Some Will not Die

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CHAPTER FIVE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt sighed. "No, I guess it isn't. How do you read it?"

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

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

He leaned forward. "Now. We've already assumed that whatever happens, we want our side on top."

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

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

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

"Think it over."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's an awful lot of fighting," Matt said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah? When's he taking over?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

"Well, what do you think, Bob?" Matt asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ted nodded slowly. "I think you're right."

And, once again, Bob was helpless.

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

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

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

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

"Heil Berendtsen!"

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

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

"I'm afraid you're stuck with me," Ted said, and finished his peas.

"Why, you egocentric--"

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

Ted looked up. "I wasn't simply being polite when I said he was right, you know."

Margaret Garvin looked as bewildered as Bob had. "Well. Well," she fumbled, "I don't know...."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt nodded slowly, some of his lost pride in his son returning. "I'll see."

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

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

"Heil Berendtsen? I don't know," Ted admitted. "I don't think so--but then, a man can't tell when he's going paranoid, can he?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll keep their pants dry," he said, raising a chorus of derisive comments from the men.

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

"Hello, Jim," Berendtsen said, holding out his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That didn't make much sense. "You're crazy," Jim said perfunctorily.

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

"Look, you know I'm your superior officer and I could have you shot."

"Shoot me."

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

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

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

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

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

"Think of the mistakes it might have saved them.

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

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

"They'll shoot you as soon as you show up, most likely."

"So they'll shoot me. And then they'll never know. Their tough luck."

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

"Almost always do."

"Where you headed?"

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

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

"Sorry, Jim. I'd rather conquer the world."

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well," Bob said. "What's your move, Jim?"

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

"What do you think, Mom?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The army moved south.

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