"Life is a bunch of cells walking around with a common purpose. If that common purpose is to get my ass-"

"Oh,William. You sound like old Cortez."

"Cortez kept us alive."

"Not many of us," she snapped.

I rolled over and studied the ceiling tiles. She traced little designs on my chest, pushing the sweat around with her fingertip. "I'm sorry, William. I guess we're both just trying to adjust."

"That's okay. You're right, anyhow."

We talked for a long time. The only urban center Mary-gay had been to since our publicity rounds (which were very sheltered) was Sioux Falls. She had gone with her parents and the commune bodyguard. It sounded like a scaled-down version of Washington: the same problems, but not as acute.

We ticked off the things that bothered us: violence, high cost of living, too many people everywhere. I'd have added homolife, but Marygay said I just didn't appreciate the social dynamic that had led to it; it had been inevitable. The only thing she said she had against it was that it took so many of the prettiest men out of circulation.

And the main thing that was wrong was that everything seemed to have gotten just a little worse, or at best remained the same. You would have predicted that at least a few facets of everyday life would improve markedly in twenty-two years. Her father contended the War was behind it all: any person who showed a shred of talent was sucked up by UNEF; the very best fell to the Elite Conscription Act and wound up being cannon fodder.

It was hard not to agree with him. Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products. Such improvements as had been made on late-twentieth-century technology were-like tachyon bombs and warships two kilometers long-at best, interesting developments of things that only required the synergy of money and existing engineering techniques. Social reform? The world was technically under martial law. As for art, I'm not sure I know good from bad. But artists to some extent have to reflect the temper of the times. Paintings and sculpture were full of torture and dark brooding; movies seemed static and plotless; music was dominated by nostalgic revivals of earlier forms; architecture was mainly concerned with finding someplace to put everybody; literature was damn near incomprehensible. Most people seemed to spend most of their time trying to find ways to outwit the government, trying to scrounge a few extra K's or ration tickets without putting their lives in too much danger.

And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air-but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist's monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate.

But this war. . . the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional-more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth's economy would collapse.

* * *

You approached the dirigible by means of a small propeller-driven aircraft that drifted up to match trajectories and docked alongside. A clerk took our baggage and we checked our weapons with the purser, then went outside.

Just about everybody on the flight was standing out on the promenade deck, watching Manhattan creep toward the horizon. It was an eerie sight. The day was very still, so the bottom thirty or forty stories of the buildings were buried in smog. It looked like a city built on a cloud, a thunderhead floating. We watched it for a while and then went inside to eat.

The meal was elegantly served and simple: filet of beef, two vegetables, wine. Cheese and fruit and more wine for dessert. No fiddling with ration tickets; a loophole in the rationing laws implied that they were not required for meals consumed en route, on intercontinental transport.

We spent a lazy, comfortable three days crossing the Atlantic. The dirigibles had been a new thing when we first left Earth, and now they had turned out to be one of the few successful new financial ventures of the late twentieth century.. . the company that built them had bought up a few obsolete nuclear weapons; one bomb-sized hunk of plutonium would keep the whole fleet in the air for years. And, once launched, they never did come down. Floating hotels, supplied and maintained by regular shuttles, they were one last vestige of luxury in a world where nine billion people had something to eat, and almost nobody had enough.

London was not as dismal from the air as New York City had been; the air was clean even if the Thames was poison. We packed our handbags, claimed our weapons, and landed on a VTO pad atop the London Hilton. We rented a couple of tricycles at the hotel and, maps in hand, set off for Regent Street, planning on dinner at the venerable Cafe Royal.

The tricycles were little armored vehicles, stabilized gyroscopically so they couldn't be tipped over. Seemed overly cautious for the part of London we traveled through, but I supposed there were probably sections as rough as Washington.

I got a dish of marinated venison and Marygay got salmon; both very good but astoundingly expensive. At first I was a bit overawed by the huge room, filled with plush and mirrors and faded gilding, very quiet even with a dozen tables occupied, and we talked in whispers until we realized that was foolish.

Over coffee I asked Marygay what the deal was with her parents.

"Oh, it happens often enough," she said. "Dad got mixed up in some ration ticket thing. He'd gotten some black market tickets that turned out to be counterfeit. Cost him his job and he probably would have gone to jail, but while he was waiting for trial a bodysnatcher got him."

"Bodysnatcher?"

"That's right. All the commune organizations have them. They've got to get reliable farm labor, people who aren't eligible for relief. . . people who can't just lay down their tools and walk off when it gets rough. Almost everybody can get enough assistance to stay alive, though; everyone who isn't on the government's fecal roster."

"So he skipped out before his trial came up?"

She nodded. "It was a case of choosing between commune life, which he knew wasn't easy, and going on the dole after a few years' working on a prison farm; exconvicts can't get legitimate jobs. They had to forfeit their condominium, which they'd put up for bail, but the government would've gotten that anyhow, once he was in jail.

"So the bodysnatcher offered him and Mother new identities, transportation to the commune, a cottage, and a plot of land. They took it."

"And what did the bodysnatcher get?"

"He himself probably didn't get anything. The commune got their ration tickets; they were allowed to keep their money, although they didn't have very much-"

"What happens if they get caught?"

"Not a chance." She laughed. "The communes provide over half the country's produce-they're really just an unofficial arm of the government. I'm sure the CBI knows exactly where they are.. . . Dad grumbles that it's just a fancy way of being in jail anyhow."

"What a weird setup."

"Well, it keeps the land farmed." She pushed her empty dessert plate a symbolic centimeter away from her. "And they're eating better than most people, better than they ever had in the city. Mom knows a hundred ways to fix chicken and potatoes."

After dinner we went to a musical show. The hotel had gotten us tickets to a "cultural translation" of the old rock opera Hair. The program explained that they had taken some liberties with the original choreography, because back in those days they didn't allow actual coition on stage. The music was pleasantly old-fashioned, but neither of us was quite old enough to work up any blurry-eyed nostalgia over it. Still, it was much more enjoyable than the movies I'd seen, and some of the physical feats performed were quite inspiring. We slept late the next morning.

We dutifully watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, walked through the British Museum, ate fish and chips, ran up to Stratford-on-Avon and caught the Old Vic doing an incomprehensible play about a mad king, and didn't get into any trouble until the day before we were to leave for Lisbon.

It was about 2 A.M. and we were tooling our tricycles down a nearly deserted thoroughfare. Turned a corner and there was a gang of boys beating the hell out of someone. I screeched to the curb and leaped out of my vehicle, firing the shotgun-pistol over their heads.

It was a girl they were attacking; it was rape. Most of them scattered, but one pulled a pistol out of his coat and I shot him. I remember trying to aim for his arm. The blast hit his shoulder and ripped off his arm and what seemed to be half of his chest; it flung him two meters to the side of a building and he must have been dead before he hit the ground.

The others ran, one of them shooting at me with a little pistol as he went. I watched him trying to kill me for the longest time before it occurred to me to shoot back. I sent one blast way high and he dove into an alley and disappeared.

The girl looked dazedly around, saw the mutilated body of her attacker, and staggered to her feet and ran off screaming, naked from the waist down. I knew I should have tried to stop her, but I couldn't find my voice and my feet seemed nailed to the sidewalk. A tricycle door slammed and Marygay was beside me.

"What hap-" She gasped, seeing the dead man. "Whwhat was he doing?"

I just stood there stupefied. I'd certainly seen enough death these past two years, but this was a different thing

• . . there was nothing noble in being crushed to death by the failure of some electronic component, or in having your suit fail and freeze you solid; or even dying in a shoot-out with the incomprehensible enemy. . . but death seemed natural in that setting. Not on a quaint little street in old-fashioned London, not for trying to steal what most people would give freely.

Marygay was pulling my arm. "We've got to get out of here. They'll brainwipe you!"

She was tight. I turned and took one step and fell to the concrete. I looked down at the leg that had betrayed me and bright red blood was pulsing out of a small hole in my calf. Marygay tore a strip of cloth from her blouse and started to bind it. I remember thinking it wasn't a big enough wound to go into shock over, but my ears started to ring and I got lightheaded and everything went red and fuzzy. Before I went under, I heard a siren wailing in the distance.

Fortunately, the police also picked up the girl, who was wandering down the street a few blocks away. They compared her version of the thing with mine, both of us under hypnosis. They let me go with a stern admonition to leave law enforcement up to professional law enforcers.

I wanted to get out of the cities: just put a pack on my back and wander through the woods for a while, get my mind straightened out. So did Marygay. But we tried to make arrangements and found that the country was worse than the cities. Farms were practically armed camps, the areas between ruled by nomad gangs who survived by making lightning raids into villages and farms, murdering and plundering for a few minutes, and then fading back into the forest, before help could arrive.

Still, Britishers called their island "the most civilized country in Europe." From what we'd heard about France and Spain and Germany, especially Germany, they were probably right.

I talked it over with Marygay, and we decided to cut short our tour and go back to the States.  We could finish the tour after we'd become acclimated to the twenty-first century. It was just too much foreignness to take in one dose.

The dirigible line refunded most of our money and we took a conventional suborbital flight back home. The high altitude made my leg throb, though it was nearly healed.

They'd made great strides in the treatment of gunshot wounds, in the past twenty years. Lots of practice.

We split up at Ellis. Her description of commune life appealed to me more than the city; I made arrangements to join her after a week or so, and went back to Washington.

10

I rang the bell and a strange woman answered the door, opening it a couple of centimeters and peering through.

"Pardon me," I said, "isn't this Mrs. Mandella's residence?"

"Oh, you must be William!" She closed the door and unfastened the chains and opened it wide. "Beth, look who's here!"

My mother came into the living room from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. "Willy.. . what are you doing back so soon?"

"Well, it's-it's a long story."

"Sit down, sit down," the other woman said. "Let me get you a drink, don't start till I get back."

"Wait," my mother said. "I haven't even introduced you two. William, this is Rhonda Wilder. Rhonda, William."

"I've been so looking forward to meeting you," she said. "Beth has told me all about you-one cold beer, right?"

"Right." She was likable enough, a trim middle-aged woman. I wondered why I hadn't met her before. I asked my mother whether she was a neighbor.

"Uh. . . really more than that, William. She's been my roommate for a couple of years. That's why I had an extra room when you came home-a single person isn't allowed two bedrooms."

"But why-"

"I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to feel that you were putting her out of her room while you stayed here. And you weren't, actually; she has-"

"That's right." Rhonda came in with the beer. "I've got relatives in Pennsylvania, out in the country. I can stay with them any time."

"Thanks." I took the beer. "Actually, I won't be here long. I'm kind of en route to South Dakota. I could find another place to flop."

"Oh, no," Rhonda said. "I can take the couch." I was too old-fashioned male-chauv to allow that; we discussed it for a minute and I wound up with the couch.

I filled Rhonda in on who Marygay was and told them about our disturbing experiences in England, how we came back to get our bearings. I had expected my mother to be horrified that I had killed a man, but she accepted it without comment. Rhonda clucked a little bit about our being out in a city after midnight, especially without a bodyguard.

We talked on these and other topics until late at night, when Mother called her bodyguard and went off to work.

Something had been nagging at me all night, the way Mother and Rhonda acted toward each other. I decided to bring it out into the open, once Mother was gone.

"Rhonda-" I settled down in the chair across from her. I didn't know exactly how to put it. "What, ub, what exactly is your relationship with my mother?"

She took a long drink. "Good friends." She stared at me with a mixture of defiance and resignation. "Very good friends. Sometimes lovers."

I felt very hollow and lost. My mother?

"Listen," she continued. "You had better stop trying to live in the nineties. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but you're stuck with it."

She crossed and took my hand, almost kneeling in front of me. Her voice was softer. "William. . . look, I'm only two years older than you are-that is, I was born two years before-what I mean is, I can understand how you feel. B-your mother understands too. It, our. . . relationship, wouldn't be a secret to anybody else. It's perfectly normal. A lot has changed, these twenty years. You've got to change too."

I didn't say anything.

She stood up and said firmly, "You think, because your mother is sixty, she's outgrown her need for love? She needs it more than you do. Even now. Especially now."

Accusation in her eyes. "Especially now with you coming back from the dead past. Reminding her of how old she is. How-old I am, twenty years younger." Her voice quavered and cracked, and she ran to her room.

I wrote Mother a note saying that Marygay had called; an emergency had come up and I had to go immediately to South Dakota. I called a bodyguard and left.

A whining, ozone-leaking, battered old bus let me out at the intersection of a bad road and a worse one. It had taken me an hour to go the 2000 kilometers to Sioux Falls, two hours to get a chopper to Geddes, 150 kilometers away, and three hours waiting and jouncing on the dilapidated bus to go the last 12 kilometers to Freehold, an organization of communes where the Potters had their acreage. I wondered if the progression was going to continue and I would be four hours walking down this dirt road to the farm.

It was a half-hour before I even came to a building. My bag was getting intolerably heavy and the bulky pistol was chafing my hip. I walked up a stone path to the door of a simple plastic dome and pulled a string that caused a bell to tinkle inside. A peephole darkened.

"Who is it?" Voice muffled by thick wood.

"Stranger asking directions."

"Ask." I couldn't tell whether it was a woman or a child.

"I'm looking for the Potters' farm."

"Just a second." Footsteps went away and came back.

"Down the road one point nine klicks. Lots of potatoes and green beans on your right. You'll probably smell the chickens."

"Thanks."

"If you want a drink we got a pump out back. Can't let you in without my husband's at home."

"I understand. Thank you." The water was metallic-tasting but wonderfully cool.

I wouldn't know a potato or green bean plant if it stood up and took a bite out of my ankle, but I knew how to walk a half-meter step.  So I resolved to count to 3800 and take a deep breath. I supposed I could tell the difference between the smell of chicken manure and the absence thereof.

At 3650 there was a rutted path leading to a complex of plastic domes and rectangular buildings apparently made of sod. There was a pen enclosing a small population explosion of chickens. They had a smell but it wasn't strong.

Halfway down the path, a door opened and Marygay came running out, wearing one tiny wisp of cloth. After a slippery but gratifying greeting, she asked what I was doing here so early.

"Oh, my mother had friends staying with her. I didn't want to put them out. Suppose I should have called."

"Indeed you should have. . . save you a long dusty walk-but we've got plenty of room, don't worry about that."

She took me inside to meet her parents, who greeted me warmly and made me feel definitely overdressed. Their faces showed their age but their bodies had no sag and few wrinkles.

Since dinner was an occasion, they let the chickens live and instead opened a can of beef, steaming it along with a cabbage and some potatoes. To my plain tastes it was equal to most of the gourmet fare we'd had on the dirigible and in London.

Over coffee and goat cheese (they apologized for not having wine; the commune would have a new vintage out in a couple of weeks), I asked what kind of work I could do.

"Will," Mr. Potter said, "I don't mind telling you that your coming here is a godsend. We've got five acres that are just sitting out there, fallow, because we don't have enough hands to work them. You can take the plow tomorrow and start breaking up an acre at a time."

"More potatoes, Daddy?" Marygay asked.

"No, no.. . not this season. Soybeans-cash crop and good for the soil. And Will, at night we all take turns standing guard. With four of us, we ought to be able to do a lot more sleeping." He took a big slurp of coffee. "Now, what else. . ."

"Richard," Mrs. Potter said, "tell him about the greenhouse."

"That's right, yes, the greenhouse. The commune has a two-acre greenhouse down about a click from here, by the recreation center. Mostly grapes and tomatoes. Everybody spends one morning or one afternoon a week there.

"Why don't you children go down there tonight.. show Will the night life in fabulous Freehold? Sometimes you can get a real exciting game of checkers going."

"Oh, Daddy. It's not that bad."

"Actually, it isn't. They've got a fair library and a coin-op terminal to the Library of Congress. Marygay tells me you're a reader. That's good."

"Sounds fascinating." It did. "But what about guard?"

"No problem. Mrs. Potter-April-and I'll take the first four hours-oh," he said, standing, "let me show you the setup."

We went out back to "the tower," a sandbag hut on stilts. Climbed up a rope ladder through a hole in the middle of the hut.

"A little crowded in here, with two," Richard said.

"Have a seat." There was an old piano stool beside the hole in the floor. I sat on it. "It's handy to be able to see all the field without getting a crick in your neck. Just don't keep turning in the same direction all the time."

He opened a wooden crate and uncovered a sleek rifle, wrapped in oily rags. "Recognize this?"

"Sure." I'd had to sleep with one in basic training.  "Army standard issue T-sixteen. Semi-automatic, twelve-caliber tumblers-where the hell did you get it?"

"Commune went to a government auction. It's an antique now, son." He handed it to me and I snapped it apart.

Clean, too clean.

"Has it ever been used?"

"Not in almost a year. Ammo costs too much for target practice. Take a couple of practice shots, though, convince yourself that it works."

I turned on the scope and just got a washed-out bright green. Set for nighttime. Clicked it back to log zero, set the magnification at ten, reassembled it.

"Marygay didn't want to try it out. Said she'd had her fill of that. I didn't press her, but a person's got to have confidence in ther tools."

I clicked off the safety and found a clod of dirt that the range-finder said was between 100 and 120 meters away.

Set it at 110, rested the barrel of the rifle on the sandbags, centered the clod in the crosshairs, and squeezed. The round hissed out and kicked up dirt about five centimeters low.

"Fine." I reset it for night use and safetied it and handed it back. "What happened a year ago?"

He wrapped it up carefully, keeping the rags away from the eyepiece. "Had some jumpers come in. Fired a few rounds and scared 'em away."

"All right, what's a jumper?"

"Yeah, you wouldn't know." He shook out a tobacco cigarette and passed me the box. "I don't know why they don't just call 'em thieves, that's what they are.  Murderers, too, sometimes.

"They know that a lot of the commune members are pretty well off. If you raise cash crops you get to keep half the cash; besides, a lot of our members were prosperous when they joined.

"Anyhow, the jumpers take advantage of our relative isolation. They come out from the city and try to sneak in, usually hit one place, and run. Most of the time, they don't get this far in, but the farms closer to the road.. . We hear gunfire every couple of weeks. Usually just scaring off kids. If it keeps up, a siren goes off and the commune goes on alert."

"Doesn't sound fair to the people living close to the road."

"There're compensations. They only have to donate half as much of their crop as the rest of us do. And they're issued heavier weapons."

Marygay and I took the family's two bicycles and pedaled down to the recreation center. I only fell off twice, negotiating the bumpy road in the dark.

It was a little livelier than Richard had described it. A young nude girl was dancing sensuously to an assortment of homemade drums near the far side of the dome. Turned out she was still in school; it was a project for a "cultural relativity" class.

Most of the people there, in fact, were young and therefore still in school. They considered it a joke, though. After you had learned to read and write and could pass the Class I literacy test, you only had to take one course per year, and some of those you could pass just by signing up. So much for the "eighteen years' compulsory education" they had startled us with at Stargate.

Other people were playing board games, reading, watching the girl gyrate, or just talking. There was a bar that served soya, coffee, or thin homemade beer. Not a ration ticket to be seen; all made by the commune or purchased outside with commune tickets.

We got into a discussion about the war, with a bunch of people who knew Marygay and I were veterans. It's hard to describe their attitude, which was pretty uniform. They were angry in an abstract way that it took so much tax money to support; they were convinced that the Taurans would never be any danger to Earth; but they all knew that nearly half the jobs in the world were associated with the war, and if it stopped, everything would fall apart.

I thought everything was in shambles already, but then I hadn't grown up in this world. And they had never known "peacetime."

We went home about midnight and Maiygay and I each stood two hours' guard. By the middle of the next morning, I was wishing I had gotten a little more sleep.

The plow was a big blade on wheels with two handles for steering, atomic powered. Not very much power, though; enough to move it forward at a slow crawl if the blade was in soft earth. Needless to say, there was little soft earth in the unused five acres. The plow would go a few centimeters, get stuck, freewheel until I put some back into it, then move a few more centimeters. I finished a tenth of an acre the first day and eventually got it up to a fifth of an acre a day.

It was hard, hardening work, but pleasant. I had an ear-clip that piped music to me, old tapes from Richard's collection, and the sun browned me all over. I was beginning to think I could live that way forever, when suddenly it was finished.

Marygay and I were reading up at the recreation center one evening when we heard faint gunfire down by the road. We decided it'd be smart to get back to the house. We were less than halfway there when firing broke out all along our left, on a line that seemed to extend from the road to far past the recreation center: a coordinated attack. We had to abandon the bikes and crawl on hands and knees in the drainage ditch by the side of the road, bullets hissing over our heads. A heavy vehicle rumbled by, shooting left and right. It took a good twenty minutes to crawl home. We passed two farmhouses that were burning brightly. I was glad ours didn't have any wood.

I noticed there was no return fire coming from our tower, but didn't say anything. There were two dead strangers in front of the house as we rushed inside.

April was lying on the floor, still alive but bleeding from a hundred tiny fragment wounds. The living room was rubble and dust; someone must have thrown a bomb through a door or window. I left Marygay with her mother and ran out back to the tower. The ladder was pulled up, so I had to shinny up one of the stilts.

Richard was sitting slumped over the rifle. In the pale green glow from the scope I could see a perfectly round bole above his left eye. A little blood had trickled down the bridge of his nose and dried.

I laid his body on the floor and covered his head with my shirt. I filled my pockets with clips and took the rifle back to the house.

Marygay had tried to make her mother comfortable. They were talking quietly. She was holding my shotgun-pistol and had another gun on the floor beside her. When I came in she looked up and nodded soberly, not crying.

April whispered something and Maiygay asked, "Mother wants to know whether.. . Daddy had a hard time of it.  She knows he's dead."

"No. I'm sure he didn't feel anything."

"That's good."

"It's something." I should keep my mouth shut. "It is good, yes."

I checked the doors and windows for an effective vantage point. I couldn't find anyplace that wouldn't allow a whole platoon to sneak up behind me.

"I'm going to go outside and get on top of the house." Couldn't go back to the tower. "Don't you shoot unless somebody gets inside. . . maybe they'll think the place is deserted."

By the time I had clambered up to the sod roof, the heavy truck was coming back down the road. Through the scope I could see that there were five men on it, four in the cab and one who was on the open bed, cradling a machine gun, surrounded by loot. He was crouched between two refrigerators, but I had a clear shot at him. Held my fire, not wanting to draw attention. The truck stopped in front of the house, sat for a minute, and turned in. The window was probably bulletproof, but I sighted on the driver's face and squeezed off a round. He jumped as it ricocheted, whining, leaving an opaque star on the plastic, and the man in back opened up. A steady stream of bullets hummed over my head; I could hear them thumping into the sandbags of the tower. He didn't see me.

The truck wasn't ten meters away when the shooting stopped. He was evidently reloading, hidden behind the refrigerator. I took careful aim and when he popped up to fire I shot him in the throat. The bullet being a tumbler, it exited through the top of his skull.

The driver pulled the truck around in a long arc so that, when it stopped, the door to the cab was flush with the door of the house. This protected them from the tower and also from me, though I doubted they yet knew where I was; a T-16 makes no flash and very little noise. I kicked off my shoes and stepped cautiously onto the top of the cab, hoping the driver would get out on his side. Once the door opened I could fill the cab with ricocheting bullets.

No good. The far door, hidden from me by the roof's overhang, opened first. I waited for the driver and hoped that Marygay was well hidden. I shouldn't have worried.

There was a deafening roar, then another and another. The heavy truck rocked with the impact of thousands of tiny fiechettes. One short scream that the second shot ended.

I jumped from the truck and ran around to the back door.  Marygay had her mother's head on her lap, and someone was crying softly. I went to them and Marygay's cheeks were dry under my palms.

"Good work, dear."

She didn't say anything. There was a steady heavy dripping sound from the door and the air was acrid with smoke and the smell of fresh meat. We huddled together until dawn.

I had thought April was sleeping, but in the dim light her eyes were wide open and filmed. Her breath came in shallow rasps. Her skin was gray parchment and dried blood. She didn't answer when we talked to her.

A vehicle was coming up the road, so I took the rifle and went outside. It was a dump truck with j white sheet draped over one side and a man standing in The back with a megaphone repeating, "Wounded. . . wounded." I waved and the truck came in. They took April out on a makeshift litter and told us which hospital they were going to. We wanted to go along but there was simply no room; the bed of the truck was covered with people in various stages of disrepair.

Marygay didn't want to go back inside because it was getting light enough to see the men she had killed so completely. I went back in to get some cigarettes and forced myself to look. It was messy enough, but just didn't disturb me that much. That bothered me, to be confronted with a pile of human hamburger and mainly notice the flies and ants and smell. Death is so much neater in space.

We buried her father behind the house, and when the truck came back with April's small body wrapped in a shroud, we buried her beside him. The commune's sanitation truck came by a little later, and gas-masked men took care of the jumpers' bodies.

We sat in the baking sun, and finally Marygay wept, for a long time, silently.

11

We got off the plane at Dulles and found a monorail to Columbia.

It was a pleasingly diverse jumble of various kinds of buildings, arranged around a lake, surrounded by trees. All of the buildings were connected by slidewalk to the largest place, a fullerdome with stores and schools and offices.

We could have taken the enclosed slidewalk to Mom's place, but instead walked alongside it in the good cold air that smelled of fallen leaves. People slid by on the other side of the plastic, carefully not staring.

Mom didn't answer her door, but she'd given me an entry card. Mom was asleep in the bedroom, so Marygay and I settled in the living room and read for a while.

We were startled suddenly by a loud fit of coughing from the bedroom. I raced over and knocked on the door.

"William? I didn't-" coughing "-come in, I didn't know you were..."

She was propped up in bed, the light on, surrounded by various nostrums. She looked ghastly, pale and lined.

She lit a joint and it seemed to quell the coughing. "When did you get in? I didn't know..."

"Just a few minutes ago. .. . How long has this. . . have you been..."

"Oh, it's just a bug I picked up after Rhonda went to see her kids. I'll be fine in a couple of days." She started coughing again, drank some thick red liquid from a bottle. All of her medicines seemed to be the commercial, patent variety.

"Have you seen a doctor?"

"Doctor? Heavens no, Willy. They don't have.. . it's not serious . . . don't-"

"Not serious?" At eighty-four. "For Chrissake, mother." I went to the phone in the kitchen and with some difficulty managed to get the hospital.

A plain girl in her twenties formed in the cube. "Nurse Donalson, general services." She had a fixed smile, professional sincerity. But then everybody smiled.

"My mother needs to be looked at by a doctor. She has a-"

"Name and number, please."

"Beth Mandella." I spelled it. "What number?"

"Medical services number, of course," she smiled.

I called into Mom and asked her what her number was. "She says she can't remember."

"That's all right, sir, I'm sure I can find her records."

She turned her smile to a keyboard beside her and punched out a code.

"Beth Mandella?" she said, her smile wrning quizzical.

"You're her son? She must be in her eighties."

"Please. It's a long story. She really has to see a doctor."

"Is this some kind of joke?"

"What do you mean?" Strangled coughing from the other room, the worst yet. "Really-this might be very serious, you've got to-"

"But sir, Mrs. Mandella got a zero priority rating way back in 2010."

"What the hell is that supposed to me"

"S-i-r..." The smile was hardening in place.

"Look. Pretend that I came from another planet. What is a 'zero priority rating'?"

"Another-oh! I know you!" She looked off to the left. "Sonya-come over here a second. You'd never guess who..." Another face crowded the cube, a vapid blonde girl whose smile was twin to the other nurse's. "Remember? On the stat this morning?"

"Oh, yeah," she said. "One of the soldiers-hey, that's really max, really max." The head withdrew.

"Oh, Mr. Mandella," she said, effusive. "No wonder you're confused. It's really very simple."

"Well?"

"It's part of the Universal Medical Security System. Everybody gets a rating on their seventieth birthday. It comes in automatically from Geneva."

"What does it rate? What does it mean?" But the ugly truth was obvious.

"Well, it tells how important a person is and what level of treatment he's allowed. Class three is the same as anybody else's; class two is the same except for certain life-extending-"

"And class zero is no treatment at all."

"That's correct, Mr. Mandella." And in her smile was not a glimmer of pity or understanding.

"Thank you." I disconnected.  Marygay was standing behind me, crying soundlessly with her mouth wide open.

I found mountaineer's oxygen at a sporting goods store and even managed to get some black-market antibiotics through a character in a bar downtown in Washington. But Mom was beyond being able to respond to amateur treatment. She lived four days. The people from the crematonum had the same fixed smile.

I tried to get through to my brother, Mike, on the Moon, but the phone company wouldn't let me place the call until I had signed a contract and posted a $25,000 bond. I had to get a credit transfer from Geneva. The paperwork took half a day.

I finally got through to him. Without preamble:

"Mother's dead."

For a fraction of a second, the radio waves wandered up to the moon, and in another fraction, came back. He started and then nodded his head slowly. "No surprise. Every time I've come down to Earth the past ten years, I've wondered whether she'd still be there. Neither of us had enough money to keep in very close touch." He had told us in Geneva that a letter from Luna to Earth cost $100 postage-plus $5,000 tax. It discouraged communication with what the UN considered to be a bunch of regrettably necessary anarchists.

We commiserated for a while and then Mike said,

"Willy, Earth is no place for you and Marygay; you know that by now. Come to Luna. Where you can still be an individual. Where we don't throw people out the airlock on their seventieth birthday."

"We'd have to rejoin UNEF."

"True, but you wouldn't have to fight. They say they need you more for training. You could study in your spare time, bring your physics up to date-maybe wind up eventually in research."

We talked some more, a total of three minutes. I got $1000 back.

Marygay and I talked about it through the night. Maybe our decision would have been different if we hadn't been staying there, surrounded by Mother's life and death, but when the dawn came the proud, ambitious, careful beauty of Columbia had turned sinister and foreboding.

We packed our bags and had our money transferred to the Tycho Credit Union and took a monorail to the Cape.

"In case you're interested, you aren't the first combat veterans to come back." The recruiting officer was a muscular lieutenant of indeterminate sex. I flipped a coin mentally and it came up tails.

"Last I heard, there had been nine others," she said in her husky tenor. "All of them opted for the moon... maybe you'll find some of your friends there." She slid two simple forms across the desk. "Sign these and you're in again. Second lieutenants."

The form was a simple request to be assigned to active duty; we had never really gotten out of the Force, since they extended the draft law, but had just been on inactive status. I scrutinized the paper.

"There's nothing on this about the guarantees we were given at Stargate."

"That won't be necessary. The Force will-"

"I think it is necessary, Lieutenant." I handed back the form. So did Marygay.

"Let me check." She left the desk and disappeared into an office. After a while we heard a printer rattle.

She brought back the same two sheets, with an addition typed under our names: GUARANTEED LOCATION OF CHOICE [LUNA] AND ASSIGNMENT OF CHOICE [COMBAT TRAINING

SPECIALIST].

We got a thorough physical checkup and were fitted for new fighting suits, made our financial arrangements, and caught the next morning's shuttle. We laid over at Earth-port, enjoying zero gravity for a few hours, and then caught a ride to Luna, setting down at the Grimaldi base.

On the door to the Transient Officers' Billet, some wag had scraped "abandon hope all ye who enter." We found our two-man cubicle and began changing for chow.

Two raps on the door. "Mail call, sirs."

I opened the door and the sergeant standing there saluted. I just looked at him for a second and then remembered I was an officer and returned the salute. He handed me two identical faxes. I gave one to Marygay and we both gasped at the same time:

* ORDERS *ORDERS**ORDERS

THE FOLLOWING NAMED PERSONNEL:

Mandella, William 2LT [11 575 278] COCOMM D Co

GRITRABN

AND

Potter, Marygay 2LT [17 386 907] COCOMM B Co

GRITRABN ARE HEREBY REASSIGNED TO:

LT Mandella. PLCOMM 2 PL STFFHETA STARGATE

Lr Potter: PLCOMM 3 PL STF~HETA STARGATE.

DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES:

Command infantry platoon in Tet-2 Campaign.

THE ABOVE NAMED PERSONNEL WILL REPORT IMMEDIATELY

TO GRIMALDI TRANSPORTATION BATTALION TO BE MAN IFESTED TO STARGATE.

ISSUED STARGATE TACBD/l 298-8684-1450/20 Aug 2019

SO:

BY AUTHO STFCOM Commander.

**ORDERS* *ORDERS**ORDERS

"They didn't waste any time, did they?" Marygay said bitterly.

 "Must be a standing order. Strike Force Command's light-weeks away; they can't even know we've re-upped yet."

"What about our. . ." She let it trail off.

"The guarantee. Well, we were given our assignment of choice. Nobody guaranteed we'd have the assignment for more than an hour."

"It's so dirty."

I shrugged. "It's so army."

But I couldn't shake the feeling that we were going home.

LIEUTENANT MANDELLA

2024-2389 A.D.

"Quick and dirty." I was looking at my platoon sergeant, Santesteban, but talking to myself. And anybody else who was listening.

"Yeah," he said. "Gotta do it in the first coupla minutes or we're screwed tight." He was matter-of-fact, laconic. Drugged.

Private Collins came up with Halliday. They were holding hands unself-consciously. "Lieutenant Mandella?" Her voice broke a little. "Can we have just a minute?"

"One minute," I said, too abruptly. "We have to leave in five, I'm sorry."

Hard to watch those two together now. Neither one had any combat experience. But they knew what everybody did; how slim their chances were of ever being together again. They slumped in a corner and mumbled words and traded mechanical caresses, no passion or even comfort. Collins's eyes shone but she wasn't weeping. Halliday just looked grim, numb. She was normally by far the prettier of the two, but the sparkle had gone out of her and left a well-formed dull shell.

I'd gotten used to open female homosex in the months since we'd left Earth. Even stopped resenting the loss of potential partners. The men together still gave me a chill, though.

I stripped and backed into the clamshelled suit. The new ones were a hell of a lot more complicated, with all the new biometrics and trauma maintenance. But well worth the trouble of hooking up, in case you got blown apart just a little bit. Go home to a comfortable pension with heroic prosthesis. They were even talking about the possibility of regeneration, at least for missing arms and legs. Better get it soon, before Heaven filled up with fractional people. Heaven was the new hospital/rest-and-recreation planet.

I finished the set-up sequence and the suit closed by itself. Gritted my teeth against the pain that never came, when the internal sensors and fluid tubes poked into your body. Conditioned neural bypass, so you felt only a slight puzzling dislocation. Rather than the death of a thousand cuts.

Collins and Halliday were getting into their suits now and the other dozen were almost set, so I stepped over to the third platoon's staging area. Say goodbye again to Marygay.

She was suited and heading my way. We touched helmets instead of using the radio. Privacy.

"Feeling OK, honey?"

"All right," she said. "Took my pill."

"Yeah, happy times." I'd taken mine too, supposed to make you feel optimistic without interfering with your sense of judgment. I knew most of us would probably die, but I didn't feel too bad about it. "Sack with me tonight?"

"If we're both here," she said neutrally. "Have to take a pill for that, too." She tried to laugh. "Sleep, I mean. How're the new people taking it? You have ten?"

"Ten, yeah, they're OK. Doped up, quarter-dose."

"I did that, too; try to keep them loose."

In fact, Santesteban was the only other combat veteran in my platoon; the four corporals had been in UNEF for a while but hadn't ever fought.

The speaker in my cheekbone crackled and Commander Cortez said, "Two minutes. Get your people lined up."

We had our goodbye and I went back to check my flock. Everybody seemed to have gotten suited up without any problems, so I put them on line. We waited for what seemed like a long time.

"All right, load 'em up." With the word "up," the bay door in front of me opened-the staging area having already been bled of air-and I led my men and women through to the assault ship.

These new ships were ugly as hell.  Just an open framework with clamps to hold you in place, swiveled lasers fore and aft, small tachyon powerplants below the lasers. Everything automated; the machine would land us as quickly as possible and then zip off to harass the enemy. It was a one-use, throwaway drone. The vehicle that would come pick us up if we survived was cradled next to it, much prettier.

We clamped in and the assault ship cast off from the Sangre y Victoria with twin spurts from the yaw jets. Then the voice of the machine gave us a short countdown and we sped off at four gees' acceleration, straight down.

The planet, which we hadn't bothered to name, was a chunk of black rock without any normal star close enough to give it heat. At first it was visible only by the absence of stars where its bulk cut off their light, but as we dropped closer we could see subtle variations in the blackness of its surface. We were coming down on the hemisphere opposite the Taurans' outpost.

Our recon had shown that their camp sat in the middle of a flat lava plain several hundred kilometers in diameter. It was pretty primitive compared to other Tauran bases UNEF had encountered, but there wouldn't be any sneaking up on it. We were going to careen over the horizon some fifteen klicks from the place, four ships converging simultaneously from different directions, all of us decelerating like mad, hopefully to drop right in their laps and come up shooting. There would be nothing to hide behind.

I wasn't worried, of course. Abstractedly, I wished I hadn't taken the pill.

We leveled off about a kilometer from the surface and sped along much faster than the rock's escape velocity, constantly correcting to keep from flying away. The surface rolled below us in a dark gray blur; we shed a little light from the pseudo-cerenkov glow made by our tachyon exhaust, scooting away from our reality into its own.

The ungainly contraption skimmed and jumped along for some ten minutes; then suddenly the front jet glowed and we were snapped forward inside our suits, eyeballs trying to escape from their sockets in the rapid deceleration.

"Prepare for ejection," the machine's female-mechanical voice said. "Five, four. . ."

The ship's lasers started firing, millisecond flashes freezing the land below in jerky stroboscopic motion. It was a twisted, pock-marked jumble of fissures and random black rocks, a few meters below our feet. We were dropping, slowing.

"Three-" It never got any farther. There was a too-bright flash and I saw the horizon drop away as the ship's tail pitched down-then clipped the ground, and we were rolling, horribly, pieces of people and ship scattering. Then we slid pinwheeling to a bumpy halt, and I tried to pull free but my leg was pinned under the ship's bulk: excruciating pain and a dry crunch as the girder crushed my leg; shrill whistle of air escaping my breached suit; then the trauma maintenance turned on snick, more pain, then no pain and I was rolling free, short stump of a leg trailing blood that froze shiny black on the dull black rock. I tasted brass and a red haze closed everything out, then deepened to the brown of river clay, then loam and I passed out, with the pill thinking this is not so bad.

The suit is set up to save as much of your body as possible. If you lose part of an arm or a leg, one of sixteen razor-sharp irises closes around your limb with the force of a hydraulic press, snipping it off neatly and sealing the suit before you can die of explosive decompression. Then "trauma maintenance" cauterizes the stump, replaces lost blood, and fills you full of happy-juice and No-shock. So you will either die happy or, if your comrades go on to win the battle, eventually be carried back up to the ship's aid station.

We'd won that round, while I slept swaddled in dark cotton. I woke up in the infirmary. It was crowded. I was in the middle of a long row of cots, each one holding someone who had been three-fourths (or less) saved by his suit's trauma maintenance feature. We were being ignored by the ship's two doctors, who stood in bright light at operating tables, absorbed in blood rituals. I watched them for a long time. Squinting into the bright light, the blood on their green tunics could have been grease, the swathed bodies, odd soft machines that they were fixing. But the machines would cry out in their sleep, and the mechanics muttered reassurances while they plied their greasy tools. I watched and slept and woke up in different places.

Finally I woke up in a regular bay.  I was strapped down and being fed through a tube, biosensor electrodes attached here and there, but no medics around. The only other person in the little room was Marygay, sleeping on the bunk next to me. Her right arm was amputated just above the elbow.

I didn't wake her up, just looked at her for a long time and tried to sort out my feelings. Tried to filter out the effect of the mood drugs. Looking at her stump, I could feel neither empathy nor revulsion. I tried to force one reaction, and then the other, but nothing real happened. It was as if she had always been that way. Was it drugs, conditioning, love? Have to wait to see.

Her eyes opened suddenly and I knew she had been awake for some time, had been giving me time to think "Hello, broken toy," she said.

"How-how do you feel?" Bright question.

She put a finger to her lips and kissed it, a familiar gesture, reflection. "Stupid, numb. Glad not to be a soldier anymore." She smiled. "Did they tell you? We're going to Heaven."

"No. I knew it would be either there or Earth."

"Heaven will be better." Anything would. "I wish we were there now."

"How long?" I asked. "How long before we get there?"

She rolled over and looked at the ceiling. "No telling. You haven't talked to anybody?"

"Just woke up."

"There's a new directive they didn't bother to tell us about before. The Sangre y Victoria got orders for four missions. We have to keep on fighting until we've done all four. Or until we've sustained so many casualties that it wouldn't be practical to go on."

"How many is that?"

"I wonder. We lost a good third already. But we're headed for Aleph-7. Panty raid." New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artifacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic.

One knock on the door and Dr. Foster barged in. He fluttered his hands. "Still in separate beds? Marygay, I thought you were more recovered than that." Foster was all right. A flaming mariposa, but he had an amused tolerance for heterosexuality.

He examined Marygay's stump and then mine. He stuck thermometers in our mouths so we couldn't talk. When he spoke, he was serious and blunt.

"I'm not going to sugarcoat anything for you. You're both on happyjuice up to your ears, and the loss you've sustained isn't going to bother you until I take you off the stuff. For my own convenience I'm keeping you drugged until you get to Heaven. I have twenty-one amputees to take care of. We can't handle twenty-one psychiatric cases.

"Enjoy your peace of mind while you still have it. You two especially, since you'll probably want to stay together. The prosthetics you get on Heaven will work just fine, but every time you look at his mechanical leg or you look at her arm, you're going to think of how lucky the other one is. You're going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other. You may be at each other's throats in a week. Or you may share a sullen kind of love for the rest of your lives.

"Or you may be able to transcend it. Give each other strength. Just don't kid yourselves if it doesn't work out."

He checked the readout on each thermometer and made a notation in his notebook. "Doctor knows best, even if he is a little weird by your own old-fashioned standards. Keep it in mind." He took the thermometer out of my mouth and gave me a little pat on the shoulder. Impartially, he did the same to Marygay. At the door, he said, "We've got collapsar insertion in about six hours. One of the nurses will take you to the tanks."

We went into the tanks-so much more comfortable and safer than the old individual acceleration shells-and dropped into the Tet-2 collapsar field already starting the crazy fifty-gee evasive maneuvers that would protect us from enemy cruisers when we popped out by Aleph-7, a microsecond later.

Predictably, the Aleph-7 campaign was a dismal failure, and we limped away from it with a two-campaign total of fifty-four dead and thirty-nine cripples bound for Heaven. Only twelve soldiers were still able to fight, but they weren't exactly straining at the leash.

It took three collapsar jumps to get to Heaven. No ship ever went there directly from a battle, even though the delay sometimes cost extra lives. It was the one place besides Earth that the Taurans could not be allowed to find.

Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust. Virgin forests, white beaches, pristine deserts. The few dozen cities there either blended perfectly with the environment (one was totally underground) or were brazen statements of human ingenuity; Oceanus, in a coral reef with six fathoms of water over its transparent roof; Boreas, perched on a sheared-off mountaintop in the polar wasteland; and the fabulous Skye, a huge resort city that floated from continent to continent on the trade winds.

We landed, as everyone does, at the jungle city, Threshold. Three-fourths hospital, it's by far the planet's largest city, but you couldn't tell that from the air, flying down from orbit. The only sign of civilization was a short runway that suddenly appeared, a small white patch dwarfed to insignificance by the stately rain forest that crowded in from the east and an immense ocean that dominated the other horizon.

Once under the arboreal cover, the city was very much in evidence. Low buildings of native stone and wood rested among ten-meter-thick tree trunks. They were connected by unobtrusive stone paths, with one wide promenade meandering off to the beach. Sunlight filtered down in patches, and the air held a mixture of forest sweetness and salt tang.

I later learned that the city sprawled out over 200 square kilometers, that you could take a subway to anyplace that was too far to walk. The ecology of Threshold was very carefully balanced and maintained so as to resemble the jungle outside, with all the dangerous and uncomfortable elements eliminated. A powerful pressor field kept out large predators and such insect life as was not necessary for the health of the plants inside.

We walked, limped and rolled into the nearest building, which was the hospital's reception area. The rest of the hospital was underneath, thirty subterranean stories. Each person was examined and assigned his own room; I tried to get a double with Marygay, but they weren't set up for that.

"Earth-year" was 2189. So I was 215 years old, God, look at that old codger. Somebody pass the hat-no, not necessary. The doctor who examined me said that my accumulated pay would be transferred from Earth to Heaven. With compound interest, I was just shy of being a billionaire. He remarked that I'd find lots of ways to spend my billion on Heaven.

They took the most severely wounded first, so it was several days before I went into surgery. Afterwards, I woke up in my room and found that they had grafted a prosthesis onto my stump, an articulated structure of shiny metal that to my untrained eye looked exactly like the skeleton of a leg and foot. It looked creepy as hell, lying there in a transparent bag of fluid, wires running out of it to a machine at the end of the bed.

An aide came in. "How you feelin', sir?" I almost told him to forget the "sir" bullshit, I was out of the army and staying out this time. But it might be nice for the guy to keep feeling that I outranked him.

"I don't know. Hurts a little."

"Gonna hurt like a sonuvabitch. Wait'll the nerves start to grow."

"Nerves?"

"Sure." He was fiddling with the machine, reading dials on the other side. "How you gonna have a leg without nerves? It'd just sit there."

"Nerves? Like regular nerves? You mean I can just think 'move' and the thing moves?"

"'Course you can." He looked at me quizzically, then went back to his adjustments.

What a wonder. "Prosthetics has sure come a long way."

 "Pross-what-ics?"

"You know, artificial-"

"Oh yeah, like in books. Wooden legs, hooks and stuff." How'd he ever get a job?

"Yeah, prosthetics. Like this thing on the end of my stump."

"Look, sir." He set down the clipboard he'd been scribbling on. "You've been away a long time. That's gonna be a leg, just like the other leg except it can't break."

"They do it with arms, too?"

"Sure, any limb." He went back to his writing. "Livers, kidneys, stomachs, all kinds of things. Still working on hearts and lungs, have to use mechanical substitutes."

"Fantastic." Marygay would be whole again, too.

He shrugged. "Guess so. They've been doing it since before I was born. How old are you, sir?"

I told him, and he whistled. "God damn. You musta been in it from the beginning." His accent was very strange. All the words were right but all the sounds were wrong.

"Yeah. I was in the Epsilon attack. Aleph-null." They'd started naming collapsars after letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in order of discovery, then ran out of letters when the damn things started cropping up all over the place. So they added numbers after the letters; last I heard, they were up to Yod-42.

"Wow, ancient history. What was it like back then?"

"I don't know. Less crowded, nicer. Went back to Earth a year ago-hell, a century ago. Depends on how you look at it. It was so bad I re-enlisted, you know? Bunch of zombies. No offense."

He shrugged. "Never been there, myself. People who come from there seem to miss it. Maybe it got better."

"What, you were born on another planet? Heaven?" No wonder I couldn't place his accent.

"Born, raised and drafted." He put the pen back in his pocket and folded the clipboard up to a wallet-sized package. "Yes, sir. Third-generation angel. Best damned planet in all UNEF." He spelled it out, didn't say "youneff" the way I'd always heard it.

"Look, I've gotta run, lieutenant. Two other monitors to check, this hour." He backed out the door. "You need anything, there's a buzzer on the table there."

Third-generation angel. His grandparents came from Earth, probably when I was a young punk of a hundred. I wondered how many other worlds they'd colonized while my back was turned. Lose an arm, grow a new one?

It was going to be good to settle down and live a whole year for every year that went by.

The guy wasn't kidding about the pain. And it wasn't just the new leg, though that hurt like boiling oil. For the new tissues to "take," they'd had to subvert my body's resistance to alien cells; cancer broke out in a half-dozen places and had to be treated separately, painfully.

I was feeling pretty used up, but it was still kind of fascinating to watch the leg grow. White threads turned into blood vessels and nerves, first hanging a little slack, then moving into place as the musculature grew up around the metal bone.

I got used to seeing it grow, so the sight never repelled me. But when Marygay came to visit, it was a jolt-she was ambulatory before the skin on her new arm had started to grow; looked like a walking anatomy demonstration. I got over the shock, though, and she eventually came in for a few hours every day to play games or trade gossip or just sit and read, her arm slowly growing inside the plastic cast.

I'd had skin for a week before they uncased the new leg and trundled the machine away. It was ugly as hell, hairless and dead white, stiff as a metal rod. But it worked, after a fashion. I could stand up and shuffle along.

They transferred me to orthopedics, for "range and motion repatterning"-a fancy name for slow torture. They strap you into a machine that bends both the old and new legs simultaneously. The new one resists.

Marygay was in a nearby section, having her arm twisted methodically. It must have been even worse on her; she looked gray and haggard every afternoon, when we met to go upstairs and sunbathe in the broken shade.

As the days went by, the therapy became less like torture and more like strenuous exercise. We both began swimming for an hour or so every clear day, in the calm, pressor guarded water off the beach. I still limped on land, but in the water I could get around pretty well.

The only real excitement we had on Heaven-excitement to our combat-blunted sensibilities-was in that carefully guarded water.

They have to turn off the pressor field for a split second every time a ship lands; otherwise it would just ricochet off over the ocean. Every now and then an animal slips in, but the dangerous land animals are too slow to get through. Not so in the sea.

The undisputed master of Heaven's oceans is an ugly customer that the angels, in a fit of originality, named the "shark." It could eat a stack of earth sharks for breakfast, though.

The one that got in was an average-sized white shark who had been bumping around the edge of the pressor field for days, tormented by all that protein splashing around inside. Fortunately, there's a warning siren two minutes before the pressor is shut down, so nobody was in the water when he came streaking through. And streak through he did, almost beaching himself in the fury of his fruitless attack.

He was twelve meters of flexible muscle with a razor-sharp tail at one end and a collection of arm-length fangs at the other. His eyes, big yellow globes, were set on stalks more than a meter out from his head. His mouth was so wide that, open, a man could comfortably stand in it. Make an impressive photo for his heirs.

They couldn't just turn off the pressor field and wait for the thing to swim away. So the Recreation Committee organized a hunting party.

I wasn't too enthusiastic about offering myself up as an hors d'oeuvre to a giant fish, but Marygay had spearfished a lot as a kid growing up in Florida and was really excited by the prospect. I went along with the gag when I found out how they were doing it; seemed safe enough.

These "sharks" supposedly never attack people in boats. Two people who had more faith in fishermen's stories than I had gone out to the edge of the pressor field in a rowboat, armed only with a side of beef. They kicked the meat overboard and the shark was there in a flash.

This was the cue for us to step in and have our fun. There were twenty-three of us fools waiting on the beach with flippers, masks, breathers and one spear each. The spears were pretty formidable, though, jet-propelled and with high-explosive heads.

We splashed in and swam in phalanx, underwater, toward the feeding creature. When it saw us at first, it didn't attack. It tried to hide its meal, presumably so that some of us wouldn't be able to sneak around and munch on it while the shark was dealing with the others. But every time he tried for the deep water, he'd bump into the pressor field. He was obviously getting pissed off.

Finally, he just let go of the beef, whipped around and charged. Great sport. He was the size of your finger one second, way down there at the other end of the field, then suddenly as big as the guy next to you and closing fast.

Maybe ten of the spears hit him-mine didn't-and they tore him to shreds. But even after an expert, or lucky, brain shot that took off the top of his head and one eye, even with half his flesh and entrails scattered in a bloody path behind him, he slammed into our line and clamped his jaws around a woman, grinding off both of her legs before it occurred to him to die.

We carried her, barely alive, back to the beach, where an ambulance was waiting. They poured her full of blood surrogate and No-shock and rushed her to the hospital, where she survived to eventually go through the agony of growing new legs. I decided that I would leave the hunting of fish to other fish.

Most of our stay at Threshold, once the therapy became bearable, was pleasant enough. No military discipline, lots of reading and things to potter around with. But there was a pall over it, since it was obvious that we weren't out of the army; just pieces of broken equipment that they were fixing up to throw back into the fray. Marygay and I each had another three years to serve in our lieutenancies.

But we did have six months of rest and recreation coming once our new limbs were pronounced in good working order. Marygay was released two days before I was but waited around for me.

My back pay came to $892,746,012. Not in the form of bales of currency, fortunately; on Heaven they used an electronic credit exchange, so I carried my fortune around in a little machine with a digital readout. To buy something you punched in the vendor's credit number and the amount of purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint.

Heaven's economy was governed by the continual presence of thousands of resting, recreating millionaire soldiers. A modest snack would cost a hundred bucks, a room for a night at least ten times that. Since UNEF built and owned Heaven, this runaway inflation was pretty transparently a simple way of getting our accumulated pay back into the economic mainstream.

We had fun, desperate fun. We rented a flyer and camping gear and went off for weeks, exploring the planet. There were icy rivers to swim and lush jungles to crawl through; meadows and mountains and polar wastes and deserts.

We could be totally protected from the environment by adjusting our individual pressor fields-sleep naked in a blizzard-or we could take nature straight. At Marygay's suggestion, the last thing we did before coming back to civilization was to climb a pinnacle in the desert, fasting for several days to heighten our sensibilities (or warp our perceptions, I'm still not sure), and sit back-to-back in the searing heat, contemplating the languid flux of life.

Then off to the fleshpots. We toured every city on the planet, and each had its own particular charm, but we finally returned to Skye to spend the rest of our leave time.

The rest of the planet was bargain-basement compared to Skye. In the four weeks we were using the airborne pleasure dome as our home base, Marygay and I each went through a good half-billion dollars. We gambled-sometimes losing a million dollars or more in a night-ate and drank the finest the planet had to offer, and sampled every service and product that wasn't too bizarre for our admittedly archaic tastes. We each had a personal servant whosesalary was rather more than that of a major general.

Desperate fun, as I said. Unless the war changed radically, our chances of surviving the next three years were microscopic. We were remarkably healthy victims of a terminal disease, trying to cram a lifetime of sensation into a half of a year.

We did have the consolation, not small, that however short the remainder of our lives would be, we would at least be together. For some reason it never occurred to me that even that could be taken from us.

We were enjoying a light lunch in the transparent "first floor" of Skye, watching the ocean glide by underneath us, when a messenger bustled in and gave us two envelopes: our orders.

Marygay had been bumped to captain, and I to major, on the basis of our military records and tests we had taken at Threshold. I was a company commander and she was a company's executive officer.

But they weren't the same company.

She was going to muster with a new company being formed right here on Heaven. I was going back to Stargate for "indoctrination and education" before taking command.

For a long time we couldn't say anything. "I'm going to protest," I said finally, weakly. "They can't make me a commander. Into a commander."

She was still struck dumb. This was not just a separation. Even if the war was over and we left for Earth only a few minutes apart, in different ships, the geometry of the collapsar jump would pile up years between us. When the second one arrived on Earth, his partner would probably be a half-century older; more probably dead.

We sat there for some time, not touching the exquisite food, ignoring the beauty around us and beneath us, only conscious of each other and the two sheets of paper that separated us with a gulf as wide and real as death.

We went back to Threshold. I protested but my arguments were shrugged off. I tried to get Marygay assigned to my company, as my exec. They said my personnel had all been allotted. I pointed out that most of them probably hadn't even been born yet. Nevertheless, allotted, they said.

It would be almost a century, I said, before I even get to Stargate. They replied that Strike Force Command plans in terms of centuries.

Not in terms of people.

We had a day and a night together. The less said about that, the better. It wasn't just losing a lover. Marygay and I were each other's only link to real life, the Earth of the 1980s and 90s. Not the perverse grotesquerie we were supposedly fighting to preserve. When her shuttle took off it was like a casket rattling down into a grave.

I commandeered computer time and found out the orbital elements of her ship and its departure time; found out I could watch her leave from "our" desert.

I landed on the pinnacle where we had starved together and, a few hours before dawn, watched a new star appear over the western horizon, flare to brilliance and fade as it moved away, becoming just another star, then a dim star, and then nothing. I walked to the edge and looked down the sheer rock face to the dim frozen rippling of dunes half a kilometer below. I sat with my feet dangling over the edge, thinking nothing, until the sun's oblique rays illuminated the dunes in a soft, tempting chiaroscuro of low relief. Twice I shifted my weight as if to jump. When I didn't, it was not for fear of pain or loss. The pain would be only a bright spark and the loss would be only the army's. And it would be their ultimate victory over me- having ruled my life for so long, to force an end to it.

That much, I owed to the enemy.

MAJOR

MANDELLA

2458-3143 A.D.

1

What was that old experiment they told us about in high school biology? Take a flatworm and teach it how to swim through a maze. Then mash it up and feed it to a stupid flatworm, and lo! the stupid flatworm would be able to swim the maze, too.

I had a bad taste of major general in my mouth.

Actually, I supposed they had refined the techniques since my high school days. With time dilation, that was about 450 years for research and development.

At Stargate, my orders said, I was to undergo "indoctrination and education" prior to taking command of my very own Strike Force. Which was what they still called a company.

For my education on Stargate, they didn't mince up major generals and serve them to me with hollandaise. They didn't feed me anything except glucose for three weeks.

Glucose and electricity.

They shaved every hair off my body, gave me a shot that turned me into a dishrag, attached dozens of electrodes to my head and body, immersed me in a tank of oxygenated fluorocarbon, and hooked me up to an ALSC. That's an "accelerated life situation computer." It kept me busy.

I guess it took the machine about ten minutes to review everything I had learned previously about the martial (excuse the expression) arts. Then it started in on the new stuff.

I learned the best way to use every weapon from a rock to a nova bomb. Not just intellectually; that's what all those electrodes were for. Cybernetically-controlled negative feedback kinesthesia; I felt the weapons in my hands and watched my performance with them. And did it over and over until I did it right. The illusion of reality was total. I used a spear-thrower with a band of Masai warriors on a village raid, and when I looked down at my body it was long and black. I relearned epee from a cruel-looking man in foppish clothes, in an eighteenth-century French courtyard. I sat quietly in a tree with a Sharps rifle and sniped at blue-uniformed men as they crawled across a muddy field toward Vicksburg.  In three weeks I killed several regiments of electronic ghosts. It seemed more like a year to me, but the ALSC does strange things to your sense of time.

Learning to use useless exotic weapons was only a small part of the training. In fact, it was the relaxing part. Because when I wasn't in kinesthesia, the machine kept my body totally inert and zapped my brain with four millennia's worth of military facts and theories. And I couldn't forget any of it! Not while I was in the tank.

Want to know who Scipio Aemilianus was? I don't. Bright light of the Third Punic War. War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained. And I'll never forget the poetry of "the advance party minus normally moves in a column formation with the platoon headquarters leading, followed by a laser squad, the heavy weapons squad, and the remaining laser squad; the column relies on observation for its flank security except when the terrain and visibility dictate the need for small security detachments to the flanks, in which case the advance party commander will detail one platoon sergeant. . ." and so on.

That's from Strike Force Command Small Unit Leader's Handbook, as if you could call something a handbook when it takes up two whole microfiche cards, 2,000 pages.

If you want to become a thoroughly eclectic expert in a subject that repels you, join UNEF and sign up for officer training.

One hundred nineteen people, and I was responsible for 118 of them. Counting myself but not counting the Commodore, who could presumably take care of herself.

I hadn't met any of my company during the two weeks of physical rehabilitation that followed the ALSC session. Before our first muster I was supposed to report to the Temporal Orientation Officer. I called for an appointment and his clerk said the Colonel would meet me at the Level Six Officers' Club after dinner.

TABLE OF ORGANIZATION

Strike Force Gamma

Sade-138 Campaign

IECHN:

MAJ Mondella

COMM Anwpol

2ECHN:

CAPT Moore

3ECHN:

ILT Hilleboe

4ECHN:

2LT Riland

2LT Rusk

2LT ALvever MD

5ECHN:

2LT Borgstedz 2LT Brill

2LT Gainor

2LT Heimoff

6ECHN:

SSgr Webster SSgt Gillies

SSgr Abram:

SSgt Dole

7ECHN:

Sgt Dolins Sgz Bell Cpl Geller Cpl Kahn

Sgt Anderson

Cpl Kalvm

Sgt Noyes Cpl Spraggs

8ECHN:

Pvt Boas CpJ Weiner

Pvt Lingeman                Pvt IkIe

Pvt Rosevear                Pvt Schon

Pvt Wolfe, R.                Pvt Shubik

Pvt Lin    Pvt Duhl

Pvt Simmons                Pvt Perloff

Pvt Winograd                Pvt Moynihan

Pvt Brown                Pvt Frank

Pvt Bloomquist Pvt Graubard

Pvt Wong                Pvt Orlans

Pvt Louria                Pvt Mayr

Pvt Gross                Pvt Quarton

Pvt Asadi                Pvt Hin

Pvt Horman                Pvt Stendahi

Pvt Fox   Pvt Erikson Pvt Born

Pvt Miller

Pvt Reisman

Pvt Coupling

Pvt Rosiow

Pvt Huntington

Pvt Dc Sola

Pvt Pool

Pvt Nepala

Pvt Schuba

Pvt Ulanov

Pvt Shelley

Pvt Lynn

Pvt Slaer

Pvt Schenk

Pvt Deelstre

Pvt Levy

Pvt Conroy

Pvt Yakata

Pvt Burns

Pvt Cohen

Pvt Graham

Pvt Schoeliple

Pvt Wolfe, E.

Pvt Karkoshka

Pvt Majer

Pvt Dioujova

Pvt Armaing

Pvt Baulez

Pvt Johnson

Pvt Oitrecht

Pvt Kayibanth

Pvt Tschudi

Supporting:                ILT Williams (NAy), 2LTs Jarvil (MED), Laasonen (MED),

Wilber (PSY), Szydlowska (MAINT), Gaptchcnko (ORD), Gedo (COMM),

Gim (COMP); 1SGTs Evans (MED), Rodriguez (MED), Kostidinov

(MED), Rwabwogo (PSY), Blazynski (MAINT), Turpin (ORD); SSGTS

Carreras (MED), Kousnetzov (MED), Waruinge (MED). Rojas (MED), Botos (MAINT), Orban (CK), Mbugua (COMP); SGTs Perez (MED), Seales

(MAINT), Anghelov (01W), Vugin (COMP); CPLs Daborg (MED), Correa

(MED), Kajdi (SEX), Valdez (SEX), Muranga (01W); PVTs Kottysch

(MAINT), Rudkoski (CK), Minter (ORE)).

APPROVED STFCOM STARGATE 12 Mar 2458. FOR ThE

COMMANDER:

Olga Torischeva BGEN STFCOM

I went down to Six early, thinking to eat dinner there, but they had nothing but snacks. So I munched on a fungus thing that vaguely resembled escargots and took the rest of my calories in the form of alcohol.

"Major Mandeila?" I'd been busily engaged in my seventh beer and hadn't seen the Colonel approach. I started to rise but he motioned for me to stay seated and dropped heavily into the chair opposite me.

"I'm in your debt," he said. "You saved me from at least half of a boring evening." He offered his hand. "Jack Kynock, at your service."

"Colonel-"

"Don't Colonel me and I won't Major you. We old fossits have to - - keep our perspective. William."

"All right with me."

He ordered a kind of drink I'd never heard of. "Where to start? Last time you were on Earth was 2007, according to the records."

"That's right."

"Didn't like it much, did you?"

"No." Zombies, happy robots.

"Well, it got better. Then it got worse, thank you." A private brought his drink, a bubbling concoction that was green at the bottom of the glass and lightened to chartreuse at the top. He sipped. "Then they got better again, then worse, then. . . I don't know. Cycles."

"What's it like now?"

"Well - . - I'm not really sure. Stacks of reports and such, but it's hard to filter out the propaganda. I haven't been back in almost two hundred years; it was pretty bad then. Depending on what you like."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, let me see. There was lots of excitement. Ever hear of the Pacifist movement?"

"I don't think so."

"Hmn, the name's deceptive. Actually, it was a war, a guerrilla war."

"I thought I could give you name, rank and serial number of every war from Troy on up." He smiled. "They must have missed one."

"For good reason. It was run by veterans-survivors of Yod-38 and Aleph-40, I hear; they got discharged together and decided they could take on all of UNEF, Earthside. They got lots of support from the population."

"But didn't win."

"We're still here." He swirled his drink and the colors shifted. "Actually, all I know is hearsay. Last time I got to Earth, the war was over, except for some sporadic sabotage. And it wasn't exactly a safe topic of conversation."

"It surprises me a little," I said, "well, more than a little. That Earth's population would do anything at all.. - against the government's wishes."

He made a noncommittal sound.

"Least of all, revolution. When we were there, you couldn't get anybody to say a damned thing against the UNEF-or any of the local governments, for that matter. They were conditioned from ear to ear to accept things as they were."

"Ah. That's a cyclic thing, too." He settled back in his chair. "It's not a matter of technique. if they wanted to, Earth's government could have total control over. . . every nontrivial thought and action of each citizen, from cradle to grave.

"They don't do it because it would be fatal. Because there's a war on. Take your own case: did you get any motivational conditioning while you were in the can?"

I thought for a moment. "If I did, I wouldn't necessarily know about it."

"That's true. Partially true. But take my word for it, they left that part of your brain alone. Any change in your attitude toward UNEF or the war, or war in general, comes only from new knowledge. Nobody's fiddled with your basic motivations. And you should know why."

Names, dates, figures rattled down through the maze of new knowledge. "Tet-17, Sed-2l, Aleph-14. The Lazlo

'The Lazlo Emergency Commission Report.' June, 2106."

"Right. And by extension, your own experience on Aleph-l. Robots don't make good soldiers."

"They would," I said. "Up to the twenty-first century.

BehaViOral conditioning would have been the answer to a general's dream. Make up an army with all the best features of the SS, the Praetorian Guard, the Golden Horde. Mosby's Raiders, the Green Berets."

He laughed over his glass. "Then put that army up against a squad of men in modem fighting suits. It'd be over in a couple of minutes."

"So long as each man in the squad kept his head about him. And just fought like hell to stay alive." The generation of soldiers that had precipitated the Lazlo Reports had been conditioned from birth to conform to somebody's vision of the ideal fighting man. They worked beautifully as a team, totally bloodthirsty, placing no great importance on personal survival-and the Taurans cut them to ribbons.

The Taurans also fought with no regard for self. But they were better at it, and there were always more of them.

Kynock took a drink and watched the colors. "I've seen your psych profile," he said. "Both before you got here and after your session in the can. It's essentially the same, before and after."

"That's reassuring." I signaled for another beer.

"Maybe it shouldn't be."

"What, it says I won't make a good officer? I told them that from the beginning. I'm no leader."

"Right in a way, wrong in a way. Want to know what that profile says?"

I shrugged. "Classified, isn't it?"

"Yes," he said. "But you're a major now. You can pull the profile of anybody in your command."

"I don't suppose it has any big surprises." But I was a little curious. What animal isn't fascinated by a mirror?

"No. It says you're a pacifist. A failed one at that, which gives you a mild neurosis. Which you handle by transferring the burden of guilt to the army."

The fresh beer was so cold it hurt my teeth. "No surprises yet."

"And as far as being a leader, you do have a certain potential. But it would be along the lines of a teacher or a minister; you would have to lead from empathy, compassion. You have the desire to impose your ideas on other people, but not your will. Which means, you're right, you'll make one hell of a bad officer unless you shape up."

I had to laugh. "UNEF must have known all of this when they ordered me to officer training."

"There are other parameters," he said. "For instance, you're adaptable, reasonably intelligent, analytical. And you're one of the eleven people who's lived through the whole war."

"Surviving is a virtue in a private." Couldn't resist it. "But an officer should provide gallant example. Go down with the ship. Stride the parapet as if unafraid."

He harrumphed at that. "Not when you're a thousand light years from your replacement."

"It doesn't add up, though. Why would they haul me all the way from Heaven to take a chance on my 'shaping up,' when probably a third of the people here on Stargate are better officer material? God, the military mind!"

"I suspect the bureaucratic mind, at least, had something to do with it. You have an embarrassing amount of seniority to be a footsoldier."

"That's all time dilation. I've only been in three campaigns."

"Immaterial. Besides, that's two-and-a-half more than the average soldier survives. The propaganda boys will probably make you into some kind of a folk hero."

"Folk hero." I sipped at the beer. "Where is John Wayne now that we really need him?"

"John Wayne?" He shook his head. "I never went in the can, you know. I'm no expert at military history."

"Forget it."

Kynock finished his drink and asked the private to get him-I swear to God-a "rum Antares."

"Well, I'm supposed to be your Temporal Orientation Officer. What do you want to know about the present? What passes for the present."

Still on my mind: "You've never been in the can?"

"No, combat officers only. The computer facilities and energy you go through in three weeks would keep the Earth running for several days. Too expensive for us deskwarmers."

"Your decorations say you're combat."

"Honorary. I was." The rum Antares was a tall slender glass with a little ice floating at the top, filled with pale amber liquid. At the bottom was a bright red globule about the size of a thumbnail; crimson filaments waved up from it.

"What's that red stuff?"

"Cinnamon. Oh, some ester with cinnamon in it. Quite good. . . want a taste?"

"No, I'll stick to beer, thanks."

"Down at level one, the library machine has a temporal orientation file, that my staff updates every day. You can go to it for specific questions. Mainly I want to... prepare you for meeting your Strike Force."

"What, they're all cyborgs? Clones?"

He laughed. "No, it's illegal to clone humans. The main problem is with, uh, you're heterosexual."

"Oh, that's no problem. I'm tolerant."

"Yes, your profile shows that you... think you're tolerant, but that's not the problem, exactly."

"Oh," I knew what he was going to say. Not the details, but the substance.

"Only emotionally stable people are drafted into UNEF.

"I know this is hard for you to accept, but heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure."

"If they think they're going to cure me-"

"Relax, you're too old." He took a delicate sip. "It won't be as hard to get along with them as you might-"

"Wait. You mean nobody... everybody in my company is homosexual? But me?"

"William, everybody on Earth is homosexual. Except for a thousand or so; veterans and incurables."

"AK" What could I say? "Seems like a drastic way to solve the population problem."

"Perhaps. It does work, though; Earth's population is stable at just under a billion. When one person dies or goes offplanet, another is quickened."

"Not 'born.'"

"Born, yes, but not the old-fashioned way. Your old term for it was 'test-tube babies,' but of course they don't use a test-tube."

"Well, that's something."

"Part of every creche is an artificial womb that takes care of a person the first eight or ten months after quickening. What you would call birth takes place over a period of days; it isn't the sudden, drastic event that it used to be."

O brave new world, I thought. "No birth trauma. A billion perfectly adjusted homosexuals."

"Perfectly adjusted by present-day Earth standards. You and I might find them a little odd."

"That's an understatement." I drank off the rest of my beer. "Yourself, you, uh.. . are you homosexual?"

"Oh, no," he said. I relaxed. "Actually, though, I'm not hetero anymore, either." He slapped his hip and it made an odd sound. "Got wounded and it turned out that I had a rare disorder of the lymphatic system, can't regenerate. Nothing but metal and plastic from the waist down. To use your word, I'm a cyborg."

Far out, as my mother used to say. "Oh, Private," I called to the waiter, "bring me one of those Antares things." Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.

"Make it a double, please."

2

They looked normal enough, filing into the lecture hail where we held our first muster, the next day. Rather young and a little stiff.

Most of them had only been out of the creche for seven or eight years. The creche was a controlled, isolated environment to which only a few specialists-pediatricians and teachers, mostly-had access. When a person leaves the creche at age twelve or thirteen, he chooses a first name (his last name having been taken from the donor-parent with the higher genetic rating) and is legally a probationary adult, with schooling about equivalent to what I had after my first year of college. Most of them go on to more specialized education, but some are assigned a job and go right to work.

They're observed very closely and anyone who shows any signs of sociopathy, such as heterosexual leanings, is sent away to a correctional facility. He's either cured or kept there for the rest of his life.

Everyone is drafted into UNEF at the age of twenty. Most people work at a desk for five years and are discharged. A few lucky souls, about one in eight thousand, are invited to volunteer for combat training. Refusing is "sociopathic," even though it means signing up for an extra five years. And your chance of surviving the ten years is so small as to be negligible; nobody ever had. Your best chance is to have the war end before your ten (subjective) years of service are up. Hope that time dilation puts many years between each of your battles.

Since you can figure on going into battle roughly once every subjective year, and since an average of 34 percent survive each battle, it's easy to compute your chances of being able to fight it out for ten years. It comes to about two one-thousandths of one percent. Or, to put it another way, get an old-fashioned six-shooter and play Russian Roulette with four of the six chambers loaded. If you can do it ten times in a row without decorating the opposite wall, congratulations! You're a civilian.

There being some sixty thousand combat soldiers in UNEF, you could expect about 1.2 of them to survive for ten years. I didn't seriously plan on being the lucky one, even though I was halfway there.

How many of these young soldiers filing into the auditorium knew they were doomed? I tried to match faces up with the dossiers I'd been scanning all morning, but it was hard. They'd all been selected through the same battery of stringent parameters, and they looked remarkably alike: tall but not too tall, muscular but not heavy, intelligent but not in a brooding way. . . and Earth was much more racially homogenous than it had been in my century. Most of them looked vaguely Polynesian. Only two of them, Kayibanda and Lin, seemed pure representatives of racial types. I wondered whether the others gave them a hard time.

Most of the women were achingly handsome, but I was in no position to be critical. I'd been celibate for over a year, ever since saying goodbye to Marygay, back on Heaven.

I wondered if one of them might have a trace of atavism, or might humor her commander's eccentricity. It is absolately forbidden for an officer to form sexual liaison with his subordinates. Such a warm way of putting it. Violation of this regulation is punishable by attachment of all funds and reduction to the rank of private or, if the relationship interferes with a unit's combat efficiency, summary execution. If all of UNEF's regulations could be broken so casually and consistently as that one was, it would be a very easygoing army.

But not one of the boys appealed to me. How they'd look after another year, I wasn't sure.

"Tench-hut!" That was Lieutenant Hilleboe. It was a credit to my new reflexes that I didn't jump to my feet. Everybody in the auditorium snapped to.

"My name is Lieutenant Hilleboe and I am your Second Field Officer." That used to be "Field First Sergeant." A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

Hilleboe came on like a real hard-ass professional soldier. Probably shouted orders at the mirror every morning, while she was shaving. But I'd seen her profile and knew that she'd only been in action once, and only for a couple of minutes at that. Lost an arm and a leg and was commissioned, same as me, as a result of the tests they give at the regeneration clinic.

Hell, maybe she had been a very pleasant person before going through that trauma; it was bad enough just having one limb regrown.

She was giving them the usual first-sergeant peptalk, stern-but-fair: don't waste my time with little things, use the chain of command, most problems can be solved at the fifth echelon.

It made me wish I'd had more time to talk with her earlier. Strike Force Command had really rushed us into this first muster-we were scheduled to board ship the next day-and I'd only had a few words with my officers.

Not enough, because it was becoming clear that Hilleboe and I had rather disparate philosophies about how to run a company. It was true that running it was her job; I only commanded. But she was setting up a potential "good guy-bad guy" situation, using the chain of command to so isolate herself from the men and women under her. I had planned not to be quite so aloof, setting aside an hour every other day when any soldier could come to me directly with grievances or suggestions, without permission from his superiors.

We had both been given the same information during our three weeks in the can. It was interesting that we'd arrived at such different conclusions about leadership. This Open Door policy, for instance, had shown good results in "modern" armies in Australia and America. And it seemed especially appropriate to our situation, in which everybody would be cooped up for months or even years at a time. We'd used the system on the Sangre y Victoria, the last starship to which I'd been attached, and it had seemed to keep tensions down.

She had them at ease while delivering this organizational harangue; pretty soon she'd call them to attention and introduce me. What would I talk about? I'd planned just to say a few predictable words and explain my Open Door policy, then turn them over to Commodore Antopol, who would say something about the Masaryk II. But I'd better put off my explanation until after I'd had a long talk with Hilleboe; in fact, it would be best if she were the one to introduce the policy to the men and women, so it wouldn't look like the two of us were at loggerheads.

My executive officer, Captain Moore, saved me. He came rushing through a side door-he was always rushing, a pudgy meteor-threw a quick salute and handed me an envelope that contained our combat orders. I had a quick whispered conference with the Commodore, and she agreed that it wouldn't do any harm to tell them where we were going, even though the rank and file technically didn't have the "need to know."

One thing we didn't have to worry about in this war was enemy agents. With a good coat of paint, a Tauran might be able to disguise himself as an ambulatory mushroom. Bound to raise suspicions.

Hilleboe had called them to attention and was dutifully telling them what a good commander I was going to be; that I'd been in the war from the beginning, and if they intended to survive through their enlistment they had better follow my example. She didn't mention that I was a mediocre soldier with a talent for getting missed. Nor that I'd resigned from the army at the earliest opportunity and only got back in because conditions on Earth were so intolerable.

"Thank you, Lieutenant." I took her place at the podium. "At ease." I unfolded the single sheet that had our orders, and held it up. "I have some good news and some bad news." What had been a joke five centuries before was now just a statement of fact.

"These are our combat orders for the Sade-138 campaign. The good news is that we probably won't be fighting, not immediately. The bad news is that we're going to be a target."

They stirred a little bit at that, but nobody said anything or took his eyes off me. Good discipline. Or maybe just fatalism; I didn't know how realistic a picture they had of their future. Their lack of a future, that is.

"What we are ordered to do.. . is to find the largest portal planet orbiting the Sade-138 collapsar and build a base there. Then stay at the base until we are relieved. That will be two or three years, probably.

"During that time we will almost certainly be attacked. As most of you probably know, Strike Force Command has uncovered a pattern in the enemy's movements from collapsar to collapsar. They hope eventually to trace this complex pattern back through tune and space and find the Taurans' home planet. For the present, they can only send out intercepting forces, to hamper the enemy's expansion.

"In a large perspective, this is what we're ordered to do. We'll be one of several dozen strike forces employed in these blocking maneuvers, on the enemy's frontier. I won't be able to stress often enough or hard enough how important this mission is-if UNEF can keep the enemy from expanding, we may be able to envelop him. And win the war."

Preferably before we're all dead meat. "One thing I want to be clear we may be attacked the day we land, or we may simply occupy the planet for ten years and come on home." Fat chance. "Whatever happens, every one of us will stay in the best fighting trim all the time. In transit, we will maintain a regular program of calisthenics as well as a review of our training. Especially construction techniques-we have to set up the base and its defense facilities in the shortest possible time."

God, I was beginning to sound like an officer. "Any questions?" There were none. "Then I'd like to introduce Commodore Antopol. Commodore?"

The commodore didn't try to hide her boredom as she outlined, to this room full of ground-pounders, the characteristics and capabilities of Masaryk Ii. I had learned most of what she was saying through the can's forcefeeding, but the last thing she said caught my attention.

"Sade-138 will be the most distant collapsar men have gone to. It isn't even in the galaxy proper, but rather is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, some 150,000 light years distant.

"Our voyage will require four collapsar jumps and will last some four months, subjective. Maneuvering into collapsar insertion will put us about three hundred years behind Stargate's calendar by the time we reach Sade-138."

And another seven hundred years gone, if I lived to return. Not that it would make that much difference; Marygay was as good as dead and there wasn't another person alive who meant anything to me.

"As the major said, you mustn't let these figures lull you into complacency. The enemy is also headed for Sade-138; we may all get there the same day. The mathematics of the situation is complicated, but take our word for it; it's going to be a close race.

"Major, do you have anything more for them?"

I started to rise. "Well. . ."

"Tench-hut!" Hilleboe shouted. Had to learn to expect that.

"Only that I'd like to meet with my senior officers, echelon 4 and above, for a few minutes. Platoon sergeants, you're responsible for getting your troops to Staging Area 67 at 0400 tomorrow morning. Your time's your own until then. Dismissed."

I invited the five officers up to my billet and brought out a bottle of real French brandy. It had cost two months' pay, but what else could I do with the money? Invest it?

I passed around glasses but Alsever, the doctor, demurred. Instead she broke a little capsule under her nose and inhaled deeply. Then tried without too much success to mask her euphoric expression.

"First let's get down to one basic personnel problem," I said, pouring. "Do all of you know that I'm not homosexual?"

Mixed chorus of yes sirs and no sirs.