he was at “work.” Generals were special. He hurried out again into the drizzle. Around him and unnoticed were the artifacts of an Army base at war. Sky-eye’search radars popped from their silos to scan the horizons for a moment and then retreat, the burden of search taken up by the next in line. Helicopter sentries on guard duty prowled the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp. Fort Bradley was not all reception center. Above-ground were the barracks, warehouses and rail and highway termini for processing recruits-ninety thousand men and all their goods-but they were only the skin over the fort itself. They were, as the scared kids told each other in the dayrooms, naked to the air. If the yutes ever did spring a megaton attack, they would become a thin coating of charcoal on the parade ground, but they would not affect the operation of the real Fort Bradley a bit. The real Fort Bradley was a hardened installation beneath meters of reinforced concrete, some miles of rambling warrens that held the North American (and Allied) Army’s G-l. Its business was people: the past, present and future of every soul in the Army. G-l decided that a fifteen-year-old in Duluth was unlikely to succeed in civilian schools and drafted him. G-l punched his Army tests and civilian records on cards, consulted its card-punched tables of military requirements and assigned him, perhaps, to Machinist Training rather than Telemetering School. G-l yanked a platoon leader halfway around the world from Formosa and handed him a commando for a raid on the yutes’ Polar Station Seven. G-l put foulball Kramer at the “head” of the 561st PRB. G-l promoted and allocated and staffed and rewarded and punished. Foulball Kramer approached the guardbox at the elevators to the warrens and instinctively squared his shoulders and smoothed his tie. General Grote, he thought. He hadn’t seen a general officer since he’d been commissioned. Not close up. Colonels and majors had court-martialed him. He didn’t know who Grote was, whether he had one star or six, whether he was Assignment, Qualifications, Training, Evaluation, Psychological-or Disciplinary. Military Police looked him over at the elevator head. They read him like a book. Kramer wore his record on his chest and sleeves. Dull gold bars spelled out the overseas months-for his age and arm-, the Infantry, not enough. “Formosa,” said a green ribbon, and “the storming of the beach” said a small bronze spearpoint on it. A brown ribbon told them “Chinese Mainland,” and the stars on it meant that he had engaged hi three of the five mainland campaigns-presumably Canton, Mukden and Tsingtao, since they were the first. After that, nothing. Especially not the purple ribbon that might indicate a wound serious enough to keep him out of further fighting. The ribbons, his age and the fact that he was still a first lieutenant were grounds enough for the MP’s to despise him. An officer of thirty-eight should be a captain at least. Many were majors and some were colonels. “You can go down, Lieutenant,” they told the patent foulball, and he went down to the interminable concrete tunnels of G-l. A display machine considered the name General Grote when he typed it on its keyboard, and told him with a map where the general was to be found. It was a longjsh walk through the tunnels. While he walked past banks of clicking card-sorters and their servants he pondered other information the machine had gratuitously supplied: GROTE, Lawrence W, Lt Gen, 0-459732, Unassigned. It did not lessen any of Kramer’s puzzles. A three-star general, then. He couldn’t possibly have anything to do with disciplining a lousy first-John. Lieutenant generals ran Army Groups, gigantic ad hoc assemblages of up to a hundred divisions, complete with air forces, missile groups, amphibious assault teams, even carrier and missile-sub task forces. The fact of Ms rank indicated that, whoever he was, he was an immensely able and tenacious person. He had gone through at least a twenty-year threshing of the wheat from the chaff, all up the screening and evaluation boards from second lieutenant to, say, lieutenant colonel, and then the murderous grind of accelerated courses at Command and General Staff School, the fanatically rigid selection for the War College, an obstacle course designed not to tram the substandard up to competence but to keep them out. It was just this side of impossible for a human being to become a lieutenant general. And yet a few human beings in every generation did bulldoze their way through that h’ttle gap between the impossible and the almost impossible. And such a man was unassigned? Kramer found the office at last. A motherly, but sharp-eyed, WAC major told him to go right in. John Kramer studied his three-star general while going through the ancient rituals of reporting-as-or-dered. General Grote was an old man, straight, spare, white-haired, tanned. He wore no overseas bars. On his chest were all the meritorious service ribbons his country could bestow, but none of the decorations of the combat soldier. This was explained by a modest sunburst centered over the ribbons. General Grote was, had always been, General Staff Corps. A desk man. “Sit down, Lieutenant,” Grote said, eyeing him casually. “You’ve never heard of me, I assume.” “I’m afraid not, sir.” “As I expected,” said Grote complacently. “I’m not a dashing tank commander or one of those flying generals who leads his own raids. I’m one of the people who moves the dashing tank commanders and flying generals around the board like chess pieces. And now, confound it, I’m going to be a dashing combat leader at last. You may smoke if you like.” Kramer obediently lit up. “Dan Medway,” said the general, “wants me to start from scratch, build up a striking force and hit the Asian mainland across the Bering Strait.” Kramer was horrified twice-first by the reference to The Supreme Commander as “Dan” and second by the fact that he, a lieutenant, was being told about high strategy. “Relax,” the general said. “Why you’re here, now. You’re going to be my aide.” Kramer was horrified again. The general grinned. “Your card popped out of the machinery,” he said, and that was all there was to say about that, “and so you’re going to be a highly privileged character and everybody will detest you. That’s the way it is with aides. You’ll know everything I know. And vice versa; that’s the important part. You’ll run errands for me, do investigations, serve as hatchet man, see that my pajamas are pressed without starch and make coffee the way I like it-coarse grind, brought to the boil for just a moment hi an old-fashioned coffee pot. Actually what you’ll do is what I want you to do from day to day. For these privileges you get to wear a blue fourragere around your left shoulder which marks you as a man not to be trifled with by colonels, brigadiers or MP’s. That’s the way it is with aides. And, I don’t know if you have any outside interests, women or chess or drinking. The machinery didn’t mention any. But you’ll have to give them up if you do.” “Yes, sir,” said Kramer. And it seemed wildly possible that he might never touch pencil to puzzle again. With something to do- “We’re Operation Ripsaw,” said the general. “So far, that’s me, Margaret out there hi the office and you. In addition to other duties, you’ll keep a diary of Ripsaw, by the way, and I want you to have a summary with you at all times in case I need it. Now call in Margaret, make a pot of coffee, there’s a little stove thing in the washroom there, and I’ll start putting together my general staff.” It started as small and as quietly as that. 11 It was a week before Kramer got back to the 561st long enough to pick up his possessions, and then he left the stacks of Timeses and Saturday Reviews where they lay, puzzles and all. No time. The first person to hate him was Margaret, the motherly major. For all her rank over him, she was a secretary and he was an aide with a fourragere who had the general’s willing ear. She began a policy of nonresistance that was noncooperation, too; she would not deliberately obstruct him, but she would allow him to poke through the files for ten minutes before volunteering the information that the folder he wanted was already on the general’s desk. This interfered with the smooth performance of Kramer’s duties, and of course the general spotted it at once. “It’s nothing,” said Kramer when the general called him on it. “I don’t like to say anything.” “Go on,” General Grote urged. “You’re not a soldier any more; you’re a rat.” “I think I can handle it, sir.” The general motioned silently to the coffee pot and waited while Kramer fixed him a cup, two sugars, no cream. He said: “Tell me everything, always. All the dirty rumors about inefficiency and favoritism. Your suspicions and hunches. Anybody that gets in your way-or more important, in mine. In the underworld they shoot stool-pigeons, but here we give them blue cords for their shoulders. Do you understand?” Kramer did. He did not ask the general to intercede with the motherly major, or transfer her; but he did handle it himself. He discovered it was very easy. He simply threatened to have her sent to Narvik. With the others it was easier. Margaret had resented him because she was senior in Operation Ripsaw to him, but as the others were sucked hi they found him there already. Instead of resentment, their attitude toward him was purely fear. The next people to hate him were the aides of Grote’s general staff because he was a wild card in the deck. The five members of the staff-Chief, Personnel, Intelligence, Plans & Training and Operations-proceeded with their orderly, systematic jobs day by day, building Ripsaw . . . until the inevitable moment when Kramer would breeze in with, “Fine job, but the general suggests-” and the unhorsing of many assumptions, and the undoing of many days’ work. That was his job also. He was a bird of ill omen, a coiled snake in fair grass, a hired killer and a professional betrayer of confidences-though it was not long before there were no confidences to betray, except from an occasional young, new officer who hadn’t learned his way around, and those not worth betraying. That, as the general had said, was the way it was with aides. Kramer wondered sometimes if he liked what he was doing, or liked himself for doing it. But he never carried the thought through. No time. Troops completed basic training or were redeployed from rest areas and entrained, emplaned, em-bussed or embarked for the scattered staging areas of Ripsaw. Great forty-wheeled trucks bore nuclear cannon up the Alcan Highway at a snail’s pace. Air groups and missile sections launched on training exercises over Canadian wasteland that closely resembled tundra, with grid maps that bore names like Maina Pylgin and Kamenskoe. Yet these were not Ripsaw, not yet, only the separate tools that Ripsaw would someday pick up and use. Ripsaw itself moved to Wichita and a base of its own when its headquarters staff swelled to fifteen hundred men and women. Most of them hated Kramer. It was never perfectly clear to Kramer what his boss had to do with the show. Kramer made his coffee, carried his briefcase, locked and unlocked his files, delivered to him those destructive tales and delivered for him those devastating suggestions, but never understood just why there had to be a Commanding General of Ripsaw. The time they went to Washington to argue an allocation of seventy rather than sixty armored divisions for Ripsaw, for instance, General Grote just sat, smiled and smoked his pipe. It was his chief of staff, the young and brilliant major general Cartmill, who passionately argued the case before D. Beauregard Medway, though when Grote addressed his superior it still was as “Dan.” (They did get the ten extra divisions, of course.) Back in Wichita, it was Cartmill who toiled around, the clock coordinating. A security lid was clamped down early in the game. The fifteen hundred men and women in the Wichita camp stayed hi the Wichita camp. Commerce with the outside world, except via coded messages to other elements of Ripsaw, was a capital offense-as three privates learned the hard way. But through those coded channels Cartmill reached out to every area of the North American (and Allied) world. Personnel scoured the globe for human components that might be fitted into Ripsaw. Intelligence gathered information about that tract of Siberia which they were to invade, and the waters they were to cross. Plans & Training slaved at methods of effecting the crossing and invasion efficiently, with the least (or at any rate the optimum least, consistent with requirements of speed, security and so on) losses in men and materiel. Operations studied and restudied the various ways the crossing and invasion might go right or wrong, and how a good turn of fortune could be exploited, a bad turn minimized. General Cartmill was in constant touch with all of them, his fingers on every cord hi the web. So was John Kramer. Grote ambled about all this with an air of pleased surprise. Kramer discovered one day that there had been books written about his boss-not best sellers with titles like “Bloody Lorry” Grote, Sword of Freedom, but thick, gray mimeographed staff documents, in Chinese and Russian, for top-level circulation among yute commanders. He surprised Grote reading one of them -in Chinese. The general was not embarrassed. “Just refreshing my memory of what the yutes think I’m like so I can cross them up by doing something different. Listen: ‘Characteristic of this officer’s philosophy of attack is varied tactics. Reference his lecture, Lee’s 1862 Campaigns, delivered at Fort Leavenworth Command & General Staff School, attached. Opposing commanders should not expect a force under him to do the same-‘ Hmm. Tsueng, water radical.’-under him to press the advance the same way twice.’ Now all I have to do is make sure we attack by the book, like Grant instead of Lee, slug it out without any brilliant variations. See how easy it is, John? How’s the message center?” Kramer had been snooping around the message center at Grote’s request. It was a matter of feeding out cigarettes and smiles in return for an occasional incautious word or a hint; gumshoe work. The message center was an underground complex of encoders, decoders, transmitters, receivers and switchboards. It was staffed by a Signal Corps WAC battalion in three shifts around lie clock. The girls were worked hard-though a battalion should have been enough for the job. Messages went from and to the message center linking the Wichita brain with those seventy divisions training now from Capetown to Manitoba, a carrier task force conducting exercises in the Antarctic, a fleet of landing craft growing every day on the Gulf of California. The average time-lag between receipt of messages and delivery to the Wichita personnel at destination was 12.25 minutes. The average number of erroneous transmis- sions detected per day was three. Both figures General Grote considered intolerable. “It’s Colonel Bucknell that’s lousing it up, General. She’s trying too hard. No give. Physical training twice a day, for instance, and a very hard policy on excuses. A stern attitude’s filtered down from her to the detachments. Everybody’s chewing out subordinates to keep themselves covered. The working girls call Bucknell ‘the monster.’ Their feeling is the Army’s impossible to please, so what the hell.” “Relieve her,” Grote said amiably. “Make her mess officer; Ripsaw chow’s rotten anyway.” He went back to his Chinese text. And suddenly it all began to seem as if it really might someday rise and strike out across the Strait. From Lieutenant Kramer’s Ripsaw Diary: At AM staff meeting CG RIPSAW xmitted order CG NAAARMY designating RIPSAW D day 15 May 1986. Gen CARTMILL observed this date allowed 45 days to form troops in final staging areas assuming RIPSAW could be staged in 10 days. CG RIPSAW stated that a 10-day staging seemed feasible. Staff concurred. CG RIPSAW so ordered. At 1357 hours CG NAAARMY concurrence received. They were on the way. As the days grew shorter Grote seemed to have less and less to do, and curiously so did Kramer. He had not expected this. He had been aide-de-camp to the general for nearly a year now, and he fretted when he could find no fresh treason to bring to the general’s ears. He redoubled his prowling tours of the kitchens, the BOQ, the motor pools, the message center, but not even the guard mounts or the shine on the shoes of the soldiers at Retreat parade was in any way at fault. Kramer could only imagine that he was missing things. It did not occur to him that, as at last they should be, the affairs of Ripsaw had gathered enough speed to keep them straight and clean, until the general called him hi one night and ordered him to pack. Grote put on his spectacles and looked over them at Kramer. “D plus five,” he said, “assuming all goes well, we’re moving this headquarters to Kiska. I want you to take a look-see. Arrange a plane. You can leave tomorrow.” It was, Kramer realized that night as he undressed, Just Something to Do. Evidently the hard part of his job was at an end. It was now only a question of fighting the battle, and for that the field commanders were much more important than he. For the first time in many months he thought it would be nice to do a crossword puzzle, but instead fell asleep. It was an hour before leaving the next day that Kramer met Ripsaw’s “cover.” The “cover” was another lieutenant general, a bristling and wiry man named Clough, with a brilliant combat record staked out on his chest and sleeves for the world to read. Kramer came in when his buzzer sounded, made coffee for the two generals and was aware that Grote and Clough were old pals and that the Ripsaw general was kidding the pants off his guest. “You always were a great admirer of Georgie Patton,” Grote teased. “You should be glad to follow in his footsteps. Your operation will go down in history as big and important as his historic cross-Channel smash into Le Havre.” Kramer’s thoughts were full of himself-he did not much like getting even so close to the yutes as Kiska, where he would be before the sun set that night -but his ears pricked up. He could not remember any cross-Channel smash into Le Havre. By Patton or anybody else. “Just because I came to visit your show doesn’t mean you have to rib me, Larry,” Clough grumbled. “But it’s such a pleasure, Mick.” Clough opened his eyes wide and looked at Grote. “I’ve generated against Novotny before. If you want to know what I think of him, I’ll tell you,” Pause. Then Grote, gently: “Take it easy, Mick. Look at my boy there. See him quivering with curiosity?” Kramer’s back was turned. He hoped his blush would subside before he had to turn around with the coffee. It did not. “Caught red-faced,” Grote said happily, and winked at the other general. Clough looked stonily back. “Shall we put him out of his misery, Mick? Shall we fill him in on the big picture?” “Might as well get it over with.” “I accept your gracious assent.” Grote waved for Kramer to help himself to coffee and to sit down. Clearly he was unusually cheerful today, Kramer thought. Grote said: “Lieutenant Kramer, General Clough is the gun-captain of a Quaker cannon which covers Ripsaw. He looks like a cannon. He acts like a cannpn. But he isn’t loaded. Like his late idol George Patton at one point in his career, General Clough is the commander of a vast force which exists on paper and in radio transmissions alone.” Clough stirred uneasily, so Grote became more serious. “We’re brainwashing Continental Defense Commissar Novotny by serving up to him his old enemy as the man he’ll have to fight. The yute radio intercepts are getting a perfect picture of an assault on Polar Nine being prepared under old Mick here. That’s what they’ll prepare to counter, of course. Ripsaw will catch them flatfooted.” Clough stirred again but did not speak. Grote grinned. “All right. We hope,” he conceded. “But there’s a lot of planning in this thing. Of course, it’s a waste of the talent of a rather remarkably able general-” Clough gave him a lifted-eyebrow look- “but you’ve got to have a real man at the head of the fake army group or they won’t believe it. Anyway, it worked with Patton and the Nazis. Some unkind people have suggested that Patton never did a better bit of work than sitting on his knapsack in England and letting his name be used.” “All full of beans with a combat command, aren’t you?” Clough said sourly. “Wait’11 the shooting starts.” “Ike never commanded a battalion before the day he invaded North Africa, Mick. He did all right.” “Ike wasn’t up against Novotny,” Clough said heavily. “I can talk better while I’m eating, Larry. Want to buy me a lunch?” General Grote nodded. “Lieutenant, see what you can charm out of Colonel Bucknell for us to eat, will you? We’ll have it sent in here, of course, and the best girls she’s got to serve it.” Then, unusually, he stood up and looked appraisingly at Kramer. “Have a nice flight,” he said. • •• 111 Kramer’s blue fourragere won him cold handshakes but a seat at the first table in the Hq Officers Mess in Kiska. He didn’t have quite enough appetite to appreciate it. Approaching the island from the air had taken appetite away from him, as the GCA autocontroller rocked the plane in a carefully calculated zigzag in its approach. They were, Kramer discovered, under direct visual observation from any chance-met bird from yute eyries across the Strait until they got below five hundred feet. Sometimes the yutes sent over a flight of birds to knock down a transport. Hence the zigzags. Captain Mabry, a dark, tall Georgian who had been designated to make the general’s aide feel at home, noticed Kramer wasn’t eating, pushed his own tray into the center strip and, as it sailed away, stood up. “Get it off the pad, shall we? Can’t keep the Old Man waiting.” The captain took Mabry through clanging com- dors to an elevator and then up to the eyrie. It was only a room. From it the spy-bird missiles-rockets, they were really, but the services like to think of them as having a punch, even though the punch was only a television camera-were controlled. To it the birds returned the pictures their eyes saw. Brigadier Spiegelhauer shook Kramer’s hand. “Make yourself at home, Lieutenant,” he boomed. He was short and almost skeletally thin, but his voice was enormous. “Everything satisfactory for the general, I hope?” “Why, yes, sir. I’m just looking around.” “Of course,” Spiegelhauer shouted. “Care to monitor a ride?” “Yes, sir.” Mabry was looking at him with amusement, Kramer saw. Confound him, what right did he have to think Kramer was scared-even if he was? Not a physical fear; he was not insane. But . . . scared. The service life of a spy-bird over yute territory was something under twenty minutes, by then the homing heads on the ground-to-air birds would have sniffed out its special fragrance and knocked it out. In that twenty-minute period it would see what it could see. Through its eyes the observers in the eyrie would learn just that much more about yute dispositions-so long as it remained in direct line-of-sight to the eyrie, so long as everything in its instrumentation worked, so long as yute jamming did not penetrate its microwave control. Captain Mabry took Kramer’s arm. “Take ‘er off the pad,” Mabry said negligently to the launch officer. He conducted Kramer to a pair of monitors and sat before them. On both eight-inch screens the officers saw a diamond-sharp scan of the inside of a silo plug. There was no sound. The plug lifted off its lip without a whisper, dividing into two semicircles of steel. A two-inch circle of sky showed. Then, abruptly, the circle widened; the lip irised out and disappeared; the gray surrounded the screen and blanked it out, and then it was bright blue, and a curl of cirrocumulus in one quadrant of the screen. Metro had promised no cloud over the tactical area, but there was cloud there. Captain Mabry frowned and tapped a tune on the buttons before him; the cirrocumulus disappeared and a line of gray-white appeared at an angle on the screen. “Horizon,” said Mabry. “Labble to make you seasick, Lootenant.”‘ He tapped some more and the image righted itself. A faint yellowish stain, not bright against the bright cloud, curved up before them and burst into spidery black smoke. “Oh, they are anxious,” said Mabry, sounding nettled. “General, weather has busted it again. Cain’t see a thing.” Spiegelhauer bawled angrily, “I’m going to the weather station,” and stamped out. Kramer knew what he was angry about. It was not the waste of a bird; it was that he had been made to lose face before the general’s aide-de-camp. There would be a bad tune for the Weather Officer because Kramer had been there that day. The telemetering crew turned off their instruments. The whining eighteen-inch reel that was flinging tape across a row of fifteen magnetic heads, recording the picture the spy-bird took, slowed and droned and stopped. Out of instinct and habit Kramer pulled out his rough diary and jotted down Brig. Spiegelhauer- Permits bad wea. sta. situation? But it was little enough to have learned on a flight to Kiska, and everything else seemed going well. Captain Mabry fetched over two mugs of hot cocoa. “Sorry,” he said. “Cain’t be helped, I guess.” Kramer put his notebook away and accepted the cocoa. “Beats U-2in’,” Mabry went on. “Course, you don’t get to see as much of the country.” Kramer could not help a small, involuntary tremor. For just a moment there, looking out of the spy-bird’s eyes, he had imagined himself actually in the air above yute territory and conceived the possibility of being shot down, parachuting, internment, the Blank Tanks, “Yankee! Why not be good fellow? You proud you murderer?” “No,” Kramer said, “you don’t get to see as much of the country.” But he had already seen all the yute country he ever wanted. Kramer got back hi the elevator and descended rapidly, his mind full. Perhaps a psychopath, a hungry cat or a child would have noticed that the ride downward lasted a second or two less than the ride up. Kramer did not. If the sound echoing from the tunnel he walked out into was a bit more clangorous than the one he had entered from, he didn’t notice that either. Kramer’s mind was occupied with the thought that, all in all, he was pleased to find that he had approached this close to yute territory, ‘and to yute Blank Tanks, without feeling particularly afraid. Even though he recognized that there was nothing to be afraid of, since of course the yutes could not get hold of him here. Then he observed that the door Mabry opened for him led to a chamber he knew he had never seen before. They were standing on an approach stage and below them forty-foot rockets extended downward into their pit. A gantry-bridge hung across space from the stage to the nearest rocket, which lay open, showing a clumsily padded compartment where there should have been a warhead or an instrument capsule. Kramer turned around and was not surprised to find that Mabry was pointing a gun at him. He had almost expected it. He started to speak. But there was someone else in the shadowed chamber, and the first he knew of that was when the sap struck him just behind the ear. It was all coming true: “Yankee! Why not be honest man? You like murder babies?” Kramer only shook his head. He knew it did no good to answer. Three years before he had answered. He knew it also did no good to keep quiet; because he had done that too. What he knew most of all was that nothing was going to do him any good because the yutes had him now, and who would have thought Mabry would have been the one to do him in? They did not beat him at this point, but then they did not need to. The nose capsule Mabry had thrust him into had never been designed for carrying passengers. With ingenuity Kramer could only guess at Mabry had contrived to fit it with parachutes and watertight seals and flares so the yute gunboat could find it in the water and pull out their captive alive. But he had taken 15- and 20-G accelerations, however briefly. He seemed to have no serious broken bones, but he was bruised all over. Secretly he found that almost amusing. In the preliminary softening up, the yutes did not expect their captives to be in physical pain. By being in pain he was in some measure upsetting their schedule. It was not much of a victory but it was all he had. Phase Two was direct questioning: What was Ripsaw exactly? HOW many divisions? Where located? Why had Lieutenarit-General Grote spent so much time with Lieutenant-General Clough? When Mary Elizabeth Grote, before her death, entertained the Vietnamese UNESCO delegate’s aunt in Sag Harbor, had she known her husband had just been passed over for promotion to brigadier? And was resentment over that the reason she had subsequently donated twenty-five dollars to a mission hospital in Laos? What were the Bering Straits rendezvous points for missile submarines supporting Ripsaw? Was the transfer of Lieutenant Colonel • Carolyn S. Bucknell from Message Center Battalion C.O. to Mess Officer a cover for some CIC complexity? What air support was planned for D plus one? D plus two? Did Major Somebody-or-other’s secret drinking account for the curious radio intercept in clear logged at 0834 on 6 October 1985? Or was “Omo- *. *M bray for my eadhay” the code designation for some nefarious scheme to be launched against the gallant, the ever-victorious forces of Neo-Utilitarianism? Kramer was alternately cast into despondency by the amount of knowledge his captors displayed and puzzled by the psychotic irrelevance of some of the questions they asked him. But most of all he was afraid. As the hours of Phase Two became days, he became more and more afraid-afraid of Phase Three-and so he was ready for Phase Three when the yutes were ready for him. Phase Three was physical. They beat the living be-hell out of First Lieutenant John Kramer, and then they shouted at him and starved him and kicked him and threw him into bathtubs filled half with salt and water and half with shaved ice. And then they kicked him in the belly and fed him cathartics by the ounce and it went on for a long time; but that was not the bad thing about Phase Three. Kramer found himself crying most of the tune, when he was conscious. He did not want to tell them everything he knew about Ripsaw-and thus have them be ready when it came, poised and prepared, and know that maybe 50,000 American lives would be down the drain because the surprise was on the wrong side. But he did not know if he could help himself. He was in constant pain. He thought he might die from the pain. Sometimes people did. But he didn’t think much about the pain, or the fear of dying, or even about what would happen if-no, when he cracked. What he thought about was what came next. For the bad thing about Phase Three was Phase Four. He remembered. First they would let him sleep. (He had slept very well that other time, because he hadn’t known exactly what the Blank Tanks were like. He didn’t think he would sleep so well this tune.) Then they would wake him up and feed him quickly, and bandage his worst bruises, and bandage his ears, with cotton tampons dipped in vaseline jelly plugged into them, and bandage his eyes, with light-tight adhesive around them, and bandage his mouth, with something like a boxer’s toothguard inside so he couldn’t even bite his tongue, and bandage his arms and legs, so he couldn’t even move them or touch them together. . . . And then the short superior-private who was kicking him while he thought all this stopped and talked briefly to a noncom. The two of them helped him to a mattress and left him. Kramer didn’t want to sleep, but he couldn’t help himself; he slipped off, crying weakly out of his purled and bloody eyes, because he didn’t want to sleep, he wanted to die. Ten hours later he was back in the Blank Tanks. Sit back and listen. What do you hear? Perhaps you think you hear nothing. You are wrong. You discount the sound of a distant car’s tires, or the crackle of metal as steam expands the pipes. Listen more carefully to these sounds; others lie under them. From the kitchen there is a grunt and hum as the electric refrigerator switches itself on. You change position; your chair creaks, the leather of your shoes slip-slides with a faint sound. Listen more carefully still and hear the tiny roughness in the main bearing of the electric clock in the next room, or the almost inaudible hum of wind in a television antenna. Listen to yourself: Your heartbeat, your pulse in your chin. The rumble of your belly and the faint grating of your teeth. The susurrus of air entering your nostrils. The rub of thumb against finger. In the Blank Tanks a man hears nothing at all. The pressure of the tampons in the ear does not allow stirrup to strike anvil; teeth cannot touch teeth, hands cannot clap, he cannot make a noise if he tries to, or hear it if he did. That is deafness. The Blank Tanks are more than deafness. In them a man is blind, even to the red fog that reaches through closed eyelids. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to taste. There is nothing to feel except the swaddling-cloths, and through time the nerve ends tire and stop registering this constant touch. It is something like being unborn and something like never having been at all. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, and although you are not dead you are not alive either. And there you stay. Kramer was ready for the Blank Tank and did not at once panic. He remembered the tricks he had employed before. He swallowed his own sputum and it made a gratifying popping sound in his inner ear; he hummed until his throat was raw and gasped through flaring nostrils until he became dizzy. But each sound he was able to produce lasted only a moment. He might have dropped them like snowflakes onto wool. They were absorbed and they died. It was actually worse, he remembered tardily, to produce a sound because you could not help but listen for the echo and no echo came. So he stopped. In three years he must have acquired some additional resources, he thought. Of course. He had! He settled dqwn to construct a crossword puzzle hi his head. Let 1 Across be a tropical South American bird, hdatzin. Let 1 Down be a medieval diatonic series of tones, hexacord. Let 2 Down be the Asiatic wild ass, or onagin, which might make the first horizontal word under 1 Across be, let’s see, E – N – . . . well, why not the ligature of couplets in verse writing, or enjambment. That would make 3 Down- He began to cry, because he could not remember 1 Across. Something was nagging at his mind, so he stopped crying and waited for it to take form, but it would not. He thought of General Grote, by now surely aware that his aide had been taken; he thought of the consternation that must be shuddering through all the tentacles of Ripsaw. It was not actually going to be so hard, he thought pathetically, because he didn’t actually have to hold out against the Blank Tanks, he only had to wait. After D day, or better, say, D plus 7, it wouldn’t much matter what he told them. Then the divisions would be across. Or not across. Breakthrough or failure, it would be decided by then and he could talk. He began to count off Ripsaw’s division officers to himself, as he had so often seen the names on the morning reports. Catton of the XLIst Armored, with Colonels Bogart, Ripner and Bletterman. M’Cleargh of the Highland & Lowland, with Brigadiers Douglass and McCloud. Leventhal of the Vth Israeli, with Koehne, Meier and-he stopped, because it had occurred to him that he might be speaking aloud. He could not tell. All right. Think of something else. But what? There was nothing dangerous about sensory deprivation, he lied. It was only a rest. Nobody was hurting him. Looked at in the right way, it was a chance to do some solid thinking like you never got tune for in real life-strike that. In outside life. For instance, what about freshing up on French irregular verbs? Start with avoir. Tu as, vous avez, nous avons. Voi avete, noi ab-biamo, du habst . . . Du habst? How did that get in there? Well, how about poetry? It is an Ancient Mariner, and he stops the next of kin. The guests are met, the feast is set, and sisters under the skin Are rag and bone and hank of hair, and beard and glittering eye Invite the sight of patient Night, etherized under the sky. I should have been a ragged claw; I should have said ‘I love you’; But-here the brown eyes lower fell-I hate to go above you. If Ripsaw fail and yutes prevail, what price dough’s Quaker cannon? So Grote- Kramer stopped himself, barely in time. Were there throat mikes? Were the yutes listening in? He churned miserably in his cotton bonds, because, as near as he could guess, he had probably been in the Blank Tank for less than an hour. D day, he thought to himself, praying that it was only to himself, was still some six weeks away and a week beyond that was seven. Seven weeks, forty-nine days, eleven hundred and, um, seventy-six hours, sixty-six thousand minutes plus. He had only to wait those minutes out, what about the diary?, and then he could talk all he wanted. Talk, confess, broadcast, anything, what difference would it make then? He paused, trying to remember. That furtive thought had struggled briefly to the surface but he had lost it again. It would not come back. He tried to fall asleep. It should have been easy enough. His air was metered and the CO2 content held to a level that would make him torpid; his wastes cathe-terized away; water and glucose valved into his veins; he was all but in utero, and unborn babies slept, didn’t they? Did they? He would have to look hi the diary, but it would have to wait until he could remember what thought it was that was struggling for recognition. And that was becoming harder with every second. Sensory deprivation in small doses is one thing; it even has its therapeutic uses, like shock. In large doses it produces a disorientation of psychotic proportions, a melancholia that is alf but lethal; Kramer never knew when he went loopy. iv He never quite knew when he went sane again, either, except that one day the fog lifted for a moment and he asked a WAC corporal, “When did I get back to Utah.” The corporal had dealt with returning yute prisoners before. She said only: “It’s Fort Hamilton, sir. Brooklyn.” He was in a private room, which was bad, but he wore a maroon bathrobe, which was good-at least it meant he was in a hospital instead of an Army stockade. (Unless the private room meant he was in the detention ward of the hospital.) Kramer wondered what he had done. There was no way to tell, at least not by searching his memory. Everything went into a blurry alternation of shouting relays of yutes and the silence of the Blank Tanks. He was nearly sure he had finally told the yutes everything they wanted to know. The question was, when? He would find out at the court-martial, he thought. Or he might have jotted it down, he thought crazily, in the diary. Jotted it down in the… ? Diary! That was the thought that had struggled to come through to the surface! Kramer’s screams brought the corporal back in a hurry, and then two doctors who quickly prepared knockout needles. He fought against them all the way. “Poor old man,” said the WAC, watching him twitch and shudder in unconsciousness. (Kramer had just turned forty.) “Second dose of the Blank Tanks for him, wasn’t it? I’m not surprised he’s having nightmares.” She didn’t know that his nightmares were not caused by the Blank Tanks themselves, but by his sudden realization that his last stay in the Tanks was totally unnecessary. It didn’t matter what he told the yutes, or when! They had had the diary all along, for it had been on him when Mabry thrust him in the rocket; and all Ripsaw’s secrets were in it! The next time the fog lifted for Kramer it was quick, like the turning on of a light, and he had distorted memories of dreams before it. He thought he had just dreamed that General Gfote had been with him. He was alone in the same room, sun streaming in a window, voices outside. He felt pretty good, he thought tentatively, and had no time to think more than that because the door opened and a ward boy looked in, very astonished to find Kramer looking back at him. “Holy heaven,” he said. “Wait there!” He disappeared. Foolish, Kramer thought. Of course he would wait. Where else would he go? And then, surprisingly, General Grote did indeed walk in. “Hello, John,” he said mildly, and sat down beside the bed, looking at Kramer. “I was just getting in my car when they caught me.” He pulled out his pipe and stuffed it with tobacco, watching Kramer. Kramer could think of nothing to say. “They said you were all right, John. Are you?” “I-.think so.” He watched the general light his pipe. “Funny,” he said. “I dreamed you were here a minute ago.” “No, it’s not so funny; I was. I brought you a present.” Kramer could not imagine anything more wildly improbable in the world than that the man whose combat operation he had betrayed should bring him a box of chocolates, bunch of flowers, light novel or whatever else was appropriate. But the general glanced at the table by Kramer’s bed. There was a flat, green-leather-covered box on it. “Open it up,” Grote invited. Kramer took out a glittering bit of metal depending from a three-barred ribbon. The gold medallion bore a jampaht eagle and lettering he could not at first read. “It’s your D.S.M.,” Grote said helpfully. “You can pin it on if you like. I tried,” he said, “to make it a Medal of Honor. But they wouldn’t allow it, logically enough.” “I was expecting something different,” Kramer mumbled foolishly. Grote laughed. “We smashed them, boy,” he said gently. “That is, Mick did. He went straight across Po- lar Nine,, down the Ob with one force and the Yenisei with another. General dough’s got his forward command in Chebarkul now, loving every minute of it. Why, I was in Karpinsk myself last week-they let me get that far-of course, it’s a rest area. It was a brilliant, bloody, backbreaking show. Completely successful.” Kramer interrupted hi sheer horror: “Polar Nine? But that was the cover-the Quaker cannon!” General Grote looked meditatively at his former aide. “John,” he said after a moment, “didn’t you ever wonder why the card-sorters pulled you out for my staff? A man who was sure to crack in the Blank Tanks, because he already had?” The room was very silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, John. Well, it worked-had to, you know; a lot of thought went into,it. Novotny’s been relieved. Mick’s got his biggest victory, no matter what happens now; he was the man that led the invasion.” The room was silent again. Carefully Grote tapped out his pipe into a metal wastebasket. “You’re a valuable man, John. Matter of fact, we traded a major general to get you back.” Silence. Grote sighed and stood up. “If it’s any consolation to you, you held out four full weeks in the Tanks. Good thing we’d made sure you had the diary with you. Otherwise our Quaker cannon would have been a bust.” He nodded good-bye and was gone. He was a good officer, was General Grote. He would use a weapon in any way he had to, to win a fight; but if the weapon was destroyed, and had feelings, he would come around to bring it a medal afterwards. Kramer contemplated his Distinguished Service Medal for a while. Then he lay back and considered ringing for a Sunday Times, but fell asleep instead. Novotny was now a sour, angry corps commander away off on the Baltic periphery because of him; a million and a half NAAARMY troops were dug in the heart of the enemy’s homeland; the greatest operation of the war was an unqualified success. But when the nurse came in that night, the Quaker cannon-the man who had discovered that the greatest service he could perform for his country was to betray it-was moaning in his sleep. MUTE INGLORIOUS TAM Cyril left a fragment about medieval England; it had no story attached to it, only a few pages of description and character. It lay in my files for fifteen years, until I happened to be sitting in a panel discussion with two or three other s-f writers (Ben Bova, Katherine Mac-Lean and Gordon Dickson, I think they were) and we fell to talking about what made a science-fiction writer what he is. What, I asked, might any of us have been if we had been born in another place and time? If we could not possibly have been science-fiction writers, perhaps because there was no science yet, maybe because we were illiterate? And then it occurred to me that it would be fun to write a story about that; and sometime later it struck me that Cyril’s fragment might fit in well with such a notion; and I dug it out, and it did. ON A LATE SATURDAY afternoon in summer, just before the ringing of Angelus, Tam of the Wealdway straightened from the furrows in his plowed strip of Oldfield and stretched his cracking joints. He was a small and dark man, of almost pure Saxon blood. Properly speaking, his name was only Tam. There was no need for further identification. He would never go a mile from a neighbor who had known him from birth. But sometimes he called himself by a surname-it was one of many small conceits that complicated his proper and straightforward life-and he would be soundly whipped for it if his Norman masters ever caught him at it. He had been breaking clods in the field for fifteen hours, interrupted only by the ringing of the canonical hours from the squat, tiny church, and a mouthful of bread and soft cheese at noon. It was not easy for him to stand straight. It was also not particularly wise. A man could lose his strip for poor tilth, and Tarn had come close enough, often enough. But there were times when the thoughts that chased themselves around his head made him forget the steady chop of the wooden hoe, and he would stand entranced, staring toward Lymeford Castle, or the river, or toward nothing at all, while he invented fanciful encounters and impossible prosperings. It was another of Tarn’s conceits, and a most dangerous one, if it were known. The least it might get him was a cuff from a man-at-arms. The most was a particularly unpleasing death. Since Salisbury, in Sussex, was flat ground, its great houses were not perched dramatically on crags, like the keeps of robber barons along the Rhine or the grim fortresses of the Scottish lairds. They were the least they could be to do the job they had to do, in an age which had not yet imagined the palace or the cathedral. In the year 1303 Lymeford Castle was a dingy pile of stone. It housed Sir and Lady Robert Bowen (sometimes they spelled it Bohun, or Beauhun, or Beauhaunt) and their household servants and men-at-arms in very great discomfort. It did not seem so to them particularly. They had before them the housing of their Saxon subjects to show what misery could be. The castle was intended to guard a bridge across the Lyme River: a key point on the high road from Portsmouth to London. It did this most effectively. William of Normandy, who had taken England by storm a couple of centuries earlier, did not mean for himself or his descendants to be taken in the same way on another day. So Lymeford Castle had been awarded to Sir Robert’s great-great-great-grandfather on the condition that he defend it and thereby defend London as well against invasion on that particular route from the sea. That first Bowen had owned more than stones. A castle must be fed. The castellan and his lady, their household servants and their armed men could not be expected to till the field and milk the cows. The founder of Sir Robert’s line had solved the problem of feeding the castle by rounding up a hundred of the defeated Saxon soldiers, clamping iron rings around their necks and setting them to work at the great task of clearing the untidy woods which surrounded the castle. After cleaning and plowing from sunup to sunset the slaves were free to gather twigs and mud, with which they made themselves kennels to sleep in. And in that first year, to celebrate the harvest and to insure a continuing supply of slaves, the castellan led his men-at-arms on a raid into Salisbury town itself. They drove back to Lymeford, with whips, about a hundred Saxon girls and women. After taking their pick, they gave the rest to the slaves, and the chaplain read a single perfunctory marriage service over the filthy, ring-necked slaves and the weeping Salisbury women. Since the male slaves happened to be from Northumbria, while the women were Sussex bred, they could not understand each other’s dialects. It did not matter. The huts were enlarged, and next midsummer there was another crop, this time of babies. The passage of two centuries had changed things remarkably little. A Bowen (or Beauhaunt) still guarded the Portsmouth-London high road. He still took pride in his Norman blood. Saxons still tilled the soil for him and if they no longer had the iron collar, or the name of slaves, they still would dangle from the gallows in the castle courtyard for any of a very large number of possible offenses against his authority. -At Runnymede, many years before, King John had signed the Great Charter conferring some sort of rule of law to protect his barons against arbitrary acts, but no one had thought of extending those rights to the serfs. They could die for almost anything or for nothing at all: for trying to quit their master’s soil for greener fields; for failing to deliver to the castle their bushels of grain, as well as their choicest lambs, calves and girl-children; for daring in any way to flout the divine law that made one kind of man ruler and another kind ruled. It was this offense to which Tarn was prone, and one day, as his father had told him the day before he died, it would cost him the price that no man can afford to pay, though all do. Though Tarn had never even heard of the Mag-na Carta, he sometimes thought that a world might sometime come to be in which a man like himself might own the things he owned as a matter of right and not because a man with a sword had not decided to take them from him. Take Alys his wife. He did not mind in any real sense that the men-at-arms had bedded her before he had. She was none the worse for it in any way that Tarn could measure; but he had slept badly that night, pondering why it was that no one needed to consult him about the woman the priest had sworn to him that day, and whether it might not be more-more-he grappled for a word (“fair” did not occur to him) and caught at “right”-more right that he should say whose pleasures his property served. Mostly he thought of sweeter and more fanciful things. When the falconers were by, he sometimes stole a look at the hawk stooping on a pigeon and thought that a man might fly if only he had the wings and the wit to move them. Pressed into driving the castellan’s crops into the granary, he swore at the dumb oxen and imagined a cart that could turn its wheels by itself. If the Lyme in flood could carry a tree bigger than a house faster than a man could run, why could that power not pull a plow? Why did a man have to plant five kernels of corn to see one come up? Why could not all five come up and make him five times as fat? He even looked at the village that was his home, and wondered why it had to be so poor, so filthy and so small; and that thought had hardly occurred evert to Sir Robert himself. In the year 1303 Lymeford looked like this: • The Lyme River, crossed by the new stone structure that was the fourth Lymeford Bridge, ran south to the English Channel. Its west bank was overgrown with the old English oak forest. Its right bank was the edge of the great clearing. Lymeford Castle, hard by the bridge, covered the road and curved northeast to London. For the length of the clearing, the road was not only the king’s highway, it was also the Lymeford village street. At a discreet distance from the castle it began to be edged with huts, larger or smaller as their tenants were rich or fecund. The road widened a bit halfway to the edge of the clearing, and there on its right side sat the village church. The church was made of stone, but that was about all you could say for it. All the wealth it owned it had to draw from the village, and there was not much wealth there to draw. Still, silver pennies had to be sent regularly to the bishop, who in turn would send them on to Rome. The parish priest of Lymeford was an Italian who had never seen the bishop, to whom it had never occurred to try to speak the language and who had been awarded the living of Lymeford by a cardinal who was likewise Italian and likewise could not have described its location within fifty miles. There was nothing unusual in that, and the Italian collected the silver pennies while his largely Norman, but Saxon speaking, locum tenens scraped along on donations of beer, dried fish and the odd occasional calf. He was a dour man who would have been a dreadful one if he had had a field of action that was larger than Lymeford. Across the street from the church was The Green, a cheerless trampled field where the compulsory archery practice and pike drill were undergone by every physically able male of Lymeford, each four weeks, except in the worst of winter and when plowing or harvest was larger in Sir Robert’s mind than the defense of his castle. His serfs would fight when he told them to, and he would squander their lives with the joy a man feels in exercising the one extravagance he permits himself on occasion. But that was only at need, and the fields and the crops were forever. He saw to the crops with some considerable skill. A three-field system prevailed in Lymeford. There was Oldfield, east of the road, and the first land brought under cultivation by the slaves two hundred years ago. There was Newfield, straddling the road and marked off from Oldfield by a path into the woods called the Wealdway, running southeast from The Green info the oak forest at the edge of the clearing. There was Fallowfield, last to be cleared and planted, which for the most part lay south of the road and the castle. From the left side of the road to the river, The Mead spread its green acres. The Mead was held in common by all the villagers. Any man might turn his cows or sheep to graze on it anywhere. The farmed fields, however, were divided into long, narrow strips, each held by a villager who would defend it with his fists or his sickle against the encroachment of a single inch. In the year 1303 Oldfield and Newfield were under cultivation, and Fallowfield was being rested. Next year it would be Newfield and Fallowfield farmed, and Oldfield would rest. While Angelus clanged on the cracked church bell, Tarn stood with his head downcast. He was supposed to be praying. In a way he was, the impenetrable rote-learned Latin slipping through his brain like the reiteration of a mantra, but he was also pleasantly occupied in speculating how plump his daughter might become if they could farm all three fields each year without destroying the soil, and at the same time thinking of the pot of fennel-spiced beer that should be waiting in his hut. As the Angelus ceased to ring, his neighbor’s hail dispelled both dreams. Irritated, Tarn shouldered his wooden-bladed hoe and trudged along the Wealdway, worn deep by two hundred years of bare peasant feet. His neighbor, Hud, fell in with him. In the bastard MidlandSussex hybrid that was the Lymeford dialect, Hud said, “Man, that was a long day.” “All the days are long in the summer.” “You were dreaming again, man. Saw you.” Tarn did not reply. He was careful of Hud. Hud was as small and dark as himself, but thin and nervous rather than blocky. Tarn knew he got that from his father Robin, who had got it from his mother Joan -who had got it from some man-at-arms on her wedding night spent hi the castle. Hud was always asking, always talking, always seeking new things. But when Tarn, years younger, had dared to try to open his untamable thoughts to him, Hud had run straight to the priest. “Won’t the players be coming by this time of year, man?” he pestered. “They might” “Ah, wouldn’t it be a great thing if they came by tomorrow? And then after Mass they’d make their pitch in The Green, and out would come the King of England and Captain Slasher and the Turkish Champion in their clothes colored like the sunset, and St. George in his silver armor!” Tarn grunted. ” ‘Tisn’t silver. Couldn’t be. If it was silver the robbers in the Weald would never let them get this far.” The nervous little man said, “I didn’t mean it was silver. I meant it looked like silver.” Tarn could feel anger welling up in him, drowning the good aftertaste of his reverje and the foretaste of his fennel beer. He said angrily, vYou talk like a fool.” “Like a fool, is it? And who is always dreaming the sun away, man?” “God’s guts, leave off!” shouted Tarn, and clamped his teeth on Ms words too late. He seldom swore. He could have bitten his tongue out after he uttered the words. Now there would be confession of blasphemy to make, and Father Bloughram, who had been looking lean and starved of late, would demand a penance in grain instead of any beggarly saying of prayers. Hud cowered back, staring. Tarn snarled something at him, he could not himself have said what, and turned off the deep-trodden path into his own hut. The hut was cramped and murky with wood smoke from its open hearth. There was a smoke hole in the roof that let some of it out. Tarn leaned his hoe against the wattled wall, flopped down onto the bundle of rags in the corner that was the bed for all three of the members of his family and growled at Alys his wife: “Beer.” His mind was full of Hud and anger, but slowly the rage cooled and the good thoughts crept back in: Why not a softer bed, a larger hut? Why not a fire that did not smoke, as his returning grandfather, who wore a scar from the Holy Land to his grave, had told him the Saracens had? And with the thought of a different kind of life came the thought of beer; he could taste the stuff now, sluicing the dust from his throat; the bitterness of the roasted barley; the sweetness of the fennel. “Beer,” he called again, and became aware that his wife had been tiptoeing about the hut. “Tarn,” she said apprehensively, “Joanie Brewer’s got the flux.” His brows drew together like thunderclouds. “No beer?” he asked. “She’s got the flux, and not for all the barley hi Oldfield could she brew beer. I tried to borrow from Hud’s wife, and she had only enough for him, she showed me-” Tarn got up and knocked her spinning into a corner with one backhanded blow. “Was there no beer yesterday?” he shouted. “God forgive you for being the useless slut you are! May the Horned Man and all his brood fly away with a miserable wretch that won’t brew beer for the husband that sweats his guts out from sunup to sunset!” She got up cringing, and he knocked her into the corner again. The next moment that was a solid crack across his back, and he crashed to the dirt floor. Another blow took him on the legs as he rolled over, and he looked up and saw the raging face of his daughter Kate and the wooden-bladed hoe upraised in her hands. She did not strike him a third time, but stood there menacingly. “Will you leave her alone?” she demanded. “Yes, you devil’s get!” Tarn shouted from the floor, and then, “You’d like me to say no, wouldn’t you? And then you’d beat in the brains of the old fool that gave you a name and a home.” Weeping, Alys protested, “Don’t say that, husband. She’s your child, I’m a good woman, I have nothing black on my soul.” Tarn got to his feet and brushed dirt from hs leather breeches and shirt. “We’ll say no more about it,” he said. “But it’s hard when a man can’t have his beer.” “You wild boar,” said Kate, not lowering the hoe. “If I hadn’t come back from The Mead with the cow, you might have killed her.” “No, child,” Tarn said uneasily. He knew his temper. “Let’s talk of other things.” Contemptuously she put down the hoe, while Alys got up, sniffling, and began to stir the peaseporridge on the hearth. Suddenly the smoke and heat inside the hut was more than Tarn could bear, and muttering something, he stumbled outside and breathed in the cool air of the night. It was full dark now and, for a wonder, stars were out. Tarn’s Crusader grandfather had told him of the great bright nights in the mountains beyond Acre, with such stars that a man could spy friend’s face from foe’s at a bowshot. England had nothing like that, but Tarn could make out the Plow, fading toward the sunset, and Cassiopeia pursuing it from the east. His grandfather had tried to teach him the Arabic names for some of the brighter stars, but the man had died when Tarn was ten and the memories were gone. What were those two, now, so bright and so close together? Something about twin peacocks? Twins at least, thought Tarn, staring at Gemini, but a thought of peacocks lingered. He wished he had paid closer attention to the old man, who had been a Saracen’s slave for nine years until a lucky raid had captured his caravan and set him free. A distant sound of yelping caught his ear. Tarn read the sound easily enough; a vixen and her half-grown young, by the shrillness. The birds came into the plowed fields at night to steal the seed, and the foxes came to catch the birds, and this night they had found something big enough to try to catch them- wolf, perhaps, Tarn thought, though it was not like them to come so near to men’s huts in good weather. There were a plenty of them in Sir Robert’s forest, with fat deer and birds and fish beyond counting in the streams; but it was what a man’s life was worth to take them. He stood there, musing on the curious chance that put venison on Sir Robert’s table and peasepor-ridge on his, and on the lights in the sky, until he realized Alys had progressed from abject to angry and must by now be eating without him. After the evening meal Alys scurried over to Hud’s wife with her tale of beastly husbands, and Kate sat on a billet of wood, picking knots out of her hair. Tarn squatted on the rags and studied her. At fifteen years, or whatever she was, she was a wild one. How had it happened that the babe who cooed and grasped at the grass whistle her father made her had turned into this stranger? She was not biddable. Ed- wy’s strip adjoined Tarn’s hi Fallowfield, and Edwy had a marriageable son. What was more reasonable than that Kate should marry him? But she had talked about bis looks. True, the boy was no beauty. What did that matter? When, as a father should, he had brushed that aside, she had threatened plainly to run away, bringing ruin and the rope on all of them. Nor would she let herself be beaten into good sense, but instead kicked-with painful accuracy-and bit and scratched like a fiend from hell’s pit. He felt a pang at that thought. Oh, Alys was an honest woman. But there were other ways the child of another could be fobbed off on you. A moment of carelessness when you didn’t watch the cradle-it was too awful to think of, but sometimes you had to think of it. Everybody knew that Old People liked nothing better than to steal somebody’s baby and slip one of their own into the cradle. He and Alys had duly left bowls of milk out during the child’s infancy, and on feast days bowls of beer. They had always kept a bit of iron by Kate, because the Old People hated iron. But still…. Tarn lighted a rushlight soaked in mutton fat at what was left of the fire. Alys would have something to say about his extravagance, but a mood for talking was on him, and he wanted to see Kate’s face. “Child,” he said, “one Sunday now the players will come by and pitch on The Green. And we’ll all go after Mass and see them play. Why, St. George looks as if he wears armor all of silver!” She tugged at her hair and would not speak or look at him. He squirmed uncomfortably on the ragged bed. “Ill tell.you a story, child,” he offered. Contemptuously, “Tell your drunken friend. I’ve heard the two of you, Hud and yourself, lying away at each other with the beer working in you.” “Not that sort of story, Kate. A story no one has ever told.” No answer, but at least her face was turned toward him. Emboldened, he began: ” Tis a story of a man who owned a great strong wain that could move without oxen, and in it he-” “What pulled it, then? Goats?” “Nothing pulled it, child. It moved by itself. It-” he fumbled, and found inspiration-“it was a gift from the Old People, and the man put on it meal and dried fish and casks of water, and he rode in it to one of those bright stars you see just over church. Many days he traveled, child. When he got there-” “What road goes to a star, man?” “No road, Kate. This wain rode in the air, like a cloud. And then-” “Clouds can’t carry casks of water,” she announced. “You talk like Edwy’s mad son that thinks he saw the Devil in a turnip.” “Listen now, Kate!” he snapped. “It is only a story. When the man came to-” “Story! It’s a great silly lie.” “Neither lie nor truth,” he roared. “It is a story I am telling you.” “Stories should be sense,” she said positively. “Leave off your dreaming, father. All Lymeford talks of it, man. Even in the castle they speak of mad Tarn the dreamer.” “Mad, I am?” he shouted, reaching for the hoe. But she was too quick for him. She had it in her hands; he tried to take it from her, and they wrestled, rock against flame, until he heard his wife’s caterwauling from the entrance, where she’d come running, called by the noise; and when he looked round, Kate had the hoe from him and space to use it and this time she got him firmly atop the skull-and he knew no more that night. In the morning he was well enough, and Kate was wisely nowhere in sight. By the time the long day was through he had lost the anger. Alys made sure there was beer that night, and the nights that followed. The dreams that came from the brew were not the same as the dreams he had tried so hard to put into words. For the rest of his life, sometimes he dreamed those dreams again, immense dreams, dreams that-had he had the words, and the skill, and above all the audience-a hundred generations might have remembered. But he didn’t have any of those things. Only the beer. THE WORLD OF MYRION FLOWERS “The World of Myrion Flowers’* touched on touchy subjects and, although most of the comments it has drawn since it was first published have been encouraging, there were some that were not. One was that white writers should not write about black characters. In a way, I agree with that; but in the late 1950’s there weren’t any black writers writing science fiction. One of the nice things about the last decade or so is that that is no longer true. THE WORLD of Myrion Flowers, which was the world of the American Negro, was something like an idealized England and something like the real Renaissance. As it is in some versions of England, all the members of the upper class were at least friends of friends. Any Harlem businessman knew automatically who was the new top dog in the music department of Howard University a week after an upheaval of the faculty. And -as it was in the Florence of Cellini, there was room for versatile men. An American Negro could be a doctor-builder-educator-realist-politician. Myrion Flowers was. Boston-born in 1913 to a lawyer-realist-politician father and a glamorous show-biz mother, he worked hard, drew the lucky number and was permitted to enter the schools which led to an M.D. and a license to practice hi the State of New York. Power vacuums occurred around him during the years that followed, and willy-nilly he filled them. A construction firm go-