COMPLETE BOOK-LENGTH NOVEL

 THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES

 By FRITZ LEIBER

 ILLUSTRATED by FINLAY

CHAPTER 1

 _Any man who saw you, or even heard your footsteps must be ambushed, stalked and killed, whether needed for food or not. Otherwise, so long as his strength held out, he would be on your trail. _

 --The Twenty-Fifth Hour, _by Herbert Best_

I was one hundred miles from Nowhere--and I mean that literally--when Ispotted this girl out of the corner of my eye. I'd been keeping an extralookout because I still expected the other undead bugger left overfrom the murder party at Nowhere to be stalking me. 

[Illustration: They were two desperate scavengers in a no-man's land ofradiation and death. ]

I'd been following a line of high-voltage towers all canted over at thesame gentlemanly tipsy angle by an old blast from the Last War. I judgedthe girl was going in the same general direction and was being edgedover toward my course by a drift of dust that even at my distance showeddangerous metallic gleams and dark humps that might be dead men orcattle. 

She looked slim, dark topped, and on guard. Small like me and like mewearing a scarf loosely around the lower half of her face in the styleof the old buckaroos. 

We didn't wave or turn our heads or give the slightest indication we'dseen each other as our paths slowly converged. But we were intensely, minutely watchful--I knew I was and she had better be. 

Overhead the sky was a low dust haze, as always. I don't remember what ahigh sky looks like. Three years ago I think I saw Venus. Or it may havebeen Sirius or Jupiter. 

The hot smoky light was turning from the amber of midday to the bloodybronze of evening. 

The line of towers I was following showed the faintest spread in thedirection of their canting--they must have been only a few miles fromblast center. As I passed each one I could see where the metal on theblast side had been eroded--vaporized by the original blast, mostlysmoothly, but with welts and pustules where the metal had merely meltedand run. I supposed the lines the towers carried had all been vaporizedtoo, but with the haze I couldn't be sure, though I did see three darkblobs up there that might be vultures perching. 

From the drift around the foot of the nearest tower a human skull peeredwhitely. That is rather unusual. Years later now you still see more deadbodies with the meat on them than skeletons. Intense radiation haskilled their bacteria and preserved them indefinitely from decay, justlike the packaged meat in the last advertisements. In fact such bodiesare one of the signs of a really hot drift--you avoid them. The vulturespass up such poisonously hot carrion too--they've learned their lesson. 

Ahead some big gas tanks began to loom up, like deformed battleships andflat-tops in a smoke screen, their prows being the juncture of thenatural curve of the off-blast side with the massive concavity of theon-blast side. 

None of the three other buggers and me had had too clear an idea ofwhere Nowhere had been--hence, in part, the name--but I knew in ageneral way that I was somewhere in the Deathlands between Porter Countyand Ouachita Parish, probably much nearer the former. 

 * * * * *

It's a real mixed-up America we've got these days, you know, with justthe faintest trickle of a sense of identity left, like a guy in thepaddedest cell in the most locked up ward in the whole loony bin. If atime traveler from mid Twentieth Century hopped forward to it across thefew intervening years and looked at a map of it, if anybody has a map ofit, he'd think that the map had run--that it had got some sort ofdisease that had swollen a few tiny parts beyond all bounds, papertumors, while most of the other parts, the parts he remembered carryingnames in such big print and showing such bold colors, had shrunk tonothingness. 

To the east he'd see Atlantic Highlands and Savannah Fortress. To thewest, Walla Walla Territory, Pacific Palisades, and Los Alamos--andthere he'd see an actual change in the coastline, I'm told, where threeof the biggest stockpiles of fusionables let go and opened Death Valleyto the sea--so that Los Alamos is closer to being a port. Centrally he'dfind Porter County and Manteno Asylum surprisingly close together nearthe Great Lakes, which are tilted and spilled out a bit toward thesouthwest with the big quake. South-centrally: Ouachita Parish inchingup the Mississippi from old Louisiana under the cruel urging of theFisher Sheriffs. 

Those he'd find and a few, a very few other places, including a couple Isuppose I haven't heard of. Practically all of them would surprisehim--no one can predict what scraps of a blasted nation are going tohang onto a shred of organization and ruthlessly maintain it and veryslowly and very jealously extend it. 

But biggest of all, occupying practically all the map, reducing allthose swollen localities I've mentioned back to tiny blobs, boundingmost of America and thrusting its jetty pseudopods everywhere, he'd seethe great inkblot of the Deathlands. I don't know how else than by anarea of solid, absolutely unrelieved black you'd represent theDeathlands with its multicolored radioactive dusts and its skimpyfreightage of lonely Deathlanders, each bound on his murderous, utterlypointless, but utterly absorbing business--an area where names likeNowhere, It, Anywhere, and the Place are the most natural thing in theworld when a few of us decide to try to pad down together for a fewnervous months or weeks. 

As I say, I was somewhere in the Deathlands near Manteno Asylum. 

 * * * * *

The girl and me were getting closer now, well within pistol or dartrange though beyond any but the most expert or lucky knife throw. Shewore boots and a weathered long-sleeved shirt and jeans. The blacktopping was hair, piled high in an elaborate coiffure that was held inplace by twisted shavings of bright metal. A fine bug-trap, I toldmyself. 

In her left hand, which was closest to me, she carried a dart gun, pointed away from me, across her body. It was the kind of potent tinycrossbow you can't easily tell whether the spring is loaded. Back aroundon her left hip a small leather satchel was strapped to her belt. Alsoon the same side were two sheathed knives, one of which was anoddity--it had no handle, just the bare tang. For nothing but throwing, I guessed. 

I let my own left hand drift a little closer to my Banker's Special inits open holster--Ray Baker's great psychological weapon, though (whoknows?) the two . 38 cartridges it contained might actually fire. The oneI'd put to the test at Nowhere had, and very lucky for me. 

She seemed to be hiding her right arm from me. Then I spotted the weaponit held, one you don't often see, a stevedore's hook. She _was_ hidingher right hand, all right, she had the long sleeve pulled down over itso just the hook stuck out. I asked myself if the hand were perhapscovered with radiation scars or sores or otherwise disfigured. WeDeathlanders have our vanities. I'm sensitive about my baldness. 

Then she let her right arm swing more freely and I saw how short it was. She had no right hand. The hook was attached to the wrist stump. 

I judged she was about ten years younger than me. I'm pushing forty, Ithink, though some people have judged I'm younger. No way of my knowingfor sure. In this life you forget trifles like chronology. 

Anyway, the age difference meant she would have quicker reflexes. I'dhave to keep that in mind. 

 * * * * *

The greenishly glinting dust drift that I'd judged she was avoidingswung closer ahead. The girl's left elbow gave a little kick to thesatchel on her hip and there was a sudden burst of irregular ticks thatalmost made me start. I steadied myself and concentrated on thinkingwhether I should attach any special significance to her carrying aGeiger counter. Naturally it wasn't the sort of thinking that interferedin any way with my watchfulness--you quickly lose the habit of that kindof thinking in the Deathlands or you lose something else. 

It could mean she was some sort of greenhorn. Most of us old-timers canvisually judge the heat of a dust drift or crater or rayed area morereliably than any instrument. Some buggers claim they just feel it, though I've never known any of the latter too eager to navigate inunfamiliar country at night--which you'd think they'd be willing to doif they could feel heat blind. 

But she didn't look one bit like a tenderfoot--like for instance somecitizeness newly banished from Manteno. Or like some Porter burgher'sunfaithful wife or troublesome girlfriend whom he'd personally cartedout beyond the ridges of cleaned-out hot dust that help guard suchplaces, and then abandoned in revenge or from boredom--and they callthemselves civilized, those cultural queers!

No, she looked like she _belonged_ in the Deathlands. But then why thecounter?

Her eyes might be bad, real bad. I didn't think so. She raised her bootan extra inch to step over a little jagged fragment of concrete. No. 

Maybe she was just a born double-checker, using science to back upknowledge based on experience as rich as my own or richer. I've met thesuper-careful type before. They mostly get along pretty well, but theytend to be a shade too slow in the clutches. 

Maybe she was _testing_ the counter, planning to use it some other wayor trade it for something. 

Maybe she made a practice of traveling by night! Then the counter madegood sense. But then why use it by day? Why reveal it to me in any case?

Was she trying to convince me that she was a greenhorn? Or had she hopedthat the sudden noise would throw me off guard? But who would go to thetrouble of carrying a Geiger counter for such devious purposes? Andwouldn't she have waited until we got closer before trying the noisegambit?

Think-shmink--it gets you nowhere!

She kicked off the counter with another bump of her elbow and started toedge in toward me faster. I turned the thinking all off and gave mywhole mind to watchfulness. 

Soon we were barely more than eight feet apart, almost within lungingrange without even the preliminary one-two step, and still we hadn'tspoken or looked straight at each other, though being that close we'dhad to cant our heads around a bit to keep each other in peripheralvision. Our eyes would be on each other steadily for five or sixseconds, then dart forward an instant to check for rocks and holes inthe trail we were following in parallel. A cultural queer from one ofthe "civilized" places would have found it funny, I suppose, if he'dbeen able to watch us perform in an arena or from behind armor glass forhis exclusive pleasure. 

 * * * * *

The girl had eyebrows as black as her hair, which in its piled-up andmetal-knotted savagery called to mind African queens despite her typicalpale complexion--very little ultraviolet gets through the dust. From theinside corner of her right eye socket a narrow radiation scar ran upbetween her eyebrows and across her forehead at a rakish angle until itdisappeared under a sweep of hair at the upper left corner of herforehead. 

I'd been smelling her, of course, for some time. 

I could even tell the color of her eyes now. They were blue. It's acolor you never see. Almost no dusts have a bluish cast, there are fewblue objects except certain dark steels, the sky never gets very faraway from the orange range, though it is green from time to time, andwater reflects the sky. 

Yes, she had blue eyes, blue eyes and that jaunty scar, blue eyes andthat jaunty scar and a dart gun and a steel hook for a right hand, andwe were walking side by side, eight feet apart, not an inch closer, still not looking straight at each other, still not saying a word, and Irealized that the initial period of unadulterated watchfulness was over, that I'd had adequate opportunity to inspect this girl and size her up, and that night was coming on fast, and that here I was, once again, backwith _the problem of the two urges_. 

I could try either to kill her or go to bed with her. 

 * * * * *

I know that at this point the cultural queers (and certainly ourimaginary time traveler from mid Twentieth Century) would make a greatnoise about not understanding and not believing in the genuineness ofthe simple urge to murder that governs the lives of us Deathlanders. Like detective-story pundits, they would say that a man or woman murdersfor gain, or concealment of crime, or from thwarted sexual desire oroutraged sexual possessiveness--and maybe they would list a few other"rational" motives--but not, they would say, just for the simple sake ofmurder, for the sure release and relief it gives, for the sake of wipingout one recognizable bit more (the closest bit we can, since those of uswith the courage or lazy rationality to wipe out ourselves have longsince done so)--wiping out one recognizable bit more of the wholemiserable, unutterably disgusting human mess. Unless, they would say, aperson is completely insane, which is actually how all outsiders view usDeathlanders. They can think of us in no other way. 

I guess cultural queers and time travelers simply _don't_ understand, though to be so blind it seems to me that they have to overlook much ofthe history of the Last War and of the subsequent years, especially themushrooming of crackpot cults with a murder tinge: the werewolf gangs, the Berserkers and Amuckers, the revival of Shiva worship and the BlackMass, the machine wreckers, the kill-the-killers movements, the newwitchcraft, the Unholy Creepers, the Unconsciousers, the radioactiveblue gods and rocket devils of the Atomites, and a dozen other groupingsclearly prefiguring Deathlander psychology. Those cults had all been asunpredictable as Thuggee or the Dancing Madness of the Middle Ages orthe Children's Crusade, yet they had happened just the same. 

But cultural queers are good at overlooking things. They have to be, Isuppose. They think they're humanity growing again. Yes, despite theirlaughable warpedness and hysterical crippledness, they actuallybelieve--each howlingly different community of them--that they're thenew Adams and Eves. They're all excited about themselves and whether ornot they wear fig leaves. They don't carry with them, twenty-four hoursa day, like us Deathlanders do, the burden of all that was forever lost. 

 * * * * *

Since I've gone this far I'll go a bit further and make the paradoxicaladmission that even us Deathlanders don't really understand our urge tomurder. Oh, we have our rationalizations of it, just like everyone hasof his ruling passion--we call ourselves junkmen, scavengers, gangrenesurgeons; we sometimes believe we're doing the person we kill theultimate kindness, yes and get slobbery tearful about it afterwards; wesometimes tell ourselves we've finally found and are rubbing out the oneman or woman who was responsible for everything; we talk, mostly toourselves, about the aesthetics of homicide; we occasionally admit, butonly each to himself alone, that we're just plain nuts. 

But we don't really understand our urge to murder, we only _feel_ it. 

At the hateful sight of another human being, we feel it begins to growin us until it becomes an overpowering impulse that jerks us, like apuppet is jerked by its strings, into the act itself or its attemptedcommission. 

Like I was feeling it grow in me now as we did this parallel deathmarchthrough the reddening haze, me and this girl and our problem. This girlwith the blue eyes and the jaunty scar. 

The problem of the _two_ urges, I said. The other urge, the sexual, isone that I know all cultural queers (and certainly our time traveler)would claim to know all about. Maybe they do. But I wonder if theyunderstand how intense it can be with us Deathlanders when it's the onlyrelease (except maybe liquor and drugs, which we seldom can get and evenmore rarely dare use)--the only complete release, even though a briefone, from the overpowering loneliness and from the tyranny of the urgeto kill. 

To embrace, to possess, to glut lust on, yes even briefly to love, briefly to shelter in--that was good, that was a relief and release tobe treasured. 

But it couldn't last. You could draw it out, prop it up perhaps for afew days, for a month even (though sometimes not for a singlenight)--you might even start to talk to each other a little, after awhile--but it could never last. The glands always tire, if nothing else. 

Murder was the only _final_ solution, the only _permanent_ release. Only us Deathlanders know how good it feels. But then after the kill theloneliness would come back, redoubled, and after a while I'd meetanother hateful human . . . 

_Our_ problem of the two urges. As I watched this girl slogging alongparallel to me, as I kept constant watch on her of course, I wonderedhow _she_ was feeling the two urges. Was she attracted to the ridgyscars on my cheeks half revealed by my scarf?--to me they have apleasing symmetry. Was she wondering how my head and face looked withoutthe black felt skullcap low-visored over my eyes? Or was she thinkingmostly of that hook swinging into my throat under the chin and draggingme down?

I couldn't tell. She looked as poker-faced as I was trying to. 

 * * * * *

For that matter, I asked myself, how was _I_ feeling the two urges?--howwas I feeling them as I watched this girl with the blue eyes and thejaunty scar and the arrogantly thinned lips that asked to be smashed, and the slender throat?--and I realized that there was no way todescribe that, not even to myself. I could only feel the two urges growin me, side by side, like monstrous twins, until they would simply betoo big for my taut body and one of them would have to get out fast. 

I don't know which one of us started to slow down first, it happened sogradually, but the dust puffs that rise from the ground of theDeathlands under even the lightest treading became smaller and smalleraround our steps and finally vanished altogether, and we were standingstill. Only then did I notice the obvious physical trigger for ourstopping. An old freeway ran at right angles across our path. Theshoulder by which we'd approached it was sharply eroded, so that thepavement, which even had a shallow cave eroded under it, was a goodthree feet above the level of our path, forming a low wall. From whereI'd stopped I could almost reach out and touch the rough-edgedsmooth-topped concrete. So could she. 

We were right in the midst of the gas tanks now, six or seven of themtowered around us, squeezed like beer cans by the decade-old blast buttheir metal looking sound enough until you became aware of the red lightshowing through in odd patterns of dots and dashes where vaporization orlater erosion had been complete. Almost but not quite lace-work. Justahead of us, right across the freeway, was the six-storey skeletalstructure of an old cracking plant, sagged like the power towers awayfrom the blast and the lower storeys drifted with piles and ridges andsmooth gobbets of dust. 

 * * * * *

The light was getting redder and smokier every minute. 

With the cessation of the physical movement of walking, which is alwayssome sort of release for emotions, I could feel the twin urges growingfaster in me. But that was all right, I told myself--this was thecrisis, as she must realize too, and that should key us up to bear theurges a little longer without explosion. 

I was the first to start to turn my head. For the first time I lookedstraight into her eyes and she into mine. And as always happens at suchtimes, a third urge appeared abruptly, an urge momentarily as strong asthe other two--the urge to speak, to tell and ask all about it. But evenas I started to phrase the first crazily happy greeting, my throatlumped, as I'd known it would, with the awful melancholy of all that wasforever lost, with the uselessness of any communication, with theimpossibility of recreating the past, our individual pasts, any pasts. And as it always does, the third urge died. 

I could tell she was feeling that ultimate pain just like me. I couldsee her eyelids squeeze down on her eyes and her face lift and hershoulders go back as she swallowed hard. 

She was the first to start to lay aside a weapon. She took two sidewisesteps toward the freeway and reached her whole left arm further acrossher body and laid the dart gun on the concrete and drew back her handfrom it about six inches. At the same time looking at me hard--fiercelyangrily, you'd say--across her left shoulder. She had the experiencedduelist's trick of seeming to look into my eyes but actually focussingon my mouth. I was using the same gimmick myself--it's tiring to lookstraight into another person's eyes and it can put you off guard. 

My left side was nearest the wall so I didn't for the moment have theproblem of reaching across my body. I took the same sidewise steps shehad and using just two fingers, very gingerly--_disarmingly_, I hoped--Ilifted my antique firearm from its holster and laid it on the concreteand drew back my hand from it all the way. Now it was up to her again, or should be. Her hook was going to be quite a problem, I realized, butwe needn't come to it right away. 

She temporized by successively unsheathing the two knives at her leftside and laying them beside the dart gun. Then she stopped and her looktold me plainly that it was up to me. 

 * * * * *

Now I am a bugger who believes in carrying _one perfectknife_--otherwise, I know for a fact, you'll go knife-happy and end upby weighing yourself down with dozens, literally. So I am naturally veryreluctant to get out of touch in any way with Mother, who is a littlerusty along the sides but made of the toughest and most sharpenablealloy steel I've ever run across. 

Still, I was most curious to find out what she'd do about that hook, soI finally laid Mother on the concrete beside the . 38 and rested myhands lightly on my hips, all ready to enjoy myself--at least I hoped Igave that impression. 

She smiled, it was almost a nice smile--by now we'd let our scarves dropsince we weren't raising any more dust--and then she took hold of thehook with her left hand and started to unscrew it from theleather-and-metal base fitting over her stump. 

Of course, I told myself. And her second knife, the one without a grip, must be that way so she could screw its tang into the base when shewanted a knife on her right hand instead of a hook. I ought to haveguessed. 

I grinned my admiration of her mechanical ingenuity and immediatelyunhitched my knapsack and laid it beside my weapons. Then a thoughtoccurred to me. I opened the knapsack and moving my hand slowly and veryopenly so she'd have no reason to suspect a ruse, I drew out a blanketand, trying to show her both sides of it in the process, as if I wereperforming some damned conjuring trick, dropped it gently on the groundbetween us. 

She unsnapped the straps on her satchel that fastened it to her belt andlaid it aside and then she took off her belt too, slowly drawing itthrough the wide loops of weathered denim. Then she looked meaningfullyat my belt. 

I had to agree with her. Belts, especially heavy-buckled ones like ours, can be nasty weapons. I removed mine. Simultaneously each belt joinedits corresponding pile of weapons and other belongings. 

She shook her head, not in any sort of negation, and ran her fingersinto the black hair at several points, to show me it hid no weapon, thenlooked at me questioningly. I nodded that I was satisfied--I hadn't seenanything run out of it, by the way. Then she looked up at my blackskullcap and she raised her eyebrows and smiled again, this time with aspice of mocking anticipation. 

In some ways I hate to part with that headpiece more than I do withMother. Not really because of its sandwiched lead-mesh inner lining--ifthe rays haven't baked my brain yet they never will and I'm sure thatthe patches of lead mesh sewed into my pants over my loins give a lotmore practical protection. But I was getting real attracted to this girlby now and there are times when a person must make a sacrifice of hisvanity. I whipped off my stylish black felt and tossed it on my pile anddared her to laugh at my shiny egg top. 

Strangely she didn't even smile. She parted her lips and ran her tonguealong the upper one. I gave an eager grin in reply, an incautiously wideone, and she saw my plates flash. 

 * * * * *

My plates are something rather special though they are by no meansunique. Back toward the end of the Last War, when it was obvious to anyrealist how bad things were going to be, though not how strangelyterrible, a number of people, like myself, had all their teeth jerkedand replaced with durable plates. I went some of them one better. Myplates were stainless steel biting and chewing ridges, smooth continuousones that didn't attempt to copy individual teeth. A person who looksclosely at a slab of chewing tobacco, say, I offer him will be puzzledby the smoothly curved incision, made as if by a razor blade mounted onthe arm of a compass. Magnetic powder buried in my gums makes for a realnice fit. 

This sacrifice was worse than my hat and Mother combined, but I couldsee the girl expected me to make it and would take no substitutes, andin this attitude I had to admit that she showed very sound judgment, because I keep the incisor parts of those plates filed to razorsharpness. I have to be careful about my tongue and lips but I figureit's worth it. With my dental scimitars I can in a wink bite out a chunkof throat and windpipe or jugular, though I've never had occasion to doso yet. 

For the first minute it made me feel like an old man, a real dodderer, but by now the attraction this girl had for me was getting irrational. Icarefully laid the two plates on top of my knapsack. 

In return, as a sort of reward you might say, she opened her mouth wideand showed me what was left of her own teeth--about two-thirds of them, a patchwork of tartar and gold. 

We took off our boots, pants and shirts, she watching verysuspiciously--I knew she'd been skeptical of my carrying only one knife. 

Oddly perhaps, considering how touchy I am about my baldness, I felt nosensitivity about revealing the lack of hair on my chest and in fact asort of pride in displaying the slanting radiation scars that havereplaced it, though they are crawling keloids of the ugliest, bumpiestsort. I guess to me such scars are tribal insignia--one-man andone-woman tribes of course. No question but that the scar on the girl'sforehead had been the first focus of my desire for her and it stilladded to my interest. 

By now we weren't staying as perfectly on guard or watching each other'sclothing for concealed weapons as carefully as we should--I know Iwasn't. It was getting dark fast, there wasn't much time left, and theother interest was simply becoming too great. 

 * * * * *

We were still automatically careful about how we did things. Forinstance the way we took off our pants was like ballet, simultaneouslycrouching a little on the left foot and whipping the right leg out ofits sheath in one movement, all ready to jump without trippingourselves if the other person did anything funny, and then skinning downthe left pants-leg with a movement almost as swift. 

But as I say it was getting too late for perfect watchfulness, in factfor any kind of effective watchfulness at all. The complexion of thewhole situation was changing in a rush. The possibilities of dealing orreceiving death--along with the chance of the minor indignity ofcannibalism, which some of us practice--were suddenly gone, all gone. Itwas going to be all right this time, I was telling myself. This was thetime it would be different, this was the time love would last, this wasthe time lust would be the firm foundation for understanding and trust, this time there would be really safe sleeping. This girl's body would behome for me, a beautiful tender inexhaustibly exciting home, and minefor her, for always. 

As she threw off her shirt, the last darkly red light showed me anothersmooth slantwise scar, this one around her hips, like a narrow girdlethat has slipped down a little on one side. 

CHAPTER 2

 _Murder most foul, as in the best it is; But this most foul, strange and unnatural. _

 --Hamlet

When I woke the light was almost full amber and I could feel no fleshagainst mine, only the blanket under me. I very slowly rolled over andthere she was, sitting on the corner of the blanket not two feet fromme, combing her long black hair with a big, wide-toothed comb she'dscrewed into the leather-and-metal cap over her wrist stump. 

She'd put on her pants and shirt, but the former were rolled up to herknees and the latter, though tucked in, wasn't buttoned. 

She was looking at me, contemplating me you might say, quite dreamilybut with a faint, easy smile. 

I smiled back at her. 

It was lovely. 

Too lovely. There had to be something wrong with it. 

There was. Oh, nothing big. Just a solitary trifle--nothing worthnoticing really. 

But the tiniest solitary things can sometimes be the most irritating, like _one_ mosquito. 

When I'd first rolled over she'd been combing her hair straight back, revealing a wedge of baldness following the continuation of her foreheadscar deep back across her scalp. Now with a movement that was swiftthough not hurried-looking she swept the mass of her hair forward and tothe left, so that it covered the bald area. Also her lips straightenedout. 

I was hurt. She shouldn't have hidden her bit of baldness, it wassomething we had in common, something that brought us closer. And sheshouldn't have stopped smiling at just that moment. Didn't she realizeI loved that blaze on her scalp just as much as any other part of her, that she no longer had any need to practice vanity in front of me?

Didn't she realize that as soon as she stopped smiling, hercontemplative stare became an insult to me? What right had she to stare, critically I felt sure, at my bald head? What right had she to knowabout the nearly-healed ulcer on my left shin?--that was a piece ofinformation worth a man's life in a fight. What right had she to coverup, anyways, while I was still naked? She ought to have waked me up sothat we could have got dressed as we'd undressed, together. There werelots of things wrong with her manners. 

Oh, I know that if I'd been able to think calmly, maybe if I'd just hadsome breakfast or a little coffee inside me, or even if there'd beensome hot breakfast to eat at that moment, I'd have recognized myirritation for the irrational, one-mosquito surge of negative feelingthat it was. 

Even without breakfast, if I'd just had the knowledge that there was areasonably secure day ahead of me in which there'd be an opportunity forme to straighten out my feelings, I wouldn't have been irked, or atleast being irked wouldn't have bothered me terribly. 

But a sense of security is an even rarer commodity in the Deathlandsthan a hot breakfast. 

Given just the ghost of a sense of security and/or some hot breakfast, I'd have told myself that she was merely being amusingly coquettishabout her bald streak and her hair, that it was natural for a woman totry to preserve some mystery about herself in front of the man she bedswith. 

But you get leery of any kind of mystery in the Deathlands. It makes youfrightened and angry, like it does an animal. Mystery is for culturalqueers, strictly. The only way for two people to get along together inthe Deathlands, even for a while, is never to hide anything and never tomake a move that doesn't have an immediate clear explanation. You can'ttalk, you see, certainly not at first, and so you can't explain anything(most explanations are just lies and dreams, anyway), so you have to bedoubly careful and explicit about everything you do. 

 * * * * *

This girl wasn't being either. Right now, on top of her othergaucheries, she was unscrewing the comb from her wrist--an unfriendly ifnot quite a hostile act, as anyone must admit. 

Understand, please, I wasn't _showing_ any of these negative reactionsof mine any more than she was showing hers, except for her stoppingsmiling. In fact _I hadn't_ stopped smiling, I was playing the game tothe hilt. 

But inside me everything was stewed up and the other urge had come backand presently it would begin to grow again. That's the trouble, youknow, with sex as a solution to the problem of the two urges. It's finewhile it lasts but it wears itself out and then you're back with UrgeNumber One and you have nothing left to balance it with. 

Oh, I wouldn't kill this girl today, I probably wouldn't seriously thinkof killing her for a month or more, but Old Urge Number One would bethere and growing, mostly under cover, all the time. Of course therewere things I could do to slow its growth, lots of little gimmicks, infact--I was pretty experienced at this business. 

 * * * * *

For instance, I could take a shot at talking to her pretty soon. For acatchy starter, I could tell her about Nowhere, how these five otherbuggers and me found ourselves independently skulking along after thisscavenging expedition from Porter, how we naturally joined forces inthat situation, how we set a pitfall for their alky-powered jeep andwrecked it and them, how when our haul turned out to be unexpectedly bigthe four of us left from the kill chummied up and padded down togetherand amused each other for a while and played games, you might say. Why, at one point we even had an old crank phonograph going and read somebooks. And, of course, how when the loot gave out and the fun wore off, we had our murder party and I survived along with, I think, a buggernamed Jerry--at any rate, he was gone when the blood stopped spurting, and I'd had no stomach for tracking him, though I probably should have. 

And in return she could tell me how she had killed off her last set ofgirlfriends, or boyfriends, or friend, or whatever it was. 

After that, we could have a go at exchanging news, rumors andspeculations about local, national and world events. Was it true thatAtlantic Highlands had planes of some sort or were they from Europe?Were they actually crucifying the Deathlanders around Walla Walla oronly nailing up their dead bodies as dire warnings to others such? HadManteno made Christianity compulsory yet, or were they still toleratingZen Buddhists? Was it true that Los Alamos had been completely wiped outby plague, but the area taboo to Deathlanders because of the robotguards they'd left behind--metal guards eight feet tall who trampedacross the white sands, wailing? Did they still have free love inPacific Palisades? Did she know there'd been a pitched battle fought byexpeditionary forces from Ouachita and Savannah Fortress? Over the lootof Birmingham, apparently, after yellow fever had finished off thatprincipality. Had she rooted out any "observers" lately?--some of the"civilized" communities, the more "scientific" ones, try to maintain afew weather stations and the like in the Deathlands, camouflaging themelaborately and manning them with one or two impudent characters to whomwe give a hard time if we uncover them. Had she heard the tale that wasgoing around that South America and the French Riviera had survived theLast War absolutely untouched?--and the obviously ridiculous rider thatthey had blue skies there and saw stars every third night? Did she thinkthat subsequent conditions were showing that the Earth actually hadplunged into an interstellar dust cloud coincidentally with the start ofthe Last War (the dust cloud used as a cover for the first attacks, somesaid) or did she still hold with the majority that the dust was solelyof atomic origin with a little help from volcanoes and dry spells? Howmany green sunsets had she seen in the last year?

 * * * * *

After we'd chewed over those racy topics and some more like them, andincidentally got bored with guessing and fabricating, we might, if wefelt especially daring and conversation were going particularly well, even take a chance on talking a little about our childhoods, about howthings were before the Last War (though she was almost too young forthat)--about the _little_ things we remembered--the big things were muchtoo dangerous topics to venture on and sometimes even the littlememories could suddenly twist you up as if you'd swallowed lye. 

But after that there wouldn't be anything left to talk about. Anythingyou'd risk talking about, that is. For instance, no matter how long wetalked, it was very unlikely that we'd either of us tell the otheranything complete or very accurate about how we lived from day to day, about our techniques of surviving and staying sane or at leastfunctional--that would be too imprudent, it would go too much againstthe grain of any player of the murder game. Would I tell her, or anyone, about how I worked the ruses of playing dead and disguising myself as awoman, about my trick of picking a path just before dark and thencircling back to it by a pre-surveyed route, about the chess games Iplayed with myself, about the bottle of green, terribly hot-lookingpowder I carried to sprinkle behind me to bluff off pursuers? A fatchance of my revealing things like that!

And when all the talk was over, what would it have gained us? Ourminds would be filled with a lot of painful stuff better keptburied--meaningless hopes, scraps of vicarious living in "cultured"communities, memories that were nothing but melancholy given concreteform. The melancholy is easiest to bear when it's the diffusedbackground for everything; and all garbage is best kept in the can. Ohyes, our talking would have gained us a few more days of infatuation, ofphantom security, but those we could have--almost as many of them, atany rate--without talking. 

For instance things were smoothing over already between her and me againand I no longer felt quite so irked. She'd replaced the comb with aninoffensive-looking pair of light pliers and was doing up her hair withthe metal shavings. And I was acting as if content to watch her, as in away I was. I'd still made no move to get dressed. 

She looked real sweet, you know, primping herself that way. Her face wasa little flat, but it was young, and the scar gave it just the fillip itneeded. 

But what was going on behind that forehead right now, I asked myself? Ifelt real psychic this morning, my mind as clear as a bottle of WhiteRock you find miraculously unbroken in a blasted tavern, and the answersto the question I'd asked myself came effortlessly. 

 * * * * *

She was telling herself she'd got herself a man again, a man who wasadequate in the primal clutch (I gave myself that pat on the back), andthat she wouldn't have to be plagued and have her safety endangered by_that_ kind of mind-dulling restlessness and yearning for a while. 

She was lightly playing around with ideas about how she'd found a homeand a protector, knowing she was kidding herself, that it was the mostgimcracky feminine make-believe, but enjoying it just the same. 

She was sizing me up, deciding in detail just what I went for in awoman, what whetted my interest, so she could keep that roused as longas seemed desirable or prudent to her to continue our relation. 

She was kicking herself, only lightly to begin with, because she hadn'ttaken any precautions--because we who've escaped hot death against allreasonable expectations by virtue of some incalculable resistance to theills of radioactivity, quite often find we've escaped sterility too. Ifshe should become pregnant, she was telling herself, then she had a realsticky business ahead of her where no man could be trusted for a second. 

And because she was thinking of this and because she was obviously arealistic Deathlander, she was reminding herself that a woman isbasically less impulsive and daring and resourceful than a man and sohad always better be sure she gets in the first blow. She would bethinking that I was a realist myself and a smart man, one able tounderstand her predicament quite clearly--and because of that a muchsooner danger to her. She was feeling Old Number One Urge starting togrow in her again and wondering whether it mightn't be wisest to give itthe hot-house treatment. 

That is the trouble with a clear mind. For a little while you see thingsas they really are and you can accurately predict how they're going toshape the future . . . And then suddenly you realize you've predictedyourself a week or a month into the future and you can't live theintervening time any more because you've already imagined it in detail. People who live in communities, even the cultural queers of our maimedera, aren't much bothered by it--there must be some sort of blinkersthey hand you out along with the key to the city--but in the Deathlandsit's a fairly common phenomenon and there's no hiding from it. 

 * * * * *

Me and my clear mind!--once again it had done me out of days of fun, changed a thoroughly-explored love affair into a one night stand. Oh, there was no question about it, this girl and I were finished, rightthis minute, as of now, because she was just as psychic as I was thismorning and had sensed every last thing that I'd been thinking. 

With a movement smooth enough not to look rushed I swung into a crouch. She was on her knees faster than that, her left hand hovering over thelittle set of tools for her stump, which like any good mechanic she'dlined up neatly on the edge of the blanket--the hook, the comb, a longtelescoping fork, a couple of other items, and the knife. I'd grabbed ahandful of blanket, ready to jerk it from under her. She'd seen that I'dgrabbed it. Our gazes dueled. 

There was a high-pitched whine over our heads! Quite loud from thestart, though it sounded as if it were very deep up in the haze. Itswiftly dropped in pitch and volume. 

The top of the skeletal cracking plant across the freeway glowed withSt. Elmo's fire! Three times it glowed that way, so bright we could seethe violet-blue flames of it reaching up despite the full amberdaylight. 

The whine died away but in the last moment, paradoxically, it seemed tobe coming closer!

This shared threat--for any unexpected event is a threat in theDeathlands and a mysterious event doubly so--put a stop to our murdergame. The girl and I were buddies again, buddies to be relied on in apinch, for the duration of the threat at least. No need to say so or toreassure each other of the fact in any way, it was taken for granted. Besides, there was no time. We had to use every second allowed us ingetting ready for whatever was coming. 

First I grabbed up Mother. Then I relieved myself--fear made it easy. Then I skinned into my pants and boots, slapped in my teeth, thrust theblanket and knapsack into the shallow cave under the edge of thefreeway, looking around me all the time so as not to be surprised fromany quarter. 

Meanwhile the girl had put on her boots, located her dart gun, unscrewedthe pliers from her stump, put the knife in, and was arranging her scarfso it made a sling for the maimed arm--I wondered why but had no time towaste guessing, even if I'd wanted to, for at that moment a small dullsilver plane, beetle-shaped more than anything else, loomed out of thehaze beyond the cracking plant and came silently drifting down towardus. 

The girl thrust her satchel into the cave and along with it her dartgun. I caught her idea and tucked Mother into my pants behind my back. 

I'd thought from the first glimpse of it that the plane was disabled--Iguess it was its silence that gave me the idea. This theory wasconfirmed when one of its very stubby wings or vanes touched a cornerpillar of the cracking plant. The plane was moving in too slow a glideto be wrecked, in fact it was moving in a slower glide than I would havebelieved possible--but then it's many years since I have seen a plane inflight. 

It wasn't wrecked but the little collision spun it around twice in alazy circle and it landed on the freeway with a scuffing noise not fiftyfeet from us. You couldn't exactly say it had crashed in, but it stayedat an odd tilt. It looked crippled all right. 

An oval door in the plane opened and a man dropped lightly out on theconcrete. And what a man! He was nearer seven feet tall than six, close-cropped blond hair, face and hands richly tanned, the rest of himcovered by trim garments of a gleaming gray. He must have weighed asmuch as the two of us together, but he was beautifully built, muscularyet supple-seeming. His face looked brightly intelligent andeven-tempered and kind. 

Yes, kind!--damn him! It wasn't enough that his body should fairly glowwith a health and vitality that was an insult to our seared skins andstringy muscles and ulcers and half-rotted stomachs and half-arrestedcancers, he had to look kind too--the sort of man who would put you tobed and take care of you, as if you were some sort of interesting sickfox, and maybe even say a little prayer for you, and all manner of otherabominations. 

 * * * * *

I don't think I could have endured my fury standing still. Fortunatelythere was no need to. As if we'd rehearsed the whole thing for hours, the girl and I scrambled up onto the freeway and scurried toward the manfrom the plane, cunningly swinging away from each other so that it wouldbe harder for him to watch the two of us at once, but not enough to makeit obvious that we attended an attack from two quarters. 

We didn't run though we covered the ground as fast as we dared--runningwould have been too much of a give-away too, and the Pilot, which washow I named him to myself, had a strange-looking small gun in his righthand. In fact the way we moved was part of our act--I dragged one leg asif it were crippled and the girl faked another sort of limp, one thatmade her approach a series of half curtsies. Her arm in the sling wasall twisted, but at the same time she was accidently showing herbreasts--I remember thinking _you won't distract this breed bull thatway, sister, he probably has a harem of six-foot heifers_. I had my headthrown back and my hands stretched out supplicatingly. Meanwhile theboth of us were babbling a blue streak. I was rapidly croaking somethinglike, "Mister for God's sake save my pal he's hurt a lot worse'n I amnot a hundred yards away he's dyin' mister he's dyin' o' thirst histongue's black'n all swole up oh save him mister save my pal he's not ahundred yards away he's dyin' mister dyin'--" and she was singsonging aneven worse rigamarole about how "they" were after us from Porter andgoing to crucify us because we believed in science and how they'dalready impaled her mother and her ten-year-old sister and a lot more ofthe same. 

It didn't matter that our stories didn't fit or make sense, the babblehad a convincing tone and getting us closer to this guy, which was allthat counted. He pointed his gun at me and then I could see him hesitateand I thought exultingly _it's a lot of healthy meat you got there, mister, but it's tame meat, mister, tame!_

He compromised by taking a step back and sort of hooting at us andwaving us off with his left hand, as if we were a couple of stray dogs. 

It was greatly to our advantage that we'd acted without hesitation, andI don't think we'd have been able to do that except that we'd been allset to kill each other when he dropped in. Our muscles and nerves andminds were keyed for instant ruthless attack. And some "civilized"people still say that the urge to murder doesn't contribute toself-preservation!

 * * * * *

We were almost close enough now and he was steeling himself to shoot andI remember wondering for a split second what his damn gun did to you, and then me and the girl had started the alternation routine. I'd stopdead, as if completely cowed by the threat of his weapon, and as he tooknote of it she'd go in a little further, and as his gaze shifted to hershe'd stop dead and I'd go in another foot and then try to make my halteven more convincing as his gaze darted back to me. We worked itperfectly, our rhythm was beautiful, as if we were old dancing partners, though the whole thing was absolutely impromptu. 

Still, I honestly don't think we'd ever have got to him if it hadn'tbeen for the distraction that came just then to help us. I could tell, you see, that he'd finally steeled himself and we still weren't quiteclose enough. He wasn't as tame as I'd hoped. I reached behind me forMother, determined to do a last-minute rush and leap anyway, when therecame this sick scream. 

I don't know how else to describe it briefly. It was a scream, femininefor choice, it came from some distance and the direction of the oldcracking plant, it had a note of anguish and warning, yet at the sametime it was weak and almost faltering you might say and squeaky at theend, as if it came from a person half dead and a throat choked withphlegm. It had all those qualities or a wonderful mimicking of them. 

And it had quite an effect on our boy in gray for in the act of shootingme down he started to turn and look over his shoulder. 

Oh, it didn't altogether stop him from shooting me. He got me partlycovered again as I was in the middle of my lunge. I found out what hisgun did to you. My right arm, which was the part he'd covered, just wentdead and I finished my lunge slamming up against his iron knees, like ahighschool kid trying to block out a pro footballer, with the knifeslipping uselessly away from my fingers. 

But in the blessed meanwhile the girl had lunged too, not with a slowslash, thank God, but with a high, slicing thrust aimed arrow-straightfor a point just under his ear. 

She connected and a fan of blood sprayed her full in the face. 

I grabbed my knife with my left hand as it fell, scrambled to my feet, and drove the knife at his throat in a round-house swing that happenedto come handiest at the time. The point went through his flesh likenothing and jarred against his spine with a violence that I hoped wouldshock into nervous insensibility the stoutest medulla oblongata andprevent any dying reprisals on his part. 

I got my wish, in large part. He swayed, straightened, dropped his gun, and fell flat on his back, giving his skull a murderous crack on theconcrete for good measure. He lay there and after a half dozen gushesthe bright blood quit pumping strongly out of his neck. 

Then came the part that was like a dying reprisal, though obviously notbeing directed by him as of now. And come to think of it, it may havehad its good points. 

 * * * * *

The girl, who was clearly a most cool-headed cuss, snatched for his gunwhere he'd dropped it, to make sure she got it ahead of me. Shesnatched, yes--and then jerked back, letting off a sizable squeal ofpain, anger, and surprise. 

Where we'd seen his gun hit the concrete there was now a tinyincandescent puddle. A rill of blood snaked out from the pool around hishead and touched the whitely glowing puddle and a jet of steam sizzledup. 

Somehow the gun had managed to melt itself in the moment of its ownerdying. Well, at any rate that showed it hadn't contained any gunpowderor ordinary chemical explosives, though I already knew it operated onother principles from the way it had been used to paralyze me. More tothe point, it showed that the gun's owner was the member of a culturethat believed in taking very complete precautions against its gadgetsfalling into the hands of strangers. 

But the gun fusing wasn't quite all. As the girl and me shifted our gazefrom the puddle, which was cooling fast and now glowed red like theblood--as we shifted our gaze back from the puddle to the dead man, wesaw that at three points (points over where you'd expect pockets to be)his gray clothing had charred in small irregularly shaped patches fromwhich threads of black smoke were twisting upward. 

Just at that moment, so close as to make me jump in spite of years oflearning to absorb shocks stoically--right at my elbow it seemed to (thegirl jumped too, I may say)--a voice said, "Done a murder, hey?"

Advancing briskly around the skewily grounded plane from the directionof the cracking plant was an old geezer, a seasoned, hard-bakedDeathlander if I ever saw one. He had a shock of bone-white hair, therest of him that showed from his weathered gray clothing looked fried bythe sun's rays and others to a stringy crisp, and strapped to his bootsand weighing down his belt were a good dozen knives. 

Not satisfied with the unnerving noise he'd made already, he went onbrightly, "Neat job too, I give you credit for that, but why the helldid you have to set the guy afire?"

CHAPTER 3

 _We are always, thanks to our human nature, potential criminals. None of us stands outside humanity's black collective shadow. _

 --The Undiscovered Self, _by Carl Jung_

Ordinarily scroungers who hide around on the outskirts until thekilling's done and then come in to share the loot get what theydeserve--wordless orders, well backed up, to be on their way at once. Sometimes they even catch an after-clap of the murder urge, if it hasn'tall been expended on the first victim or victims. Yet they _will_ do it, trusting I suppose to the irresistible glamor of their personalities. There were several reasons why we didn't at once give Pop thistreatment. 

In the first place we didn't neither of us have our distance weapons. Myrevolver and her dart gun were both tucked in the cave back at the edgeof the freeway. And there's one bad thing about a bugger so knife-happyhe lugs them around by the carload--he's generally good at tossing them. With his dozen or so knives Pop definitely outgunned us. 

Second, we were both of us without the use of an arm. That's right, theboth of us. My right arm still dangled like a string of sausages and Icouldn't yet feel any signs of it coming undead. While she'd burned herfingers badly grabbing at the gun--I could see their red-splotched tipsnow as she pulled them out of her mouth for a second to wipe the Pilot'sblood out of her eyes. All she had was her stump with the knife screwedto it. Me, I can throw a knife left-handed if I have to, but you bet Iwasn't going to risk Mother that way. 

Then I'd no sooner heard Pop's voice, breathy and a little high like anold man's will get, than it occurred to me that he must have been theone who had given the funny scream that had distracted the Pilot'sattention and let us get him. Which incidentally made Pop a quickthinker and imaginative to boot, and meant that he'd helped on thekilling. 

 * * * * *

Besides all that, Pop did not come in fawning and full of extravagantpraise, as most scroungers will. He just assumed equality with us rightfrom the start and he talked in an absolutely matter-of-fact way, neither praising nor criticizing one bit--too damn matter-of-fact andopen, for that matter, to suit my taste, but then I have heard otherbuggers say that some old men are apt to get talkative, though I hadnever worked with or run into one myself. Old people are very rare inthe Deathlands, as you might imagine. 

So the girl and me just scowled at him but did nothing to stop him as hecame along. Near us, his extra knives would be no advantage to him. 

"Hum, " he said, "looks a lot like a guy I murdered five years back downLos Alamos way. Same silver monkey suit and almost as tall. Nice chaptoo--was trying to give me something for a fever I'd faked. That his gunmelted? My man didn't smoke after I gave him his quietus, but then itturned out he didn't have any metal on him. I wonder if this chap--" Hestarted to kneel down by the body. 

"Hands off, Pop!" I gritted at him. That was how we started calling himPop. 

"Why sure, sure, " he said, staying there on one knee. "I won't lay afinger on him. It's just that I've heard the Alamosers have it rigged sothat any metal they're carrying melts when they die, and I was wonderingabout this boy. But he's all yours, friend. By the way, what's yourname, friend?"

"Ray, " I snarled. "Ray Baker. " I think the main reason I told him wasthat I didn't want him calling me "friend" again. "You talk too much, Pop. "

"I suppose I do, Ray, " he agreed. "What's your name, lady?"

The girl just sort of hissed at him and he grinned at me as if to say, "Oh, women!" Then he said, "Why don't you go through his pockets, Ray?I'm real curious. "

"Shut up, " I said, but I felt that he'd put me on the spot just thesame. I was curious about the guy's pockets myself, of course, but I wasalso wondering if Pop was alone or if he had somebody with him, andwhether there was anybody else in the plane or not--things like that, too many things. At the same time I didn't want to let on to Pop howuseless my right arm was--if I'd just get a twinge of feeling in thatarm, I knew I'd feel a lot more confident fast. I knelt down across thebody from him, started to lay Mother aside and then hesitated. 

 * * * * *

The girl gave me an encouraging look, as if to say, "I'll take care ofthe old geezer. " On the strength of her look I put down Mother andstarted to pry open the Pilot's left hand, which was clenched in a fistthat looked a mite too big to have nothing inside it. 

The girl started to edge behind Pop, but he caught the movement rightaway and looked at her with a grin that was so knowing and yet sofriendly, and yet so pitying at the same time--with the pity of the oldpro for even the seasoned amateur--that in her place I think I'd haveblushed myself, as she did now . . . Through the streaks of the Pilot'sblood. 

"You don't have to worry none about me, lady, " he said, running a handthrough his white hair and incidentally touching the pommel of one ofthe two knives strapped high on the back of his jacket so he could reachone over either shoulder. "I quit murdering some years back. It got tobe too much of a strain on my nerves. "

"Oh yeah?" I couldn't help saying as I pried up the Pilot's index fingerand started on the next. "Then why the stab-factory, Pop?"

"Oh you mean those, " he said, glancing down at his knives. "Well, thefact is, Ray, I carry them to impress buggers dumber than you and thelady here. Anybody wants to think I'm still a practicing murderer I gotno objections. Matter of sentiment, too, I just hate to part withthem--they bring back important memories. And then--you won't believethis, Ray, but I'm going to tell you just the same--guys just up andgive me their knives and I doubly hate to part with a gift. "

I wasn't going to say "Oh yeah?" again or "Shut up!" either, though Icertainly wished I could turn off Pop's spigot, or thought I did. Then Ifelt a painful tingling shoot down my right arm. I smiled at Pop andsaid, "Any other reasons?"

"Yep, " he said. "Got to shave and I might as well do it in style. A newblade every day in the fortnight is twice as good as the old ads. Youknow, it makes you keep a knife in fine shape if you shave with it. Whatyou got there, Ray?"

"You were wrong, Pop, " I said. "He did have some metal on him thatdidn't melt. "

I held up for them to see the object I'd extracted from his left fist:a bright steel cube measuring about an inch across each side, but itfelt lighter than if it were solid metal. Five of the faces lookedabsolutely bare. The sixth had a round button recessed in it. 

From the way they looked at it neither Pop nor the girl had the faintestidea of what it was. I certainly hadn't. 

"Had he pushed the button?" the girl asked. Her voice was throaty butunexpectedly refined, as if she'd done no talking at all, not even toherself, since coming to the Deathlands and so retained the culturedintonations she'd had earlier, whenever and wherever that had been. Itgave me a funny feeling, of course, because they were the first wordsI'd heard her speak. 

"Not from the way he was holding it, " I told her. "The button waspointed up toward his thumb but the thumb was on the outside of hisfingers. " I felt an unexpected satisfaction at having expressed myselfso clearly and I told myself not to get childish. 

The girl slitted her eyes. "Don't you push it, Ray, " she said. 

"Think I'm nuts?" I told her, meanwhile sliding the cube into thesmaller pocket of my pants, where it fit tight and wouldn't turnsideways and the button maybe get pressed by accident. The tingling inmy right arm was almost unbearable now, but I was getting control overthe muscles again. 

"Pushing that button, " I added, "might melt what's left of the plane, orblow us all up. " It never hurts to emphasize that you may have anotherweapon in your possession, even if it's just a suicide bomb. 

"There was a man pushed another button once, " Pop said softly andreflectively. His gaze went far out over the Deathlands and took in agood half of the horizon and he slowly shook his head. Then his facebrightened. "Did you know, Ray, " he said, "that I actually met that man?Long afterwards. You don't believe me, I know, but I actually did. Tellyou about it some other time. "

I almost said, "Thanks, Pop, for sparing me at least for a while, " but Iwas afraid that would set him off again. Besides, it wouldn't have beenquite true. I've heard other buggers tell the yarn of how they met (andinvariably rubbed out) the actual guy who pushed the button or buttonsthat set the fusion missiles blasting toward their targets, but I felt asudden curiosity as to what Pop's version of the yarn would be. Oh well, I could ask him some other time, if we both lived that long. I startedto check the Pilot's pockets. My right hand could help a little now. 

 * * * * *

"Those look like mean burns you got there, lady, " I heard Pop tell thegirl. He was right. There were blisters easy to see on three of thefingertips. "I've got some salve that's pretty good, " he went on, "andsome clean cloth. I could put on a bandage for you if you wanted. Ifyour hand started to feel poisoned you could always tell Ray here toslip a knife in me. "

Pop was a cute gasser, you had to admit. I reminded myself that it wasPop's business to play up to the both of us, charm being the secretweapon of all scroungers. 

The girl gave a harsh little laugh. "Very well, " she said, "but we willuse my salve, I know it works for me. " And she started to lead Pop towhere we'd hidden our things. 

"I'll go with you, " I told them, standing up. 

It didn't look like we were going to have any more murders today--Pophad got through the preliminary ingratiations pretty well and the girland me had had our catharsis--but that would be no excuse for any suchstupidity as letting the two of them get near my . 38. 

Strolling to the cave and back I eased the situation a bit more bysaying, "That scream you let off, Pop, really helped. I don't know whatgave you the idea, but thanks. "

"Oh that, " he said. "Forget about it. "

"I won't, " I told him. "You may say you've quit killing, but helped on ado-in today. "

"Ray, " he said a little solemnly, "if it'll make you feel any happier, I'll take a bit of the responsibility for every murder that's been donesince the beginning of time. "

I looked at him for a while. Then, "Pop, you're not by any chance thereligious type?" I asked suddenly. 

"Lord, no, " he told us. 

That struck me as a satisfactory answer. God preserve me from thereligious type! We have quite a few of those in the Deathlands. Itgenerally means that they try to convert you to something before theykill you. Or sometimes afterwards. 

We completed our errands. I felt a lot more secure with Old Financier'sFriend strapped to my middle. Mother is wonderful but she is not enough. 

I dawdled over inspecting the Pilot's pockets, partly to give my righthand time to come back all the way. And to tell the truth I didn't muchenjoy the job--a corpse, especially such a handsome cadaver as this, just didn't go with Pop's brand of light patter. 

 * * * * *

Pop did up the girl's hand in high style, bandaging each fingerseparately and then persuading her to put on a big left-hand work glovehe took out of his small pack. 

"Lost the right, " he explained, "which was the only one I ever usedanyway. Never knew until now why I kept this. How does it feel, Alice?"

I might have known he'd worm her name out of her. It occurred to me thatPop's ideas of scrounging might extend to Alice's favors. The urgedoesn't die out when you get old, they tell me. Not completely. 

He'd also helped her replace the knife on her stump with the hook. 

By that time I'd poked into all the Pilot's pockets I could get atwithout stripping him and found nothing but three irregularly shapedblobs of metal, still hot to the touch. Under the charred spots, ofcourse. 

I didn't want the job of stripping him. Somebody else could do a littlework, I told myself. I've been bothered by bodies before (as who hasn't, I suppose?) but this one was really beginning to make me sick. Maybe Iwas cracking up, it occurred to me. Murder is a very wearing business, as all Deathlanders know, and although some crack earlier than others, all crack in the end. 

I must have been showing how I was feeling because, "Cheer up, Ray, " Popsaid. "You and Alice have done a big murder--I'd say the subject was sixfoot ten--so you ought to be happy. You've drawn a blank on his pocketsbut there's still the plane. "

"Yeah, that's right, " I said, brightening a little. "There's still thestuff in the plane. " I knew there were some items I couldn't hope for, like . 38 shells, but there'd be food and other things. 

"Nuh-uh, " Pop corrected me. "I said _the plane_. You may have thoughtit's wrecked, but I don't. Have you taken a real gander at it? It'sworth doing, believe me. "

I jumped up. My heart was suddenly pounding. I was glad of an excuse toget away from the body, but there was a lot more in my feelings thanthat. I was filled with an excitement to which I didn't want to give aname because it would make the let-down too great. 

One of the wide stubby wings of the plane, raking downward so that itstip almost touched the concrete, had hidden the undercarriage of thefuselage from our view. Now, coming around the wing, I saw that _therewas no undercarriage_. 

I had to drop to my hands and knees and scan around with my cheek nextto the concrete before I'd believe it. _The "wrecked" plane was at allpoints at least six inches off the ground. _

 * * * * *

I got to my feet again. I was shaking. I wanted to talk but I couldn't. I grabbed the leading edge of the wing to stop from falling. The wholebody of the plane gave a fraction of an inch and then resisted myleaning weight with lazy power, just like a gyroscope. 

"Antigravity, " I croaked, though you couldn't have heard me two feet. Then my voice came back. "Pop, Alice! They got antigravity!Antigravity--and it's working!"

Alice had just come around the wing and was facing me. She was shakingtoo and her face was white like I knew mine was. Pop was politelystanding off a little to one side, watching us curiously. "Told youyou'd won a real prize, " he said in his matter-of-fact way. 

Alice wet her lips. "Ray, " she said, "we can get away. "

Just those four words, but they did it. Something in me unlocked--no, exploded describes it better. 

"We can go places!" I almost shouted. 

"Beyond the dust, " she said. "Mexico City. South America!" She wasforgetting the Deathlander's cynical article of belief that the dustnever ends, but then so was I. It makes a difference whether or notyou've got a means of doing something. 

"Rio!" I topped her with. "The Indies. Hong Kong. Bombay. Egypt. Bermuda. The French Riviera!"

"Bullfights and clean beds, " she burst out with. "Restaurants. Swimmingpools. Bathrooms!"

"Skindiving, " I took it up with, as hysterical as she was. "Road racesand roulette tables. "

"Bentleys and Porsches!"

"Aircoups and DC4s and Comets!"

"Martinis and hashish and ice cream sodas!"

"Hot food! Fresh coffee! Gambling, smoking, dancing, music, drinks!" Iwas going to add _women_, but then I thought of how hard-bitten littleAlice would look beside the dream creatures I had in mind. I tactfullysuppressed the word but I filed the idea away. 

I don't think either of us knew exactly what we were saying. Alice inparticular I don't believe was old enough to have experienced almost anyof the things the words referred to. They were mysterious symbols oflong-interdicted delights spewing out of us. 

"Ray, " Alice said, hurrying to me, "let's get aboard. "

"Yes, " I said eagerly and then I saw a little problem. The door to theplane was a couple of feet above our heads. Whoever hoisted himself upfirst--or got hoisted up, as would have to be the case with Alice onaccount of her hand--would be momentarily at the other's mercy. I guessit occurred to Alice too because she stopped and looked at me. It was alittle like the old teaser about the fox, the goose, and the corn. 

Maybe, too, we were both a little scared the plane was booby-trapped. 

 * * * * *

Pop solved the problem in the direct way I might have expected of him bystepping quietly between us, giving a light leap, catching hold of thecurving sill, chinning himself on it, and scrambling up into the planeso quickly that we'd hardly have had time to do anything about it ifwe'd wanted to. Pop couldn't be much more than a bantamweight, even withall his knives. The plane sagged an inch and then swung up again. 

As Pop disappeared from view I backed off, reaching for my . 38, but amoment later he stuck out his head and grinned down at us, resting hiselbows on the sill. 

"Come on up, " he said. "It's quite a place. I promise not to push anybuttons 'til you get here, though there's whole regiments of them. "

I grinned back at Pop and gave Alice a boost up. She didn't like it, butshe could see it had to be her next. She hooked onto the sill and Popcaught hold of her left wrist below the big glove and heaved. 

Then it was my turn. I didn't like it. I didn't like the idea of thosetwo buggers poised above me while my hands were helpless on the sill. But I thought _Pop's a nut. You can trust a nut, at least a little ways, though you can't trust nobody else. _ I heaved myself up. It was strangeto feel the plane giving and then bracing itself like something alive. It seemed to have no trouble accepting our combined weight, which afterall was hardly more than half again the Pilot's. 

 * * * * *

Inside the cabin was pretty small but as Pop had implied, oh my!Everything looked soft and smoothly curved, like you imagine yourinsides being, and almost everything was a restfully dull silver. Thegeneral shape of it was something like the inside of an egg. Forward, which was the larger end, were a couple of screens and a wide viewportand some small dials and the button brigades Pop had mentioned, lined uplike blank typewriter keys but enough for writing Chinese. 

Just aft of the instrument panel were two very comfortable-lookingstrange low seats. They seemed to be facing backwards until I realizedthey were meant to be knelt into. The occupant, I could see, would sortof sprawl forward, his hands free for button-pushing and such. Therewere spongy chinrests. 

Aft was a tiny instrument panel and a kind of sideways seat, not nearlyso fancy. The door by which we'd entered was to the side, a little aft. 

I didn't see any indications of cabinets or fixed storage spaces of anykinds, but somehow stuck to the walls here and there were quite a fewsmooth blobby packages, mostly dull silver too, some large, somesmall--valises and handbags, you might say. 

All in all, it was a lovely cabin and, more than that, it seemed livedin. It looked as if it had been shaped for, and maybe by one man. It hada personality you could feel, a strong but warm personality of its own. 

Then I realized whose personality it was. I almost got sick--so close toit I started telling myself it must be something antigravity did to yourstomach. 

But it was all too interesting to let you get sick right away. Pop waspoking into two of the large mound-shaped cases that were sitting looseand open on the right-hand seat, as if ready for emergency use. One hada folded something with straps on it that was probably a parachute. Thesecond had I judged a thousand or more of the inch cubes such as I'dpried out of the Pilot's hand, all neatly stacked in a cubical boxinside the soft outer bag. You could see the one-cube gap where he'dtaken the one. 

I decided to take the rest of the bags off the walls and open them, if Icould figure out how. The others had the same idea, but Alice had totake off her hook and put on her pliers, before she could make progress. Pop helped her. There was room enough for us to do these things withoutcrowding each other too closely. 

By the time Alice was set to go I'd discovered the trick of getting thebags off. You couldn't pull them away from the wall no matter what forceyou used, at least I couldn't, and you couldn't even slide them straightalong the walls, but if you just gave them a gentle counterclockwisetwist they came off like nothing. Twisting them clockwise glued themback on. It was very strange, but I told myself that if these boys couldgenerate antigravity fields they could create screwy fields of othersorts. 

It also occurred to me to wonder if "these boys" came from Earth. ThePilot had looked human enough, but these accomplishments didn't--not bymy standards for human achievement in the Age of the Deaders. At anyrate I had to admit to myself that my pet term "cultural queer" did notdescribe to my own satisfaction members of a culture which could createthings like this cabin. Not that I liked making the admission. It's hardto admit an exception to a pet gripe against things. 

The excitement of getting down and opening the Christmas packages savedme from speculating too much along these or any other lines. 

I hit a minor jackpot right away. In the same bag were a compass, acatalytic pocket lighter, a knife with a saw-tooth back edge that mademy affection for Mother waver, a dust mask, what looked like a compactwater-filtration unit, and several other items adding up to a deluxeDeathlands Survival Kit. 

There were some goggles in the kit I didn't savvy until I put them onand surveyed the landscape out the viewport. A nearby dust drift I knewto be hot glowed green as death in the slightly smoky lenses. Wow! Thosespecs had Geiger counters beat a mile and I privately bet myself theyworked at night. I stuck them in my pocket quick. 

 * * * * *

We found bunches of tiny electronics parts--I think they were; spools ofmagnetic tape, but nothing to play it on; reels of very narrow film withframes much too small to see anything at all unmagnified; about threethousand cigarettes in unlabeled transparent packs of twenty--we lit upquick, using my new lighter; a picture book that didn't make much sensebecause the views might have been of tissue sections or starfields, wecouldn't quite decide, and there were no captions to help; a thin bookwith ricepaper pages covered with Chinese characters--_that_ was apuzzler; a thick book with nothing but columns of figures, all zeros andones and nothing else; some tiny chisels; and a mouth organ. Pop, who'dmake a point of just helping in the hunt, appropriated that last item--Imight have known he would, I told myself. Now we could expect "Turkey inthe Straw" at odd moments. 

Alice found a whole bag of what were women's things judging from thefrilliness of the garments included. She set aside some squeeze-packsand little gadgets and elastic items right away, but she didn't take anyof the clothes. I caught her measuring some kind of transparent chemiseagainst herself when she thought we weren't looking; it was for a girlmaybe six sizes bigger. 

 * * * * *

And we found food. Cans of food that was heated up inside by the timeyou got the top rolled off, though the outside could still be cool tothe touch. Cans of boneless steak, boneless chops, cream soup, peas, carrots, and fried potatoes--they weren't labeled at all but you couldgenerally guess the contents from the shape of the can. Eggs that heatedwhen you touched them and were soft-boiled evenly and barely firm by thetime you had the shell broke. And small plastic bottles of strong coffeethat heated up hospitably too--in this case the tops did a five-secondhesitation in the middle of your unscrewing them. 

At that point as you can imagine we let the rest of the packages go andhad ourselves a feast. The food ate even better than it smelled. It wasreal hard for me not to gorge. 

Then as I was slurping down my second bottle of coffee I happened tolook out the viewport and see the Pilot's body and the darkening puddlearound it and the coffee began to taste, well, not bad, but sickening. Idon't think it was guilty conscience. Deathlanders outgrow those if theyever have them to start with; loners don't keep consciences--it takescultures to give you those and make them work. Artisticinappropriateness is the closest I can come to describing what botheredme. Whatever it was, it made me feel lousy for a minute. 

About the same time Alice did an odd thing with the last of _her_coffee. She slopped it on a rag and used it to wash her face. I guessshe'd caught a reflection of herself with the blood smears. She didn'teat any more after that either. Pop kept on chomping away, a slow feederand appreciative. 

To be doing something I started to inspect the instrument panel andright away I was all excited again. The two screens were what got me. They showed shadowy maps, one of North America, the other of the World. The first one was a whole lot like the map I'd been imaginingearlier--faint colors marked the small "civilized" areas including onein Eastern Canada and another in Upper Michigan that must be "countries"I didn't know about, and the Deathlands were real dark just as I'dalways maintained they should be!

South of Lake Michigan was a brightly luminous green point that must bewhere we were, I decided. And for some reason the colored areasrepresenting Los Alamos and Atlantic Highlands were glowing brighterthan the others--they had an active luminosity. Los Alamos was blue, Atla-Hi violet. Los Alamos was shown having more territory than Iexpected. Savannah Fortress for that matter was a whole _lot_ biggerthan I'd have made it, pushing out pseudopods west and northeast alongthe coast, though its red didn't have the extra glow. But itsgrowth-pattern reeked of imperialism. 

 * * * * *

The World screen showed dim color patches too, but for the moment I wasmore interested in the other. 

The button armies marched right up to the lower edge of the screens andright away I got the crazy hunch that they were connected with spots onthe map. Push the button for a certain spot and the plane would gothere! Why, one button even seemed to have a faint violet nimbus aroundit (or else my eyes were going bad) as if to say, "Push me and we go toAtlantic Highlands. "

A crazy notion as I say and no sensible way to handle a plane'snavigation according to any standards I could imagine, but then as I'vealso said this plane didn't seem to be designed according to anystandards but rather in line with one man's ideas, including his whims. 

At any rate that was my hunch about the buttons and the screens. Ittantalized rather than helped, for the only button that seemed to bemarked in any way was the one (guessing by color) for AtlanticHighlands, and I certainly didn't want to go there. Like Alamos, Atla-Hihas the reputation for being a mysteriously dangerous place. Not openlymean and death-on-Deathlanders like Walla Walla or Porter, but buggerswho swing too close to Atla-Hi have a way of never turning up again. Younever expect to see again two out of three buggers who pass in thenight, but for three out of three to keep disappearing is againststatistics. 

Alice was beside me now, scanning things over too, and from the way shefrowned and what not I gathered she had caught my hunch and also sharedmy puzzlement. 

Now was the time, all right, when we needed an instruction manual andnot one in Chinese neither!

Pop swallowed a mouthful and said, "Yep, now'd be a good time to havehim back for a minute, to explain things a bit. Oh, don't take offense, Ray, I know how it was for you and for you too, Alice. I know the bothof you _had_ to murder him, it wasn't a matter of free choice, it's theway us Deathlanders are built. Just the same, it'd be nice to have a wayof killing 'em and keeping them on hand at the same time. I rememberfeeling that way after murdering the Alamoser I told you about. You see, I come down with the very fever I'd faked and almost died of it, whilethe man who could have cured me easy wouldn't do nothing but perfume thelandscape with the help of a gang of anaerobic bacteria. Stubbornsingle-minded cuss!"

 * * * * *

The first part of that oration started up my sickness again and irked menot a little. Dammit, what right had Pop to talk about how all usDeathlanders _had to_ kill (which was true enough and by itself wouldhave made me cotton to him) if as he'd claimed earlier _he'd_ been ableto quit killing? Pop was, an old hypocrite, I told myself--he'd helpedmurder the Pilot, he'd admitted as much--and Alice and me'd be betteroff if we bedded the both of them down together. But then the secondpart of what Pop said so made me want to feel pleasantly sorry formyself and laugh at the same time that I forgave the old geezer. Practically everything Pop said had that reassuring touch of insanityabout it. 

So it was Alice who said, "Shut up, Pop"--and rather casually atthat--and she and me went on to speculate and then to argue about whichbuttons we ought to push, if any and in what order. 

"Why not just start anywhere and keep pushing 'em one afteranother?--you're going to have to eventually, may as well start now, "was Pop's light-hearted contribution to the discussion. "Got to takesome chances in this life. " He was sitting in the back seat and stillnibbling away like a white-topped mangy old squirrel. 

Of course Alice and me knew more than that. We kept making guesses as tohow the buttons worked and then backing up our guesses with hotlanguage. It was a little like two savages trying to decide how to playchess by looking at the pieces. And then the old escape-to-paradisetheme took hold of us again and we studied the colored blobs on theWorld screen, trying to decide which would have the fanciestaccommodations for blase ex-murderers. On the North America screen toothere was an intriguing pink patch in southern Mexico that seemed totake in old Mexico City and Acapulco too. 

"Quit talking and start pushing, " Pop prodded us. "This way you'regetting nowhere fast. I can't stand hesitation, it riles my nerves. "

Alice thought you ought to push ten buttons at once, using both hands, and she was working out patterns for me to try. But I was off on a kickabout how we should darken the plane to see if any of the other buttonsglowed beside the one with the Atla-Hi violet. 

"Look here, you killed a big man to get this plane, " Pop broke in, coming up behind me. "Are you going to use it for discussion groups orare you going to fly it?"

"Quiet, " I told him. I'd got a new hunch and was using the dark glassesto scan the instrument panel. They didn't show anything. 

"Dammit, I can't stand this any more, " Pop said and reached a hand andarm between us and brought it down on about fifty buttons, I'd judge. 

The other buttons just went down and up, but the Atla-Hi button wentdown and stayed down. 

The violet blob of Atla-Hi on the screen got even brighter in the nextfew moments. 

The door closed with a tiny thud. 

We took off. 

CHAPTER 4

 _Any man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of thinking, and truly inaccurate principles. _

 --_Thomas de Quincey in_ Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts

For that matter we took off _fast_ with the plane swinging to beat hell. Alice and me was in the two kneeling seats and we hugged them tight, butPop was loose and sort of rattled around the cabin for a while--andserve him right!

On one of the swings I caught a glimpse of the seven dented gas tanks, looking like dull crescents from this angle through the orange haze andgetting rapidly smaller as they hazed out. 

After a while the plane levelled off and quit swinging, and a whileafter that my image of the cabin quit swinging too. Once again I justmanaged to stave off the vomits, this time the vomits from naturalcauses. Alice looked very pale around the gills and kept her face buriedin the chinrest of her chair. 

Pop ended up right in our faces, sort of spread-eagled against theinstrument panel. In getting himself off it he must have braced hishands against half the buttons at one time or another and I noticed thatnone of them went down a fraction. They were _locked_. It had probablyhappened automatically when the Atla-Hi button got pushed. 

I'd have stopped him messing around in that apish way, but with theultra-queasy state of my stomach I lacked all ambition and was happyjust not to be smelling him so close. 

I still wasn't taking too great an interest in things as I idly watchedthe old geezer rummaging around the cabin for something that gotmisplaced in the shake-up. Eventually he found it--a small almond-shapedcan. He opened it. Sure enough it turned out to have almonds in it. Hefitted himself in the back seat and munched them one at a time. Ish!

"Nothing like a few nuts to top off with, " he said cheerfully. 

I could have cut his throat even more cheerfully, but the damage hadbeen done and you think twice before you kill a person in close quarterswhen you aren't absolutely sure you'll be able to dispose of the body. How did I know I'd be able to open the door? I remember philosophizingthat Pop ought at least to have broke an arm so he'd be as badly off asAlice and me (though for that matter my right arm was fully recoverednow) but he was all in one piece. There's no justice in events, that'sfor sure. 

The plane ploughed along silently through the orange soup, though therewas really no way to tell it was moving now--until a skewy spindle shapeloomed up ahead and shot back over the viewport. I think it was avulture. I don't know how vultures manage to operate in the haze, whichought to cancel their keen eyesight, but they do. It shot past _fast_. 

Alice lifted her face out of the sponge stuff and began to study thebuttons again. I heaved myself up and around a little and said, "Pop, Alice and me are going to try to work out how this plane navigates. Thistime we don't want no interference. " I didn't say a word more about whathe'd done. It never does to hash over stupidities. 

"That's perfectly fine, go right ahead, " he told me. "I feel calm as akitten now we're going somewheres. That's all that ever matters withme. " He chuckled a bit and added, "You got to admit I gave you and Alicesomething to work with, " but then he had the sense to shut up tight. 

 * * * * *

We weren't so chary of pushing buttons this time, but ten minutes or soconvinced us that you couldn't push any of the buttons any more, they_were_ all locked down--all locked except for maybe one, which we didn'ttry at first for a special reason. 

We looked for other controls--sticks, levers, pedals, finger-holes andthe like. There weren't any. Alice went back and tried the buttons onPop's minor console. They were locked too. Pop looked interested butdidn't say a word. 

We realized in a general way what had happened, of course. Pushing theAtla-Hi button had set us on some kind of irreversible automatic. Icouldn't imagine the why of gimmicking a plane's controls like that, unless maybe to keep loose children or prisoners from being able to messthings up while the pilot took a snooze, but there were a lot of whys tothis plane that didn't seem to have any standard answers. 

The business of taking off on irreversible automatic had happened soneatly that I naturally wondered whether Pop might not know more aboutnavigating this plane than he let on, a whole lot more in fact, and theseemingly idiotic petulance of his pushing all the buttons have been ashrewd cover for pushing the Atla-Hi button. But if Pop had been actinghe'd been acting beautifully, with a serene disregard for the chances ofbreaking his own neck. I decided this was a possibility I could thinkabout later and maybe act on then, after Alice and me had worked throughthe more obvious stuff. 

The reason we hadn't tried the one button yet was that it showed a greennimbus, just like the Atla-Hi button had had a violet nimbus. Now therewas no green on either of the screens except for the tiny green starthat I had figured stood for the plane and it didn't make sense to gowhere we already were. And if it meant some other place, some place notshown on the screens, you bet we weren't going to be too quick aboutdeciding to go there. It might not be on Earth. 

Alice expressed it by saying, "My namesake was always a little too quickat responding to those DRINK ME cues. "

I suppose she thought she was being cryptic, but I fooled her. "_Alicein Wonderland_?" I asked. She nodded, and gave me a little smile, not atall like one of the EAT ME smiles she'd given me last evening. 

It is funny how crazily happy a little touch of the intellectual pastlike that can make you feel--and how horribly uncomfortable a momentlater. 

We both started to study the North America screen again and almost atonce we realized that it had changed in one small particular. The greenstar had twinned. Where there had been one point of green light therewere now two, very close together like the double star in the handle ofthe Dipper. We watched it for a while. The distance between the twostars grew perceptibly greater. We watched it for a while longer, considerably longer. It became clear that the position of the morewesterly star on the screen was fixed, while the more easterly star wasmoving east toward Atla-Hi with about the speed of the tip of the minutehand on a wrist watch (two inches an hour, say). The pattern began tomake sense. 

 * * * * *

I figured it this way: the moving star must stand for the plane, theother green dot must stand for where the plane had just been. For somereason the spot on the freeway by the old cracking plant was recognizedas a marked locality by the screen. Why I don't know. It reminded me ofthe old "X Marks the Spot" of newspaper murders, but that would begetting very fancy. Anyway the spot we'd just taken off from was somarked and in that case the button with the green nimbus . . . 

"Hold tight, everybody, " I said to Alice, grudgingly including Pop in mywarning. "I got to try it. "

I gripped my seat with my knees and one arm and pushed the greenbutton. It pushed. 

The plane swung around in a level loop, not too tight to disturb thestomach much, and steadied out again. 

I couldn't judge how far we'd swung but Alice and me watched the greenstars and after about a minute she said, "They're getting closer, " and alittle while later I said, "Yeah, for sure. "

I scanned the board. The green button--the cracking-plant button, tocall it that--was locked down of course. The Atla-Hi button was up, glowing violet. All the other buttons were still up and _locked_ up--Itried them all again. 

 * * * * *

It was clear as day used to be. We could either go to Atla-Hi or wecould go back where we'd started from. There was no third possibility. 

It was a little hard to take. You think of a plane as freedom, assomething that will carry you anywhere in the world you choose to go, especially any paradise, and then you find yourself worse limited thanif you'd stayed on the ground--at least that was the way it washappening to us. 

But Alice and me were realists. We knew it wouldn't help to wail. Wewere up against another of those "two" problems, the problem of twodestinations, and we had to choose ours. 

_If we go back_, I thought, _we can trek on somewhere--anywhere--richerby the loot from the plane, especially that Survival Kit. Trek on withsome loot we'll mostly never understand and with the knowledge that weare leaving a plane that can fly, that we are shrinking back from anunknown adventure_. 

_Also if we go back there's something else we'll have to face, somethingwe'll have to live with for a little while at least that won't be niceto live with after this cozily personal cabin, something that shouldn'tbother me at all but, dammit, it does. _

Alice made the decision for us and at the same time showed she wasthinking about the same thing as me. 

"I don't want to have to smell him, Ray, " she said. "I am not going backto keep company with that filthy corpse. I'd rather anything than that. "And she pushed the Atla-Hi button again and as the plane started toswing she looked at me defiantly as if to say I'd reverse the courseagain over her dead body. 

"Don't tense up, " I told her. "I want a new shake of the dice myself. "

"You know, Alice, " Pop said reflectively, "it was the smell of myAlamoser got to me too. I just couldn't bear it. I couldn't get awayfrom it because my fever had me pinned down, so there was nothing leftfor me to do but go crazy. No Atla-Hi for me, just Bug-land. My minddied, though not my memory. By the time I'd got my strength back I'dstarted to be a new bugger. I didn't know no more about living than anewborn babe, except I knew I couldn't go back--go back to murderingand all that. My new mind knew that much though otherwise it was just ablank. It was all very funny. "

"And then I suppose, " Alice cut in, her voice corrosive with sarcasm, "you hunted up a wandering preacher, or perhaps a kindly old hermit wholived on hot manna, and he showed you the blue sky!"

"Why no, Alice, " Pop said. "I told you I don't go for religion. As ithappens, I hunted me up a couple of murderers, guys who were worse casesthen myself but who'd wanted to quit because it wasn't getting themnowhere and who'd found, I'd heard, a way of quitting, and the three ofus had a long talk together. "

"And they told you the great secret of how to live in the Deathlandswithout killing, " Alice continued acidly. "Drop the nonsense, Pop. Itcan't be done. "

"It's hard, I'll grant you, " Pop said. "You have to go crazy orsomething almost as bad--in fact, maybe going crazy is the easiest way. But it can be done and, in the long run, murder is even harder. "

 * * * * *

I decided to interrupt this idle chatter. Since we were now definitelyheaded for Atla-Hi and there was nothing to do until we got there, unless one of us got a brainstorm about the controls, it was time tostart on the less obvious stuff I'd tabled in my mind. 

"Why are you on this plane, Pop?" I asked sharply. "What do you figureon getting out of Alice and me?--and I don't mean the free meals. "

He grinned. His teeth were white and even--plates, of course. "Why, Ray, " he said, "I was just giving Alice the reason. I like to talk tomurderers, practicing murderers preferred. I need to--_have_ to talk to'em, to keep myself straight. Otherwise I might start killing again andI'm not up to that any more. "

"Oh, so you get your kicks at second hand, you old peeper, " Alice put inbut, "Quit lying, Pop, " I said. "About having quit killing, for onething. In my books, which happen to be the old books in this case, theaccomplice is every bit as guilty as the man with the slicer. You helpedus kill the Pilot by giving that funny scream and you know it. "

"Who says I did?" Pop countered, rearing up a little. "I never said so. I just said, 'Forget it. '" He hesitated a moment, studying me. Then hesaid, "I wasn't the one gave that scream. In fact, I'd have stopped itif I'd been able. "

"Who did then?"

Again he studied me as he hesitated. "I'm not telling, " he said, settling back. 

"Pop!" I said, sharp again. "Buggers who pad together tell everything. "

"Oh yeah, " he agreed, smiling. "I remember saying that to quite a fewguys in my day. It's a very restful comradely sentiment. I killed everylast one of 'em, too. "

"You may have, Pop, " I granted, "but we're two to one. "

"So you are, " he agreed softly, looking the both of us over. I knew whathe was thinking--that Alice still had just her pliers on and that inthese close quarters his knives were as good as my gun. 

"Give me your right hand, Alice, " I said. Without taking my eyes off PopI reached the knife without a handle out of her belt and then I startedto unscrew the pliers out of her stump. 

"Pop, " I said as I did so, "you may have quit killing for all I know. Imean you may have quit killing clean decent Deathland style. But I don'tbelieve one bit of that guff about having to talk to murderers to keepyour mind sweet. Furthermore--"

"It's true though, " he interrupted. "I got to keep myself reminded ofhow lousy it feels to be a murderer. "

"So?" I said. "Well, here's one person who believes you've got a morepractical reason for being on this plane. Pop, what's the bounty Atla-Higives you for every Deathlander you bring in? What would it be for twolive Deathlanders? And what sort of reward would they pay for a lostplane brought in? Seems to me they might very well make you a citizenfor that. "

"Yes, even give you your own church, " Alice added with a sort of wickedgaiety. I squeezed her stump gently to tell her let me handle it. 

"Why, I guess you can believe that if you want to, " Pop said and let outa soft breath. "Seems to me you need a lot of coincidences andhappenstances to make that theory hold water, but you sure can believeit if you want to. I got no way, Ray, to prove to you I'm telling thetruth except to say I am. "

"Right, " I said and then I threw the next one at him real fast. "What'smore, Pop, weren't you traveling in this plane to begin with? That cutsa happenstance. Didn't you hop out while we were too busy with the Pilotto notice and just _pretend_ to be coming from the cracking plant?Weren't the buttons locked because you were the Pilot's prisoner?"

 * * * * *

Pop creased his brow thoughtfully. "It could have been that way, " hesaid at last. "Could have been--according to the evidence as you saw it. It's quite a bright idea, Ray. I can almost see myself skulking in thiscabin, while you and Alice--"

"You were skulking somewhere, " I said. I finished screwing in the knifeand gave Alice back her hand. "I'll repeat it, Pop, " I said. "We're twoto one. You'd better talk. "

"Yes, " Alice added, disregarding my previous hint. "You may have givenup fighting, Pop, but I haven't. Not fighting, nor killing, nor anythingin between those two. Any least thing. " My girl was being her mostpantherish. 

"Now who says I've given up _fighting_?" Pop demanded, rearing a littleagain. "You people assume too much, it's a dangerous habit. Before wehave any trouble and somebody squawks about me cheating, let's get onething straight. If anybody jumps me I'll try to disable them, I'll tryto hurt them in any way short of killing, and that means hamstringingand rabbit-punching and everything else. Every least thing, Alice. Andif they happen to die while I'm honestly just trying to hurt them in away short of killing, then I won't grieve too much. My conscience willbe reasonably clear. Is that understood?"

I had to admit that it was. Pop might be lying about a lot of things, but I just didn't believe he was lying about this. And I already knewPop was quick for his age and strong enough. If Alice and me jumped himnow there'd be blood let six different ways. You can't jump a man whohas a dozen knives easy to hand and not expect that to happen, two toone or not. We'd get him in the end but it would be gory. 

 * * * * *

"And now, " Pop said quietly, "I _will_ talk a little if you don't mind. Look here, Ray . . . Alice . . . The two of you are confirmed murderers, Iknow you wouldn't tell me nothing different, and being such you bothknow that there's nothing in murder in the long run. It satisfies ahunger and maybe gets you a little loot and it lets you get on to thenext killing. But that's all, absolutely all. Yet you got to do itbecause it's the way you're built. The urge is there, it's anoverpowering urge, and you got nothing to oppose it with. You feel theBig Grief and the Big Resentment, the dust is eating at your bones, youcan't stand the city squares--the Porterites and Mantenors andsuch--because you know they're whistling in the dark and it's a dirtytune, so you go on killing. But if there were a decent practical way toquit, you'd take it. At least I think you would. When you still thoughtthis plane could take you to Rio or Europe you felt that way, didn'tyou? You weren't planning to go there as murderers, were you? You weregoing to leave your trade behind. "

It was pretty quiet in the cabin for a couple of seconds. Then Alice'sthin laugh sliced the silence. "We were dreaming then, " she said. "Wewere out of our heads. But now you're talking about practical things, asyou say. What do you expect us to do if we quit our trade, as you callit--go into Walla Walla or Ouachita and give ourselves up? I might losemore than my right hand at Ouachita this time--that was just onsuspicion. "

"Or Atla-Hi, " I added meaningfully. "Are you expecting us to admit we'remurderers when we get to Atla-Hi, Pop?"

The old geezer smiled and thinned his eyes. "Now that wouldn'taccomplish much, would it? Most places they'd just string you up, maybeafter tickling your pain nerves a bit, or if it was Manteno they mightput you in a cage and feed you slops and pray over you, and would thathelp you or anybody else? If a man or woman quits killing there's a lotof things he's got to straighten out--first his own mind and feelings, next he's got to do what he can to make up for the murders he'sdone--help the next of kin if any and so on--then he's got to carry thenews to other killers who haven't heard it yet. He's got no time towaste being hanged. Believe me, he's got work lined up for him, workthat's got to be done mostly in the Deathlands, and it's the sort ofwork the city squares can't help him with one bit, because they justdon't understand us murderers and what makes us tick. We have to do itourselves. "

 * * * * *

"Hey, Pop, " I cut in, getting a little interested in the argument (therewasn't anything else to get interested in until we got to Atla-Hi or Poplet down his guard), "I dig you on the city squares (I call 'em culturalqueers) and what sort of screwed-up fatheads they are, but just the samefor a man to quit killing he's got to quit lone-wolfing it. He's got tobelong to a community, he's got to have a culture of some sort, nomatter how disgusting or nutsy. "

"Well, " Pop said, "don't us Deathlanders have a culture? With customsand folkways and all the rest? A very tight little culture, in fact. Nutsy as all get out, of course, but that's one of the beauties of it. "

"Oh sure, " I granted him, "but it's a culture based on murder anddevoted wholly to murder. Murder is our way of life. That gets yourargument nowhere, Pop. "

"Correction, " he said. "Or rather, re-interpretation. " And now for alittle while his voice got less old-man harsh and yet bigger somehow, asif it were more than just Pop talking. "Every culture, " he said, "is away of growth as well as a way of life, because the first law of life isgrowth. Our Deathland culture is devoted to growing _through_ murder_away from_ murder. That's my thought. It's about the toughest way ofgrowth anybody was ever asked to face up to, but it's a way of growthjust the same. A lot bigger and fancier cultures never could figure outthe answer to the problem of war and killing--_we_ know that, all right, we inhabit their grandest failure. Maybe us Deathlanders, working withmurder every day, unable to pretend that it isn't part of every one ofus, unable to put it out of our minds like the city squares do--maybe usDeathlanders are the ones to do that little job. "

"But hell, Pop, " I objected, getting excited in spite of myself, "evenif we got a culture here in the Deathlands, a culture that can grow, itain't a culture that can deal with repentant murderers. In a _real_culture a murderer feels guilty and confesses and then he gets hangedor imprisoned a long time and that squares things for him and everybody. You need religion and courts and hangmen and screws and all the rest ofit. I don't think it's enough for a man just to say he's sorry and goaround glad-handing other killers--_that_ isn't going to be enough towipe out his sense of guilt. "

Pop squared his eyes at mine. "Are you so fancy that you have to have asense of guilt, Ray?" he demanded. "Can't you just see when something'slousy? A sense of guilt's a luxury. Of course it's not enough to sayyou're sorry--you're going to have to spend a good part of the rest ofyour life making up for what you've done . . . And what you will do, too!But about hanging and prisons--was it ever proved those were the rightthing for murderers? As for religion now--some of us who've quit killingare religious and a lot of us (me included) aren't; and some of the onesthat are religious figure (maybe because there's no way for them to gethanged) that they're damned eternally--but that doesn't stop them doinggood work. I ask you now, is any little thing like being damnedeternally a satisfactory excuse for behaving like a complete rat?"

That did it, somehow. That last statement of Pop's appealed so much tome and was completely crazy at the same time, that I couldn't helpwarming up to him. Don't get me wrong, I didn't really fall for his lineof chatter at all, but I found it fun to go along with it--so long asthe plane was in this shuttle situation and we had nothing better to do. 

Alice seemed to feel the same way. I guess any bugger that could kidreligion the way Pop could got a little silver star in her books. Bronze, anyway. 

 * * * * *

Right away the atmosphere got easier. To start with we asked Pop to tellus about this "us" he kept mentioning and he said it was some dozens (orhundreds--nobody had accurate figures) of killers who'd quit and wentnomading around the Deathlands trying to recruit others and help thosewho wanted to be helped. They had semi-permanent meeting places wherethey tried to get together at pre-arranged dates, but mostly they kepton the go, by twos and threes or--more rarely--alone. They were all menso far, at least Pop hadn't heard of any women members, but--he assuredAlice earnestly--he would personally guarantee that there would be noobjections to a girl joining up. They had recently taken to callingthemselves Murderers Anonymous, after some pre-war organization Popdidn't know the original purpose of. Quite a few of them had slipped andgone back to murdering again, but some of these had come back after awhile, more determined than ever to make a go of it. 

"We welcomed 'em, of course, " Pop said. "We welcome everybody. Everybody that's a genuine murderer, that is, and says he wants to quit. Guys that aren't blooded yet we draw the line at, no matter how finethey are. "

Also, "We have a lot of fun at our meetings, " Pop assured us. "You neversaw such high times. Nobody's got a right to go glooming around or pulla long face just because he's done a killing or two. Religion or noreligion, pride's a sin. "

Alice and me ate it all up like we was a couple of kids and Pop wastelling us fairy tales. That's what it all was, of course, a fairytale--a crazy mixed-up fairy tale. Alice and me knew there could be nofellowship of Deathlanders like Pop was describing--it was impossible asblue sky--but it gave us a kick to pretend to ourselves for a while tobelieve in it. 

 * * * * *

Pop could talk forever, apparently, about murder and murderers and hehad a bottomless bag of funny stories on the same topic and charactervignettes--the murderers who were forever wanting their victims tounderstand and forgive them, the ones who thought of themselves aslittle kings with divine rights of dispensing death, the ones whoinsisted on laying down (chastely) beside their finished victims andplaying dead for a couple of hours, the ones who weren't so chaste, theones who could only do their killings when they were dressed a certainway (and the troubles they had with their murder costumes), the ones whocould only kill people with certain traits or of a certain appearance(red-heads, say, or people who read books, or who couldn't carry tunes, or who used bad language), the ones who always mixed sex and murder andthe ones who believed that murder was contaminated by the least breath ofsex, the sticklers and the Sloppy Joes, the artists and the butchers, theax- and stiletto-types, the _com_pulsives and the _re_pulsives--honestly, Pop's portraits from life added up to a Dance of Death as good asanything the Middle Ages ever produced and they ought to have beenillustrated like those by some great artist. Pop told us a lot about hisown killings too. Alice and me was interested, but neither of us wasn'ttempted into making parallel revelations about ourselves. Your privatelife's your own business, I felt, as close as your guts, and no joke'sgood enough to justify revealing a knot of it. 

Not that we talked about nothing but murder while we were bulletingalong toward Atla-Hi. The conversation was free-wheeling and we got ontoall sorts of topics. For instance, we got to talking about the plane andhow it flew itself--or levitated itself, rather. I said it must generatean antigravity field that was keyed to the body of the plane but nothingelse, so that _we_ didn't feel lighter, nor any of the objects in thecabin--it just worked on the dull silvery metal--and I proved my pointby using Mother to shave a little wisp of metal off the edge of thecontrol board. The curlicue stayed in the air wherever you put it andwhen you moved it you could feel the faintest sort of gyroscopicresistance. It was very strange. 

Pop pointed out it was a little like magnetism. A germ riding on an ironfiling that was traveling toward the pole of a big magnet wouldn't feelthe magnetic pull--it wouldn't be operating on him, only on theiron--but just the same the germ'd be carried along with the filing andfeel its acceleration and all, provided he could hold on--but for thatpurpose you could imagine a tiny cabin in the filing. "That's what weare, " Pop added. "Three germs, jumbo size. "

Alice wanted to know why an antigravity plane should have even thestubbiest wings or a jet for that matter, for we remembered now we'dnoticed the tubes, and I said it was maybe just a reserve system in casethe antigravity failed and Pop guessed it might be for extra-fast battlemaneuvering or even for operating outside the atmosphere (which hardlymade sense, as I proved to him). 

"If we're a battle plane, where's our guns?" Alice asked. None of us hadan answer. 

We remembered the noise the plane had made before we saw it. It musthave been using its jets then. "And do you suppose, " Pop asked, "that itwas something from the antigravity that made electricity flare out ofthe top of the cracking plant? Like to have scared the pants off me!" Noanswer to that either. 

Now was a logical time, of course, to ask Pop what he knew about thecracking plant and just who had done the scream if not him, but Ifigured he still wouldn't talk; as long as we were acting friendly therewas no point in spoiling it. 

 * * * * *

We guessed around a little, though, about where the plane came from. Popsaid Alamos, I said Atla-Hi, Alice said why not from both, why couldn'tAlamos and Atla-Hi have some sort of treaty and the plane be travelingfrom the one to the other. We agreed it might be. At least it fittedwith the Atla-Hi violet and the Alamos blue being brighter than theother colors. 

"I just hope we got some sort of anti-collision radar, " I said. Iguessed we had, because twice we'd jogged in our course a little, maybeto clear the Alleghenies. The easterly green star was by now gettingpretty close to the violet blot of Atla-Hi. I looked out at the orangesoup, which was _one_ thing that hadn't changed a bit so far, and I gotto wishing like a baby that it wasn't there and to thinking how itblanketed the whole Earth (stars over the Riviera?--don't make melaugh!) and I heard myself asking, "Pop, did you rub out that guy thatpushed the buttons for all this?"

"Nope, " Pop answered without hesitation, just as if it hadn't been fourhours or so since he'd mentioned the point. "Nope, Ray. Fact is Iwelcomed him into our little fellowship about six months back. This is_his_ knife here, this horn-handle in my boot, though he never killedwith it. He claimed he'd been tortured for years by the thought of themillions and millions he'd killed with blast and radiation, but now hewas finding peace at last because he was where he belonged, with themurderers, and could start to do something about it. Several of the boysdidn't want to let him in. They claimed he wasn't a real murderer, doingit by remote control, no matter how many he bumped off. "

"I'd have been on their side, " Alice said, thinning her lips. 

"Yep, " Pop continued, "they got real hot about it. _He_ got hot too andall excited and offered to go out and kill somebody with his bare handsright off, or try to (he's a skinny little runt), if that's what he hadto do to join. We argued it over, I pointed out that we let ex-soldierscount the killings they'd done in service, and that we countedpoisonings and booby traps and such too--which are remote-controlkillings in a way--so eventually we let him in. He's doing good work. We're fortunate to have him. "

"Do you think he's really the guy who pushed the buttons?" I asked Pop. 

"How should I know?" Pop replied. "He claims to be. "

I was going to say something about people who faked confessions to get alittle easy glory, as compared to the guys who were really guilty andwould sooner be chopped up than talk about it, but at that moment afourth voice started talking in the plane. It seemed to be coming out ofthe violet patch on the North America screen. That is, it came from thegeneral direction of the screen at any rate and my mind instantly tiedit to the violet patch at Atla-Hi. It gave us a fright, I can tell you. Alice grabbed my knee with her pliers (she changed again), harder thanshe'd intended, I suppose, though I didn't let out a yip--I was toodefensively frozen. 

 * * * * *

The voice was talking a language I didn't understand at all that went upand down the scale like atonal music. 

"Sounds like Chinese, " Pop whispered, giving me a nudge. 

"It _is_ Chinese. Mandarin, " the screen responded instantly in thepurest English--at least that was how I'd describe it. PracticallyBoston. "Who are you? And where is Grayl? Come in, Grayl. "

I knew well enough who Grayl must be--or rather, have been. I looked atPop and Alice. Pop grinned, maybe a mite feebly this time, I thought, and gave me a look as if to say, "_You_ want to handle it?"

I cleared my throat. Then, "We've taken over for Grayl, " I said to thescreen. 

"Oh. " The screen hesitated, just barely. Then, "Do any of 'you' speakMandarin?"

I hardly bothered to look at Pop and Alice. "No, " I said. 

"Oh. " Again a tiny pause. "Is Grayl aboard the plane?"

"No. " I said. 

"Oh. Incapacitated in some way, I suppose?"

"Yes, " I said, grateful for the screen's tactfulness, unintentional ornot. 

"But you have taken over for him?" the screen pressed. 

"Yes, " I said, swallowing. I didn't know what I was getting us into, things were moving too fast, but it seemed the merest sense to actcooperative. 

"I'm very glad of that, " the screen said with something in its tone thatmade me feel funny--I guess it was sincerity. Then it said, "Is the--"and hesitated, and started again with "Are the blocks aboard?"

I thought. Alice pointed at the stuff she dumped out of the other seat. I said. "There's a box with a thousand or so one-inch underweight steelcubes in it. Like a child's blocks, but with buttons in them. Alongsidea box with a parachute. "

"That's what I mean, " the screen said and somehow, maybe because whoeverwas talking was trying to hide it, I caught a note of great relief. 

"Look, " the screen said, more rapidly now, "I don't know how much youknow, but we may have to work very fast. You aren't going to be able todeliver the steel cubes to us directly. In fact you aren't going to beable to land in Atlantic Highlands at all. We're sieged in by planes andground forces of Savannah Fortress. All our aircraft, such as haven'tbeen destroyed, are pinned down. You're going to have to parachute theblocks to a point as near as possible to one of our ground partiesthat's made a sortie. We'll give you a signal. I hope it will belater--nearer here, that is--but it may be sooner. Do you know how tofight the plane you're in? Operate its armament?"

"No, " I said, wetting my lip. 

"Then that's the first thing I'd best teach you. Anything you see in thehaze from now on will be from Savannah. You must shoot it down. "

CHAPTER 5

 _And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. _

 --Dover Beach, _by Matthew Arnold_

I am not going to try to describe point by point all that happened thenext half hour because there was too much of it and it involved allthree of us, sometimes doing different things at the same time, andalthough we were told a lot of things, we were seldom if ever told thewhy of them, and through it all was the constant impression that wewere dealing with human beings (I almost left out the "human" and I'mstill not absolutely sure whether I shouldn't) of vastly greaterscope--and probably intelligence too--than ourselves. 

And that was just the _basic_ confusion, to give it a name. After awhile the situation got more difficult, as I'll try to tell in duecourse. 

 * * * * *

To begin with, it was extremely weird to plunge from a rather leisurelyconfab about a fairy-tale fellowship of non-practicing murderers into ashooting war between a violet blob and a dark red puddle on a shadowyfluorescent map. The voice didn't throw any great shining lights on thistopic, because after the first--and perhaps unguarded--revelation, welearned little more of the war between Atla-Hi and Savannah Fortress andnothing of the reasons behind it. Presumably Savannah was the aggressor, reaching out north after the conquest of Birmingham, but even that wasjust a guess. It is hard to describe how shadowy it all felt to me;there were some minutes while my mind kept mixing up the whole thingwith what I'd read long ago about the Civil War: Savannah was Lee, Atla-Hi was Grant, and we had been dropped spang into the middle of thesecond Battle of the Wilderness. 

Apparently the Savannah planes had some sort of needle ray as part oftheir armament--at any rate I was warned to watch out for "swinginglines in the haze, like straight strings of pink stars" and later toldto aim at the sources of such lines. And naturally I guessed that thesteel cubes must be some crucial weapon for Atla-Hi, or ammunition for aweapon, or parts for some essential instrument like a giant computer, but the voice ignored my questions on that point and didn't fall intothe couple of crude conversational traps I tried to set. We were to dropthe cubes when told, that was all. Pop had the box of them closed againand rigged to the parachute--he took over that job because Alice and mewere busy with other things when the instructions on that camethrough--and he was told how to open the door of the plane for the drop(you just held your hand steadily on a point beside the door), but, as Isay, that was all. 

Naturally it occurred to me that once we had made the drop, Atla-Hiwould have no more use for us and might simply let us be destroyed bySavannah or otherwise--perhaps _want_ us to be destroyed--so that itmight be wisest for us to refuse to make the drop when the signal cameand hang onto those myriad steel cubes as our only bargaining point. Still, I could see no advantage to refusing _before_ the signal came. I'd have liked to discuss the point with Alice and maybe Pop too, butapparently everything we said, even whispered, could be overheard byAtla-Hi. (We never did determine, incidentally, whether Atla-Hi could_see_ into the cabin of the plane also. I don't believe they could, though they sure had it bugged for sound. )

All in all, we found out almost nothing about Atla-Hi. In fact, threewitless germs traveling in a cabin in an iron filing wasn't a baddescription of us at all. As I often say of my deductivefaculties--think--shmink! But Atla-Hi (always meaning, of course, thepersonality behind the voice from the screen) found out all it wantedabout us--and apparently knew a good deal to start with. For one thing, they must have been tracking our plane for some time, because theyguessed it was on automatic and that we could reverse its course butnothing else. Though they seemed under the impression that we couldreverse its course to Los Alamos, not the cracking plant. Here obviouslyI did get a nugget of new data, though it was just about the only one. For a moment the voice from the screen got real unguarded--anxious as itasked, "Do you know if it is true that they have stopped dying at LosAlamos, or are they merely broadcasting that to cheer us up?"

I answered, "Oh yes, they're all fine, " to that, but I couldn't havemade it very convincing, because the next thing I knew the voice wasgetting me to admit that we'd only boarded the plane somewhere in theCentral Deathlands. I even had to describe the cracking plant andfreeway and gas tanks--I couldn't think of a lie that mightn't get usinto as much trouble as the truth--and the voice said, "Oh, did Graylstay there?" and I said, "Yes, " and braced myself to do some moreadmitting, or some heavy lying, as the inspiration took me. 

But the voice continued to skirt around the question of what exactly hadhappened to Grayl. I guess they knew well enough we'd bumped him off, but didn't bring it up because they needed our cooperation--they werehandling us like children or savages, you see. 

 * * * * *

One pretty amazing point--Atla-Hi apparently knew something about Pop'sfairy-tale fellowship of non-practicing murderers, because when he hadto speak up, while he was getting instructions on preparing the stufffor the drop, the voice said, "Excuse me, but you sound like one ofthose M. A. Boys. "

Murderers Anonymous, Pop had said some of their boys called theirunorganized organization. 

"Yep, I am, " Pop admitted uncomfortably. 

"Well, a word of advice then, or perhaps I only mean gossip, " the screensaid, for once getting on a side track. "Most of our people do notbelieve you are serious about it, although you may think that you are. Our skeptics (which includes all but a very few of us) split quiteevenly between those who think that the M. A. Spirit is a terminalpsychotic illusion and those who believe it is an elaborate ruse inpreparation for some concerted attack on cities by Deathlanders. "

"Can't say that I blame the either of them, " was Pop's only comment. "Ithink I'm nuts myself and a murderer forever. " Alice glared at him forthat admission, but it seemed to do us no damage. Pop really did seemout of his depth though during this part of our adventure, more out ofhis depth than even Alice and me--I mean, as if he could only reallyfunction in the Deathland with Deathlanders and wanted to get anythingelse over quickly. 

 * * * * *

I think one reason Pop was that way was that he was feeling veryintensely something I was feeling myself: a sort of sadness andbewilderment that beings as smart as the voice from the screen soundedshould still be fighting wars. Murder, as you must know by now, I canunderstand and sympathize with deeply, but war?--no!

Oh, I can understand cultural queers fighting city squares and even geta kick out of it and whoop 'em on, but these Atla-Hi and Alamos folkseemed a different sort of cat altogether (though I'd only come to thatpoint of view today)--the kind of cat that ought to have outgrown war orthought its way around it. Maybe Savannah Fortress had simply forced thewar on them and they had to defend themselves. I hadn't contacted anySavannans--they might be as blood-simple as the Porterites. Still, Idon't know that it's always a good excuse that somebody else forced youinto war. That sort of justification can keep on until the end of time. But who's a germ to judge?

A minute later I was feeling doubly like a germ and a very lowly one, because the situation had just got more difficult and depressingtoo--the thing had happened that I said I'd tell you about in duecourse. 

The voice was just repeating its instructions to Pop on making the drop, when it broke off of a sudden and a second voice came in, a deep voicewith a sort of European accent (not Chinese, oddly)--not talking _to_us, I think, but to the first voice and overlooking or not caring thatwe could hear. 

"_Also_ tell them, " the second voice said, "that we will blow them outof the sky the instant they stop obeying us! If they should hesitate tomake the drop or if they should put a finger on the button that reversestheir course, then--_pouf!_ Such brutes understand only the language offorce. _Also_ warn them that the blocks are atomic grenades that willblow them out of the sky too if--"

"Dr. Kovalsky, will you permit me to point out--" the first voiceinterrupted, getting as close to expressing irritation as I imagine itever allowed itself to do. Then both voices cut off abruptly and thescreen was silent for ten seconds or so. I guess the first voice thoughtit wasn't nice for us to overhear Atla-Hi bickering with itself, even ifthe second voice didn't give a damn (any more than a farmer would mindthe pigs overhearing him squabble with his hired man; of course this guyseemed to overlook that we were killer-pigs, but there wasn't anythingwe could do in that line just now except get burned up). 

When the screen came on again, it was just the first voice talking oncemore, but it had something to say that was probably the result of arapid conference and compromise. 

"Attention, everyone! I wish to inform you that the plane in which youare traveling can be exploded--melted in the air, rather--if we activatea certain control at this end. We will _not_ do so, now or subsequently, if you make the drop when we give the signal and if you remain on yourpresent course until then. Afterwards you will be at liberty to reverseyour course and escape as best you may. Let me re-emphasize that whenyou told me you had taken over for Grayl I accepted that assertion infull faith and still so accept it. Is that all fully understood?"

We all told him "Yes, " though I don't imagine we sounded very happyabout it, even Pop. However I did get that funny feeling again that thevoice was being really sincere--an illusion, I supposed, but still acomforting one. 

Now while all these things were going on, believe it or not, and whilethe plane continued to bullet through the orange haze--which hadn'tshown any foreign objects in it so far, thank God, even vultures, letalone "straight strings of pink stars"--I was receiving a cram course ingunnery! (Do you wonder I don't try to tell this part of my storyconsecutively?)

 * * * * *

It turned out that Alice had been brilliantly right about one thing: ifyou pushed some of the buttons simultaneously in patterns of five theyunlocked and you could play on them like organ keys. Two sets of fivekeys, played properly, would rig out a sight just in front of theviewport and let you aim and fire the plane's main gun in any forwarddirection. There was a rearward firing gun too, that you aimed bychanging over the World Screen to a rear-view TV window, but we didn'tget around to mastering that one. In fact, in spite of my specialtalents it was all I could do to achieve a beginner's control over themain gun, and I wouldn't have managed even that except that Alice, fromthe thinking she'd been doing about patterns of five, was quick atunderstanding from the voice's descriptions which buttons were meant. She couldn't work them herself of course, what with her stump and burnthand, but she could point them out for me. 

After twenty minutes of drill I was a gunner of sorts, sprawled in theright-hand kneeling seat and intently scanning the onrushing orange hazewhich at last was beginning to change toward the bronze of evening. Ifsomething showed up in it I'd be able to make a stab at getting a shotin. Not that I knew what my gun fired--the voice wasn't giving away anyunnecessary data. 

Naturally I had asked why didn't the voice teach me to fly the plane sothat I could maneuver in case of attack, and naturally the voice hadtold me it was out of the question--much too difficult and besides theywanted us on a known course so they could plan better for the drop andrecovery. (I think maybe the voice would have given me some hints--andmaybe even told me more about the steel cubes too and how much danger wewere in from them--if it hadn't been for the second voice, whichpresumably had issued from a being who was keeping watch to make sureamong other things that the first voice didn't get soft-hearted. )

So there I was being a front gunner. Actually a part of me was getting abig bang out of it--from antique Banker's Special to needle cannon (orwhatever it was)--but at the same time another part of me was disgustedwith the idea of acting like I belonged to a live culture (even a smart, unqueer one) and working in a war (even just so as to get out of itfast), while a third part of me--one that I normally keep down--was verysimply horrified. 

Pop was back by the door with the box and 'chute, ready to make thedrop. 

Alice had no duties for the moment, but she'd suddenly started gatheringup food cans and packing them in one bag--I couldn't figure out at firstwhat she had in mind. Orderly housewife wouldn't be exactly mydescription of her occupational personality. 

Then of course everything had to happen at once. 

The voice said, "Make the drop!"

Alice crossed to Pop and thrust out the bag of cans toward him, writhingher lips in silent "talk" to tell him something. She had a knife in herburnt hand too. 

 * * * * *

But I didn't have time to do any lip-reading, because just then aglittering pink asterisk showed up in the darkening haze ahead--a wholehalf dozen straight lines spreading out from a blank central spot, as ifa super-fast gigantic spider had laid in the first strands of its web. 

Wind whistled as the door of the plane started to open. 

I fought to center my sight on the blank central spot, which driftedtoward the left. 

One of the straight lines grew dazzlingly bright. 

I heard Alice whisper fiercely, "Drop _these_!" and the part of my mindthat couldn't be applied to gunnery instantly deduced that she'd hadsome last-minute inspiration about dropping a bunch of cans instead ofthe steel cubes. 

I got the sight centered and held down the firing combo. The thoughtflashed to me: _it's a city you're firing at, not a plane_, and Iflinched. 

The dazzlingly pink line dipped down toward me. 

Behind me, the sound of a struggle. Alice snarling and Pop giving agrunt. 

Then all at once a scream from Alice, a big whoosh of wind, a flash wayahead (where I'd aimed), a spatter of hot metal inside the cabin, ablinding spot in the middle of the World Screen, a searing beam inchesfrom my neck, an electric shock that lifted me from my seat and rippedat my consciousness!

 * * * * *

When I came to (if I really ever was out--seconds later, at most) therewere no more pink lines. The haze was just its disgustingly tawnyevening self with black spots that were only after-images. The cabinstunk of ozone, but wind funneling through a hole in the one-time WorldScreen was blowing it out fast enough--Savannah had gotten in one lick, all right. And we were falling, the plane was swinging down like acrippled bird--I could feel it and there was no use kidding myself. 

But staring at the control panel wouldn't keep us from crashing if thatwas in the cards. I looked around and there were Pop and Alice glaringat each other across the closing door. He looked mean. She lookedagonized and was pressing her burnt hand into her side with her elbow asif he'd stamped on the hand, maybe. I didn't see any blood though. Ididn't see the box and 'chute either, though I did see Alice's bag ofgroceries. I guessed Pop had made the drop. 

Now, it occurred to me, was a bully time for Voice Two to melt theplane--if he hadn't already tried. My first thought had been that thespatter of hot metal had come from the Savannah craft spitting us, butthere was no way to be sure. 

I looked around at the viewport in time to see rocks and stunted treesjump out of the haze. _Good old Ray_, I thought, _always in at thedeath_. But just then the plane took a sickening bounce, as if itsantigravity had only started to operate within yards of the ground. Another lurching fall and another bounce, less violent. A couple ofrepetitions of that, each one a little gentler, and then we were sort ofbumping along on an even keel with the rocks and such sliding past fastabout a hundred feet below, I judged. We'd been spoiled for altitudework, it seemed, but we could still cripple along in some sort oflow-power repulsion field. 

I looked at the North America screen and the buttons, wondering if Ishould start us back west again or leave us set on Atla-Hi and see whatthe hell happened--at the moment I hardly cared what else Savannah didto us. I needn't have wasted the mental energy. The decision was madefor me. As I watched, the Atla-Hi button jumped up by itself and thebutton for the cracking plant went down and there was some extra bumpingas we swung around. 

Also, the violet patch of Atla-Hi went real dim and the button for it nolonger had a violet nimbus. The Los Alamos blue went dull too. Thecracking-plant dot glowed a brighter green--that was all. 

All except for one thing. As the violet dimmed I thought I heard VoiceOne very faintly (not as if speaking directly but as if the screen hadheard and remembered--not a voice but the fluorescent ghost of one):"Thank you and good luck!"

CHAPTER 6

 _Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time. _

 --Thomas de Quincey

"And a long merry siege to you, sir, and roast rat for Christmas!" Iresponded, very out loud and rather to my surprise. 

"War! How I hate war!"--that was what Pop exploded with. He didn'texactly dance in senile rage--he was still keeping too sharp a watch onAlice--but his voice sounded that way. 

"Damn you, Pop!" Alice contributed. "And you too, Ray! We might havepulled something, but you had to go obedience-happy. " Then her anger gotthe better of her grammar, or maybe Pop and me was corrupting it. "Damnthe both of you!" she finished. 

It didn't make much sense, any of it. We were just cutting loose, Iguess, after being scared to say anything for the last half hour. 

I said to Alice, "I don't know what you could have pulled, except thechain on us. " To Pop I remarked, "You may hate war, but you sure helpedthat one along. Those grenades you dropped will probably take care of afew hundred Savannans. "

"That's what you always say about me, isn't it?" he snapped back. "But Idon't suppose I should expect any kinder interpretation of my motives. "To Alice he said, "I'm sorry I had to slap your burnt fingers, sister, but you can't say I didn't warn you about my low-down tactics. " Then tome again: "I _do_ hate war, Ray. It's just murder on a bigger scale, though some of the boys give me an argument there. "

"Then why don't you go preach against war in Atla-Hi and Savannah?"Alice demanded, still very hot but not quite so bitter. 

"Yeah, Pop, how about it?" I seconded. 

"Maybe I should, " he said, thoughtful all at once. "They sure need it. "Then he grinned. "Hey, how'd this sound: HEAR THE WORLD-FAMOUS MURDERERPOP TRUMBULL TALK AGAINST WAR. WEAR YOUR STEEL THROAT PROTECTORS. Prettygood, hey?"

We all laughed at that, grudgingly at first, then with a touch ofwholeheartedness. I think we all recognized that things weren't going tobe very cheerful from here on in and we'd better not turn up our nosesat the feeblest fun. 

"I guess I didn't have anything very bright in mind, " Alice admitted tome, while to Pop she said, "All right, I forgive you for the present. "

"Don't!" Pop said with a shudder. "I hate to think of what happened tothe last bugger made the mistake of forgiving me. "

We looked around and took stock of our resources. It was time we did. Itwas getting dark fast, although we were chasing the sun, and thereweren't any cabin lights coming on and we sure didn't know of any way ofgetting any. 

We wadded a couple of satchels into the hole in the World Screen withouttrying to probe it. After a while it got warmer again in the cabin andthe air a little less dusty. Presently it started to get too smoky fromthe cigarettes we were burning, but that came later. 

We screwed off the walls the few storage bags we hadn't inspected. Theydidn't contain nothing of consequence, not even a flashlight. 

I had one last go at the buttons, though there weren't any left withnimbuses on them--the darker it got, the clearer that was. Even theAtla-Hi button wouldn't push now that it had lost its violet halo. Itried the gunnery patterns, figuring to put in a little time taking potshots at any mountains that turned up, but the buttons that had beenresponding so well a few minutes ago refused to budge. Alice suggesteddifferent patterns, but none of them worked. That console was reallylocked--maybe the shot from Savannah was partly responsible, thoughAtla-Hi remote-locking things was explanation enough. 

"The buggers!" I said. "They didn't have to tie us up _this_ tight. Going east we at least had a choice--forward or back. Now we got none. "

"Maybe we're just as well off, " Pop said. "If Atla-Hi had been able todo anything more for us--that is, if they hadn't been sieged in, Imean--they'd sure as anything have pulled us in. Pull the plane in, Imean, and picked us out of it--with a big pair of tweezers, likely asnot. And contrary to your flattering opinion of my preaching (which bythe way none of the religious boys in my outfit share--they call me'that misguided old atheist'), I don't think none of us would go overbig at Atla-Hi. "

 * * * * *

We had to agree with him there. I couldn't imagine Pop or Alice or evenme cutting much of a figure (even if we weren't murder-pariahs) with thepack of geniuses that seemed to make up the Atla-Alamos crowd. TheDouble-A Republics, to give them a name, might have their small-braintypes, but somehow I didn't think so. There must be more than oneEdison-Einstein, it seemed to me, back of antigravity and all thewonders in this plane and the other things we'd gotten hints of. Also, Grayl had seemed bred for brains as well as size, even if us smallmammals had cooked his goose. And none of the modern "countries" hadmore than a few thousand population yet, I was pretty sure, and thathardly left room for a dumbbell class. Finally, too, I got hold of amemory I'd been reaching for the last hour--how when I was a kid I'dread about some scientists who learned to talk Mandarin just for kicks. I told Alice and Pop. 

"And if _that's_ the average Atla-Alamoser's idea of mental recreation, "I said, "well, you can see what I mean. "

"I'll grant you they got a monopoly of brains, " Pop agreed. "Not sense, though, " he added doggedly. 

"Intellectual snobs, " was Alice's comment. "I know the type and I detestit. " ("You _are_ sort of intellectual, aren't you?" Pop told her, whichfortunately didn't start a riot. )

Still, I guess all three of us found it fun to chew over a bit the newslant we'd gotten on two (in a way, three) of the great "countries" ofthe modern world. (And as long as we thought of it as fun, we didn'thave to admit the envy and wistfulness that was behind our wisecracks. )

I said, "We've always figured in a general way that Alamos was theremains of a community of scientists and technicians. Now we know thesame's true of the Atla-Hi group. They're the Brookhaven survivors. "

"Manhattan Project, don't you mean?" Alice corrected. 

"Nope, that was in Colorado Springs, " Pop said with finality. 

 * * * * *

I also pointed out that a community of scientists would educate fortechnical intelligence, maybe breed for it too. And being a group pickedfor high I. Q. To begin with, they might make startlingly fast progress. You could easily imagine such folk, unimpeded by the boobs, creating awonder world in a couple of generations. 

"They got their troubles though, " Pop reminded me and that led us tospeculating about the war we'd dipped into. Savannah Fortress, we knew, was supposed to be based on some big atomic plants on the river downthat way, but its culture seemed to have a fiercer ingredient thanAtla-Alamos. Before we knew it we were, musing almost romantically aboutthe plight of Atla-Hi, besieged by superior and (it was easy to suppose)barbaric forces, and maybe distant Los Alamos in a similarpredicament--Alice reminded me how the voice had asked if they werestill dying out there. For a moment I found myself fiercely proud that Ihad been able to strike a blow against evil aggressors. At once, ofcourse, then, the revulsion came. 

"This is a hell of a way, " I said, "for three so-called realists to bemooning about things. "

"Yes, especially when your heroes kicked us out, " Alice agreed. 

Pop chuckled. "Yep, " he said, "they even took Ray's artillery away fromhim. "

"You're wrong there, Pop, " I said, sitting up. "I still got one of thegrenades--the one the pilot had in his fist. " To tell the truth I'dforgotten all about it and it bothered me a little now to feel itsnugged up in my pocket against my hip bone where the skin is thin. 

"You believe what that old Dutchman said about the steel cubes beingatomic grenades?" Pop asked me. 

"I don't know, " I said, "He sure didn't sound enthusiastic about tellingus the truth about anything. But for that matter he sounded mean enoughto tell the truth figuring we'd think it was a lie. Maybe this _is_ somesort of baby A-bomb with a fuse timed like a grenade. " I got it out andhefted it. "How about I press the button and drop it out the door? Thenwe'll know. " I really felt like doing it--restless, I guess. 

"Don't be a fool, Ray, " Alice said. 

"Don't tense up, I won't, " I told her. At the same time I made myselfthe little promise that if I ever got to feeling restless, that is, restless and _bad_, I'd just go ahead and punch the button and see whathappened--sort of leave my future up to the gods of the Deathlands, youmight say. 

"What makes you so sure it's a weapon?" Pop asked. 

"What else would it be, " I asked him, "that they'd be so hot on gettingthem in the middle of a war?"

"I don't know for sure, " Pop said. "I've made a guess, but I don't wantto tell it now. What I'm getting at, Ray, is that your first thoughtabout anything you find--in the world outside or in your own mind--isthat it's a weapon. "

"Anything worthwhile in your mind is a weapon!" Alice interjected withsurprising intensity. 

"You see?" Pop said. "That's what I mean about the both of you. Thatsort of thinking's been going on a long time. Cave man picks up a rockand right away asks himself, 'Who can I brain with this?' Doesn't occurto him for several hundred thousand years to use it to start building ahospital. "

"You know, Pop, " I said, carefully tucking the cube back in my pocket, "you _are_ sort of preachy at times. "

"Guess I am, " he said. "How about some grub?"

 * * * * *

It was a good idea. Another few minutes and we wouldn't have been ableto see to eat, though with the cans shaped to tell their contents Iguess we'd have managed. It was a funny circumstance that in this wonderplane we didn't even know how to turn on the light--and a good measureof our general helplessness. 

 * * * * *

We had our little feed and lit up again and settled ourselves. I judgedit would be an overnight trip, at least to the cracking plant--weweren't making anything like the speed we had been going east. Pop wassitting in back again and Alice and I lay half hitched around on thekneeling seats, which allowed us to watch each other. Pretty soon it gotso dark we couldn't see anything of each other but the glowing tips ofthe cigarettes and a bit of face around the mouth when the person took adeep drag. They were a good idea, those cigarettes--kept us from havingideas about the other person starting to creep around with a knife inhis hand. 

The North America screen still glowed dimly and we could watch our greendot trying to make progress. The viewport was dead black at first, thenthere came the faintest sort of bronze blotch that very slowly shiftedforward and down. The Old Moon, of course, going west ahead of us. 

After a while I realized what it was like--an old Pullman car (I'dtraveled in one once as a kid) or especially the smoker of an oldPullman, very late at night. Our crippled antigravity, working on theirregularities of the ground as they came along below, made the riderhythmically bumpy, you see. I remembered how lonely and strange thatold sleeping car had seemed to me as a kid. This felt the same. I keptwaiting for a hoot or a whistle. It was the sort of loneliness thatsettles in your bones and keeps working at you. 

"I recall the first man I ever killed--" Pop started to reminiscesoftly. 

"Shut up!" Alice told him. "Don't you ever talk about anything butmurder, Pop?"

"Guess not, " he said. "After all, it's the only really interesting topicthere is. Do you know of another?"

It was silent in the cabin for a long time after that. Then Alice said, "It was the afternoon before my twelfth birthday when they came into thekitchen and killed my father. He'd been wise, in a way, and had usliving at a spot where the bombs didn't touch us or the worst fallout. But he hadn't counted on the local werewolf gang. He'd just been slicingsome bread--homemade from our own wheat (Dad was great on back to natureand all)--but he laid down the knife. 

"Dad couldn't see any object or idea as a weapon, you see--that was hisgreat weakness. Dad couldn't even see weapons as weapons. Dad had aphilosophy of cooperation, that was his name for it, that he was goingto explain to people. Sometimes I think he was glad of the Last War, because he believed it would give him his chance. 

"But the werewolves weren't interested in philosophy and although theirknives weren't as sharp as Dad's they didn't lay them down. Afterwardsthey had themselves a meal, with me for dessert. I remember one of themused a slice of bread to sop up blood like gravy. And another washed hishands and face in the cold coffee . . . "

She didn't say anything else for a bit. Pop said softly, "That was theafternoon, wasn't it, that the fallen angels . . . " and then just said, "My big mouth. "

"You were going to say 'the afternoon they killed God?'" Alice askedhim. "You're right, it was. They killed God in the kitchen thatafternoon. That's how I know he's dead. Afterwards they would havekilled me too, eventually, except--"

 * * * * *

Again she broke off, this time to say, "Pop, do you suppose I can havebeen thinking about myself as the Daughter of God all these years? Thatthat's why everything seems so intense?"

"I don't know, " Pop said. "The religious boys say we're all children ofGod. I don't put much stock in it--or else God sure has some lousychildren. Go on with your story. "

"Well, they would have killed me too, except the leader took a fancy tome and got the idea of training me up for a Weregirl or She-wolf Deb orwhatever they called it. "

"That was my first experience of ideas as weapons. He got an idea aboutme and I used it to kill him. I had to wait three months for myopportunity. I got him so lazy he let me shave him. He bled to death thesame way as Dad. "

"Hum, " Pop commented after a bit, "that was a chiller, all right. I gotto remember to tell it to Bill--it was somebody killing his mother thatgot _him_ started. Alice, you had about as good a justification for yourfirst murder as any I remember hearing. "

"Yet, " Alice said after another pause, with just a trace of the oldsarcasm creeping back into her voice, "I don't suppose you think I wasright to do it?"

"Right? Wrong? Who knows?" Pop said almost blusteringly. "Sure you werejustified in a whole pack of ways. Anybody'd sympathize with you. A manoften has fine justification for the first murder he commits. But as youmust know, it's not that the first murder's always so bad in itself asthat it's apt to start you on a killing spree. Your sense of values getsshifted a tiny bit and never shifts back. But you know all that and whoam I to tell you anything, anyway? I've killed men because I didn't likethe way they spit. And may very well do it again if I don't keepwatching myself and my mind ventilated. "

"Well, Pop, " Alice said, "I didn't always have such dandy justificationfor my killings. Last one was a moony old physicist--he fixed me theGeiger counter I carry. A silly old geek--I don't know how he survivedso long. Maybe an exile or a runaway. You know, I often attach myselfto the elderly do-gooder type like my father was. Or like you, Pop. "

Pop nodded. "It's good to know yourself, " he said. 

 * * * * *

There was a third pause and then, although I hadn't exactly beenintending to, I said, "Alice had justification for her first murder, personal justification that an ape would understand. I had no personaljustification at all for mine, yet I killed about a million people at amodest estimate. You see, I was the boss of the crew that took care ofthe hydrogen missile ticketed for Moscow, and when the ticket wasfinally taken up I was the one to punch it. My finger on the firingbutton, I mean. "

I went on, "Yeah, Pop, I was one of the button-pushers. There werereally quite a few of us, of course--that's why I get such a laugh outof stories about being or rubbing out the _one_ guy who pushed all thebuttons. "

"That so?" Pop said with only mild-sounding interest. "In that case youought to know--"

We didn't get to hear right then who I ought to know because I had a fitof coughing and we realized the cigarette smoke was getting just toothick. Pop fixed the door so it was open a crack and after a while theatmosphere got reasonably okay though we had to put up with a low lonelywhistling sound. 

"Yeah, " I continued, "I was the boss of the missile crew and I wore avery handsome uniform with impressive insignia--not the bully oldstripes I got on my chest now--and I was very young and handsome myself. We were all very young in that line of service, though a few of the menunder me were a little older. Young and dedicated. I remember feeling avery deep and grim--and _clean_--responsibility. But I wonder sometimesjust how deep it went or how clean it really was. 

"I had an uncle flew in the war they fought to lick fascism, bombardieron a Flying Fortress or something, and once when he got drunk he told mehow some days it didn't bother him at all to drop the eggs on Germany;the buildings and people down there seemed just like toys that a kidsets up to kick over, and the whole business about as naive fun aspoking an anthill. 

"_I_ didn't even have to fly over at seven miles what I was going to beaiming at. Only I remember sometimes getting out a map and looking at acertain large dot on it and smiling a little and softly saying, 'Pow!'--and then giving a little conventional shudder and folding up themap quick. 

"Naturally we told ourselves we'd never have to do it, fire the thing, Imean, we joked about how after twenty years or so we'd all be given jobsas museum attendants of this same bomb, deactivated at last. Butnaturally it didn't work out that way. There came the day when our sideof the world got hit and the orders started cascading down from DefenseCoordinator Bigelow--"

"Bigelow?" Pop interrupted. "Not Joe Bigelow?"

"Joseph A. , I believe, " I told him, a little annoyed. 

"Why he's my boy then, the one I was telling you about--the skinny runthad this horn-handle! Can you beat that?" Pop sounded startlingly happy. "Him and you'll have a lot to talk about when you get together. "

I wasn't so sure of that myself, in fact my first reaction was that theopposite would be true. To be honest I was for the first moment morethan a little annoyed at Pop interrupting my story of my Big Grief--forit was that to me, make no mistake. Here my story had finally beenteased out of me, against all expectation, after decades of repressionand in spite of dozens of assorted psychological blocks--and here wasPop interrupting it for the sake of a lot of trivial organizationalgossip about Joes and Bills and Georges we'd never heard of and whatthey'd say or think!

But then all of a sudden I realized that I didn't really care, that itdidn't feel like a Big Grief any more, that just starting to tell aboutit after hearing Pop and Alice tell their stories had purged it of thatunnecessary weight of feeling that had made it a millstone around myneck. It seemed to me now that I could look down at Ray Baker from aconsiderable height (but not an angelic or contemptuously superiorheight) and ask myself _not_ why he had grieved so much--that wasunderstandable and even desirable--but why he had grieved so _uselessly_in such a stuffy little private hell. 

And it _would_ be interesting to find out how Joseph A. Bigelow hadfelt. 

"How does it feel, Ray, to kill a million people?"

 * * * * *

I realized that Alice had asked me the question several seconds back andit was hanging in the air. 

"That's just what I've been trying to tell you, " I told her and startedto explain it all over again--the words poured out of me now. I won'tput them down here--it would take too long--but they were honest wordsas far as I knew and they eased me. 

I couldn't get over it: here were us three murderers feeling a trust andunderstanding and sharing a communion that I wouldn't have believedpossible between _any_ two or three people in the Age of the Deaders--orin _any_ age, to tell the truth. It was against everything I knew ofDeathland psychology, but it was happening just the same. Oh, ourstrange isolation had something to do with it, I knew, and thatPullman-car memory hypnotizing my mind, and our reactions to the voicesand violence of Atla-Alamos, but in spite of all that I ranked it as awonder. I felt an inward freedom and easiness that I never would havebelieved possible. Pop's little disorganized organization had reallygot hold of something, I couldn't deny it. 

 * * * * *

Three treacherous killers talking from the bottoms of their hearts andbelieving each other!--for it never occurred to me to doubt that Pop andAlice were feeling exactly like I was. In fact, we were all so sure ofit that we didn't even mention our communion to each other. Perhaps wewere a little afraid we would rub off the bloom. We just enjoyed it. 

We must have talked about a thousand things that night and smoked acouple of hundred cigarettes. After a while we started taking littlecatnaps--we'd gotten too much off our chests and come to feel tootranquil for even our excitement to keep us awake. I remember the firsttime I dozed waking up with a cold start and grabbing for Mother--andthen hearing Pop and Alice gabbing in the dark, and remembering what hadhappened, and relaxing again with a smile. 

Of all things, Pop was saying, "Yep, I imagine Ray must be good to makelove to, murderers almost always are, they got the fire. It reminds meof what a guy named Fred told me, one of our boys . . . "

Mostly we took turns going to sleep, though I think there were timeswhen all three of us were snoozing. About the fifth time I woke up, after some tighter shut-eye, the orange soup was back again outside andAlice was snoring gently in the next seat and Pop was up and had one ofhis knives out. 

He was looking at his reflection in the viewport. His face gleamed. Hewas rubbing butter into it. 

"Another day, another pack of troubles, " he said cheerfully. 

The tone of his remark jangled my nerves, as that tone generally doesearly in the morning. I squeezed my eyes. "Where are we?" I asked. 

He poked his elbow toward the North America screen. The two green dotswere almost one. 

"My God, we're practically there, " Alice said for me. She'd waked fast, Deathlands style. 

"I know, " Pop said, concentrating on what he was doing, "but I aim to beshaved before they commence landing maneuvers. "

"You think automatic will land us?" Alice asked. "What if we just startcircling around?"

"We can figure out what to do when it happens, " Pop said, whittling awayat his chin. "Until then, I'm not interested. There's still a couple ofbottles of coffee in the sack. I've had mine. "

I didn't join in this chit-chat because the green dots and Alice's firstremark had reminded me of a lot deeper reason for my jangled nerves thanPop's cheerfulness. Night was gone, with its shielding cloak and itsfeeling of being able to talk forever, and the naked day was here, withits demands for action. It is not so difficult to change your wholeview of life when you are flying, or even bumping along above the groundwith friends who understand, but soon, I knew, I'd be down in the dustwith something I never wanted to see again. 

"Coffee, Ray?"

"Yeah, I guess so. " I took the bottle from Alice and wondered whether myface looked as glum as hers. 

"They shouldn't salt butter, " Pop asserted. "It makes it lousy forshaving. "

"It was the _best_ butter, " Alice said. 

"Yeah, " I said. "The Dormouse, when they buttered the watch. "

It may be true that feeble humor is better than none. I don't know. 

"What are you two yakking about?" Pop demanded. 

"A book we both read, " I told him. 

"Either of you writers?" Pop asked with sudden interest. "Some of theboys think we should have a book about us. I say it's too soon, but theysay we might all die off or something. Whoa, Jenny! Easy does it. Gently, please!"

That last remark was by way of recognizing that the plane had started anauthoritative turn to the left. I got a sick and cold feeling. This wasit. 

Pop sheathed his knife and gave his face a final rub. Alice belted onher satchel. I reached for my knapsack, but I was staring through theviewport, dead ahead. 

The haze lightened faintly, three times. I remembered the St. Elmo'sfire that had flamed from the cracking plant. 

"Pop, " I said--almost whined, to be truthful, "why'd the bugger everhave to land here in the first place? He was rushing stuff they neededbad at Atla-Hi--why'd he have to break his trip?"

"That's easy, " Pop said. "He was being a bad boy. At least that's mytheory. He was supposed to go straight to Atla-Hi, but there wassomebody he wanted to check up on first. He stopped here to see hisgirlfriend. Yep, his girlfriend. She tried to warn him off--that's myexplanation of the juice that flared out of the cracking plant andinterfered with his landing, though I'm sure she didn't intend the last. By the way, whatever she turned on to give him the warning must still beturned on. But Grayl came on down in spite of it. "

 * * * * *

Before I could assimilate that, the seven deformed gas tanksmaterialized in the haze. We got the freeway in our sights and steadiedand slowed and kept slowing. The plane didn't graze the cracking plantthis time, though I'd have sworn it was going to hit it head on. When Isaw we _weren't_ going to hit it, I wanted to shut my eyes, but Icouldn't. 

The stain was black now and the Pilot's body was thicker than Iremembered--bloated. But that wouldn't last long. Three or four vultureswere working on it. 

CHAPTER 7

 _Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread, As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead. _

 --A Forsaken Garden, _by Charles Swinburne_

Pop was first down. Between us we helped Alice. Before joining them Itook a last look at the control panel. The cracking plant button was upagain and there was a blue nimbus on another button. For Los Alamos, Isupposed. I was tempted to push it and get away solo, but then Ithought, _nope, there's nothing for me at the other end and theloneliness will be worse than what I got to face here_. I climbed out. 

I didn't look at the body, although we were practically on top of it. Isaw a little patch of silver off to one side and remembered the gun thathad melted. The vultures had waddled off but only a few yards. 

"We could kill them, " Alice said to Pop. 

"Why?" he responded. "Didn't some Hindus use them to take care of deadbodies? Not a bad idea, either. "

"Parsees, " Alice amplified. 

"Yep, Parsees, that's what I meant. Give you a nice clean skeleton in amatter of days. "

Pop was leading us past the body toward the cracking plant. I heard theflies buzzing loudly. I felt terrible. I wanted to be dead myself. Justwalking along after Pop was an awful effort. 

"His girl was running a hidden observation tower here, " Pop was sayingnow. "Weather and all that, I suppose. Or maybe setting up a robotstation of some kind. I couldn't tell you about her before, because youwere both in a mood to try to rub out anybody remotely connected withthe Pilot. In fact, I did my best to lead you astray, letting you thinkI'd been the one to scream and all. Even now, to be honest about it, Idon't know if I'm doing the right thing telling and showing you allthis, but a man's got to take some risks whatever he does. "

"Say, Pop, " I said dully, "isn't she apt to take a shot at us orsomething?" Not that I'd have minded on my own account. "Or are you andher that good friends?"

"Nope, Ray, " he said, "she doesn't even know me. But I don't think she'sin a position to do any shooting. You'll see why. Hey, she hasn't evenshut the door. That's bad. "

He seemed to be referring to a kind of manhole cover standing on itsedge just inside the open-walled first story of the cracking plant. Heknelt and looked down the hole the cover was designed to close off. 

"Well, at least she didn't collapse at the bottom of the shaft, " hesaid. "Come on, let's see what happened. " And he climbed into the shaft. 

We followed him like zombies. At least that's how I felt. The shaft wasabout twenty feet deep. There were foot- and hand-holds. It got stuffyright away, and warmer, in spite of the shaft being open at the top. 

At the bottom there was a short horizontal passage. We had to duck toget through it. When we could straighten up we were in a large andluxurious bomb-resistant dugout, to give it a name. And it was stuffierand hotter than ever. 

There was a lot of scientific equipment around and several small controlpanels reminding me of the one in the back of the plane. Some of them, Isupposed, connected with instruments, weather and otherwise, hidden upin the skeletal structure of the cracking plant. And there were signs ofoccupancy, a young woman's occupancy--clothes scattered around in afrivolous way, and some small objects of art, and a slightly more thanlife-size head in clay that I guessed the occupant must have beensculpting. I didn't give that last more than the most fleeting look, strictly unintentional to begin with, because although it wasn'tfinished I could tell whose head it was supposed to be--the Pilot's. 

 * * * * *

The whole place was finished in dull silver like the cabin of the plane, and likewise it instantly struck me as having a living personality, partly the Pilot's and partly someone else's--the personality of amarriage. Which wasn't a bit nice, because the whole place smelt ofdeath. 

But to tell the truth I didn't give the place more than the quickestlook-over, because my attention was rivetted almost at once on a longwide couch with the covers kicked off it and on the body there. 

The woman was about six feet tall and built like a goddess. Her hair wasblonde and her skin tanned. She was lying on her stomach and she wasnaked. 

She didn't come anywhere near my libido, though. She looked sick todeath. Her face, twisted towards us, was hollow-cheeked and flushed. Hereyes, closed, were sunken and dark-circled. She was breathing shallowlyand rapidly through her open mouth, gasping now and then. 

I got the crazy impression that all the heat in the place was comingfrom her body, radiating from her fever. 

And the whole place stunk of death. Honestly it seemed to me that thisdugout was Death's underground temple, the bed Death's altar, and thewoman Death's sacrifice. (Had I unconsciously come to worship Death as agod in the Deathlands? I don't really know. There it gets too deep forme. )

No, she didn't come within a million miles of my libido, but there wasanother part of me that she was eating at . . . 

If guilt's a luxury, then I'm a plutocrat. 

. . . Eating at until I was an empty shell, until I had no props left, until I wanted to die then and there, until I figured I had to die . . . 

There was a faint sharp hiss right at my elbow. I looked and found that, unbeknownst to myself, I'd taken the steel cube out of my pocket andholding it snuggled between my first and second fingers I'd punched thebutton with my thumb just as I'd promised myself I would if I got toreally feeling bad. 

It goes to show you that you should never give your mind any kind ofinstructions even half in fun, unless you're prepared to have themcarried out whether you approve later or not. 

Pop saw what I'd done and looked at me strangely. "So you had to dieafter all, Ray, " he said softly. "Most of us find out we have to, oneway or another. "

We waited. Nothing happened. I noticed a very faint milky cloud a fewinches across hanging in the air by the cube. 

Thinking right away of poison gas, I jerked away a little, dispersingthe cloud. 

"What's that?" I demanded of no one in particular. 

"I'd say, " said Pop, "that that's something that squirted out of a tinyhole in the side of the cube opposite the button. A hole so nearlymicroscopic you wouldn't see it unless you looked for it hard. Ray, Idon't think you're going to get your baby A-blast, and what's more I'mafraid you've wasted something that's damn valuable. But don't let itworry you. Before I dropped those cubes for Atla-Hi I snagged one. "

And darn if he didn't pull the brother of my cube out of his pocket. 

"Alice, " he said, "I noticed a half pint of whiskey in your satchel whenwe got the salve. Would you put some on a rag and hand it to me. "

Alice looked at him like he was nuts, but while her eyes were lookingher pliers and her gloved hand were doing what he told her. 

Pop took the rag and swabbed a spot on the sick woman's nearest buttockand jammed the cube against the spot and pushed the button. 

"It's a jet hypodermic, folks, " he said. 

He took the cube away and there was the welt to substantiate hisstatement. 

"Hope we got to her in time, " he said. "The plague is tough. Now I guessthere's nothing for us to do but wait, maybe for quite a while. "

I felt shaken beyond all recognition. 

 * * * * *

"Pop, you old caveman detective!" I burst out. "When did you get thatidea for a steel hospital?" Don't think I was feeling anywhere near thatgay. It was reaction, close to hysterical. 

Pop was taken aback, but then he grinned. "I had a couple of clues thatyou and Alice didn't, " he said. "I knew there was a very sick womaninvolved. And I had that bout with Los Alamos fever I told you. They'vehad a lot of trouble with it, I believe--some say its spores come fromoutside the world with the cosmic dust--and now it seems to have beencarried to Atla-Hi. Let's hope they've found the answer this time. Alice, maybe we'd better start getting some water into this gal. "

After a while we sat down and fitted the facts together more orderly. Pop did the fitting mostly. Alamos researchers must have been workingfor years on the plague as it ravaged intermittently, maybe withmutations and ET tricks to make the job harder. Very recently they'dfound a promising treatment (cure, we hoped) and prepared it for rushshipment to Atla-Hi, where the plague was raging too and they weresieged in by Savannah as well. Grayl was picked to fly the serum, ordrug or whatever it was. But he knew or guessed that this lone womanobserver (because she'd fallen out of radio communication or something)had come down with the plague too and he decided to land some serum forher, probably without authorization. 

"How do we know she's his girlfriend?" I asked. 

"Or wife, " Pop said tolerantly. "Why, there was that bag of woman'sstuff he was carrying, frilly things like a man would bring for a woman. Who else'd he be apt to make a special stop for?

"Another thing, " Pop said. "He must have been using jets to hurry histrip. We heard them, you know. "

That seemed about as close a reconstruction of events as we could get. Strictly hypothetical, of course. Deathlanders trying to figure out whatgoes on inside a "country" like Atla-Alamos and _why_ are sort of likefoxes trying to understand world politics, or wolves the Gothicmigrations. Of course we're all human beings, but that doesn't mean asmuch as it sounds. 

 * * * * *

Then Pop told us how he'd happened to be on the scene. He'd been doing a"tour of duty", as he called it, when he spotted this woman'sobservatory and decided to hang around anonymously and watch over herfor a few days and maybe help protect her from some dangerous charactersthat he knew were in the neighborhood. 

"Pop, that sounds like a lousy idea to me, " I objected. "Risky, I mean. Spying on another person, watching them without their knowing, would bethe surest way to stir up in me the idea of murdering them. Safest thingfor me to do in that situation would be to turn around and run. "

"_You_ probably should, " he agreed. "For now, anyway. It's all a matterof knowing your own strength and stage of growth. Me, it helps to givemyself these little jobs. And the essence of 'em is that the otherperson shouldn't know I'm helping. "

It sounded like knighthood and pilgrimage and the Boy Scouts all overagain--for murderers. Well, why not?

Pop had seen this woman come out of the manhole a couple of times andlook around and then go back down and he'd got the impression she wassick and troubled. He'd even guessed she might be coming down withAlamos fever. He'd seen us arrive, of course, and that had bothered him. Then when the plane landed she'd come up again, acting out of her head, but when she'd seen the Pilot and us going for him she'd given thatscream and collapsed at the top of the shaft. He'd figured the onlything he could do for her was keep us occupied. Besides, now that heknew for sure we were murderers he'd started to burn with the desire totalk to us and maybe help us quit killing if we seemed to want to. Itwas only much later, in the middle of our trip, that he began to suspectthat the steel cubes were jet hypodermics. 

While Pop had been telling us all this, we hadn't been watching thewoman so closely. Now Alice called our attention to her. Her skin wascovered with fine beads of perspiration, like diamonds. 

"That's a good sign, " Pop said and Alice started to wipe her off. Whileshe was doing that the woman came to in a groggy sort of way and Pop fedher some thin soup and in the middle of his doing it she dropped off tosleep. 

Alice said, "Any other time I would be wild to kill another woman thatbeautiful. But she has been so close to death that I would feel I wasrobbing another murderer. I suppose there is more behind the change inmy feelings than that, though. "

"Yeah, a little, I suppose, " Pop said. 

I didn't have anything to say about my own feelings. Certainly not outloud. I knew that they had changed and that they were still changing. Itwas complicated. 

After a while it occurred to me and Alice to worry whether we mightn'tcatch this woman's sickness. It would serve us right, of course, butplague is plague. But Pop reassured us. "Actually I snagged threecubes, " he said. "That should take care of you two. I figure I'mimmune. "

Time wore on. Pop dragged out the harmonica, as I'd been afraid hewould, but his playing wasn't too bad. "Tenting Tonight, " "When JohnnieComes Marching Home, " and such. We had a meal. 

The Pilot's woman woke up again, in her full mind this time or somethinglike it. We were clustered around the bed, smiling a little I supposeand looking inquiring. Being even assistant nurses makes you allconcerned about the patient's health and state of mind. 

Pop helped her sit up a little. She looked around. She saw me and Alice. Recognition came into her eyes. She drew away from us with a look ofloathing. She didn't say a word, but the look stayed. 

Pop drew me aside and whispered, "I think it would be a nice gesture ifyou and Alice took a blanket and went up and sewed him into it. Inoticed a big needle and some thread in her satchel. " He looked me inthe eye and added, "You can't expect this woman to feel any other waytoward you, you know. Now or ever. "

He was right of course. I gave Alice the high sign and we got out. 

No point in dwelling on the next scene. Alice and me sewed up in ablanket a big guy who'd been dead a day and worked over by vultures. That's all. 

About the time we'd finished, Pop came up. 

"She chased me out, " he explained. "She's getting dressed. When I toldher about the plane, she said she was going back to Los Alamos. She'snot fit to travel, of course, but she's giving herself injections. It'snone of our business. Incidentally, she wants to take the body back withher. I told her how we'd dropped the serum and how you and Alice hadhelped and she listened. "

The Pilot's woman wasn't long after Pop. She must have had troublegetting up the shaft, she had a little trouble even walking straight, but she held her head high. She was wearing a dull silver tunic andsandals and cloak. As she passed me and Alice I could see the look ofloathing come back into her eyes, and her chin went a little higher. Ithought, why shouldn't she want us dead? Right now she probably wants tobe dead herself. 

Pop nodded to us and we hoisted up the body and followed her. It wasalmost too heavy a load even for the three of us. 

As she reached the plane a silver ladder telescoped down to her frombelow the door. I thought, _the Pilot must have had it keyed to her someway, so it would let down for her but nobody else. A very lovelygesture. _

The ladder went up after her and we managed to lift the body above ourheads, our arms straight, and we walked it through the door of the planethat way, she receiving it. 

The door closed and we stood back and the plane took off into the orangehaze, us watching it until it was swallowed. 

Pop said, "Right now, I imagine you two feel pretty good in a screwed-upsort of way. I know I do. But take it from me, it won't last. A day ortwo and we're going to start feeling another way, the _old_ way, if wedon't get busy. "

I knew he was right. You don't shake Old Urge Number One anything likethat easy. 

"So, " said Pop, "I got places I want to show you. Guys I want you tomeet. And there's things to do, a lot of them. Let's get moving. "

So there's my story. Alice is still with me (Urge Number Two is evenharder to shake, supposing you wanted to) and we haven't killed anybodylately. (Not since the Pilot, in fact, but it doesn't do to boast. )We're making a stab (my language!) at doing the sort of work Pop does inthe Deathlands. It's tough but interesting. I still carry a knife, butI've given Mother to Pop. He has it strapped to him alongside Alice'sscrew-in blade. 

Atla-Hi and Alamos still seem to be in existence, so I guess the serumworked for them generally as it did for the Pilot's Woman; they haven'tsent us any medals, but they haven't sent a hangman's squad after useither--which is more than fair, you'll admit. But Savannah, turned backfrom Atla-Hi, is still going strong: there's a rumor they have an armyat the gates of Ouachita right now. We tell Pop he'd better startpreaching fast--it's one of our standard jokes. 

There's also a rumor that a certain fellowship of Deathlanders is doingsurprisingly well, a rumor that there's a new America growing in theDeathlands--an America that never need kill again. But don't put toomuch stock in it. Not _too_ much. 

THE END

Transcriber's Note:

 This etext was produced from _Amazing Science Fiction Stories_ January 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. Copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.