase. “You have my thesis!”

“And you have my study!” cried Valendora.

“Not I but humanity,” said Denzer sadly, holding out the damp faxed edition of Nature’s Way.

Valendora, after one white-faced oath in Spanish, took it calmly. He glanced up at the sky for a second, then shrugged. “Someone will not like this. I should estimate,” he said thoughtfully, “that within five minutes we will all be back in the calabozo.”

But he was wrong.

It was actually less than three.

It was the third inning, and Craffany had just benched Little Joe Fliederwick. In spite of the sudden ban on air travel the stadium was full. Every television screen in the country followed Little Joe’s trudging walk to the dugout.

In the White House, President Braden, shoes off, sipping a can of beer, ignored the insistent buzzing in , his ear as long as he could. He wanted to watch the game, “-and the crowd is roaring,” roared the announcer, “just a-boiling, folks! What’s Craffany up to? What will he do next? Man, don’t we have one going here today? Folks, was that the all-important turning point in today’s all-im-in today’s record-breaking All-Star Game, folks? Well, we’ll see. In sixty seconds we’ll return to the field, but meanwhile-“

The President allowed his attention to slip away from the commercial and took another pull at his beer. Baseball, now. That was something he could get his teeth into. He’d been a fan since the age of five. All his life. Even during the Century of the Common Woman, when that madman Danton had listened to the Female Lobby and put girls on every second base in the nation. But it had never been this good. This Fliederwick, now, he was good.

Diverted, he glanced at the screen. The camera was on Little Joe again, standing at the steps to the dugout, looking up. So were his teammates; and the announcer was saying: “Looks like some more of those air-to-air missile-busters, folks. A huge flight of them. Way up. Well, it’s good to know our country’s defense is being looked after and, say, speaking of defense, what do you suppose Craffany’s going to do now that-“

The buzzing returned. The President sighed and spoke to his invisible microphones. “What? Oh. Well, damn it... all right.”

With a resentful heart he put down the beer can and snapped off the television set. He debated putting his shoes back on. He decided against it, and pulled Ms chair close to the desk to hide his socks.

The door opened and Senator Horton came in.

“Mr. President,” cried Horton, “I want to thank you. There’s no doubt your prompt action has saved your country, sir. I imagine you’ve been filled in on the, ah, incident.”

Well, he had been, the President thought, but by Senator Harkness, and maybe the time had come when Jim Harkness’ view of world affairs needed a little broadening. “Suppose you tell me about it,” he said.

Horton looked faintly perplexed, but said promptly: “It was basically an accident. Two men, working independently, came up with reports, strictly unofficial, but important. One was a graduate student’s thesis on shelter construction; happens the boy was looking for a job, the Cement Research and Development Institute recommended him to me, he was on his way to see me when the thing happened. That’s how I became involved in it. The other fellow’s a lab worker, at least as far as earning a living’s concerned, but he’s a mathematician something-or-other and was working out a problem with his lab’s computers. The problem: If the Reds are going to sneak-punch us, when will they do it? The answer: today. While we’re all off base, with the All-Star Game. In the old days they’d maybe pick a presidential election to put one over, just like Hitler used to pick the long weekends. Now all they need is a couple of hours when everybody’s looking the other way, you see. All-Star Game’s a natural.”

The President said mildly, “I can see that without using a computer, Senator.”

“Certainly, sir. But this boy proved it. Like to meet him, by the way? I’ve got the lot of them, right outside.”

In for a penny, in for a pound, thought the President, motioning them in. There were three men and a girl, rather young, rather excited. Senator Horton rattled off introductions. The President gathered the other two had been involved in the security leak that had occurred on the reports.

“But I’ve talked to them,” cried Senator Horton, “and I can’t believe there’s a grain of malice in all of them. And what they say, Mr. President, requires immediate action.”

“I was under the impression I’d taken immediate action,” said the President. “You asked me to ground all civilian air traffic so the missile-watchers could have a clear field; I did. You asked me to put all our defense aircraft airborne; I did. You asked for a Condition Red defense posture and you got it, all but the official announcement.”

“Yes, Mr. President. The immediate danger may have been averted, yes. But what about the future?”

“I see,” said the President, and paused for a second. Oddly, there was no voice from the prompter in his ear to suggest his next words. He frowned.

“I see,” he said again, louder. The tiny voice in Ms ear said at last:

“Well, sir, uh-“ It cleared its throat. “Sir, there seems to be some confusion here. Perhaps you could ask the Senator to continue to brief you.”

“Well-“ said the President.

“David,” whispered the prompter.

“-David, let’s get our thinking organized. Why don’t you continue to fill me in?”

“Gladly, sir! As you know, I’m Shelters all the way. Always have been. But what this young man here says has shaken me to the core. Mr. Venezuela says-“ Valendora grinned sullenly at the rug-“that at this very moment we would be in atoms if it hadn’t been for his timely publication of the statistical breakdown of our vulnerability. He’s even a little sore about it, Mr. President.”

“Sore?”

The senator grinned. “We spoiled his prediction,” he explained. “Of course, we saved our own lives . . . The Other Side has computers too; they must have assessed our national preoccupation with baseball. Beyond doubt they intended to strike. Only the commotion his article caused-not only in our own country but, through their embassies, on the Other Side-plus of course your immediate reaction when I telephoned you asking for a Red Alert, kept the missiles from coming down today, sir. I’m certain of it. And this other young fellow, Mr. Chase-“ Walter Chase bowed his head modestly-“brought out a lot of data in his term paper, or whatever it was. Seemed like nonsense, sir, so we checked it. Everything he said is not only fact but old stuff; it’s been published hundreds of times. Not a word of new material in it.” Chase glared. “That’s why we’ve never built deep shelters. They simply won’t stand up against massive attack- and cannot be made to stand up. It’s too late for shelters. In building them we’re falling into the oldest strategic trap of human warfare; We’re fighting yesterday’s war today.”

President Braden experienced a sinking feeling when the earprompter said only, and doubtfully, “Ask him to go on, sir.”

“Go on, si  -go on, David.”

“Why,” said the senator, astonished, “that’s all there is, Mr. President. The rest is up to you.”

President Braden remembered vaguely, as a youth, stories about the administration of President -who was it? Truman, or somebody around then. They said Truman had a sign on his desk that read: The buck stops here.

His own desk, the President noticed for the first time, was mirror-smooth. It held no such sign. Apart from the framed picture of his late wife there was nothing.

Yet the principle still held, remorselessly, no matter how long he had been able to postpone its application. He was the last man in the chain. There was no one to whom the President could pass the buck. If it was time for the nation to pick itself up, turn itself around and head off in a new direction, he was the only one who could order it to march.

He thought about the alternatives. Say these fellows were right. Say the shelters couldn’t keep the nation going in the event of all-out attack. Say the present alert, so incredibly costly in money and men, could not be maintained around the clock for any length of time, which it surely could not. Say the sneak-punchers were right...

But no, thought the President somberly, that avenue had been explored and the end was disaster. You could never get all the opposing missile bases, not while some were under the sea and some were touring the highways of the Siberian tundra on trucks and some were orbital and some were airborne. And it only took a handful of survivors- to kill you.

So what was left?

Here and now, everybody was waiting for him to speak-even the little voice in his ear.

The President pushed his chair back and put his feet up on the desk. “You know,” he said, wiggling his toes in their Argyle socks, “I once went to school’too. True,” he said, not apologizing, “it was West Point. That’s a good school too, you know. I remember writing a term paper in one of the sociology courses . . . or was it history? No matter. I still recall what I said in that paper. I said wasn’t it astonishing that things always got worse before they got better. Take monarchy, I said. It built up and up, grew more complex, more useless, more removed from government, in any real sense, until we come to things like England’s Wars of the Roses and France’s Sun King and the Czar and the Mikado-until most of the business of the government was in the person of the king, instead of the other way around. Then-bang! No more monarchy.”

“Mr. President,” whispered the voice in his ear, “you have an appointment with the Mongolian Legate.”

“Oh, shut up, you,” said the President amiably, shocking his prompter and confusing his guests. “Sorry, not you,” he apologized. “My, uh, secretary. Tells me that the Chinese representatives want to talk about our ‘unprecedented and unpeace-loving acts’-more likely, to see what they can find out.” He picked the plug out of his ear and dropped it in a desk drawer. “They’ll wait. Now, take slavery,” he went on. “It too became more institutionalized-and ritualized- until the horse was riding the man; until the South here was existing on slaves, it was even existing for slaves. The biggest single item of wealth in the thirteen Confederate states was slaves. The biggest single line of business, other than agriculture, was slavery, dealing and breeding. Things get big and formal, you see, just before they pop and blow away. Well, I wrote all this up. I turned it in, real proud, expecting, I don’t know, maybe an honorary LL.D. At least a compliment, certainly ... It came back and the instructor had scrawled one word across the top of it: Toynbee. So I read up on Toynbee’s books. After, of course, I got over being oppressed at the instructor’s injustice to me. He was right. Toynbee described the whole thing long before I did.

“But, you know, I didn’t know that at the time. I thought it up myself, as if Toynbee had never lived,” said the President with some pride. He beamed at them.

Senator Hort6n was standing with open mouth. He glanced quickly at the others in the room, but they had nothing but puzzlement to return to him. He said, “Mr. President, I don’t understand. You mean-“

“Mean? I mean what’s happened to us,” said the President testily. “We’ve had our obsessive period. Now we move on to something else. And, Senator, Congress is going to have to help move; and, I’m warning you, you’re going to help me move it.”

When they left the White House it was late afternoon. The lilacs that bordered the wall were in full, fragrant bloom. Denzer inhaled deeply and squeezed the hand of Maggie Frome.

Passing the sentry box at the end of the drive, they heard a voice from a portable radio inside. It was screaming:

“It’s going . . . it’s going . . . it’s GONE, folks! Craffany has pulled one out of the fire again! And that wraps it up for him, as Hockins sends one way out over centerfield and into the stands.. .” The guard looked out, rosily beaming, and waved them on. He would have waved them on if they had worn beards and carried ticking bombs; he was a Craffany rooter from way back, and now in an ecstasy of delight.

“Craffany did it, then,” said Walter Chase sagely.

“I thought when he benched Hockins and moved Little Joe Fliederwick to-“

“Oh, shut up, Chase.” said Denzer. “Maggie, I’m buying drinks. You want to come along, Venezuela?”

“I think not, Mr. Denzer,” said the research man. “I’m late now. Statist. Analysis Trans. is expecting me.”

“Chase?” Politeness forced that one out of him. But Chase shook his head.

“I just remembered an old friend here in town,” said Chase. He had had time for some quick thinking. If the nation was going over to a non-shelter philosophy-if cave-dwelling was at an end and a dynamic new program was going to start-maybe a cement degree wasn’t going to be the passport to security and fame he had imagined. Walter Chase had always had a keen eye for the handwriting on the wall. “A-young lady friend,” he winked. “Name of Douglasina Baggett. Perhaps you’ve heard of her father; he’s quite an important man in H. E. and W.”

The neutron, properly placed, had struck the nucleus; and the spreading chain was propagating rapidly through their world. What was it going to be from now on? They did not know; does a fissioned atom know what elements it will change into? It must change; and so it changes. “I guess we did something, eh?” said Denzer. “But ... I don’t know. If it hadn’t been us, I expect it would have been someone else. Something had to give.” For it doesn’t matter which nucleus fissions first. Once the mass is critical the chain reaction begins; it is as simple as that.

“Let’s get that drink, Denzer,” said Maggie Frome.

They flagged a cab, and all the way out to Arlington-Alex it chuckled at them as they kissed. The cab spared them its canned thoughts, and that was as they wished it. But that was not why they were in each other’s arms.

Ray Stanton set his jaw as he stared at the molded lead seal on the museum door. Slowly, he deciphered its inscription, his tongue stumbling over the unfamiliar sibilants of the Martian language as he read it aloud before translating. "To the –strangers from the third planet – who have won their – bitter –triumph – we of Mars charge you, – not to wantonly destroy –that which you will find – within this door ... Our codified learning – may serve you – better than we ourselves – might have done."

Stanton was ashamed of being an Earthman as he read this soft indictment. "Pathetic," he whispered. "Those poor damned people."

His companion, a slight, dark-haired girl who seemed out of place in the first exploratory expedition to visit Mars after the decades-long war that had annihilated its population, nodded in agreement. 'the war was a crying shame," she confirmed. "But mourning the dead won't bring them back. To work, Stanton!"

Stanton shook his head dolefully, but copied the seal's inscription into his voluminous black archaeologist's notebook. Then he tore off the seal and tentatively pushed the door. It swung open easily, and an automatic switch snapped on the hidden lights as the two people entered.

Both Stanton and Annamarie Hudgins, the girl librarian of the expedition, had seen many marvels in their wanderings over and under the red planet, for every secret place was open to their eyes. But as the lights slowly blossomed over the colossal hall of the library, he staggered back in amazement that so much stately glory could be built into one room.

The synthetic slabs of gem-like rose crystal that the Martians had reserved for their most awesome sanctuaries were flashing from every wall and article of furnishing, winking with soft ruby lights. One of the typically Martian ramps led up in a gentle curve from their left. The practical Annamarie at once commenced to mount it, heading for the reading-rooms that would be found above. Stanton followed more slowly, pausing to examine the symbolic ornamentation in the walls.

"We must have guessed right, Annamarie," he observed, catching up with her. "This one's the central museum-library for sure. Take a look at the wall-motif."

Annamarie glanced at a panel just ahead, a bas-relief done in the rose crystal. "Because of the ultimo symbol, you mean?"

"Yes, and because – well, look." The room in which they found themselves was less noble than the other, but considerably more practical. It was of radical design, corridors converging like the spokes of a wheel on a focal point where they stood. Inset in the floor – they were almost standing on it –was the ultima symbol, the quadruple linked circles which indicated pre-eminence. Stanton peered down a corridor lined with racks of wire spools. He picked up a spool and stared at its title-tag.

"Where do you suppose we ought to start?" he asked.

"Anywhere at all," Annamarie replied. "We've got lots of time, and no way of knowing what to look for. What's the one in your hands?"

"It seems to say, 'the Under-Eaters" – whatever that may mean," Stanton juggled the tiny "book" undecidedly. "That phrase seems familiar somehow. What is it?"

"Couldn't say. Put it in the scanner and we'll find out." Stanton obeyed, pulling a tiny reading-machine from its cubicle. The delicacy with which Stanton threaded the fragile wire into its proper receptacle was something to watch. The party had ruined a hundred spools of records before they'd learned how to adjust the scanners, and Stanton had learned caution.

Stanton and his companion leaned back against the bookracks and watched the fluorescent screen of the scanner. A touch of the lever started its operation. There was a soundless flare of light on the screen as the wire made contact with the scanning apparatus, then the screen filled with the curious wavering peak-and-valley writing of the Martian graphic language.

By the end of the third "chapter" the title of the book was still almost as cryptic as ever. A sort of preface had indicated that "Under-Eaters" was a name applied to a race of underground demons who feasted on the flesh of living Martians. Whether these really existed or not Stanton had no way of telling. The Martians had made no literary distinction between fact and fiction, as far as could be learned. It had been their opinion that anything except pure thought-transference was only approximately true, and that it would be useless to distinguish between an intentional and an unintentional falsehood.

But the title had no bearing on the context of the book, which was a kind of pseudo-history with heavily allusive passages. It treated of the Earth-Mars war: seemingly it had been published only a few months before the abrupt end to hostilities. One rather tragic passage, so Stanton thought, read:

"A special meeting of the tactical council was called on (an untranslatable date) to discuss the so-called new disease on which the attention of the enemy forces has been concentrating. This was argued against by (a high official) who demonstrated conclusively that the Martian intellect was immune to nervous diseases of any foreign order, due to its high development through telepathy as cultivated for (an untranslatable number of) generations. A minority report submitted that this very development itself would render the Martian intellect more liable to succumb to unusual strain. (A medical authority) suggested that certain forms of insanity were contagious by means of telepathy, and that the enemy-spread disease might be of that type."

Stanton cursed softly: "Damn Moriarity and his rocket ship. Damn Sweeney for getting killed and damn and double-damn the World Congress for declaring war on Mars!" He felt like a murderer, though he knew he was no more than a slightly pacifistic young exploring archaeologist. Annamarie nodded sympathetically but pointed at the screen. Stanton looked again and his imprecations were forgotten as he brought his mind to the problem of translating another of the strangely referential passages:

"At this time the Under-Eaters launched a bombing campaign on several of the underground cities. A number of subterranean-caves were linked with the surface through explosion craters and many of the sinister creations fumbled their way to the surface. A corps of technologists prepared to re-seal the tunnels of the Revived, which was done with complete success, save only in (an untranslatable place-name) where several Under-Eaters managed to wreak great havoc before being slain or driven back to their tunnels. The ravages of the Twice-Born, however, were trivial compared to the deaths resulting from the mind diseases fostered by the flying ships of the Under-Eaters, which were at this time …"

The archaeologist frowned. There it was again. Part of the time "Under-Eaters" obviously referred to the Earthmen, the rest of the time it equally obviously did not. The text would limp along in styleless, concise prose and then in would break an obscure reference to the "Creations" or 'twice-Born" or "Raging Glows."

"Fairy tales for the kiddies," said Annamarie Hudgins, snapping off the scanner.

Stanton replied indirectly: "Put it in the knapsack. I want to take it back and show it to some of the others. Maybe they can tell me what it means." He swept a handful of other reading-bobbins at random into the knapsack, snapped it shut, and straightened. "Lead on, Mac-Hudgins," he said.

Of the many wonders of the red planet, the one that the exploration party had come to appreciate most was the colossal system of subways which connected each of the underground cities of Mars.

With absolute precision the web of tunnels and gliding cars still functioned, and would continue to do so until the central controls were found by some Earthman and the vast propulsive mechanisms turned off.

The Mars-Tube was electrostatic in principle. The perfectly round tunnels through which the subway sped were studded with hoops of charged metal. The analysis of the metal hoops and the generators for the propulsive force had been beyond Earthly science, at least as represented by the understaffed exploring party.

Through these hoops sped the single-car trains of the Mars-Tube, every four minutes through every hour of the long Martian day. The electrostatic emanations from the hoops held the cars nicely balanced against the pull of gravity; save only when they stopped for the stations, the cars never touched anything more substantial than a puff of air. The average speed of the subway, stops not included, was upwards of five hundred miles an hour. There were no windows in the cars, for there would have been nothing to see through them but the endless tunnel wall slipping smoothly and silently by.

So easy was the completely automatic operation that the men from Earth could scarcely tell when the car was in motion, except by the signal panel that dominated one end of the car with its blinking lights and numerals.

Stanton led Annamarie to a station with ease and assurance. There was only one meaning to the tear-drop-shaped guide signs of a unique orange color that were all over Mars. Follow the point of a sign like that anywhere on Mars and you'd find yourself at a Mars-Tube station—or what passed for one.

Since there was only one door to a car, and that opened automatically whenever the car stopped at a station, there were no platforms. Just a smaller or larger anteroom with a door also opening automatically, meeting the door of the tube-car.

A train eventually slid in, and Stanton ushered Annamarie through the sliding doors. They swung themselves gently on to one of the excessively broad seats and immediately opened their notebooks. Each seat had been built for a single Martian, but accommodated two Terrestrials with room to spare.

At perhaps the third station, Annamarie, pondering the implications of a passage in the notebook, looked up for an abstracted second and froze. "Ray," she whispered in a strangled tone. "When did that come in?"

Stanton darted a glance at the forward section of the car, which they had ignored when entering. Something—something animate—was sitting there, quite stolidly ignoring the Terrestrials. "A Martian," he whispered to himself, his throat dry.

It had the enormous chest and hips, the waspish waist and the coarse, bristly hairs of the Martians. But the Martians were all dead.

"It's only a robot," he cried more loudly than was necessary, swallowing as he spoke. "Haven't you seen enough of them to know what they look like by now?"

"What's it doing here?" gulped Annamarie, not over the fright.

As though it were about to answer her question itself, the thing's metallic head turned, and its blinking eyes swept incuriously over the humans. For a long second it stared, then the dull glow within its eye-sockets faded, and the head turned again to the front. The two had not set off any system of reflexes in the creature.

"I never saw one of them in the subway before," said Annamarie, passing a damp hand over her sweating brow.

Stanton was glaring at the signal panel that dominated the front of the car. "I know why, too," he said. "I'm not as good a linguist as I thought I was—not even as good as I ought to be. We're on the wrong train—I read the code-symbol wrong."

Annamarie giggled. "Then what shall we do—see where this takes us or go back?"

"Get out and go back, of course," grumbled Stanton, rising and dragging her to her feet.

The car was slowing again for another station. They could get out, emerge to the surface, cross over, and take the return train to the library.

Only the robot wouldn't let them.

For as the car was slowing, the robot rose to its feet and stalked over to the door. "What's up?" Stanton whispered in a thin, nervous voice. Annamarie prudently got behind him.

"We're getting out here anyhow," she said. "Maybe it won't follow us."

But they didn't get out. For when the car had stopped, and the door relays clicked, the robot shouldered the humans aside and stepped to the door.

But instead of exiting himself, the robot grasped the edge of the door in his steel tentacles, clutched it with all his metal muscles straining, and held it shut!

"Damned if I can understand it," said Stanton. "It was the most uncanny thing—it held the door completely and totally shut there, but it let us get out as peaceful as playmates at the next stop. We crossed over to come back, and while we were waiting for a return car I had time to dope out the station number. It was seventh from the end of the line, and the branch was new to me. So we took the return car back to the museum. The same thing happened on the trip back—robot in the car; door held shut."

"Go on," said Ogden Josey, Roentgenologist of the expedition. "What happened then?"

"Oh. We just went back to the library, took a different car, and here we are."

"Interesting," said Josey. "Only I don't believe it a bit."

"No?" Annamarie interrupted, her eyes narrowing. "Want to take a look?"

"Sure."

"How about tomorrow morning?"

"Fine," said Josey. "You can't scare me. Now how about dinner?"

He marched into the mess hall of the expedition base, a huge rotunda-like affair that might have been designed for anything by the Martians, but was given its present capacity by the explorers because it contained tables and chairs enough for a regiment. Stanton and Annamarie lagged behind.

"What do you plan to do tomorrow?" Stanton inquired. "I don't see the point of taking Josey with us when we go to look the situation over again."

"He'll come in handy," Annanarie promised. "He's a good shot."

"A good shot?" squawked Stanton. "What do you expect we'll have to shoot at?"

But Annamarie was already inside the building.

"Hey, sand-man!" hissed Annamarie.

"Be right there," sleepily said Stanton. "This is the strangest date I ever had." He appeared a moment later dressed in the roughest kind of exploring kit.

The girl raised her brows. "Expect to go mountain-climbing?" she asked.

"I had a hunch," he said amiably.

"So?" she commented. "I get them too. One of them is that Josey is still asleep. Go rout him out."

Stanton grinned and disappeared into Josey's cubicle, emerging with him a few moments later. "He was sleeping in his clothes," Stanton explained. "Filthy habit."

"Never mind that. Are we all heeled?" Annamarie proudly displayed her own pearl-handled pipsqueak of a mild paralyzer. Joseph produced a heat-pistol, while Stanton patted the holster of his five-pound blaster. "Okay then. We're off."

The Martian subway service was excellent every hour of the day. Despite the earliness, the trip to the central museum station took no more time than usual – a matter of minutes. Stanton stared around for a second to get his bearings, then pointed. "The station we want is over there – just beyond the large pink monolith. Let's go."

The first train in was the one they wanted. They stepped into it, Josey leaping over the threshold like a startled fawn. Nervously he explained, "I never know when one of those things is going to snap shut on my – my cape." He yelped shrilly: "What's that?"

"Ah, I see the robots rise early," said Annamarie, seating herself as the train moved off. "Don't look so disturbed, Josey – we told you one would be here, even if you didn't believe us."

"We have just time for a spot of breakfast before things should happen," announced Stanton, drawing canisters from a pouch on his belt. "Here – one for each of us." They were filled with a syrup that the members of the Earth expedition carried on trips such as this – concentrated amino acids, fibrinogen, minerals and vitamins, all in a sugar solution.

Annamarie Hudgins shuddered as she downed the sticky stuff, then lit a cigarette. As the lighter flared the robot turned his head to precisely the angle required to center and focus its eyes on the flame, then eye-fronted again.

"Attracted by light and motion," Stanton advised scientifically. "Stop trembling, Josey, there's worse to come. Say, is this the station?"

"It is," said Annamarie. "Now watch. These robots function smoothly and fast – don't miss anything." •

The metal monster, with a minimum of waste motion, was doing just that. It had clumped over to the door; its monstrous appendages were fighting the relays that were to drive the door open, and the robot was winning. The robots were built to win – powerful, even by Earthly standards.

Stanton rubbed his hands briskly and tackled the robot, shoving hard. The girl laughed sharply. He turned, his face showing injury. "Suppose you help," he suggested with some anger. "I can't move this by myself."

"All right – heave!" gasped the girl, complying.

"Ho!" added Josey unexpectedly, adding his weight.

"No use," said Stanton. "No use at all. We couldn't move this thing in seven million years." He wiped his brow. The train started, then picked up speed. All three were thrown back as the robot carelessly nudged them out of its way as it returned to its seat.

"I think," said Josey abruptly, "we'd better go back by the return car and see about the other side of the station."

"No use," said the girl. "There's a robot on the return, too."

"Then let's walk back," urged Josey. By which time the car had stopped at the next station. "Come on," said Josey, stepping through the door with a suspicious glance at the robot.

"No harm in trying," mused Stanton as he followed with the girl. "Can't be more than twenty miles." •

"And that's easier than twenty Earth miles," cried Annamarie. "Let's go."

"I don't know what good it will do though," remarked Stanton, ever the pessimist. 'these Martians were thorough. There's probably a robot at every entrance to the station, blocking the way. If they haven't sealed up the entrances entirely."

There was no robot at the station, they discovered several hours and about eight miles later. But the entrance to the station that was so thoroughly and mysteriously guarded was – no more. Each entrance was sealed; only the glowing teardrop pointers remained to show where the entrance had been.

"Well, what do we do now?" groaned Josey, rubbing an aching thigh.

Stanton did not answer directly. "Will you look at that," he marvelled, indicating, the surrounding terrain. The paved ground beneath them was seamed with cracks. The infinitely tough construction concrete of the Martians was billowed and rippled, stuck through with jagged ends of metal reinforcing I-beams. The whole scene gave the appearance of total devastation – as though a natural catastrophe had come along and wrecked the city first; then the survivors of the disaster, petulantly, had turned their most potent forces on what was left in sheer disheartenment.

"Must have been bombs," suggested the girl.

"Must have been," agreed the archaeologist. "Bombs and guns and force beams and Earth – Marsquakes, too."

"You didn't answer his question, Ray," reminded Annamarie. "He said: "What do we do now?" "

"I was just thinking about it," he said, eyeing one of the monolithic buildings speculatively. "Is your Martian as good as mine? See if you can make out what that says."

"That" was a code-symbol over the sole door to the huge edifice. "I give up," said Annamarie with irritation. "What does it say?"

"Powerhouse, I think."

"Powerhouse? Powerhouse for what? All the energy for lighting and heating the city comes from the sun, through the mirrors up on the surface. The only thing they need power for down here – the only thing – Say!"

"That's right," grinned Stanton. "It must be for the Mars-Tube. Do you suppose we could find a way of getting from that building into the station?"

"There's only one way to find out," Annamarie parroted, looking for Josey for confirmation. But Josey was no longer around. He was at the door to the building, shoving it open. The others hastened after him.

"Don't wiggle, Annamarie," whispered Josey plaintively. "You'll fall on me.

"Shut up," she answered tersely; "Shut up and get out of my way." She swung herself down the Martian-sized manhole with space to spare. Dropping three feet or so from her hand-hold on the lip of the pit, she alighted easily. "Did I make much noise?" she asked.

"Oh, I think Krakatoa has been louder when it went off," Stanton replied bitterly. "But those things seem to be deaf."

The three stood perfectly still for a second, listening tensely for sounds of pursuit. They had stumbled into a nest of robots in the powerhouse, apparently left there by the thoughtful Martian race to prevent entrance to the mysteriously guarded subway station via this route. What was in that station that required so much privacy? Stanton wondered. Something so deadly dangerous that the advanced science of the Martians could not cope with it, but was forced to resort to quarantining the spot where it showed itself? Stanton didn't know the answers, but he was very quiet as a hidden upsurge of memory strove to assert itself. Something that had been in the bobbin-books ... "The Under-Eaters." That was it. Had they anything to do with this robot cordon sanitaire?

The robots had not noticed them, for which all three were duly grateful. Ogden nudged the nearest to him – it happened to be Annamarie – and thrust out a bony finger. "Is that what the Mars-Tube looks like from inside?" he hissed piercingly.

As their eyes became acclimated to the gloom – they dared use no lights – the others made out the lines of a series of hoops stretching out into blackness on either side ahead of them. No lights anywhere along the chain of rings; no sound coming from it.

"Maybe it's a deserted switch line, one that was abandoned. That's the way the Tube ought to look, all right, only with cars going along it," Stanton muttered.

"Hush!" it was Annamarie. "Would that be a car coming –from the left, way down?"

Nothing was visible, but there was the faintest of sighing sounds. As though an elevator car, cut loose from its cable, were dropping down its shaft far off there in the distance. "It sounds like a car," Stanton conceded. "What do you think, Og – Hey ! Where's Josey?"

"He brushed me, going toward the Tube. Yes – there he is! See him? Bending over between those hoops!"

"We've got to get him out of there! Josey! " Stanton cried, forgetting about the robots in the light of this new danger. "Josey! Get out of the Tube! There's a train coming!"

The dimly visible figure of the Roentgenologist straightened and turned towards the others querulously. Then as the significance of that rapidly mounting hiss-s-s-s became clear to him, he leaped out of the tube, with a vast alacrity. A split second later the hiss had deepened to a high drone, and the bulk of a car shot past them, travelling eerily without visible support, clinging to and being pushed by the intangible fields of force that emanated from the metal hoops of the Tube.

Stanton reached Josey's form in a single bound. "What were you trying to do, imbecile?" he grated. "Make an early widow of your prospective fiancée?"

Josey shook off Stanton's grasp with dignity. "I was merely trying to establish that that string of hoops was the Mars-Tube, by seeing if the power-leads were connected with the rings. It – uh, it was the Tube; that much is proven," he ended somewhat lamely.

"Brilliant man!" Stanton started to snarl, but Annamarie's voice halted him. It was a very small voice.

"You loud-mouths have been very successful in attracting the attention of those animated pile-drivers," she whispered with the very faintest of breaths. "If you will keep your lips zipped for the next little while maybe the robot that's staring at us over the rim of the pit will think we're turbo-generators or something and go away. Maybe!"

Josey swivelled his head up and gasped. "It's there—it's coming down!" he cried. "Let's leave here!"

The three backed away toward the tube, slowly, watching the efforts of the machine-thing to descend the precipitous wall. It was having difficulties, and the three were beginning to feel a bit better, when —

Annamarie, turning her head to watch where she was going, saw and heard the cavalcade that was bearing down on them at the same time and screamed shrilly. "Good Lord - the cavalry!" she yelled. "Get out your guns!"

A string of a dozen huge, spider-shaped robots of a totally new design were charging down at them, running swiftly along the sides of the rings of the Tube, through the tunnel. They carried no weapons, but the three soon saw why—from the ugly snouts of the egg-shaped bodies of the creatures protruded a black cone. A blinding flash came from the cone of the first of the new arrivals; the aim was bad, for overhead a section of the cement roof flared ghastly white and commenced to drop.

Annamarie had her useless paralyzer out and firing before she realized its uselessness against metal beings with no nervous system to paralyze. She hurled it at the nearest of the new robots in a highly futile gesture of rage.

But the two men had their more potent weapons out and firing, and were taking a toll of the spider-like monstrosities. Three or four of them were down, partially blocking the path of the oncoming others; another was missing all its metal legs along one side of its body, and two of the remainder showed evidence of the accuracy of the Earthmen's fire.

But the odds were still extreme, and the built-in blasters of the robots were coming uncomfortably close.

Stanton saw that, and shifted his tactics. Holstering his heavy blaster, he grabbed Annamarie and shoved her into the Mars-Tube, crying to Josey to follow. Josey came slowly after them, turning to fire again and again at the robots, but with little effect. A quick look at the charge-dial on the butt of his heat-gun showed why; the power was almost exhausted.

He shouted as much to Stanton. "I figured that would be happening—now we run!" Stanton cried back, and the three sped along the Mars-Tube, leaping the hoops as they came to them.

"What a time for a hurdle race!" gasped Annamarie, bounding over the rings, which were raised about a foot from the ground. "You'd think we would have known better than to investigate things that're supposed to be private."

"Save your breath for running," panted Josey. "Are they following us in here?"

Stanton swivelled his head to look, and a startled cry escaped him. "They're following us—but look!"

The other two slowed, then stopped running altogether and stared in wonder. One of the robots had charged into the Mars-Tube—and had been levitated! He was swinging gently in the air, the long metal legs squirming fiercely, but not touching anything."

"How —?"

"They're metal!" Annamarie cried. "Don't you see—they're metal, and the hoops are charged. They must have some of the same metal as the Tube cars are made of in their construction—the force of the hoops acts on them, too!"

That seemed to be the explanation. "Then we're safe!" gasped Josey, staggering about, looking for a place to sit.

"Not by a long shot! Get moving again!" And Stanton set the example.

"You mean because they can still shoot at us?" Josey cried, following Stanton's dog-trot nonetheless. "But they can't aim the guns—they seem to be built in, only capable of shooting directly forward."

"Very true," gritted Stanton. "But have you forgotten that this subway is in use? According to my calculations, there  should be another car along in about thirty seconds or less –and please notice, there isn't any by-path anymore. It stopped back a couple of hundred feet. If we get caught here by a car, we get mashed. So – unless you want to go back and sign an armistice with the robots? I thought not – so we better keep going. Fast!"

The three were lucky – very lucky. For just when it seemed certain that they would have to run on and on until the bullet-fast car overtook them, or go back and face the potent weapons of the guard robots, a narrow crevice appeared in the side of the tunnel-wall. The three bolted into it and slumped to the ground.

They turned and dropped their guns almost immediately, Stanton shrugging off the heavy power-pack harness of his blaster as Josey cast down his useless heat-pistol. The creature before them was what one would expect as a natural complement to this cavern. He was weird, pixyish, dressed in fantastic points and tatters, stooped, wrinkled, whiskered, and palely luminous. Induced radioactivity, Stanton thought.

"Hee," he giggled. "Things!"

"We're men," said Josey soberly. "Men like – like you." He shuddered.

"Lord," marvelled the pixy to himself, his gun not swerving an inch. "What won't they think of next! Now, now, you efts –you"re addressing no puling creature of the deep. I'm a man and proud of it. Don't palter with me. You shall die and be reborn again – eventually, no doubt. I'm no agnostic, efts. Here in this cavern I have seen – oh the things I have seen." His face was rapturous with holy bliss.

"Who are you?" asked Annamarie.

The pixy started at her, then turned to Josey with a questioning look. "Is your friend all right?" the pixy whispered confidentially. "Seems rather effeminate to me."

"Never mind," the girl said hastily. "What's your name?"

"Marshall Ellenbogan," said the pixy surprisingly. "Second  Lieutenant in the United States Navy. But," he snickered, "I  suspect my commission's expired."

"If you're Ellenbogan," said Stanton, "then you must be a survivor from the first Mars expedition. The one that started the war."

"Exactly," said the creature. He straightened himself with a sort of somber dignity. "You can't know," he groaned, you never could know what we went through. Landed in a desert. Then we trekked for civilization – all of us, except three kids that we left in the ship. I've often wondered what happened to them." He laughed. "Civilization! Cold-blooded killers who tracked us down like vermin. Killed Kelly, Keogh. Moley. Jumped on us and killed us – like that." He made a futile attempt to snap his fingers. "But not me – not Ellenbogan – I ducked behind a rock and they fired on the rock and rock and me both fell into a cavern. I've wandered – Lord! how I've wandered. How long ago was it, efts?"

The lucid interval heartened the explorers. "Fifty years, Ellenbogan," said Josey. "What did you live on all that time?"

"Moss-fruits from the big white trees. Meat now and then, eft, when I could shoot one of your light-headed brothers." He leered. "But I won't eat you. I haven't tasted meat for so long now ... Fifty years. That makes me seventy years old. You efts never live for more than three or four years, you don't know how long seventy years can be."

"We aren't efts," snapped Stanton. "We're human beings same as you. I swear we are! And we want to take you back to Earth where you can get rid of that poison you've been soaking into your system! Nobody can live in a radium-impregnated cave for fifty years and still be healthy. Ellenbogan, for God's sake be reasonable!"

The gun did not fall nor waver. The ancient creature regarded them shrewdly, his head cocked to one side. "Tell me what happened," he said at length.

"There was a war," said the girl. "It was about you and the rest of the expedition that had been killed. When you didn't come back, the Earth governments sent another expedition – armed this time, because the kids you left in the ship managed to raise Earth for a short time when they were attacked, and they told the whole story. The second expedition landed, and well, it's not very clear. We only have the ship's log to go by, but it seems to have been about the same with them. Then the Earth governments raised a whole fleet of rocket-ships, with everything in the way of guns and ray-projectors they could hold installed. And the Martians broke down the atomic-power process from one of the Earth ships they'd captured, and they built a fleet. And there was a war, the first interplanetary war in history. For neither side ever took prisoners. There's some evidence that the Martians realized they'd made a mistake at the beginning after the war had been going only about three years, but by that time it was too late to stop. And it went on for fifty years, with rocket-ships getting bigger and faster and better, and new weapons being developed ... Until finally we developed a mind-disease that wiped out the entire Martian race in half a year. They were telepathic, you know, and that helped spread the disease."

"Good for them," snarled the elder. "Good for the treacherous, devilish, double-dealing rats ... And what are you people doing here now?"

"We're an exploring party, sent by the new all-Earth confederation to examine the ruins and salvage what we can of their knowledge. We came on you here quite by accident. We haven't got any evil intentions. We just want to take you back to your own world. You'll be a hero there. Thousands will cheer you – millions. Ellenbogan, put down your gun. Look –we put ours down!"

"Hah!" snarled the pixy, retreating a pace. "You had me going for a minute. But not any more!" With a loud click, the pixy thumbed the safety catch of his decades-old blaster. He reached back to the power-pack he wore across his back, which supplied energy for the weapon, and spun the wheel to maximum output. The power-pack was studded with rubies which, evidently, he had hacked with diamonds into something resembling finished, faceted stones.

"Wait a minute, Ellenbogan," Stanton said desperately. "You're the king of these parts, aren't you? Don't you want to keep us for subjects?"

"Monarch of all I survey, eft. Alone and undisputed." His brow wrinkled. "Yes, eft," he sighed, "you are right. You efts are growing cleverer and cleverer – you begin almost to understand how I feel. Sometimes a king is lonely – sometimes I long for companionship – on a properly deferential plane, of course. Even you efts I would accept as my friends if I did not know that you wanted no more than my blood. I can never be the friend of an eft. Prepare to die."

Josey snapped: "Are you going to kill the girl, too?"

"Girl?" cried the pixy in amazement. "What girl?" His eyes drifted to Annamarie Hudgins. "Bless me," he cried, his eyes bulging. "Why, so he is! I mean, she is! That would explain it, of course, wouldn't it?"

"Of course," said Stanton. "But you're not going to kill her, are you?"

"If she were an eft," mused the pixy, "I certainly would. But I'm beginning to doubt that she is. In fact, you're probably all almost as human as I am. However —" He mistily surveyed her.

"Girl," he asked dreamily, "do you want to be a queen?"

"Yes, sir," said Annamarie, preventing a shudder. "Nothing would give me more pleasure."

"So be it," said the ancient, with great decision. "So be it. The ceremony of coronation can wait till later, but you are now ex officio my consort."

"That is splendid," cried Annamarie, "Simply splendid." She essayed a chuckle of pleasure, but which turned out to be a dismal choking sound. "You've – you've made me positively the happiest woman under Mars."

She walked stiffly over to the walking monument commemorating what had once been a man, and kissed him gingerly on the forehead. The pixy's seamed face glowed for more reasons than the induced radioactivity as Stantin stared in horror.

The first lesson of a queen is obedience," said the pixy fondly, "so please sit there and do not address a word to these unfortunate former friends of yours. They are about to die."

"Oh," pouted Annamarie. "You are cruel, Ellenbogan."

He turned anxiously, though keeping the hair-trigger weapon full on the two men. "What troubles you, sweet?" he demanded. "You have but to ask and it shall be granted. We are lenient to our consort."

The royal "we" already thought Stanton. He wondered if the ancient would be in the market for a coat of arms. Three years of freehand drawing in his high school in Cleveland had struck Stanton as a dead waste up till now; suddenly it seemed that it might save his life.

"How," Annamarie was complaining, "can I be a real queen without any subjects?"

The pixy was immediately suspicious, but the girl looked at him so blandly that his ruffles settled down. He scratched his  head with the hand that did not hold the blaster. "True," he admitted. "I hadn't thought of that. Very well, you may have a subject. One subject."

"I think two would be much nicer," Annamarie said a bit worriedly, though she retained the smile.

"One!"

"Please – two?"

"One! One is enough. Which of these two shall I kill?"

Now was the time to start the sales-talk about the coat-of-arms, thought Stanton. But he was halted in mid-thought, the words informed, by Annarnarie's astonishing actions. Puckering her brow so very daintily, she stepped over to the pixy and slipped an arm about his waist. "It's hard to decide," she remarked languidly staring from one to the other, still with her arm about the pixy. "But I think—"

"Yes. I think – kill that one." And she pointed at Stanton.

Stanton didn't stop to think about what a blaster could do to a promising career as artist by appointment to Mars" only monarch. He jumped – lancing straight as a string in the weak Martian gravity, directly at the figure of the ancient. He struck and bowled him over. Josey, acting a second later, landed on top of him, the two piled on to the pixy's slight figure. Annamarie, wearing a twisted smile, stepped aside and watched quite calmly.

Oddly enough, the pixy had not fired the blaster.

After a second, Stanton's voice came smotheredly from the wriggling trio. He was addressing Josey. "Get up, you oaf," he said. "I think the old guy is dead."

Josey clambered to his feet, then knelt again to examine Ellenbogan. "Heart-failure, I guess," he said briefly. "He was pretty old."

Stanton was gently prodding a swelling eye. "Your fault, idiot," he glared at Josey. "I doubt that one of your roundhouse swings touched Ellenbogan. And as for you, friend," "he sneered, turning to Annamarie, "you have my most heartfelt sympathies. Not for worlds would I have made you a widow so soon, I apologize," and he bowed low, recovering himself with some difficulty.

"Did it ever occur to you," Annamarie said tautly – Stanton was astounded as he noticed she was trembling with a nervous reaction – "did it ever occur to you that maybe you owe me something? Because if I hadn't disconnected his blaster from the power-pack, you would be —"

Stanton gaped as she turned aside to hide a flood of sudden tears, which prevented her from completing the sentence. He dropped to one knee and ungently turned over the old man's body. Right enough – the lead between power-pack and gun was dangling loose, jerked from its socket. He rose again and, staring at her shaking figure, stepped unsteadily toward her.

Josey, watching them with scientific impersonality, upcurled a lip in the beginnings of a sneer. Then suddenly the sneer died in birth, and was replaced by a broad smile. "I've seen it coming for some time," more loudly than was necessary, "and I want to be the first to congratulate you. I hope you'll be very happy," he said ...

A few hours later, they stared back at the heap of earth under which was the body of the late Second Lieutenant Ellenbogan, U.S.N., and quietly made their way toward the walls of the cavern. Choosing a different tunnel-mouth for the attempt, they began the long trek to the surface. Though at first Stanton and Annamarie walked hand-in-hand, it was soon arm-in-arm, then with arms around each other's waists, while Josey trailed sardonically behind.

LIEUTENANT JOHN KRAMER did crossword puzzles during at least eighty per cent of his waking hours. His cubicle in Bachelor Officers Quarters was untidy; one wall was stacked solid with newspapers and magazines to which he subscribed for their puzzle pages. He meant, from week to week, to clean them out but somehow never found time. The ern, or erne, a sea eagle, soared vertically through his days and by night the ai, a three-toed sloth, crept horizontally. In edes, or Dutch communes, dyers retted ecru, quaffing ades by the tun and thought was postponed.

John Kramer was in disgrace and, at thirty-eight, well on his way to becoming the oldest first lieutenant in the North American (and Allied) Army. He had been captured in ‘82 as an aftermath of the confused fighting around Tsingtao. A few exquisitely unpleasant months passed and he then delivered three TV lectures for the yutes. In them he announced his total conversion to Neo-Utilitarianism, denounced the North American (and Allied) military command as a loathesome pack of war-waging, anti-utilitarian mad dogs, and personally admitted the waging of viral warfare against the United Utilitarian Republics.

The yutes, or Utilitarians, had been faithful to their principles. They had wanted Kramer only for what he could do for them, not for his own sweet self, and when they had got the juice out of him they exchanged him. In ‘83 he came out of his fog at Fort Bradley, Utah, to find himself being court-martialed.

He was found guilty as charged, and sentenced to a reprimand. The lightness of the sentence was something to be a little proud of, if not very much. It stood as a grudging tribute to the months he had held out against involutional melancholia in the yute Blank Tanks. For exchanged PW’s, the severity of their courts-martial was in inverse proportion to the duration of their ordeal in Utilitarian hands. Soldiers who caved in after a couple of days of sense-starvation could look forward only to a firing squad. Presumably a returned soldier dogged (or rigid) enough to be driven into hopeless insanity without cooperating would have been honorably acquitted by his court, but such a case had not yet come up.

Kramer’s “reprimand” was not the face-to-face bawling-out suggested to a civilian by the word. It was a short letter with numbered paragraphs which said (1) you are reprimanded, (2) a copy of this reprimand will be punched on your profile card. This tagged him forever as a foul ball, destined to spend the rest of his military life shuffling from one dreary assignment to another, without hope of promotion or reward.

He no longer cared. Or thought he did not; which came to the same thing.

He was not liked in the Officers Club. He was bad company. Young officers passing through Bradley on their way to glory might ask him, “What’s it really like in a Blank Tank, Kramer?” But beyond answering, “You go nuts,” what was there to talk about? Also he did not drink, because when he drank he went on to become drunk, and if he became drunk he would cry.

So he did a crossword puzzle in bed before breakfast, dressed, went to his office, signed papers, did puzzles until lunch, and so on until the last one in bed at night. Nominally he was Commanding Officer of the 561^st Provisional Reception Battalion. Actually he was (with a few military overtones) the straw boss of a gang of clerks in uniform who saw to the arrival, bedding, feeding, equipping, inoculation and transfer to a training unit of one thousand scared kids per week.

On a drizzle-swept afternoon in the spring of ‘85 Kramer was sounding one of those military overtones. It was his appointed day for a “surprise” inspection of Company D of his battalion. Impeccable in dress blues, he was supposed to descend like a thunderbolt on this company or that, catching them all unaware, striding arrogantly down the barracks aisle between bunks, white-gloved and eagle-eyed for dust, maddened at the sight of disarray, vengeful against such contraband as playing cards or light reading matter. Kramer knew, quite well, that one of his orderly room clerks always telephoned the doomed company to warn that he was on his way. He did not particularly mind it. What he minded was unfair definitions of key words, and ridiculously variant spellings.

The permanent-party sergeant of D Company bawled “Tench-hut!” when Kramer snapped the door open and stepped crisply into the ‘barracks. Kramer froze his face into its approved expression of controlled annoyance and opened his mouth to give the noncom his orders. But the sergeant had miscalculated. One of the scared kids was still frantically mopping the aisle.

Kramer halted. The kid spun around in horror, made some kind of attempt to present arms with the mop and failed.

The mop shot from his soapy hands like a slung baseball bat, and its soggy gray head schlooped against the lieutenant’s dress-blue chest.

The kid turned white and seemed about to faint on the damp board floor. The other kids waited to see him destroyed.

Kramer was mildly irritated. “At ease,” he said. “Pick up that mop. Sergeant, confound it, next time they buzz you from the orderly room don’t cut it so close.”

The kids sighed perceptibly and glanced covertly at each other in the big bare room, beginning to suspect it might not be too bad after all. Lieutenant Kramer then resumed the expression of a nettled bird of prey and strode down the aisle. Long ago he had worked out a “random” selection of bunks for special attention and now followed it through habit. If he had thought about it any more, he would have supposed that it was still spy-proof; but every noncom in his cadre had long since discovered that Kramer stopped at either every second bunk on the right and every third on the left, or every third bunk on the right and every second on the left-depending on whether the day of the month was odd or even. This would not have worried Kramer if he had known it; but he never even noticed that the men beside the bunks he stopped at were always the best-shaved, best-policed and healthiest looking in each barracks.

Regardless, he delivered a certain quota of meaningless demerits which were gravely recorded by the sergeant. Of blue-eyed men on the left and brown-eyed men on the right (this, at least, had not been penetrated by the noncoms) he went on to ask their names and home towns. Before discovering crossword puzzles he had memorized atlases, and so he had something to say about every home town he had yet encountered. In this respect at least he considered himself an above-average officer, and indeed he was.

It wasn’t the Old Army, not by a long shot, but when the draft age went down to fifteen some of the Old Army’s little ways had to go. One experimental reception station in Virginia was trying out a Barracks Mother system. Kramer, thankful for small favors, was glad they hadn’t put him on that project. Even here he was expected, at the end of the inspection, to call the “men” around him and ask if anything was bothering them. Something always was. Some gangling kid would scare up the nerve to ask, gee, lieutenant, I know what the Morale Officer said, but exactly why didn’t we ever use the megaton-head missiles, and another would want to know how come Lunar Base was such a washout, tactically speaking, sir. And then he would have to rehearse the dry “recommended discussion themes” from the briefing books; and then, finally, one of them, nudged on by others, would pipe up, “Lieutenant, what’s it like in the Blank Tanks?” And he would know that already, forty-eight hours after induction, the kids all knew about what Lieutenant John Kramer had done.

But today he was spared. When he was halfway through the rigmarole the barracks phone rang and the sergeant apologetically answered it.

He returned from his office-cubicle on the double, looking vaguely frightened. “Compliments of General Grote’s secretary, sir, and will you please report to him at G-l as soon as possible.”

“Thank you, sergeant. Step outside with me a moment.” Out on the duckboard walk, with the drizzle trickling down his neck, he asked: “Sergeant, who is General Grote?”

“Never heard of him, sir.”

Neither had Lieutenant Kramer.

He hurried to Bachelor Officers Quarters to change his sullied blue jacket, not even pausing to glance at the puzzle page of the Times, which had arrived while he was at “work.” Generals were special. He hurried out again into the drizzle.

Around him and unnoticed were the artifacts of an Army base at war. Sky-eye’search radars popped from their silos to scan the horizons for a moment and then retreat, the burden of search taken up by the next in line. Helicopter sentries on guard duty prowled the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp. Fort Bradley was not all reception center. Above-ground were the barracks, warehouses and rail and highway termini for processing recruits-ninety thousand men and all their goods-but they were only the skin over the fort itself. They were, as the scared kids told each other in the dayrooms, naked to the air. If the yutes ever did spring a megaton attack, they would become a thin coating of charcoal on the parade ground, but they would not affect the operation of the real Fort Bradley a bit.

The real Fort Bradley was a hardened installation beneath meters of reinforced concrete, some miles of rambling warrens that held the North American (and Allied) Army’s G-l. Its business was people: the past, present and future of every soul in the Army.

G-l decided that a fifteen-year-old in Duluth was unlikely to succeed in civilian schools and drafted him. G-l punched his Army tests and civilian records on cards, consulted its card-punched tables of military requirements and assigned him, perhaps, to Machinist Training rather than Telemetering School. G-l yanked a platoon leader halfway around the world from Formosa and handed him a commando for a raid on the yutes’ Polar Station Seven. G-l put foulball Kramer at the “head” of the 561^st PRB. G-l promoted and allocated and staffed and rewarded and punished.

Foulball Kramer approached the guardbox at the elevators to the warrens and instinctively squared his shoulders and smoothed his tie.

General Grote, he thought. He hadn’t seen a general officer since he’d been commissioned. Not close up.

Colonels and majors had court-martialed him. He didn’t know who Grote was, whether he had one star or six, whether he was Assignment, Qualifications, Training, Evaluation, Psychological-or Disciplinary.

Military Police looked him over at the elevator head. They read him like a book. Kramer wore his record on his chest and sleeves. Dull gold bars spelled out the overseas months-for his age and arm-, the Infantry, not enough. “Formosa,” said a green ribbon, and “the storming of the beach” said a small bronze spearpoint on it. A brown ribbon told them “Chinese Mainland,” and the stars on it meant that he had engaged in three of the five mainland campaigns-presumably Canton, Mukden and Tsingtao, since they were the first. After that, nothing. Especially not the purple ribbon that might indicate a wound serious enough to keep him out of further fighting.

The ribbons, his age and the fact that he was still a first lieutenant were grounds enough for the MP’s to despise him. An officer of thirty-eight should be a captain at least. Many were majors and some were colonels. “You can go down, Lieutenant,” they told the patent foulball, and he went down to the interminable concrete tunnels of G-l.

A display machine considered the name General Grote when he typed it on its keyboard, and told him with a map where the general was to be found. It was a longish walk through the tunnels. While he walked past banks of clicking card-sorters and their servants he pondered other information the machine had gratuitously supplied: GROTE, Lawrence W, Lt Gen, 0-459732, Unassigned.

It did not lessen any of Kramer’s puzzles. A three-star general, then. He couldn’t possibly have anything to do with disciplining a lousy first-John. Lieutenant generals ran Army Groups, gigantic ad hoc assemblages of up to a hundred divisions, complete with air forces, missile groups, amphibious assault teams, even carrier and missile-sub task forces. The fact of Ms rank indicated that, whoever he was, he was an immensely able and tenacious person. He had gone through at least a twenty-year threshing of the wheat from the chaff, all up the screening and evaluation boards from second lieutenant to, say, lieutenant colonel, and then the murderous grind of accelerated courses at Command and General Staff School, the fanatically rigid selection for the War College, an obstacle course designed not to tram the substandard up to competence but to keep them out. It was just this side of impossible for a human being to become a lieutenant general. And yet a few human beings in every generation did bulldoze their way through that little gap between the impossible and the almost impossible. And such a man was unassigned?

Kramer found the office at last. A motherly, but sharp-eyed, WAC major told him to go right in.

John Kramer studied his three-star general while going through the ancient rituals of reporting-as-or-dered. General Grote was an old man, straight, spare, white-haired, tanned. He wore no overseas bars. On his chest were all the meritorious service ribbons his country could bestow, but none of the decorations of the combat soldier. This was explained by a modest sunburst centered over the ribbons. General Grote was, had always been, General Staff Corps. A desk man.

“Sit down, Lieutenant,” Grote said, eyeing him casually. “You’ve never heard of me, I assume.”

“I’m afraid not, sir.”

“As I expected,” said Grote complacently. “I’m not a dashing tank commander or one of those flying generals who leads his own raids. I’m one of the people who moves the dashing tank commanders and flying generals around the board like chess pieces. And now, confound it, I’m going to be a dashing combat leader at last. You may smoke if you like.”

Kramer obediently lit up.

“Dan Medway,” said the general, “wants me to start from scratch, build up a striking force and hit the Asian mainland across the Bering Strait.”

Kramer was horrified twice-first by the reference to The Supreme Commander as “Dan” and second by the fact that he, a lieutenant, was being told about high strategy.

“Relax,” the general said. “Why you’re here, now. You’re going to be my aide.”

Kramer was horrified again. The general grinned.

“Your card popped out of the machinery,” he said, and that was all there was to say about that, “and so you’re going to be a highly privileged character and everybody will detest you. That’s the way it is with aides. You’ll know everything I know. And vice versa; that’s the important part. You’ll run errands for me, do investigations, serve as hatchet man, see that my pajamas are pressed without starch and make coffee the way I like it-coarse grind, brought to the boil for just a moment in an old-fashioned coffee pot. Actually what you’ll do is what I want you to do from day to day. For these privileges you get to wear a blue fourragere around your left shoulder which marks you as a man not to be trifled with by colonels, brigadiers or MP’s. That’s the way it is with aides. And, I don’t know if you have any outside interests, women or chess or drinking. The machinery didn’t mention any. But you’ll have to give them up if you do.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kramer. And it seemed wildly possible that he might never touch pencil to puzzle again. With something to do-

“We’re Operation Ripsaw,” said the general. “So far, that’s me, Margaret out there in the office and you. In addition to other duties, you’ll keep a diary of Ripsaw, by the way, and I want you to have a summary with you at all times in case I need it. Now call in Margaret, make a pot of coffee, there’s a little stove thing in the washroom there, and I’ll start putting together my general staff.”

It started as small and as quietly as that.

It was a week before Kramer got back to the 561^st long enough to pick up his possessions, and then he left the stacks of Timeses and Saturday Reviews where they lay, puzzles and all. No time. The first person to hate him was Margaret, the motherly major. For all her rank over him, she was a secretary and he was an aide with a fourragere who had the general’s willing ear. She began a policy of nonresistance that was noncooperation, too; she would not deliberately obstruct him, but she would allow him to poke through the files for ten minutes before volunteering the information that the folder he wanted was already on the general’s desk. This interfered with the smooth performance of Kramer’s duties, and of course the general spotted it at once.

“It’s nothing,” said Kramer when the general called him on it. “I don’t like to say anything.”

“Go on,” General Grote urged. “You’re not a soldier any more; you’re a rat.”

“I think I can handle it, sir.”

The general motioned silently to the coffee pot and waited while Kramer fixed him a cup, two sugars, no cream. He said: “Tell me everything, always. All the dirty rumors about inefficiency and favoritism. Your suspicions and hunches. Anybody that gets in your way-or more important, in mine. In the underworld they shoot stool-pigeons, but here we give them blue cords for their shoulders. Do you understand?”

Kramer did. He did not ask the general to intercede with the motherly major, or transfer her; but he did handle it himself. He discovered it was very easy. He simply threatened to have her sent to Narvik.

With the others it was easier. Margaret had resented him because she was senior in Operation Ripsaw to him, but as the others were sucked in they found him there already. Instead of resentment, their attitude toward him was purely fear.

The next people to hate him were the aides of Grote’s general staff because he was a wild card in the deck. The five members of the staff-Chief, Personnel, Intelligence, Plans & Training and Operations-proceeded with their orderly, systematic jobs day by day, building Ripsaw . . . until the inevitable moment when Kramer would breeze in with, “Fine job, but the general suggests-“ and the unhorsing of many assumptions, and the undoing of many days’ work. That was his job also. He was a bird of ill omen, a coiled snake in fair grass, a hired killer and a professional betrayer of confidences-though it was not long before there were no confidences to betray, except from an occasional young, new officer who hadn’t learned his way around, and those not worth betraying. That, as the general had said, was the way it was with aides. Kramer wondered sometimes if he liked what he was doing, or liked himself for doing it. But he never carried the thought through. No time.

Troops completed basic training or were redeployed from rest areas and entrained, emplaned, em-bussed or embarked for the scattered staging areas of Ripsaw. Great forty-wheeled trucks bore nuclear cannon up the Alcan Highway at a snail’s pace. Air groups and missile sections launched on training exercises over Canadian wasteland that closely resembled tundra, with grid maps that bore names like Maina Pylgin and Kamenskoe. Yet these were not Ripsaw, not yet, only the separate tools that Ripsaw would someday pick up and use.

Ripsaw itself moved to Wichita and a base of its own when its headquarters staff swelled to fifteen hundred men and women. Most of them hated Kramer.

It was never perfectly clear to Kramer what his boss had to do with the show. Kramer made his coffee, carried his briefcase, locked and unlocked his files, delivered to him those destructive tales and delivered for him those devastating suggestions, but never understood just why there had to be a Commanding General of Ripsaw.

The time they went to Washington to argue an allocation of seventy rather than sixty armored divisions for Ripsaw, for instance, General Grote just sat, smiled and smoked his pipe. It was his chief of staff, the young and brilliant major general Cartmill, who passionately argued the case before D. Beauregard Medway, though when Grote addressed his superior it still was as “Dan.” (They did get the ten extra divisions, of course.)

Back in Wichita, it was Cartmill who toiled around, the clock coordinating. A security lid was clamped down early in the game. The fifteen hundred men and women in the Wichita camp stayed in the Wichita camp. Commerce with the outside world, except via coded messages to other elements of Ripsaw, was a capital offense-as three privates learned the hard way. But through those coded channels Cartmill reached out to every area of the North American (and Allied) world. Personnel scoured the globe for human components that might be fitted into Ripsaw. Intelligence gathered information about that tract of Siberia which they were to invade, and the waters they were to cross. Plans & Training slaved at methods of effecting the crossing and invasion efficiently, with the least (or at any rate the optimum least, consistent with requirements of speed, security and so on) losses in men and materiel. Operations studied and restudied the various ways the crossing and invasion might go right or wrong, and how a good turn of fortune could be exploited, a bad turn minimized. General Cartmill was in constant touch with all of them, his fingers on every cord in the web. So was John Kramer.

Grote ambled about all this with an air of pleased surprise.

Kramer discovered one day that there had been books written about his boss-not best sellers with titles like “Bloody Lorry” Grote, Sword of Freedom, but thick, gray mimeographed staff documents, in Chinese and Russian, for top-level circulation among yute commanders. He surprised Grote reading one of them -in Chinese.

The general was not embarrassed. “Just refreshing my memory of what the yutes think I’m like so I can cross them up by doing something different. Listen: ‘Characteristic of this officer’s philosophy of attack is varied tactics. Reference his lecture, Lee’s 1862 Campaigns, delivered at Fort Leavenworth Command & General Staff School, attached. Opposing commanders should not expect a force under him to do the same-‘ Hmm. Tsueng, water radical.’-under him to press the advance the same way twice.’ Now all I have to do is make sure we attack by the book, like Grant instead of Lee, slug it out without any brilliant variations. See how easy it is, John? How’s the message center?”

Kramer had been snooping around the message center at Grote’s request. It was a matter of feeding out cigarettes and smiles in return for an occasional incautious word or a hint; gumshoe work. The message center was an underground complex of encoders, decoders, transmitters, receivers and switchboards. It was staffed by a Signal Corps WAC battalion in three shifts around lie clock. The girls were worked hard-though a battalion should have been enough for the job. Messages went from and to the message center linking the Wichita brain with those seventy divisions training now from Capetown to Manitoba, a carrier task force conducting exercises in the Antarctic, a fleet of landing craft growing every day on the Gulf of California. The average time-lag between receipt of messages and delivery to the Wichita personnel at destination was 12.25 minutes. The average number of erroneous transmissions detected per day was three.

Both figures General Grote considered intolerable.

“It’s Colonel Bucknell that’s lousing it up, General. She’s trying too hard. No give. Physical training twice a day, for instance, and a very hard policy on excuses. A stern attitude’s filtered down from her to the detachments. Everybody’s chewing out subordinates to keep themselves covered. The working girls call Bucknell ‘the monster.’ Their feeling is the Army’s impossible to please, so what the hell.”

“Relieve her,” Grote said amiably. “Make her mess officer; Ripsaw chow’s rotten anyway.” He went back to his Chinese text.

And suddenly it all began to seem as if it really might someday rise and strike out across the Strait. From Lieutenant Kramer’s Ripsaw Diary:

At AM staff meeting CG RIPSAW xmitted order CG NAAARMY designating RIPSAW D day 15 May 1986. Gen CARTMILL observed this date allowed 45 days to form troops in final staging areas assuming RIPSAW could be staged in 10 days. CG RIPSAW stated that a 10-day staging seemed feasible. Staff concurred. CG RIPSAW so ordered. At 1357 hours CG NAAARMY concurrence received.

They were on the way.

As the days grew shorter Grote seemed to have less and less to do, and curiously so did Kramer. He had not expected this. He had been aide-de-camp to the general for nearly a year now, and he fretted when he could find no fresh treason to bring to the general’s ears. He redoubled his prowling tours of the kitchens, the BOQ, the motor pools, the message center, but not even the guard mounts or the shine on the shoes of the soldiers at Retreat parade was in any way at fault. Kramer could only imagine that he was missing things. It did not occur to him that, as at last they should be, the affairs of Ripsaw had gathered enough speed to keep them straight and clean, until the general called him in one night and ordered him to pack. Grote put on his spectacles and looked over them at Kramer. “D plus five,” he said, “assuming all goes well, we’re moving this headquarters to Kiska. I want you to take a look-see. Arrange a plane. You can leave tomorrow.”

It was, Kramer realized that night as he undressed, Just Something to Do. Evidently the hard part of his job was at an end. It was now only a question of fighting the battle, and for that the field commanders were much more important than he. For the first time in many months he thought it would be nice to do a crossword puzzle, but instead fell asleep.

It was an hour before leaving the next day that Kramer met Ripsaw’s “cover.”

The “cover” was another lieutenant general, a bristling and wiry man named Clough, with a brilliant combat record staked out on his chest and sleeves for the world to read. Kramer came in when his buzzer sounded, made coffee for the two generals and was aware that Grote and Clough were old pals and that the Ripsaw general was kidding the pants off his guest.

“You always were a great admirer of Georgie Patton,” Grote teased. “You should be glad to follow in his footsteps. Your operation will go down in history as big and important as his historic cross-Channel smash into Le Havre.”

Kramer’s thoughts were full of himself-he did not much like getting even so close to the yutes as Kiska, where he would be before the sun set that night -but his ears pricked up. He could not remember any cross-Channel smash into Le Havre. By Patton or anybody else.

“Just because I came to visit your show doesn’t mean you have to rib me, Larry,” Clough grumbled.

“But it’s such a pleasure, Mick.”

Clough opened his eyes wide and looked at Grote. “I’ve generated against Novotny before. If you want to know what I think of him, I’ll tell you,” Pause.

Then Grote, gently: “Take it easy, Mick. Look at my boy there. See him quivering with curiosity?”

Kramer’s back was turned. He hoped his blush would subside before he had to turn around with the coffee. It did not.

“Caught red-faced,” Grote said happily, and winked at the other general. Clough looked stonily back. “Shall we put him out of his misery, Mick? Shall we fill him in on the big picture?”

“Might as well get it over with.”

“I accept your gracious assent.” Grote waved for Kramer to help himself to coffee and to sit down. Clearly he was unusually cheerful today, Kramer thought. Grote said: “Lieutenant Kramer, General Clough is the gun-captain of a Quaker cannon which covers Ripsaw. He looks like a cannon. He acts like a cannon. But he isn’t loaded. Like his late idol George Patton at one point in his career, General Clough is the commander of a vast force which exists on paper and in radio transmissions alone.”

Clough stirred uneasily, so Grote became more serious. “We’re brainwashing Continental Defense Commissar Novotny by serving up to him his old enemy as the man he’ll have to fight. The yute radio intercepts are getting a perfect picture of an assault on Polar Nine being prepared under old Mick here. That’s what they’ll prepare to counter, of course. Ripsaw will catch them flatfooted.”

Clough stirred again but did not speak.

Grote grinned. “All right. We hope,” he conceded. “But there’s a lot of planning in this thing. Of course, it’s a waste of the talent of a rather remarkably able general-“ Clough gave him a lifted-eyebrow look- “but you’ve got to have a real man at the head of the fake army group or they won’t believe it. Anyway, it worked with Patton and the Nazis. Some unkind people have suggested that Patton never did a better bit of work than sitting on his knapsack in England and letting his name be used.”

“All full of beans with a combat command, aren’t you?” Clough said sourly. “Wait’11 the shooting starts.”

“Ike never commanded a battalion before the day he invaded North Africa, Mick. He did all right.”

“Ike wasn’t up against Novotny,” Clough said heavily. “I can talk better while I’m eating, Larry. Want to buy me a lunch?”

General Grote nodded. “Lieutenant, see what you can charm out of Colonel Bucknell for us to eat, will you? We’ll have it sent in here, of course, and the best girls she’s got to serve it.” Then, unusually, he stood up and looked appraisingly at Kramer.

“Have a nice flight,” he said.

Kramer’s blue fourragere won him cold handshakes but a seat at the first table in the Hq Officers Mess in Kiska. He didn’t have quite enough appetite to appreciate it.

Approaching the island from the air had taken appetite away from him, as the GCA autocontroller rocked the plane in a carefully calculated zigzag in its approach. They were, Kramer discovered, under direct visual observation from any chance-met bird from yute eyries across the Strait until they got below five hundred feet. Sometimes the yutes sent over a flight of birds to knock down a transport. Hence the zigzags.

Captain Mabry, a dark, tall Georgian who had been designated to make the general’s aide feel at home, noticed Kramer wasn’t eating, pushed his own tray into the center strip and, as it sailed away, stood up. “Get it off the pad, shall we? Can’t keep the Old Man waiting.”

The captain took Mabry through clanging corridors to an elevator and then up to the eyrie. It was only a room. From it the spy-bird missiles-rockets, they were really, but the services like to think of them as having a punch, even though the punch was only a television camera-were controlled. To it the birds returned the pictures their eyes saw.

Brigadier Spiegelhauer shook Kramer’s hand. “Make yourself at home, Lieutenant,” he boomed. He was short and almost skeletally thin, but his voice was enormous. “Everything satisfactory for the general, I hope?”

“Why, yes, sir. I’m just looking around.”

“Of course,” Spiegelhauer shouted. “Care to monitor a ride?”

“Yes, sir.” Mabry was looking at him with amusement, Kramer saw. Confound him, what right did he have to think Kramer was scared-even if he was? Not a physical fear; he was not insane. But . . . scared.

The service life of a spy-bird over yute territory was something under twenty minutes, by then the homing heads on the ground-to-air birds would have sniffed out its special fragrance and knocked it out. In that twenty-minute period it would see what it could see. Through its eyes the observers in the eyrie would learn just that much more about yute dispositions-so long as it remained in direct line-of-sight to the eyrie, so long as everything in its instrumentation worked, so long as yute jamming did not penetrate its microwave control.

Captain Mabry took Kramer’s arm. “Take’er off the pad,” Mabry said negligently to the launch officer. He conducted Kramer to a pair of monitors and sat before them.

On both eight-inch screens the officers saw a diamond-sharp scan of the inside of a silo plug. There was no sound. The plug lifted off its lip without a whisper, dividing into two semicircles of steel. A two-inch circle of sky showed. Then, abruptly, the circle widened; the lip irised out and disappeared; the gray surrounded the screen and blanked it out, and then it was bright blue, and a curl of cirrocumulus in one quadrant of the screen.

Metro had promised no cloud over the tactical area, but there was cloud there. Captain Mabry frowned and tapped a tune on the buttons before him; the cirrocumulus disappeared and a line of gray-white appeared at an angle on the screen. “Horizon,” said Mabry. “Labble to make you seasick, Lootenant.”’ He tapped some more and the image righted itself. A faint yellowish stain, not bright against the bright cloud, curved up before them and burst into spidery black smoke. “Oh, they are anxious,” said Mabry, sounding nettled. “General, weather has busted it again. Cain’t see a thing.”

Spiegelhauer bawled angrily, “I’m going to the weather station,” and stamped out. Kramer knew what he was angry about. It was not the waste of a bird; it was that he had been made to lose face before the general’s aide-de-camp. There would be a bad tune for the Weather Officer because Kramer had been there that day.

The telemetering crew turned off their instruments. The whining eighteen-inch reel that was flinging tape across a row of fifteen magnetic heads, recording the picture the spy-bird took, slowed and droned and stopped. Out of instinct and habit Kramer pulled out his rough diary and jotted down Brig. Spiegelhauer- Permits bad wea. sta. situation? But it was little enough to have learned on a flight to Kiska, and everything else seemed going well.

Captain Mabry fetched over two mugs of hot cocoa. “Sorry,” he said. “Cain’t be helped, I guess.”

Kramer put his notebook away and accepted the cocoa.

“Beats U-2in’,” Mabry went on. “Course, you don’t get to see as much of the country.”

Kramer could not help a small, involuntary tremor. For just a moment there, looking out of the spy-bird’s eyes, he had imagined himself actually in the air above yute territory and conceived the possibility of being shot down, parachuting, internment, the Blank Tanks, “Yankee! Why not be good fellow? You proud you murderer?”

“No,” Kramer said, “you don’t get to see as much of the country.” But he had already seen all the yute country he ever wanted.

Kramer got back in the elevator and descended rapidly, his mind full. Perhaps a psychopath, a hungry cat or a child would have noticed that the ride downward lasted a second or two less than the ride up. Kramer did not. If the sound echoing from the tunnel he walked out into was a bit more clangorous than the one he had entered from, he didn’t notice that either.

Kramer’s mind was occupied with the thought that, all in all, he was pleased to find that he had approached this close to yute territory, ‘and to yute Blank Tanks, without feeling particularly afraid. Even though he recognized that there was nothing to be afraid of, since of course the yutes could not get hold of him here.

Then he observed that the door Mabry opened for him led to a chamber he knew he had never seen before.

They were standing on an approach stage and below them forty-foot rockets extended downward into their pit. A gantry-bridge hung across space from the stage to the nearest rocket, which lay open, showing a clumsily padded compartment where there should have been a warhead or an instrument capsule.

Kramer turned around and was not surprised to find that Mabry was pointing a gun at him. He had almost expected it. He started to speak. But there was someone else in the shadowed chamber, and the first he knew of that was when the sap struck him just behind the ear.

It was all coming true: “Yankee! Why not be honest man? You like murder babies?” Kramer only shook his head. He knew it did no good to answer. Three years before he had answered. He knew it also did no good to keep quiet; because he had done that too. What he knew most of all was that nothing was going to do him any good because the yutes had him now, and who would have thought Mabry would have been the one to do him in?

They did not beat him at this point, but then they did not need to. The nose capsule Mabry had thrust him into had never been designed for carrying passengers. With ingenuity Kramer could only guess at Mabry had contrived to fit it with parachutes and watertight seals and flares so the yute gunboat could find it in the water and pull out their captive alive. But he had taken 15- and 20-G accelerations, however briefly. He seemed to have no serious broken bones, but he was bruised all over. Secretly he found that almost amusing. In the preliminary softening up, the yutes did not expect their captives to be in physical pain. By being in pain he was in some measure upsetting their schedule. It was not much of a victory but it was all he had.

Phase Two was direct questioning: What was Ripsaw exactly? HOW many divisions? Where located? Why had Lieutenant-General Grote spent so much time with Lieutenant-General Clough? When Mary Elizabeth Grote, before her death, entertained the Vietnamese UNESCO delegate’s aunt in Sag Harbor, had she known her husband had just been passed over for promotion to brigadier? And was resentment over that the reason she had subsequently donated twenty-five dollars to a mission hospital in Laos? What were the Bering Straits rendezvous points for missile submarines supporting Ripsaw? Was the transfer of Lieutenant Colonel • Carolyn S. Bucknell from Message Center Battalion C.O. to Mess Officer a cover for some CIC complexity? What air support was planned for D plus one? D plus two? Did Major Somebody-or-other’s secret drinking account for the curious radio intercept in clear logged at 0834 on 6 October 1985? Or was “Omobray for my eadhay” the code designation for some nefarious scheme to be launched against the gallant, the ever-victorious forces of Neo-Utilitarianism?

Kramer was alternately cast into despondency by the amount of knowledge his captors displayed and puzzled by the psychotic irrelevance of some of the questions they asked him. But most of all he was afraid. As the hours of Phase Two became days, he became more and more afraid-afraid of Phase Three-and so he was ready for Phase Three when the yutes were ready for him.

Phase Three was physical. They beat the living be-hell out of First Lieutenant John Kramer, and then they shouted at him and starved him and kicked him and threw him into bathtubs filled half with salt and water and half with shaved ice. And then they kicked him in the belly and fed him cathartics by the ounce and it went on for a long time; but that was not the bad thing about Phase Three. Kramer found himself crying most of the tune, when he was conscious. He did not want to tell them everything he knew about Ripsaw-and thus have them be ready when it came, poised and prepared, and know that maybe 50,000 American lives would be down the drain because the surprise was on the wrong side. But he did not know if he could help himself. He was in constant pain. He thought he might die from the pain. Sometimes people did. But he didn’t think much about the pain, or the fear of dying, or even about what would happen if-no, when he cracked. What he thought about was what came next. For the bad thing about Phase Three was Phase Four.

He remembered. First they would let him sleep. (He had slept very well that other time, because he hadn’t known exactly what the Blank Tanks were like. He didn’t think he would sleep so well this tune.) Then they would wake him up and feed him quickly, and bandage his worst bruises, and bandage his ears, with cotton tampons dipped in vaseline jelly plugged into them, and bandage his eyes, with light-tight adhesive around them, and bandage his mouth, with something like a boxer’s toothguard inside so he couldn’t even bite his tongue, and bandage his arms and legs, so he couldn’t even move them or touch them together. . . .

And then the short superior-private who was kicking him while he thought all this stopped and talked briefly to a noncom. The two of them helped him to a mattress and left him. Kramer didn’t want to sleep, but he couldn’t help himself; he slipped off, crying weakly out of his purled and bloody eyes, because he didn’t want to sleep, he wanted to die.

Ten hours later he was back in the Blank Tanks.

Sit back and listen. What do you hear?

Perhaps you think you hear nothing. You are wrong. You discount the sound of a distant car’s tires, or the crackle of metal as steam expands the pipes. Listen more carefully to these sounds; others lie under them. From the kitchen there is a grunt and hum as the electric refrigerator switches itself on. You change position; your chair creaks, the leather of your shoes slip-slides with a faint sound. Listen more carefully still and hear the tiny roughness in the main bearing of the electric clock in the next room, or the almost inaudible hum of wind in a television antenna. Listen to yourself: Your heartbeat, your pulse in your chin. The rumble of your belly and the faint grating of your teeth. The susurrus of air entering your nostrils. The rub of thumb against finger.

In the Blank Tanks a man hears nothing at all.

The pressure of the tampons in the ear does not allow stirrup to strike anvil; teeth cannot touch teeth, hands cannot clap, he cannot make a noise if he tries to, or hear it if he did.

That is deafness. The Blank Tanks are more than deafness. In them a man is blind, even to the red fog that reaches through closed eyelids. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to taste. There is nothing to feel except the swaddling-cloths, and through time the nerve ends tire and stop registering this constant touch.

It is something like being unborn and something like never having been at all. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, and although you are not dead you are not alive either. And there you stay.

Kramer was ready for the Blank Tank and did not at once panic. He remembered the tricks he had employed before. He swallowed his own sputum and it made a gratifying popping sound in his inner ear; he hummed until his throat was raw and gasped through flaring nostrils until he became dizzy. But each sound he was able to produce lasted only a moment. He might have dropped them like snowflakes onto wool. They were absorbed and they died.

It was actually worse, he remembered tardily, to produce a sound because you could not help but listen for the echo and no echo came. So he stopped.

In three years he must have acquired some additional resources, he thought. Of course. He had! He settled down to construct a crossword puzzle in his head. Let 1 Across be a tropical South American bird, hoatzin. Let 1 Down be a medieval diatonic series of tones, hexacord. Let 2 Down be the Asiatic wild ass, or onagin, which might make the first horizontal word under 1 Across be, let’s see, E - N - . . . well, why not the ligature of couplets in verse writing, or enjambment. That would make 3 Down- He began to cry, because he could not remember 1 Across.

Something was nagging at his mind, so he stopped crying and waited for it to take form, but it would not. He thought of General Grote, by now surely aware that his aide had been taken; he thought of the consternation that must be shuddering through all the tentacles of Ripsaw. It was not actually going to be so hard, he thought pathetically, because he didn’t actually have to hold out against the Blank Tanks, he only had to wait. After D day, or better, say, D plus 7, it wouldn’t much matter what he told them. Then the divisions would be across. Or not across. Breakthrough or failure, it would be decided by then and he could talk.

He began to count off Ripsaw’s division officers to himself, as he had so often seen the names on the morning reports. Catton of the XLIst Armored, with Colonels Bogart, Ripner and Bletterman. M’Cleargh of the Highland & Lowland, with Brigadiers Douglass and McCloud. Leventhal of the Vth Israeli, with Koehne, Meier and-he stopped, because it had occurred to him that he might be speaking aloud. He could not tell. All right. Think of something else.

But what?

There was nothing dangerous about sensory deprivation, he lied. It was only a rest. Nobody was hurting him. Looked at in the right way, it was a chance to do some solid thinking like you never got tune for in real life-strike that. In outside life. For instance, what about freshing up on French irregular verbs? Start with avoir. Tu as, vous avez, nous avons. Voi avete, noi ab-biamo, du habst . . . Du habst? How did that get in there? Well, how about poetry?

It is an Ancient Mariner, and he stops the next of kin.

The guests are met, the feast is set, and sisters under the skin

Are rag and bone and hank of hair, and beard and glittering eye

Invite the sight of patient Night, etherized under the sky.

I should have been a ragged claw; I should have said

‘I love you’;

But-here the brown eyes lower fell-I hate to go above you.

If Ripsaw fail and yutes prevail, what price dough’s

Quaker cannon? So Grote-

Kramer stopped himself, barely in time. Were there throat mikes? Were the yutes listening in?

He churned miserably in his cotton bonds, because, as near as he could guess, he had probably been in the Blank Tank for less than an hour. D day, he thought to himself, praying that it was only to himself, was still some six weeks away and a week beyond that was seven. Seven weeks, forty-nine days, eleven hundred and, um, seventy-six hours, sixty-six thousand minutes plus. He had only to wait those minutes out, what about the diary?, and then he could talk all he wanted. Talk, confess, broadcast, anything, what difference would it make then?

He paused, trying to remember. That furtive thought had struggled briefly to the surface but he had lost it again. It would not come back.

He tried to fall asleep. It should have been easy enough. His air was metered and the CO2 content held to a level that would make him torpid; his wastes cathe-terized away; water and glucose valved into his veins; he was all but in utero, and unborn babies slept, didn’t they? Did they? He would have to look in the diary, but it would have to wait until he could remember what thought it was that was struggling for recognition. And that was becoming harder with every second.

Sensory deprivation in small doses is one thing; it even has its therapeutic uses, like shock. In large doses it produces a disorientation of psychotic proportions, a melancholia that is all but lethal; Kramer never knew when he went loopy.

He never quite knew when he went sane again, either, except that one day the fog lifted for a moment and he asked a WAC corporal, “When did I get back to Utah.” The corporal had dealt with returning yute prisoners before. She said only: “It’s Fort Hamilton, sir. Brooklyn.”

He was in a private room, which was bad, but he wore a maroon bathrobe, which was good-at least it meant he was in a hospital instead of an Army stockade. (Unless the private room meant he was in the detention ward of the hospital.)

Kramer wondered what he had done. There was no way to tell, at least not by searching his memory. Everything went into a blurry alternation of shouting relays of yutes and the silence of the Blank Tanks. He was nearly sure he had finally told the yutes everything they wanted to know. The question was, when? He would find out at the court-martial, he thought. Or he might have jotted it down, he thought crazily, in the diary.

Jotted it down in the... ?

Diary!

That was the thought that had struggled to come through to the surface!

Kramer’s screams brought the corporal back in a hurry, and then two doctors who quickly prepared knockout needles. He fought against them all the way.

“Poor old man,” said the WAC, watching him twitch and shudder in unconsciousness. (Kramer had just turned forty.) “Second dose of the Blank Tanks for him, wasn’t it? I’m not surprised he’s having nightmares.” She didn’t know that his nightmares were not caused by the Blank Tanks themselves, but by his sudden realization that his last stay in the Tanks was totally unnecessary. It didn’t matter what he told the yutes, or when! They had had the diary all along, for it had been on him when Mabry thrust him in the rocket; and all Ripsaw’s secrets were in it!

The next time the fog lifted for Kramer it was quick, like the turning on of a light, and he had distorted memories of dreams before it. He thought he had just dreamed that General Grote had been with him. He was alone in the same room, sun streaming in a window, voices outside. He felt pretty good, he thought tentatively, and had no time to think more than that because the door opened and a ward boy looked in, very astonished to find Kramer looking back at him. “Holy heaven,” he said. “Wait there!” He disappeared. Foolish, Kramer thought.

Of course he would wait. Where else would he go?

And then, surprisingly, General Grote did indeed walk in.

“Hello, John,” he said mildly, and sat down beside the bed, looking at Kramer. “I was just getting in my car when they caught me.”

He pulled out his pipe and stuffed it with tobacco, watching Kramer. Kramer could think of nothing to say. “They said you were all right, John. Are you?”

“I-.think so.” He watched the general light his pipe. “Funny,” he said. “I dreamed you were here a minute ago.”

“No, it’s not so funny; I was. I brought you a present.”

Kramer could not imagine anything more wildly improbable in the world than that the man whose combat operation he had betrayed should bring him a box of chocolates, bunch of flowers, light novel or whatever else was appropriate. But the general glanced at the table by Kramer’s bed.

There was a flat, green-leather-covered box on it. “Open it up,” Grote invited.

Kramer took out a glittering bit of metal depending from a three-barred ribbon. The gold medallion bore a rampant eagle and lettering he could not at first read.

“It’s your D.S.M.,” Grote said helpfully. “You can pin it on if you like. I tried,” he said, “to make it a Medal of Honor. But they wouldn’t allow it, logically enough.”

“I was expecting something different,” Kramer mumbled foolishly.

Grote laughed. “We smashed them, boy,” he said gently. “That is, Mick did. He went straight across Polar Nine,, down the Ob with one force and the Yenisei with another. General dough’s got his forward command in Chebarkul now, loving every minute of it. Why, I was in Karpinsk myself last week-they let me get that far-of course, it’s a rest area. It was a brilliant, bloody, backbreaking show. Completely successful.”

Kramer interrupted in sheer horror: “Polar Nine? But that was the cover-the Quaker cannon!”

General Grote looked meditatively at his former aide. “John,” he said after a moment, “didn’t you ever wonder why the card-sorters pulled you out for my staff? A man who was sure to crack in the Blank Tanks, because he already had?”

The room was very silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, John. Well, it worked-had to, you know; a lot of thought went into it. Novotny’s been relieved. Mick’s got his biggest victory, no matter what happens now; he was the man that led the invasion.” The room was silent again. Carefully Grote tapped out his pipe into a metal wastebasket. “You’re a valuable man, John. Matter of fact, we traded a major general to get you back.” Silence.

Grote sighed and stood up. “If it’s any consolation to you, you held out four full weeks in the Tanks. Good thing we’d made sure you had the diary with you. Otherwise our Quaker cannon would have been a bust.” He nodded good-bye and was gone. He was a good officer, was General Grote. He would use a weapon in any way he had to, to win a fight; but if the weapon was destroyed, and had feelings, he would come around to bring it a medal afterwards.

Kramer contemplated his Distinguished Service Medal for a while. Then he lay back and considered ringing for a Sunday Times, but fell asleep instead.

Novotny was now a sour, angry corps commander away off on the Baltic periphery because of him; a million and a half NAAARMY troops were dug in the heart of the enemy’s homeland; the greatest operation of the war was an unqualified success. But when the nurse came in that night, the Quaker cannon-the man who had discovered that the greatest service he could perform for his country was to betray it-was moaning in his sleep.