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SECTION TWO PROLOGUE: The ground in the foothills was rocky, covered by loose gravel, and treacherous. The car heaved itself up over a sharp ridge with torturous slowness and pancaked down on the other side with a hard smash. The steering levers whipped back and forth just short of the driver's kneecaps, and the motors raced. "No more seeing, Joe," the driver told Custis. "Lights?" "No. Bed 'er down, Lew." The driver locked his treads, and cut the switches. The damper rods slammed home in the power pile, and the motors ground down to a stop. The car lay dead. Custis slid down out of the turret. "All right, let's button up. We sleep inside tonight." The driver dogged his slit shutters and Hutchinson, the machinegunner, began stuffing rags into the worn gasproof seal on his hatch. Robb, the turret gunner, dogged down the command hatch. "Load napalm," Custis told him, and Robb pulled the racks of fragmentation shells he'd been carrying in the guns all day. He fitted new loads, locked the breeches, and pulled the charging handles. "Napalm loaded," he checked back in his colorless voice. "Acoustics out," Custis said, and Hutchinson activated the car's listening gear. Henley, standing where the twin .75s could pound his head to a pulp with their recoiling breeches, asked: "What're you going to do now, Custis?" "Eat." Joe broke out five cans of rations, handed three to the crew and one to Henley. "Here." He squatted down on the deck and peeled back the lid of the can. Bending it between his fingers, he scooped food into his mouth. His eye sockets were thick with black shadow from the overhead light. His face was tanned to the cheekbones, and dead white from there to the nape of his recently shaved skull. The goggles had left a wide outline of rubber particles around his eyes. "We'll see all the bandits you want in the morning." "You mean you've made us sitting ducks on purpose?" "I mean if I was a bandit I wouldn't talk to nothin' but a sitting duck, and I'm under contract to let you talk to some bandits." "Not from a position of weakness!" Custis looked up and grinned. "That's life, Major. Honest, that's the way life is." [Image]
"There's somebody," Custis said at daybreak. He stepped away from the periscope eyepiece and let Henley take his look at the soldiery squatted on the rocks outside. There were men all around the battlewagon, in plain sight, looking at it stolidly. They were in all kinds of uniforms, standardized only by black-and-yellow shoulder badges. Some of the uniforms dated two or three Republics back. All of them were ragged, and a few were completely unfamiliar. West Coast, maybe. Or maybe even East. The men on the rocks were making no moves. They waited motionless under the battlewagon's guns. At first glance, the only arms they seemed to have were rifles that had to be practically smoothbores by now--and it had taken Custis a while to find out why these men, who looked like they'd known what they were doing, were trusting in muskets against a battlewagon. There were five two-man teams spread in a loose circle around the car. Each team had an rifle fitted with a grenade launcher. The men aiming them had them elevated just right to hit the car's turtledeck with their first shots. "Black-and-yellow," Henley said angrily. Custis shrugged. "No blue-and-silver, that's true," he answered, giving Henley the;needle again. "But that was thirty years ago. It might still be Berendtsen." Custis went back to the periscope eyepiece for another look at the grenadiers. Each of them had an open, lead-lined box beside him with more grenades in it. Custis grunted. Napalm splashed pretty well, but it would take one full traverse of the turret to knock out all five teams. The turret took fifteen seconds to revolve 360 degrees, while a grenadier could pull a trigger and have a grenade lofting in, say, one second's time. A few seconds later the grenade would have covered the outside of the car with radioactive dust that would make it death to stay inside, or death to get out. Nor could the battlewagon get out of the grenade's way in time--the basis of an interdictory weapon like this was that it would be used as soon as you made the slightest move, but, you could believe, no sooner than that. "Stalemate," Custis grunted. "But no worse than that. Generous of 'em." He unbuckled his web belt and took off his .45. He walked under the command hatch and unclogged it. "What're you doing?" Henley demanded. "Starting." He threw the hatch back and pulled himself up, getting a foothold on the saddle and climbing out on top of the turret. He flipped the hatch shut behind him and stood up. "My name's Custis," he said carefully as the men raised their rifles. "Hired out to the Seventh Republic. I've got a man here who wants to talk to your boss." There was no immediate answer. He stood and waited. He heard the hatch scrape beside him, and planted a boot on it before Henley could lift it. "What about, Custis?" a voice asked from off to one side, out of range of his eyes. The voice was old and husky, kept in tight check. Custis wondered if it might not tremble, were the old man to let it. He weighed his answer. There was no sense to playing around. Maybe he was going to get himself killed right now, and maybe he wasn't, but if he played games here he might never get a straight answer to anything. "Theodore Berendtsen," he said. "About him." The name dropped into these men like a stone. He saw their faces go tight, and he saw heads jerk involuntarily. Well, the British had stood guard over Napoleon's grave for nineteen years. "Turn this way, Custis," the same worn voice said. Custis risked taking his eyes off the grenadiers. He turned toward the voice. Standing a bit apart from his troops was a thin, weather-burned man with sharp eyes hooded under thick white eyebrows. He needed a shave badly. His marble-white hair was shaggy. There were deep creases in his face, pouches under his eyes, and a dry wattle of skin under his jaw. "I'm the commander here," he said in his halting voice. "Bring out your man." Custis stepped off the hatch and let Henley come out. The political officer gave him a savage look as he squirmed up and got to his feet. Custis ignored it. "Over there--the white-haired one," he said without moving his lips. "He's the local boss." He stepped a little to one side and gave Henley room to stand on the sloping turret top, but he kept watching the old commander, who was wearing a pair of faded black coveralls with that black-and-yellow shoulder badge. Henley squinted up toward the thin figure. The back of his neck was damp, even in the chill morning breeze, and he was nervous about his footing. "I'm Major Thomas Henley," he finally said, "direct representative of the Seventh North American Republic." Then he stopped, obviously unable to think of what to say next. Custis realized, with a flat grin, that his coming out cold with Berendtsen's name hadn't left the major much room to work in. "You're out of your country's jurisdiction, Major," the commander said. "That's a matter of opinion." "That's a matter of fact," the commander said flatly. "You and Custis can come down. I'll talk to you. Leave the rest of your men here." Henley's head turned quickly. "Should we go with him?" he muttered to Custis. "Lord, Major, don't ask me! But if you're plannin' to get anywhere, you better talk to somebody. Or do you expect Berendtsen to plop down in your lap?" Henley looked back at the thin figure on the hillside. "Maybe he already has." Custis looked at him steadily. "They shot Berendtsen in New York City thirty years ago. They threw what was left of his body on a garbage heap. And a year later there was a tomb over where they threw it." "Maybe, Captain. Maybe. Were you there?" "Were you?" [Image] Custis felt annoyed at himself for getting so exercised about it. He glared at the major. Then his common sense came trickling back, and he turned away to give Lew his orders about keeping the car sealed and the guns ready until he and Henley got back. Thirty years dead, Berendtsen was. Judged for treason, condemned, killed--and men still quarreled at the mention of his name. Custis shook his head and took another look at the old, dried-out man on the hill, wearing those patched, threadbare coveralls. Most of the commander's men stayed behind, dispersed among the rocks around the silent battlewagon. Ten of them formed up in a loose party around the commander and Henley, and Custis walked along a few yards behind the two men as they started off into the mountains. It was turning into a bright but cool day. Looking up into the west, Custis could see the mountaintops pluming as high altitude gales swept their snow caps out in banners. The track they were walking on wound among boulders higher than Custis's head, and he felt vaguely uncomfortable. He was used to the sweeping plains where his father had raised him; where, except for the spindly trees along the sparse creeks, nothing stood taller than a man. The commander's base was a group of low, one room huts strung out along the foot of a butte, with a cook-fire pit in front of each one. Their outlines were broken by rocks and boulders piled around them. There were prepared slit-trenches spotted around the area, two machinegun pits covering the approach trail, and a few mortar batteries sited on reverse slopes. From the size of the place and the depth of the organization, Custis judged the commander had about four hundred people in his outfit. Custis wondered how he could keep them all supplied, and the answer he got from looking around was that he couldn't do it very well. The huts were dark and dingy, with what looked like dirt floors. A few wan-looking women were carrying water up from a spring, balancing pails made out of cut-down oil cans. They were raggedly dressed, and the spindly-legged children that trotted beside them were hollow-eyed. Here and there, among the rocks, there were a few patches of scraggly garden. Up at one end of the valley, a small herd of gaunt cows was grazing on indifferent grass. Custis nodded to himself It confirmed something he'd been thinking for a couple of years; the bandits were still crossing the plains to raid into Republican territory, but they'd never dared set up their own towns on the untenable prairies. It was an impossible thing to have every man's hand against you and still try to make the change to a settled life. But with women and children, the bandits needed a permanent camp somewhere. So now they were pulled back all the way into the mountains, trying to make a go of it, but with their weapons wearing out. They were dying on the vine, something left behind, and by the time the cities started spreading out their holdings again, there'd be little here to stop them. If the cities could ever get themselves organized. Maybe everything was dying. The legendary East and South were too far away to count. Maybe everything that counted was dying. "In here," the commander said, gesturing into a hut. Henley and Custis stepped inside, followed by two men with rifles and then the commander. The hut was almost bare except for a cot and a table with one chair, all made out of odd pieces of scrap lumber and weapons crates. The commander sat down facing them with his veined, brown-mottled hands resting on the stained wood. Custis spread his feet and stood relaxed. Henley's hands were playing with the seams along his pant legs. "What about Berendtsen, Major?" the commander asked. "We've heard he's still alive." The commander snorted. "Fairy tales!" "Possibly. But if he's still alive, these mountains are the logical place for him to be." Henley looked at the commander meaningfully. The commander's narrow lips twitched. "My name isn't Berendtsen, Major. I don't use his colors. And my men don't call themselves The Army of Unification." "Things change," Henley answered. "I didn't say you were Berendtsen. But if Berendtsen got away from New York, he'd have been a fool to stay near there, or use his own name anywhere. If he's in these mountains, he might not care to advertise the fact." The commander grimaced. "This isn't getting us anywhere. What do you want from me?" "Information, then, if you have it. We'll pay for it, in cash or supplies, whatever you say, within reason." "In weapons?" Henley paused for a moment. Then he nodded. "If that's what you want." "And to blazes with what we do to the people in the independent towns? I suppose so. What about your own people in the outlying areas, once we're re-armed?" "It's important that we have this information." The commander smiled coldly. "There's no pretense of governing for anyone's benefit but your own, is there?" "I'm loyal to the Seventh Republic. I follow my orders." "No doubt. All right, what do you want to know?" "Do you know of any groups in this area that Berendtsen might be leading?" The commander shook his head. "No. There aren't any other groups. I've consolidated them all. You can have that news gratis." "I see." Henley smiled for the first time Custis had ever seen. It was an odd, spinsterish puckering of the lips. The corners of his eyes twinkled upward, and gave him the look of a sly cat. "You could have made me pay to find that out." "I'd rather not soil myself. A few rusty rifles pulled out of the old armories aren't worth that much to me." Henley's mouth twitched. He looked at the austere pride on the commander's face, gathered like a mask of strength and youth on the gray stubbled cheeks, and then he said: "Well, if I ever do find him, I'm empowered to offer him the presidency of the Eighth Republic." His eyes glittered and fastened like talons on the old commander's expression. Custis grunted to himself. He couldn't say Henley had exactly surprised him. And the old man was looking down at the tabletop, his old hands suddenly clenched. After a long time, he looked up slowly. "So you're not really working for the Seventh Republic. You've been sent up here to find a useful figurehead for a new combination of power." Henley smiled again, easily, blandly--and looked like a man who has shot his animal and only has to wait for it to die. "I wouldn't put it that way. Though, naturally, we wouldn't stand for any one-man dictatorships." "Naturally." One corner of the commander's lip lifted, and suddenly Custis saw Henley wasn't so sure. Custis saw him tense, as though a dying tiger had suddenly lashed out a paw. The commander's eyes were narrowed. "I'm through talking to you for the moment," he said, and Custis wondered how much of his weakness had been carefully laid on. "You'll wait outside. I want to talk to Custis." He motioned to the two waiting riflemen. "Take him out--put him in another hut and keep your eyes on him." And Custis was left alone in the hut with the old commander. The commander looked up at him. "That's your own car out there?" Custis nodded. "So you're just under contract to the Seventh Republic--you've got no particular loyalty to the government." Custis shrugged. "Right now, there's no tellin' who I'm hired out to." He was willing to wait the commander out and see what he was driving at. "You did a good job of handling things, this morning. What are you--about twenty-nine, thirty?" "Twenty-six." "So you were born four years after Berendtsen was killed. What do you know about him? What have you heard?" "Usual stuff. After the plague, everything was a mess. Berendtsen put an army together, took over the territory, made the survivors obey one law, and strengthened things out that way." The commander nodded to himself--an old man's nod, passing judgment on the far past. "You left out a lot of people between the plague and Berendtsen. And you'll never imagine how bad it was. But that'll do. Do you know why he did it?" "Why's anybody set up a government? He wanted to be boss, I guess. Then somebody decided he was too big, and cut him down. Then the people cut the somebody down. But I figure Berendtsen's dead, for sure." "Do you?" the commander's eyes were steady on Custis. Custis tightened his jaw. "Yeah." "Do I look like Berendtsen?" the commander asked softly. "No." [Image] "But hand-drawn portraits thirty years old don't really mean anything, do they, Custis?" "Well, no." Joe felt himself getting edgy. "But you're not Berendtsen," he growled belligerently. "I'm sure Berendtsen's dead." The old commander sighed. "Of course. Tell me about Chicago," he said, going off in a new direction. "Has it changed much? Have they cleaned it up? Or are they simply abandoning the buildings that're really falling down?" "Sometimes. But they try and fix 'em up, sometimes." "Only sometimes." The commander shook his head regretfully. "I had hoped that by this time, no matter what kind of men were in charge..." "When's the last time you were there?" "I was never there. But I've seen a city or two." The commander smiled at Custis. "Tell me about this car of yours. I used to be quite fond of mechanized equipment, once." Now he was an old man again, dreaming back into the past, only half-seeing Custis. "We took a whole city once, with almost no infantry support at all. That's a hard thing to do, even with tanks, and all I had was armored cars. Just twenty of them, and the heaviest weapons they mounted were light automatic cannon in demiturrets. No tracks--I remember they shot our tires flat almost at once, and we went bumping through the streets. Just armored scout cars, really, but we used them like tanks, and we took the city. Not a very large city." He looked down at his hands. "Not very large, no. But still, I don't believe that had ever been done before." "Never did any street fighting," Custis said. "Don't know a thing about it." "What do you know, then?" "Open country work. Only thing a car's good for." "One car, yes." "Hell, mister, there ain't five cars runnin' in the Republic, and they ain't got any range. Only reason I'm still goin' is mine don't need no gasoline. I ran across it in an old American government depot outside Miles City. Provin' grounds, it was. My dad, he'd taught me about runnin' cars, and I had this fellow with me, Lew Gaines, and we got it going." "How long ago was that?" "Seven years." "And nobody ever tried to take it away from you?" "Mister, there's three fifty-caliber machineguns and two 75s on that car." The commander looked at him from head to foot. "I see." He pursed his lips thoughtfully. "And now you've practically handed it to me." "Not by a long shot, I ain't. My crew's still inside, and it's kind of an open question whether you're ready to get your troops barbecued just for the sake of killing us and making the car no good to anybody." The commander cocked an eyebrow at him. "Not as open as all that." "Open enough. You set it up so we can both pull back from each other if that turns out best; if we come to some kind of agreement." "You're here. Your crew's down the mountain." "My crew's just as good without me, Mister." The commander let it ride, switching his tack a little. "You'll admit you've come to a peculiar place for a man who only knows open country work." Custis shrugged. "Car needed shopwork. Chicago's the only place with the equipment. If I use their shops, I do their work. That's the straight up and down of it. And it's one more reason why gettin' the car'd be more work than it was worth to you. Anything you busted on it would stay busted for good. And you know it. You're so fond of cars, where's yours? Wore out, right? So now you're walkin'." "Horses." "Horses!" The commander smiled crookedly. "All right. It takes a good deal to budge you, doesn't it, Custis?" "Depends on the spot I'm in. My dad taught me to pick my spot careful." The commander nodded again. "I'd say so. All right, Custis, I'll want to talk to you again, later. One of my men'll stay close to you. Other than that, you're free to look around as much as you want to. I don't imagine you'll ever be leading any expeditions up here--not if Henley's plans work out. Or even if they don't." He turned away and reached under the cot for a bottle, and Custis hadn't found out what the old commander was driving at. Outside, they were cooking their noon meal. The camp women were huddled around the firepits, bent shapeless as they stirred their pots with charred, long wooden spoons, and the smell of food lay over the area near the huts in an invisible cloud that dilated Custis's nostrils and made his empty stomach tighten up. Whatever these people ate, it was hot and smelled different from the sludgy meat in the car's ration cans. Then he shrugged and closed his mind to it. Walking upwind, he went over to a low rock and sat down on it. One of the commander's riflemen went with him and leaned against a boulder fifteen feet away, cradling his rifle in the crook of one thin arm and looking steadily at Custis through coldly sleepy eyes. A bunch of kids clustered around the fires, filling oil cans that had crude handles made out of insulated wire. When they had loaded up they moved out of the little valley with a few riflemen for escort, carrying food out to the men who were in position around the battlewagon. Custis watched them for a while, then ignored them as well as he could. So Henley was working for a group that wanted to set up the next government. It wasn't particularly surprising that the Seventh Republic was financing its own death. Every government was at least half made up of men from the one before. They played musical chairs with the titles--one government's tax collector was the next government's chief of police--and whoever wasn't happy with the graft was bound to be figuring some way to improve it the next time the positions moved around. It looked a helI of a lot like, however the pie was cut, Custis wasn't going to get paid. The Seventh wouldn't pay him if he didn't come back with Berendtsen, and if he did find him the Eighth wouldn't hold to the last government's contract. Custis twitched his mouth. Anyhow, the car was running as well as you could expect. If he got out of here, Kansas City might have a job for him. He'd heard rumors things were happening down there. It wasn't familiar territory, and there were always rumors that things were better somewhere else, but he might try it. Or he might even head east, if the highways over the mountains were still any good at all. That could be a real touchy business all around, with God knew what going on behind the Appalachians, and maybe an organization that had plenty of cars of its own, and no use for half-bandit plains people. Going there wouldn't be the smart thing to do. As a matter of fact, he knew, inside, that he'd never leave the northern plains, no matter how he reasoned. It was too risky, heading for some place where they were past needing battlewagons. He wondered how the boys in the car were making out. He hadn't heard any firing from over there, and he didn't expect to. But it was a lousy business, sitting cooped up in there, not knowing anything, and looking out at the men on the rocks as time went by. When you came right down to it, this was a lousy kind of life, waiting for the day you ran into a trap under the sod and the last thing you ever did was try to climb out through the turret while the people who'd dug the hole waited outside with their knives. Or wondering, every time you went into one of the abandoned old towns on the far prairie, where supposedly nobody lived, if somebody there hadn't found some gasoline in a sealed drum and was waiting to set you on fire. But what the hell else could a man do? Live in the damned cities, breaking your back in somebody's jackleg factory, eating nothing that couldn't be raised or scavenged right on the spot--and not much of that--living in some hole somewhere that had twelve flights of stairs before you got to it? Freezing in the winter and maybe getting your throat cut for your coat in some back alley? Custis shivered suddenly. To hell with this. He was thinking in circles. When a man did that, he licked himself before he got started. Custis slid off his rock, stretched out on the ground, and went to sleep thinking of Berendtsen. [Image]
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SECTION TWO PROLOGUE: The ground in the foothills was rocky, covered by loose gravel, and treacherous. The car heaved itself up over a sharp ridge with torturous slowness and pancaked down on the other side with a hard smash. The steering levers whipped back and forth just short of the driver's kneecaps, and the motors raced. "No more seeing, Joe," the driver told Custis. "Lights?" "No. Bed 'er down, Lew." The driver locked his treads, and cut the switches. The damper rods slammed home in the power pile, and the motors ground down to a stop. The car lay dead. Custis slid down out of the turret. "All right, let's button up. We sleep inside tonight." The driver dogged his slit shutters and Hutchinson, the machinegunner, began stuffing rags into the worn gasproof seal on his hatch. Robb, the turret gunner, dogged down the command hatch. "Load napalm," Custis told him, and Robb pulled the racks of fragmentation shells he'd been carrying in the guns all day. He fitted new loads, locked the breeches, and pulled the charging handles. "Napalm loaded," he checked back in his colorless voice. "Acoustics out," Custis said, and Hutchinson activated the car's listening gear. Henley, standing where the twin .75s could pound his head to a pulp with their recoiling breeches, asked: "What're you going to do now, Custis?" "Eat." Joe broke out five cans of rations, handed three to the crew and one to Henley. "Here." He squatted down on the deck and peeled back the lid of the can. Bending it between his fingers, he scooped food into his mouth. His eye sockets were thick with black shadow from the overhead light. His face was tanned to the cheekbones, and dead white from there to the nape of his recently shaved skull. The goggles had left a wide outline of rubber particles around his eyes. "We'll see all the bandits you want in the morning." "You mean you've made us sitting ducks on purpose?" "I mean if I was a bandit I wouldn't talk to nothin' but a sitting duck, and I'm under contract to let you talk to some bandits." "Not from a position of weakness!" Custis looked up and grinned. "That's life, Major. Honest, that's the way life is." [Image]
"There's somebody," Custis said at daybreak. He stepped away from the periscope eyepiece and let Henley take his look at the soldiery squatted on the rocks outside. There were men all around the battlewagon, in plain sight, looking at it stolidly. They were in all kinds of uniforms, standardized only by black-and-yellow shoulder badges. Some of the uniforms dated two or three Republics back. All of them were ragged, and a few were completely unfamiliar. West Coast, maybe. Or maybe even East. The men on the rocks were making no moves. They waited motionless under the battlewagon's guns. At first glance, the only arms they seemed to have were rifles that had to be practically smoothbores by now--and it had taken Custis a while to find out why these men, who looked like they'd known what they were doing, were trusting in muskets against a battlewagon. There were five two-man teams spread in a loose circle around the car. Each team had an rifle fitted with a grenade launcher. The men aiming them had them elevated just right to hit the car's turtledeck with their first shots. "Black-and-yellow," Henley said angrily. Custis shrugged. "No blue-and-silver, that's true," he answered, giving Henley the;needle again. "But that was thirty years ago. It might still be Berendtsen." Custis went back to the periscope eyepiece for another look at the grenadiers. Each of them had an open, lead-lined box beside him with more grenades in it. Custis grunted. Napalm splashed pretty well, but it would take one full traverse of the turret to knock out all five teams. The turret took fifteen seconds to revolve 360 degrees, while a grenadier could pull a trigger and have a grenade lofting in, say, one second's time. A few seconds later the grenade would have covered the outside of the car with radioactive dust that would make it death to stay inside, or death to get out. Nor could the battlewagon get out of the grenade's way in time--the basis of an interdictory weapon like this was that it would be used as soon as you made the slightest move, but, you could believe, no sooner than that. "Stalemate," Custis grunted. "But no worse than that. Generous of 'em." He unbuckled his web belt and took off his .45. He walked under the command hatch and unclogged it. "What're you doing?" Henley demanded. "Starting." He threw the hatch back and pulled himself up, getting a foothold on the saddle and climbing out on top of the turret. He flipped the hatch shut behind him and stood up. "My name's Custis," he said carefully as the men raised their rifles. "Hired out to the Seventh Republic. I've got a man here who wants to talk to your boss." There was no immediate answer. He stood and waited. He heard the hatch scrape beside him, and planted a boot on it before Henley could lift it. "What about, Custis?" a voice asked from off to one side, out of range of his eyes. The voice was old and husky, kept in tight check. Custis wondered if it might not tremble, were the old man to let it. He weighed his answer. There was no sense to playing around. Maybe he was going to get himself killed right now, and maybe he wasn't, but if he played games here he might never get a straight answer to anything. "Theodore Berendtsen," he said. "About him." The name dropped into these men like a stone. He saw their faces go tight, and he saw heads jerk involuntarily. Well, the British had stood guard over Napoleon's grave for nineteen years. "Turn this way, Custis," the same worn voice said. Custis risked taking his eyes off the grenadiers. He turned toward the voice. Standing a bit apart from his troops was a thin, weather-burned man with sharp eyes hooded under thick white eyebrows. He needed a shave badly. His marble-white hair was shaggy. There were deep creases in his face, pouches under his eyes, and a dry wattle of skin under his jaw. "I'm the commander here," he said in his halting voice. "Bring out your man." Custis stepped off the hatch and let Henley come out. The political officer gave him a savage look as he squirmed up and got to his feet. Custis ignored it. "Over there--the white-haired one," he said without moving his lips. "He's the local boss." He stepped a little to one side and gave Henley room to stand on the sloping turret top, but he kept watching the old commander, who was wearing a pair of faded black coveralls with that black-and-yellow shoulder badge. Henley squinted up toward the thin figure. The back of his neck was damp, even in the chill morning breeze, and he was nervous about his footing. "I'm Major Thomas Henley," he finally said, "direct representative of the Seventh North American Republic." Then he stopped, obviously unable to think of what to say next. Custis realized, with a flat grin, that his coming out cold with Berendtsen's name hadn't left the major much room to work in. "You're out of your country's jurisdiction, Major," the commander said. "That's a matter of opinion." "That's a matter of fact," the commander said flatly. "You and Custis can come down. I'll talk to you. Leave the rest of your men here." Henley's head turned quickly. "Should we go with him?" he muttered to Custis. "Lord, Major, don't ask me! But if you're plannin' to get anywhere, you better talk to somebody. Or do you expect Berendtsen to plop down in your lap?" Henley looked back at the thin figure on the hillside. "Maybe he already has." Custis looked at him steadily. "They shot Berendtsen in New York City thirty years ago. They threw what was left of his body on a garbage heap. And a year later there was a tomb over where they threw it." "Maybe, Captain. Maybe. Were you there?" "Were you?" [Image] Custis felt annoyed at himself for getting so exercised about it. He glared at the major. Then his common sense came trickling back, and he turned away to give Lew his orders about keeping the car sealed and the guns ready until he and Henley got back. Thirty years dead, Berendtsen was. Judged for treason, condemned, killed--and men still quarreled at the mention of his name. Custis shook his head and took another look at the old, dried-out man on the hill, wearing those patched, threadbare coveralls. Most of the commander's men stayed behind, dispersed among the rocks around the silent battlewagon. Ten of them formed up in a loose party around the commander and Henley, and Custis walked along a few yards behind the two men as they started off into the mountains. It was turning into a bright but cool day. Looking up into the west, Custis could see the mountaintops pluming as high altitude gales swept their snow caps out in banners. The track they were walking on wound among boulders higher than Custis's head, and he felt vaguely uncomfortable. He was used to the sweeping plains where his father had raised him; where, except for the spindly trees along the sparse creeks, nothing stood taller than a man. The commander's base was a group of low, one room huts strung out along the foot of a butte, with a cook-fire pit in front of each one. Their outlines were broken by rocks and boulders piled around them. There were prepared slit-trenches spotted around the area, two machinegun pits covering the approach trail, and a few mortar batteries sited on reverse slopes. From the size of the place and the depth of the organization, Custis judged the commander had about four hundred people in his outfit. Custis wondered how he could keep them all supplied, and the answer he got from looking around was that he couldn't do it very well. The huts were dark and dingy, with what looked like dirt floors. A few wan-looking women were carrying water up from a spring, balancing pails made out of cut-down oil cans. They were raggedly dressed, and the spindly-legged children that trotted beside them were hollow-eyed. Here and there, among the rocks, there were a few patches of scraggly garden. Up at one end of the valley, a small herd of gaunt cows was grazing on indifferent grass. Custis nodded to himself It confirmed something he'd been thinking for a couple of years; the bandits were still crossing the plains to raid into Republican territory, but they'd never dared set up their own towns on the untenable prairies. It was an impossible thing to have every man's hand against you and still try to make the change to a settled life. But with women and children, the bandits needed a permanent camp somewhere. So now they were pulled back all the way into the mountains, trying to make a go of it, but with their weapons wearing out. They were dying on the vine, something left behind, and by the time the cities started spreading out their holdings again, there'd be little here to stop them. If the cities could ever get themselves organized. Maybe everything was dying. The legendary East and South were too far away to count. Maybe everything that counted was dying. "In here," the commander said, gesturing into a hut. Henley and Custis stepped inside, followed by two men with rifles and then the commander. The hut was almost bare except for a cot and a table with one chair, all made out of odd pieces of scrap lumber and weapons crates. The commander sat down facing them with his veined, brown-mottled hands resting on the stained wood. Custis spread his feet and stood relaxed. Henley's hands were playing with the seams along his pant legs. "What about Berendtsen, Major?" the commander asked. "We've heard he's still alive." The commander snorted. "Fairy tales!" "Possibly. But if he's still alive, these mountains are the logical place for him to be." Henley looked at the commander meaningfully. The commander's narrow lips twitched. "My name isn't Berendtsen, Major. I don't use his colors. And my men don't call themselves The Army of Unification." "Things change," Henley answered. "I didn't say you were Berendtsen. But if Berendtsen got away from New York, he'd have been a fool to stay near there, or use his own name anywhere. If he's in these mountains, he might not care to advertise the fact." The commander grimaced. "This isn't getting us anywhere. What do you want from me?" "Information, then, if you have it. We'll pay for it, in cash or supplies, whatever you say, within reason." "In weapons?" Henley paused for a moment. Then he nodded. "If that's what you want." "And to blazes with what we do to the people in the independent towns? I suppose so. What about your own people in the outlying areas, once we're re-armed?" "It's important that we have this information." The commander smiled coldly. "There's no pretense of governing for anyone's benefit but your own, is there?" "I'm loyal to the Seventh Republic. I follow my orders." "No doubt. All right, what do you want to know?" "Do you know of any groups in this area that Berendtsen might be leading?" The commander shook his head. "No. There aren't any other groups. I've consolidated them all. You can have that news gratis." "I see." Henley smiled for the first time Custis had ever seen. It was an odd, spinsterish puckering of the lips. The corners of his eyes twinkled upward, and gave him the look of a sly cat. "You could have made me pay to find that out." "I'd rather not soil myself. A few rusty rifles pulled out of the old armories aren't worth that much to me." Henley's mouth twitched. He looked at the austere pride on the commander's face, gathered like a mask of strength and youth on the gray stubbled cheeks, and then he said: "Well, if I ever do find him, I'm empowered to offer him the presidency of the Eighth Republic." His eyes glittered and fastened like talons on the old commander's expression. Custis grunted to himself. He couldn't say Henley had exactly surprised him. And the old man was looking down at the tabletop, his old hands suddenly clenched. After a long time, he looked up slowly. "So you're not really working for the Seventh Republic. You've been sent up here to find a useful figurehead for a new combination of power." Henley smiled again, easily, blandly--and looked like a man who has shot his animal and only has to wait for it to die. "I wouldn't put it that way. Though, naturally, we wouldn't stand for any one-man dictatorships." "Naturally." One corner of the commander's lip lifted, and suddenly Custis saw Henley wasn't so sure. Custis saw him tense, as though a dying tiger had suddenly lashed out a paw. The commander's eyes were narrowed. "I'm through talking to you for the moment," he said, and Custis wondered how much of his weakness had been carefully laid on. "You'll wait outside. I want to talk to Custis." He motioned to the two waiting riflemen. "Take him out--put him in another hut and keep your eyes on him." And Custis was left alone in the hut with the old commander. The commander looked up at him. "That's your own car out there?" Custis nodded. "So you're just under contract to the Seventh Republic--you've got no particular loyalty to the government." Custis shrugged. "Right now, there's no tellin' who I'm hired out to." He was willing to wait the commander out and see what he was driving at. "You did a good job of handling things, this morning. What are you--about twenty-nine, thirty?" "Twenty-six." "So you were born four years after Berendtsen was killed. What do you know about him? What have you heard?" "Usual stuff. After the plague, everything was a mess. Berendtsen put an army together, took over the territory, made the survivors obey one law, and strengthened things out that way." The commander nodded to himself--an old man's nod, passing judgment on the far past. "You left out a lot of people between the plague and Berendtsen. And you'll never imagine how bad it was. But that'll do. Do you know why he did it?" "Why's anybody set up a government? He wanted to be boss, I guess. Then somebody decided he was too big, and cut him down. Then the people cut the somebody down. But I figure Berendtsen's dead, for sure." "Do you?" the commander's eyes were steady on Custis. Custis tightened his jaw. "Yeah." "Do I look like Berendtsen?" the commander asked softly. "No." [Image] "But hand-drawn portraits thirty years old don't really mean anything, do they, Custis?" "Well, no." Joe felt himself getting edgy. "But you're not Berendtsen," he growled belligerently. "I'm sure Berendtsen's dead." The old commander sighed. "Of course. Tell me about Chicago," he said, going off in a new direction. "Has it changed much? Have they cleaned it up? Or are they simply abandoning the buildings that're really falling down?" "Sometimes. But they try and fix 'em up, sometimes." "Only sometimes." The commander shook his head regretfully. "I had hoped that by this time, no matter what kind of men were in charge..." "When's the last time you were there?" "I was never there. But I've seen a city or two." The commander smiled at Custis. "Tell me about this car of yours. I used to be quite fond of mechanized equipment, once." Now he was an old man again, dreaming back into the past, only half-seeing Custis. "We took a whole city once, with almost no infantry support at all. That's a hard thing to do, even with tanks, and all I had was armored cars. Just twenty of them, and the heaviest weapons they mounted were light automatic cannon in demiturrets. No tracks--I remember they shot our tires flat almost at once, and we went bumping through the streets. Just armored scout cars, really, but we used them like tanks, and we took the city. Not a very large city." He looked down at his hands. "Not very large, no. But still, I don't believe that had ever been done before." "Never did any street fighting," Custis said. "Don't know a thing about it." "What do you know, then?" "Open country work. Only thing a car's good for." "One car, yes." "Hell, mister, there ain't five cars runnin' in the Republic, and they ain't got any range. Only reason I'm still goin' is mine don't need no gasoline. I ran across it in an old American government depot outside Miles City. Provin' grounds, it was. My dad, he'd taught me about runnin' cars, and I had this fellow with me, Lew Gaines, and we got it going." "How long ago was that?" "Seven years." "And nobody ever tried to take it away from you?" "Mister, there's three fifty-caliber machineguns and two 75s on that car." The commander looked at him from head to foot. "I see." He pursed his lips thoughtfully. "And now you've practically handed it to me." "Not by a long shot, I ain't. My crew's still inside, and it's kind of an open question whether you're ready to get your troops barbecued just for the sake of killing us and making the car no good to anybody." The commander cocked an eyebrow at him. "Not as open as all that." "Open enough. You set it up so we can both pull back from each other if that turns out best; if we come to some kind of agreement." "You're here. Your crew's down the mountain." "My crew's just as good without me, Mister." The commander let it ride, switching his tack a little. "You'll admit you've come to a peculiar place for a man who only knows open country work." Custis shrugged. "Car needed shopwork. Chicago's the only place with the equipment. If I use their shops, I do their work. That's the straight up and down of it. And it's one more reason why gettin' the car'd be more work than it was worth to you. Anything you busted on it would stay busted for good. And you know it. You're so fond of cars, where's yours? Wore out, right? So now you're walkin'." "Horses." "Horses!" The commander smiled crookedly. "All right. It takes a good deal to budge you, doesn't it, Custis?" "Depends on the spot I'm in. My dad taught me to pick my spot careful." The commander nodded again. "I'd say so. All right, Custis, I'll want to talk to you again, later. One of my men'll stay close to you. Other than that, you're free to look around as much as you want to. I don't imagine you'll ever be leading any expeditions up here--not if Henley's plans work out. Or even if they don't." He turned away and reached under the cot for a bottle, and Custis hadn't found out what the old commander was driving at. Outside, they were cooking their noon meal. The camp women were huddled around the firepits, bent shapeless as they stirred their pots with charred, long wooden spoons, and the smell of food lay over the area near the huts in an invisible cloud that dilated Custis's nostrils and made his empty stomach tighten up. Whatever these people ate, it was hot and smelled different from the sludgy meat in the car's ration cans. Then he shrugged and closed his mind to it. Walking upwind, he went over to a low rock and sat down on it. One of the commander's riflemen went with him and leaned against a boulder fifteen feet away, cradling his rifle in the crook of one thin arm and looking steadily at Custis through coldly sleepy eyes. A bunch of kids clustered around the fires, filling oil cans that had crude handles made out of insulated wire. When they had loaded up they moved out of the little valley with a few riflemen for escort, carrying food out to the men who were in position around the battlewagon. Custis watched them for a while, then ignored them as well as he could. So Henley was working for a group that wanted to set up the next government. It wasn't particularly surprising that the Seventh Republic was financing its own death. Every government was at least half made up of men from the one before. They played musical chairs with the titles--one government's tax collector was the next government's chief of police--and whoever wasn't happy with the graft was bound to be figuring some way to improve it the next time the positions moved around. It looked a helI of a lot like, however the pie was cut, Custis wasn't going to get paid. The Seventh wouldn't pay him if he didn't come back with Berendtsen, and if he did find him the Eighth wouldn't hold to the last government's contract. Custis twitched his mouth. Anyhow, the car was running as well as you could expect. If he got out of here, Kansas City might have a job for him. He'd heard rumors things were happening down there. It wasn't familiar territory, and there were always rumors that things were better somewhere else, but he might try it. Or he might even head east, if the highways over the mountains were still any good at all. That could be a real touchy business all around, with God knew what going on behind the Appalachians, and maybe an organization that had plenty of cars of its own, and no use for half-bandit plains people. Going there wouldn't be the smart thing to do. As a matter of fact, he knew, inside, that he'd never leave the northern plains, no matter how he reasoned. It was too risky, heading for some place where they were past needing battlewagons. He wondered how the boys in the car were making out. He hadn't heard any firing from over there, and he didn't expect to. But it was a lousy business, sitting cooped up in there, not knowing anything, and looking out at the men on the rocks as time went by. When you came right down to it, this was a lousy kind of life, waiting for the day you ran into a trap under the sod and the last thing you ever did was try to climb out through the turret while the people who'd dug the hole waited outside with their knives. Or wondering, every time you went into one of the abandoned old towns on the far prairie, where supposedly nobody lived, if somebody there hadn't found some gasoline in a sealed drum and was waiting to set you on fire. But what the hell else could a man do? Live in the damned cities, breaking your back in somebody's jackleg factory, eating nothing that couldn't be raised or scavenged right on the spot--and not much of that--living in some hole somewhere that had twelve flights of stairs before you got to it? Freezing in the winter and maybe getting your throat cut for your coat in some back alley? Custis shivered suddenly. To hell with this. He was thinking in circles. When a man did that, he licked himself before he got started. Custis slid off his rock, stretched out on the ground, and went to sleep thinking of Berendtsen. [Image]
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