The Wizards of Pung’s Corners

By Frederick Pohl

1

This is the way it happened in the old days. Pay attention now. I’m not going to repeat myself.

There was this old man. A wicked one. Coglan was his name, and he came into Pung’s Corners in a solid-lead car. He was six feet seven inches tall. He attracted a lot of attention.

Why? Why, because nobody had ever seen a solid-lead car before. Nobody much had ever seen a stranger. It wasn’t usual. That was how Pung’s Corners was in the old days, a little pocket in the middle of the desert, and nobody came there. There weren’t even planes overhead, or not for a long time; but there had been planes just before old man Coglan showed up. It made people nervous.

Old man Coglan had snapping black eyes and a loose and limber step. He got out of his car and slammed the door closed. It didn’t go tchik like a Volkswagen or perclack like a Buick. It went woomp. It was heavy, since, as I mentioned, it was solid lead.

‘Boy!’ he bellowed, standing in front of Pung’s Inn. ‘Come get my bags!’

Charley Frink was the bellboy at that time - yes, the Senator. Of course, he was only fifteen years old then. He came out for Coglan’s bags and he had to make four trips. There was a lot of space in the back of that car, with its truck tyres and double-thick glass, and all of it was full of baggage.

While Charley was hustling the bags in, Coglan was parading back and forth on Front Street. He winked at Mrs. Churchwood and ogled young Kathy Flint. He nodded to the boys in front of the barber shop. He was a character, making himself at home like that.

In front of Andy Grammis’s grocery store, Andy tipped his chair back. Considerately, he moved his feet so his yellow dog could get out the door. ‘He seems like a nice feller,’ he said to Jack Tighe. (Yes, that Jack Tighe.)

Jack Tighe stood in the shelter of the door and he was frowning. He knew more than any of the rest of them, though it wasn’t time to say anything yet. But he said: ‘We don’t get any strangers.’

Andy shrugged. He leaned back in his chair. It was warm in the sun.

‘Pshaw, Jack,’ he said. ‘Maybe we ought to get a few more. Town’s going to sleep.’ He yawned drowsily.

And Jack Tighe left him there, left him and started down the street for home, because he knew what he knew.

Anyway, Coglan didn’t hear them. If he had heard, he wouldn’t have cared. It was old man Coglan’s great talent that he didn’t care what people had to say about him, and the others like him. He couldn’t have been what he was if that hadn’t been so.

So he checked in at Pung’s Inn. ‘A suite, boy!’ he boomed. ‘The best. A place where I can be comfortable, real comfortable.’

‘Yes, sir, Mister -’

‘Coglan, boy! Edsel T. Coglan. A proud name at both ends, and I’m proud to wear it!’

‘Yes, sir, Mr. Coglan. Right away. Now let’s see.’ He pored over his room ledgers, although, except for the Willmans and Mr. Carpenter when his wife got mad at him, there weren’t any guests, as he certainly knew. He pursed his lips. He said: ‘Ah, good! The bridal suite’s vacant, Mr. Coglan. I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable there. Of course, it’s eight-fifty a day.’

‘The bridal suite it is, boy!’ Coglan chucked the pen into its holder with a fencer’s thrust. He grinned like a fine old Bengal tiger with white crewcut hair.

And there was something to grin about, in a way, wasn’t there? The bridal suite. That was funny.

Hardly anybody ever took the bridal suite at Pung’s Inn, unless they had a bride. You only had to look at Coglan to know that he was a long way from taking a bride - a long way, and in the wrong direction. Tall as he was, snapping-eyed and straight-backed as he was, he was clearly on the far side of marrying. He was at least eighty. You could see it in his crepey skin and his gnarled hands.

The room clerk whistled for Charley Frink. ‘Glad to have you with us, Mr. Coglan,’ he said. ‘Charley’Il have your bags up in a jiffy. Will you be staying with us long?’

Coglan laughed out loud. It was the laugh of a relaxed and confident man. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Quite long.’

Now what did Coglan do when he was all alone in the bridal suite?

Well, first he paid off the bellboy with a ten-dollar bill. That surprised Charley Frink, all right. He wasn’t used to that kind of tipping. He went out and Coglan closed the door behind him in a very great good humour.

Coglan was happy.

So he peered around, grinning a wolf’s grin. He looked at the bathroom, with its stall shower and bright white porcelain. ‘Quaint,’ he murmured. He amused himself with the electric lights, switching them on and off. ‘Delicious,’ he said. ‘So manual.’ In the living room of the suite, the main light was from an overhead six-point chandelier, best Grand Rapids glass. Two of the pendants were missing. ‘Ridiculous,’ chuckled old Mr. Coglan, ‘but very, very sweet.’

Of course, you know what he was thinking. He was thinking of the big caverns and the big machines. He was thinking of the design wobblators and the bomb-shielded power sources, the self-contained raw material lodes and the unitized distribution pipe-lines. But I’m getting ahead of the story. It isn’t time to talk about those things yet. So don’t ask.

Anyway, after old man Coglan had a good look around, he opened one of his bags.

He sat down in front of the desk.

He took a Kleenex out of his pocket and with a fastidious expression picked up the blotter with it, and dumped it on the floor.

He lifted the bag onto the bare desk top and propped it, open, against the wall.

You never saw a bag like that! It looked like a kind of electronic tool kit, I swear. Its back was a panel of pastel lucite with sparks embedded in it. It glittered. There was a cathode screen. There was a scanner, a microphone, a speaker. All those things and lots more. How do I know this? Why, it’s all written down in a book called My Eighteen Years at Pung’s Hall, by Senator C. T. Frink. Because Charley was in the room next door and there was a keyhole.

So then what happened was that a little tinkly chime sounded distantly within the speaker, and the cathode screen flickered and lit up.

‘Coglan,’ boomed the tall old man. ‘Reporting in. Let me speak to V. P. Maffity.’

2

Now you have to know what Pung’s Corners was like in those days.

Everybody knows what it is now, but then it was small. Very small. It sat on the bank of the Delaware River like a fat old lady on the edge of a spindly chair.

General ‘Retreating Johnnie’ Estabrook wintered there before the Battle of Monmouth and wrote pettishly to General Washington : ‘I can obtain no Provision here, as the inhabitants are so averse to our Cause, that I cannot get a Man to come near me.’

During the Civil War, a small draft riot took place in its main square in which a recruiting colonel of the IXth Volunteer Pennsylvania Zouaves was chased out of town and the son of the town’s leading banker suffered superficial scalp wounds. (He fell off his horse. He was drunk.)

These were only little wars, you know. They had left only little scars.

Pung’s Corners missed all the big ones.

For instance, when the biggest of all got going, why, Pung’s Corners had a ticket on the fifty-yard line but never had to carry the ball.

The cobalt bomb that annihilated New Jersey stopped short at the bank of the Delaware, checked by a persistent easterly wind.

The radio-dust that demolished Philadelphia went forty-some miles up the river. Then the drone that was spreading it was rammed down by a suicide pilot in a shaky jet. (Pung’s Corners was one mile farther on.)

The H-bombs that scattered around the New York megalopolis bracketed Pung’s Corners, but it lay unscathed between.

You see how it was? They never laid a glove on us. But after the war, we were marooned.

Now that wasn’t a bad way to be, you know? Read some of the old books, you’ll see. The way Pung’s Corners felt, there was a lot to be said for being marooned. People in Pung’s Corners were genuinely sorry about the war, with so many people getting killed and all. (Although we won it. It was worse for the other side.) But every cloud has its silver lining and so on, and being surrounded at every point of the compass by badlands that no one could cross had a few compensating features.

There was a Nike battalion in Pung’s Corners, and they say they shot down the first couple of helicopters that tried to land because they thought they were the enemy. Maybe they did. But along about the fifth copter, they didn’t think that any more, I guarantee. And then the planes stopped coming. Outside, they had plenty to think about, I suppose. They stopped bothering with Pung’s Corners.

Until Mr. Coglan came in.

After Coglan got his line of communication opened up - because that was what the big suitcase was, a TV communications set - he talked for a little while. Charley had a red dent on his forehead for two days, he pressed against the doorknob so hard, trying to see.

‘Mr. Maffity?’ boomed Coglan, and a pretty girl’s face lighted up on the screen.

‘This is Vice President Maffity’s secretary,’ she said sweetly. ‘I see you arrived safely. One moment, please, for Mr Maffity.’

And then the set flickered and another face showed up, the blood brother to Coglan’s own. It was the face of an elderly and successful man who recognized no obstacles, the face of a man who knew what he wanted and got it. ‘Coglan, boy! Good to see you got there!’

‘No sweat, L.S.,’ said Coglan. ‘I’m just about to secure my logistics. Money. This is going to take money.’

‘No trouble?’

‘No trouble, Chief. I can promise you that. There isn’t going to be any trouble.’ He grinned and picked up a nested set of little metallic boxes out of a pouch in the suitcase. He opened one, shook out a small disk-shaped object, silver and scarlet plastic. ‘I’m using this right away.’

‘And the reservoir?’

‘I haven’t checked yet, Chief. But the pilots said they dumped the stuff in. No opposition from the ground either, did you notice that? These people used to shoot down every plane that came near. They’re softening. They’re ripe.’

‘Good enough,’ said L. S. Maffity from the little cathode Screen. ‘Make it so, Coglan. Make it so.’

Now, at the Shawanganunk National Bank, Mr. LaFarge saw Coglan come in and knew right away something was up.

How do I know that? Why, that’s in a book too. The Federal Budget and How I Balanced It: A Study in Surplus Dynamics, by Treasury Secretary (Retired) Wilbur Otis LaFarge. Most everything is in a book, if you know where to look for it. That’s something you young people have got to learn.

Anyway, Mr. LaFarge, who was then only an Assistant Vice President, greeted old man Coglan effusively. It was his way. ‘Morning, sir!’ he said. ‘Morning! In what way can we serve you here at the bank?’

‘We’ll find a way,’ promised Mr. Coglan.

‘Of course, sir. Of course!’ Mr. LaFarge rubbed his hands. ‘You’ll want a checking account. Certainly! And a savings account? And a safety deposit box? Absolutely! Christmas Club, I suppose. Perhaps a short-term auto loan, or a chattel loan on your household effects for the purpose of consolidating debts and reducing -’

‘Don’t have any debts,’ said Coglan. ‘Look, what’s-you-name-‘

‘LaFarge, sir! Wilbur LaFarge. Call me Will.’

‘Look, Willie. Here are my credit references.’ And he spilled a manila envelope out on the desk in front of LaFarge.

The banker looked at the papers and frowned. He picked one up. ‘Letter of credit,’ he said. ‘Some time since I saw one of those. From Danbury, Connecticut, eh?’ He shook his head and pouted. ‘All from outside, sir.’

‘I’m from outside.’

‘I see.’ LaFarge sighed heavily after a second. ‘Well, sir, I don’t know. What is it you wanted?’

‘What I want is a quarter of a million dollars, Willie. In cash. And make it snappy, will you?’

Mr. LaFarge blinked.

You don’t know him, of course. He was before your time. You don’t know what a request like that would do to him.

When I say he blinked, I mean, man, he blinked. Then he blinked again and it seemed to calm him. For a moment, the veins had begun to stand out in his temples; for a moment, his mouth was open to speak. But he closed his mouth and the veins receded.

Because, you see, old man Coglan took that silvery, scarlet thing out of his pocket. It glittered. He gave it a twist and he gave it a certain kind of squeeze, and it hummed, a deep and throbbing note. But it didn’t satisfy Mr. Coglan.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said, offhandedly, and he adjusted it and squeezed it again. ‘That’s better,’ he said.

The note was deeper, but still not quite deep enough to suit Coglan. He twisted the top a fraction more, until the pulsing note was too deep to be heard, and then he nodded.

There was silence for a second.

Then: ‘Large bills?’ cried Mr. LaFarge. ‘Or small?’ He leaped up and waved to a cashier. ‘Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars! You there, Tom Fairleigh! Hurry it up now. What? No, I don’t care where you get it. Go out to the vault, if there isn’t enough in the cages. But bring me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars!’

He sank down at his desk again, panting. ‘I am really sorry, sir,’ he apologized to Mr. Coglan. ‘The clerks you get these days! I almost wish that old times would come back.’

‘Perhaps they will, friend,’ said Coglan, grinning widely to himself. ‘Now,’ he said, not unkindly, ‘shut up.’

He waited, tapping the desk top, humming to himself, staring at the blank wall. He completely ignored Mr. LaFarge until Tom Fairleigh and another teller brought four canvas sacks of bills. They began to dump them on the desk to count them.

‘No, don’t bother,’ said Coglan cheerfully, his black eyes snapping with good humour. ‘I trust you.’ He picked up the sacks, nodded courteously to Mr. LaFarge, and walked out.

Ten seconds later, Mr. LaFarge suddenly shook his head, rubbed his eyes and stared at the two tellers. ‘What -’

‘You just gave him a quarter of a million dollars,’ said Tom Fairleigh. ‘You made me get it out of the vault.’

‘I did?’

‘You did!

They looked at each other.

Mr. LaFarge said at last: ‘It’s been a long time since we had any of that in Pung’s Corners.’

3

Now I have to tell a part that isn’t so nice. It’s about a girl named Marlene Groshawk. I positively will not explain any part of it. I probably shouldn’t mention it at all, but it’s part of the history of our country. Still -

Well, this is what happened. Yes, it’s in a book too - On Call, by One Who Knows (And we know who ‘One Who Knows’ is, don’t we?)

She wasn’t a bad girl. Not a bit of it. Or, anyway, she didn’t mean to be. She was too pretty for her own good and not very smart. What she wanted out of life was to be a television star.

Well, that was out of the question, of course. We didn’t use live television at all in Pung’s Corners those days, only a few old tapes. They left the commercials in, although the goods the old, dead announcers were trying to sell were not on the market anywhere, much less in Pung’s Corners. And Marlene’s idol was a TV saleslady named Betty Furness. Marlene had pictures of her, dubbed off the tapes, pasted all over the walls of her room.

At the time I’m talking about, Marlene called herself a public stenographer. There wasn’t too much demand for her services. (And later on, after things opened up, she gave up that part of her business entirely.) But if anybody needed a little extra help in Pung’s Corners, like writing some letters or getting caught up on the back filing and such, they’d call on Marlene. She’d never worked for a stranger before.

She was rather pleased when the desk clerk told her that there was this new Mr. Coglan in town, and that he needed an assistant to help him run some new project he was up to. She didn’t know what the project was, but I have to tell you that if she knew, she would have helped anyhow. Any budding TV star would, of course.

She stopped in the lobby of Pung’s Inn to adjust her makeup. Charley Frink looked at her with that kind of a look, in spite of being only fifteen. She sniffed at him, tossed her head and proudly went upstairs.

She tapped on the carved oak door of Suite 41 - that was the bridal suite; she knew it well - and smiled prettily for the tall old man with snapping eyes who swung it open.

‘Mr. Coglan? I’m Miss Groshawk, the public stenographer. I understand you sent for me.’

The old man looked at her piercingly for a moment.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I did. Come in.’

He turned his back on her and let her come in and close the door by herself.

Coglan was busy. He had the suite’s television set in pieces all over the floor.

He was trying to fix it some way or another, Marlene judged. And that was odd, mused Marlene in her cloudy young way, because even if she wasn’t really brainy, she knew that he was no television repairman, or anything like that. She knew exactly what he was. It said so on his card, and Mr. LaFarge had shown the card around town. He was a research and development counsellor.

Whatever that was.

Marlene was conscientious, and she knew that a good public stenographer took her temporary employer’s work to heart. She said: ‘Something wrong, Mr. Coglan?’

He looked up, irritable. ‘I can’t get Danbury on this thing.’

‘Danbury, Connecticut? Outside? No, sir. It isn’t supposed to get Danbury.’

He straightened up and looked at her. ‘It isn’t supposed to get Danbury.’ He nodded thoughtfully. ‘This forty-eight-inch twenty-seven tube full-colour suppressed sideband UHF-VHF General Electric wall model with static suppressors and self-compensating tuning strips, it isn’t supposed to get Danbury, Connecticut.’

‘That’s right, sir.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘That’s going to be a big laugh on the cavern in Schenectady.’

Marlene said helpfully: ‘It hasn’t got any antenna.’

Coglan frowned and corrected her. ‘No, that’s impossible. It’s got to have an antenna. These leads go somewhere.’

Marlene shrugged attractively.

He said: ‘Right after the war, of course, you couldn’t get Danbury at all. I agree. Not with all those fission products, eh? But that’s down to a negligible count now. Danbury should come in loud and clear.’

Marlene said: ‘No, it was after that, I used to, uh, date a fellow named Timmy Horan, and he was in that line of business, making television repairs, I mean. A couple years after the war, I was just a kid, they began to get pictures once in a while. Well, they passed a law, Mr. Coglan.’

‘A law?’ His face looked suddenly harsh.

‘Well, I think they did. Anyway, Timmy had to go around taking the antennas off all the sets. He really did. Then they hooked them up with TV tape recorders, like.’ She thought hard for a second. ‘He didn’t tell me why,’ she volunteered.

‘I know why,’ he said flatly.

‘So it only plays records, Mr. Coglan. But if there’s anything you want, the desk clerk’ll get it for you. He’s got lots. Dinah Shores and Jackie Gleasons and Medic. Oh, and Westerns. You tell him what you want.’

‘I see.’ Coglan stood there for a second, thinking. Not to her but to himself, he said: ‘No wonder we weren’t getting through. Well, we’ll see about that.’

‘What, Mr. Coglan?’

‘Never mind, Miss Groshawk. I see the picture now. And it isn’t a very pretty one.’

He went back to the television set.

He wasn’t a TV mechanic, no, but he knew a little something about what he was doing for sure, because he had it all back together in a minute. Oh, less than that. And not just the way it was. He had it improved. Even Marlene could see that. Maybe not improved, but different; he’d done something to it.

‘Better?’ he demanded, looking at her.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I mean does looking at the picture do anything to you?’

‘I’m sorry, Mr. Coglan, but I honestly don’t care for Studio One. It makes me think too hard, you know?’

But she obediently watched the set.

He had tuned in on the recorded wire signal that went out to all of Pung’s Corners TV sets. I don’t suppose you know how we did it then, but there was a central station where they ran off a show all the time, for people who didn’t want to bother with tapes. It was all old stuff, of course. And everybody had seen all of them already.

But Marlene watched, and funnily, in a moment she began to giggle.

‘Why, Mr. Coglan’ she said, though he hadn’t done anything at all.

‘Better,’ he said, and he was satisfied.

He had every reason to be.

‘However,’ said Mr. Coglan, ‘first things come first. I need your help.’

‘All right, Mr. Coglan,’ Marlene said in a silky voice.

‘I mean in a business way. I want to hire some people. I want you to help me locate them, and to keep the records straight. Then I shall need to buy certain materials. And I’ll need an office, perhaps a few buildings for light industrial purposes, and soon.’

‘That will take a lot of money, won’t it?’

Coglan chuckled.

‘Well, then,’ said Marlene, satisfied, ‘I’m your girl, Mr. Coglan. I mean in a business way. Would you mind telling me what the business is?’

‘I intend to put Pung’s Corners back on its feet.’

‘Oh, sure, Mr. Coglan. But how, I mean?’

‘Advertising,’ said old man Coglan, with a devil’s smile and a demon’s voice.

Silence. There was a moment of silence.

Marlene said faintly: ‘I don’t think they’re going to like it.’

‘Who?’

‘The bigwigs. They’re aren’t going to like that. Not advertising, you know. I mean I’m for you. I’m in favour of advertising. I like it. But -’

‘There’s no question of liking it!’ Coglan said in a terrible voice. ‘It’s what has made our country great! It tooled us up to fight in a great war, and when that war was over, it put us back together again!’

‘I understand that, Mr. Coglan,’ she said. ‘But -’

‘I don’t want to hear that word from you, Miss Groshawk,’ he snapped. ‘There is no question. Consider America after the war, ah? You don’t remember, perhaps. They kept it from you. But the cities all were demolished. The buildings were ruins. It was only advertising that built them up again - advertising, and the power of research! For I remind you of what a great man once said: “Our chief job in research is to keep the customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has.” ‘

Coglan paused, visibly affected. ‘That was Charles F. Kettering of General Motors,’ he said, ‘and the beauty of it, Miss Groshawk, is that he said this in the Twenties! Imagine! So clear a perception of what Science means to all of us. So comprehensive a grasp of the meaning of American Inventiveness!’

Marlene said brokenly: ‘That’s beautiful.’

Coglan nodded. ‘Of course. So you see, there is nothing at all that your bigwigs can do, like it or not. We Americans - we real Americans - know that without advertising there is no industry; and accordingly we have shaped advertising into a tool that serves us well. Why, here, look at that television set!’

Marlene did, and in a moment began again to giggle. Archly she whispered: ‘Mr. Coglan!’

‘You see? and if that doesn’t suffice, well, there’s always the law. Let’s see what the bigwigs of Pung’s Corners can do against the massed might of the United States Army!’

‘I do hope there won’t be any fighting, Mr. Coglan.’

‘I doubt there will,’ he said sincerely. ‘And now to work, eh? Or -’ he glanced at his watch and nodded - ‘after all, there’s no real hurry this afternoon. Suppose we order some dinner, just for the two of us. And some wine? And!’

‘Of course, Mr. Coglan.’

Marlene started to go to the telephone, but Mr. Coglan stopped her.

‘On second thought, Miss Groshawk,’ he said, beginning to breathe a little hard, ‘I’ll do the ordering. You just sit there and rest for a minute. Watch the television set, eh?’

4

Now I have to tell you about Jack Tighe.

Yes, indeed. Jack Tighe. The Father of the Second Republic. Sit tight and listen and don’t interrupt, because what I have to tell you isn’t exactly what you learned in school.

The apple tree? No, that’s only a story. It couldn’t have happened, you see, because apple trees don’t grow on upper Madison Avenue, and that’s where Jack Tighe spent his youth. Because Jack Tighe wasn’t the President of the Second Republic. For a long time, he was something else, something called V.P. in charge of S.L. division, of the advertising firm of Yust and Ruminant.

That’s right. Advertising.

Don’t cry. It’s all right. He’d given it up, you see, long before - oh, long before, even before the big war; given it up and come to Fung’s Corners, to retire.

Jack Tighe had his place out on the marshland down at the bend of the Delaware River. It wasn’t particularly healthy there. All the highlands around Pung’s Corners drained into the creeks of that part of the area, and a lot of radioactivity had come down. But it didn’t bother Jack Tighe, because he was too old.

He was as old as old man Coglan, in fact. And what’s more, they had known each other, back at the agency.

Jack Tighe was also big, not as big as Coglan but well over six feet. And in a way he looked like Coglan. You’ve seen his pictures. Same eyes, same devil-may-care bounce to his walk and snap to his voice. He could have been a big man in Pung’s Corners. They would have made him mayor any time. But he said he’d come there to retire, and retire he would; it would take a major upheaval to make him come out of retirement, he said.

And he got one.

The first thing was Andy Grammis, white as a sheet.

‘Jack!’ he whispered, out of breath at the porch steps, for he’d run almost all the way from his store.

Jack Tighe took his feet down off the porch rail. ‘Sit down, Andy,’ he said kindly. ‘I suppose I know why you’re here.’

‘You do, Jack?”

‘I think so.’ Jack Tighe nodded. Oh, he was a handsome man. He said: ‘Aircraft dumping neoscopalamine in the reservoir, a stranger turning up in a car with a sheet-lead body. And we all know what’s outside, don’t we? Yes, it has to be that.’

‘It’s him, all right,’ babbled Andy Grammis, plopping himself down on the steps, his face chalk. ‘It’s him and there’s nothing we can do! He came into the store this morning. Brought Marlene with him. We should have done something about that girl, Jack. I knew she’d come to no good -’

‘What did he want?’

‘Want? Jack, he had a pad and a pencil like he wanted to take down orders, and he kept asking for - asking for - “Breakfast foods,” he says, “what’ve you got in the way of breakfast foods?” So I told him. Oatmeal and corn flakes. Jack, he flew at me! “You don’t stock Coco-Wheet?” he says. “Or Treets, Eets, Neets or Elixo-Wheets? How about Hunny-Yummies, or Prune-Bran Whippets, The Cereal with the Zip-Gun in Every Box?” “No, sir,” I tell him.

‘But he’s mad by then. “Potatoes?” he hollers. “What about potatoes?” Well, we’ve got plenty of potatoes, a whole cellar full. But I tell him and that doesn’t satisfy him. “Raw, you mean?” he yells. “Not Tater-Fluff, Pre-Skortch Mickies or Uncle Everett’s Converted Spuds?” And then he shows me his card.’

‘I know,’ said Jack Tighe kindly, for Grammis seemed to find it hard to go on. ‘You don’t have to say it, if you don’t want to.’

‘Oh, I can say it all right, Jack,’ said Andy Grammis bravely. ‘This Mr. Coglan, he’s an adver -’

‘No,’ said Jack Tighe, standing up, ‘don’t make yourself do it. It’s bad enough as it is. But it had to come. Yes, count it that it had to come, Andy. We’ve had a few good years, but we couldn’t expect them to last forever.’

‘But what are we going to do ?’

‘Get up, Andy,’ said Jack Tighe strongly. ‘Come inside! Sit down and rest yourself. And I’ll send for the others.’

‘You’re going to fight him? But he has the whole United States Army behind him.’

Old Jack Tighe nodded. ‘So he has, Andy,’ he said, but he seemed wonderfully cheerful.

Jack Tighe’s place was a sort of ranch house, with fixings. He was a great individual man, Jack Tighe was. All of you know that, because you were taught it in school; and maybe some of you have been to the house. But it’s different now; I don’t care what they say. The furniture isn’t just the same. And the grounds -

Well, during the big war, of course, that was where the radio-dust drained down from the hills, so nothing grew. They’ve prettied it up with grass and trees and flowers. Flowers! I’ll tell you what’s wrong with that. In his young days, Jack Tighe was an account executive on the National Floral account. Why, he wouldn’t have a flower in the house, much less plant and tend them.

But it was a nice house, all the same. He fixed Andy Grammis a drink and sat him down. He phoned down-town and invited half a dozen people to come in to see them. He didn’t say what it was about, naturally. No sense in starting a panic.

But everyone pretty much knew. The first to arrive was Timmy Horan, the fellow from the television service, and he’d given Charley Frink a ride on the back of his bike. He said, breathless: ‘Mr. Tighe, they’re on our lines. I don’t know how he’s done it, but Coglan is transmitting on our wire TV circuit. And the stuff he’s transmitting, Mr. Tighe!’

‘Sure,’ said Tighe soothingly. ‘Don’t worry about it, Timothy. I imagine I know what sort of stuff it is, eh?’

He got up, humming pleasantly, and snapped on the television set. ‘Time for the afternoon movie, isn’t it? I suppose you left the tapes running.’

‘Of course, but he’s interfering with it!’

Tighe nodded. ‘Let’s see.’

The picture on the TV screen quavered, twisted into slanting lines of pale dark and snapped into shape.

‘I remember that one!’ Charley Frink exclaimed. ‘It’s one of my favourites, Timmy!’

On the screen, Number Two Son, a gun in his hand, was backing away from a hooded killer. Number Two Son tripped over a loose board and fell into a vat. he came up grotesquely comic, covered with plaster and mud.

Tighe stepped back a few paces. He spread the fingers of one hand and moved them rapidly up and down before his eyes.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘yes. See for yourself, gentlemen.’

Andy Grammis hesitatingly copied the older man. He spread his fingers and, clumsily at first, moved them before his eyes, as though shielding his vision from the cathode tube. Up and down he moved his hand, making a sort of stroboscope that stopped the invisible flicker of the racing electronic pencil.

And, yes, there it was!

Seen without the stroboscope, the screen showed bland-faced Charlie Chan in his white Panama hat. But the stroboscope showed something else. Between the consecutive images of the old movie there was another image - flashed for only a tiny fraction of a second, too quick for the conscious brain to comprehend, but, oh, how it struck into the subconscious!

Andy blushed.

‘That - that girl,’ he stammered, shocked. ‘She hasn’t got any-’

‘Of course she hasn’t,’ said Tighe pleasantly. ‘Subliminal compulsion, eh? The basic sex drive; you don’t know you’re seeing it, but the submerged mind doesn’t miss it. No. And notice the box of Prune-Bran Whippets in her hand.’

Charley Frink coughed. ‘Now that you mention it, Mr Tighe,’ he said, ‘I notice that I’ve just been thinking how tasty a dish of Prune-Bran Whippets would be right now.’

‘Naturally,’ agreed Jack Tighe. Then he frowned. ‘Naked women, yes. But the female audience should be appealed to also. I wonder.’ He was silent for a couple of minutes, and held the others silent with him, while tirelessly he moved the spread hand before his eyes.

Then he blushed.

‘Well,’ he said amiably, ‘that’s for the female audience. It’s all there. Subliminal advertising. A product, and a key to the basic drives, and all flashed so quickly that the brain can’t organize its defences. So when you think of Prune-Bran Whippets, you think of sex. Or more important, when you think of sex, you think of Prune-Bran Whippets.’

‘Gee, Mr. Tighe. I think about sex a lot.’

‘Everybody does,’ said Jack Tighe comfortingly, and he nodded.

There was a gallumphing sound from outside then and Wilbur LaFarge from the Shawanganunk National came trotting in. He was all out of breath and scared.

‘He’s done it again, he’s done it again, Mr. Tighe, sir! That Mr. Coglan, he came and demanded more money! Said he’s going to build a real TV network slave station here in Pung’s Corners. Said he’s opening up a branch agency for Yust and Ruminant, whoever they are. Said he was about to put Pung’s Corners back on the map and needed money to do it.’

‘And you gave it to him?’

‘I couldn’t help it.’

Jack Tighe nodded wisely. ‘No, you couldn’t. Even in my day, you couldn’t much help it, not when the agency had you in its sights and the finger squeezing down on the trigger. Neoscop in the drinking water, to make every living soul in Pung’s Corners a little more suggestible, a little less stiff-backed. Even me, I suppose, though perhaps I don’t drink as much water as most. And subliminal advertising on the wired TV, and subsonic compulsives when it comes to man-to-man talk. Tell me, LaFarge, did you happen to hear a faint droning sound? I thought so; yes. They don’t miss a trick. Well,’ he said, looking somehow pleased, ‘there’s no help for it. We’ll have to fight.’

‘Fight?’ whispered Wilbur LaFarge, for he was no brave man, no, not even though he later became the Secretary of the Treasury.

‘Fight!’ boomed Jack Tighe.

Everybody looked at everybody else.

‘There are hundreds of us,’ said Jack Tighe, ‘and there’s only one of him. Yes, we’ll fight! We’ll distill the drinking water. We’ll rip Coglan’s little transmitter out of our TV circuit. Timmy can work up electronic sniffers to see what else he’s using; we’ll find all his gadgets, and we’ll destroy them. The subsonics? Why, he has to carry that gear with him. We’ll just take it away from him. It’s either that or we give up our heritage as free men!’

Wilbur LaFarge cleared his throat. ‘And then -’

‘Well you may say “and then”,’ agreed Jack Tighe. ‘And then the United States Cavalry comes charging over the hill to rescue him. Yes. But you must have realized by now, gentlemen, that this means war.’

And so they had, though you couldn’t have said that any of them seemed very happy about it.

5

Now I have to tell you what it was like outside in those days.

The face of the Moon is no more remote. Oh, you can’t imagine it, you really can’t. I don’t know if I can explain it to you, either, but it’s all in a book and you can read it if you want to … a book that was written by somebody important, a major, who later on became a general (but that was much later and in another army) and whose name was T. Wallace Commaigne.

The book? Why, that was called The End of the Beginning, and it is Volume One of his twelve-volume set of memoirs entitled : I Served with Tighe: The Struggle to Win the World.

War had been coming, war that threatened more, until it threatened everything, as the horrors in its supersonic pouches grew beyond even the dreads of hysteria. But there was time to guesstimate, as Time Magazine used to call it.

The dispersal plan came first. Break up cities, spread them apart, diffuse population and industry to provide the smallest possible target for even the largest possible bomb.

But dispersal increased another vulnerability - more freight trains, more cargo ships, more boxcar planes carrying raw materials to and finished products from an infinity of production points. Harder, yes, to hit and destroy, easier to choke off coming and going.

Then dig in, the planners said. Not dispersal but bomb shelter. But more than bomb shelter - make the factories mine for their ores, drill for their fuels, pump for their coolants and steams - and make them independent of supplies that may never be delivered, of workers who could not live below ground for however long the unpredictable war may last, seconds or forever - even of brains that might not reach the drawing boards and research labs and directors’ boards, brains that might either be dead or concussed into something other than brains.

So the sub-surface factories even designed for themselves, always on a rising curve:

Against an enemy presupposed to grow smarter and slicker and quicker with each advance, just as we and our machines do. Against our having fewer and fewer fighting men; pure logic that, as war continues, more and more are killed, fewer and fewer left to operate the killer engines. Against the destruction or capture of even the impregnable underground factories, guarded as no dragon of legend ever was - by all that Man could devise at first in the way of traps and cages, blast and ray - and then by the slipleashed invention of machines ordered always to speed up - more and more, deadlier and deadlier.

And the next stage - the fortress factories hooked to each other, so that the unthinkably defended plants, should they inconceivably fall, would in the dying message pass their responsibilities to the next of kin - survivor factories to split up their work, increase output, step up the lethal pace of invention and perfection, sill more murderous weapons to be operated by still fewer defenders.

And another, final plan - gear the machines to feed and house and clothe and transport a nation, a hemisphere, a world recovering from no one could know in advance what bombs and germs and poisons and - name it and it probably would happen if the war lasted long enough.

With a built-in signal of peace, of course: the air itself. Pure once more, the atmosphere, routinely tested moment by moment, would switch production from war to peace.

And so it did.

But who could have known beforehand that the machines might not know war from peace?

Here’s Detroit: a hundred thousand rat-inhabited manless acres, blind windows and shattered walls. From the air, it is dead. But underneath it - ah, the rapid pulse of life! The hammering systole and diastole of raw-material conduits sucking in fuel and ore, pumping out finished autos. Spidery passages stretched out to the taconite beds under the Lakes. Fleets of barges issued from concrete pens to match the U-boat nests at Lorient and, unmanned, swam the Lakes and the canals to their distribution points, bearing shiny new Buicks and Plymouths.

What made them new?

Why, industrial design! For the model years changed. The Dynaflow ‘61 gave place to the Super-Dynaflow Mark Eight of 1962; twin-beam headlights became triple; white-wall tyres turned to pastel and back to solid ebony black.

It was a matter of design efficiency.

What the Founding Fathers learned about production was essentially this: It doesn’t much matter what you build, it only matters that people should want to buy it. What they learned was: Never mind the judgmatical faculties of the human race. They are a frail breed. They move no merchandise. They boost no sales. Rely, instead, on the monkey trait of curiosity.

And curiosity, of course, feeds on secrecy.

So generations of automotivators reacted new cosmetic gimmicks for their cars in secret laboratories staffed by sworn mutes. No atomic device was half so classified! And all Detroit echoed their security measures; fleets of canvas-swathed mysteries swarmed the highways at new-model time each year; people talked. Oh, yes - they laughed; it was comic; but though they were amused, they were piqued; it was good to make a joke of the mystery, but the capper to the joke was to own one of the new models oneself.

The appliance manufacturers pricked up their ears. Ah, so. Curiosity, eh? So they leased concealed space to design new ice-tray compartments and brought them out with a flourish of trumpets. Their refrigerators sold like mad. Yes, like mad.

RCA brooded over the lesson and added a fillip of their own; there was the vinylite record, unbreakable, colourful, new. They designed it under wraps and then, the crowning touch, they leaked the secret; it was the trick that Manhattan Project hadn’t learned - a secret that concealed the real secret. For all the vinylite programme was only a façade; it was security in its highest manifestation; the vinylite programme was a mere cover for the submerged LP.

It moved goods. But there was a limit. The human race is a blabbermouth.

Very well, said some great unknown, eliminate the human race! Let a machine design the new models! Add a design unit. Set it, by means of wobblators and random-choice circuits, to make its changes in an unforeseeable way. Automate the factories; conceal them underground; programme the machine to programme itself. After all, why not? As Coglan had quoted Charles F. Kettering, ‘Our chief job in research is to keep the customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has,’ and proper machines can de that as well as any man. Better, if you really want to know.

And so the world was full of drusy caverns from which wonders constantly poured. The war had given industry its start by starting the dispersal pattern; bomb shelter had embedded the factories in rock; now industrial security made the factories independent. Goods flowed out in a variegated torrent.

But they couldn’t stop. And nobody could get inside to shut them off or even slow them down. And that torrent of goods, made for so many people who didn’t exist, had to be moved. The advertising men had to do the moving, and they were excellent at the job.

So that was the outside, a very, very busy place and a very, very big one. In spite of what happened in the big war.

I can’t begin to tell you how busy it was or how big; I can only tell you about a little bit of it. There was a building called the Pentagon and it covered acres of ground. It had five sides, of course; one for the Army, one for the Navy, one for the Air Force, one for the Marines, and one for the offices of Yust & Ruminant.

So here’s the Pentagon, this great big building, the nerve centre of the United States in every way that mattered. (There was also a ‘Capitol’, as they called it, but that doesn’t matter much. Didn’t then, in fact.)

And here’s Major Commaigne, in his scarlet dress uniform with his epaulettes and his little gilt sword. He’s waiting in the anteroom of the Director’s Office of Yust & Ruminant, nervously watching television. He’s been waiting there for an hour, and then at last they send for him.

He goes in.

Don’t try to imagine his emotions as he walks into that pigskin-panelled suite. You can’t. But understand that he believes that the key to all of his future lies in this room; he believes that with all his heart and in a way, as it develops, he is right.

‘Major,’ snaps an old man, a man very like Coglan and very like Jack Tighe, for they were all pretty much of a breed, those Ivy-League charcoal-greys, ‘Major, he’s coming through. It’s just as we feared. There has been trouble.’

‘Yes, sir!’

Major Commaigne is very erect and military in his bearing, because he has been an Army officer for fifteen years now and this is his first chance at combat. He missed the big war - well, the whole Army missed the big war; it was over too fast for moving troops - and fighting has pretty much stopped since then. It isn’t safe to fight, except under certain conditions. But maybe the conditions are right now, he thinks. And it can mean a lot to a major’s career, these days, if he gets an expeditionary force to lead and acquits himself well with it!

So he stands erect, alert, sharp-eyed. His braided cap is tucked in the corner of one arm, and his other hand rests on the hilt of his sword, and he looks fierce. Why, that’s natural enough, too. What comes in over the TV communicator in that pigskin-panelled office would make any honest Army officer look fierce. The authority of the United States has been flouted!

‘L.S.,’ gasps the image of a tall, dark old man in the picture tube, ‘they’ve turned against me! They’ve seized my transmitter, neutralized my drugs, confiscated my subsonic gear. All I have left is this transmitter!’

And he isn’t urbane any more, this man Coglan whose picture is being received in this room; he looks excited and he looks mad.

‘Funny,’ comments Mr. Maffity, called ‘L.S.’ by his intimate staff, ‘that they didn’t take the transmitter away too. They must have known you’d contact us and that there would be reprisals.’

‘But they wanted me to contact you!’ cries the voice from the picture tube. ‘I told them what it would mean. L.S., they’re going crazy. They’re spoiling for a fight.’

And after a little more talk, L.S. Maffity turns off the set.

‘We’ll give it to them, eh, Major?’ he says, as stern and straight as a ramrod himself.

‘We will, sir!’ says the major, and he salutes, spins around and leaves. Already he can feel the eagles on his shoulders -who knows, maybe even stars!

And that is how the punitive expedition came to be launched; and it was exactly what Pung’s Corners could have expected as a result of their actions - could have, and did.

Now I already told you that fighting had been out of fashion for some time, though getting ready to fight was a number-one preoccupation of a great many people. You must understand that there appeared to be no contradiction in these two contradictory facts, outside.

The big war had pretty much discouraged anybody from doing anything very violent. Fighting in the old-fashioned way - that is, with missiles and radio-dust and atomic cannon - had turned out to be expensive and for other reasons impractical. It was only the greatest of luck then that stopped things before the planet was wiped off, nice and clean, of everything more advanced than the notochord, ready for the one-celled beasts of the sea to start over again. Now things were different.

First place, all atomic explosives were under rigid interdiction. There were a couple of dozen countries in the world that owned A-bombs or better, and every one of them had men on duty, twenty-four hours a day, with their fingers held ready over buttons that would wipe out for once and all whichever one of them might first use an atomic weapon again. So that was out.

And aircraft, by the same token, lost a major part of their usefulness. The satellites with their beady little TV eyes scanned every place every second, so that you didn’t dare drop even an ordinary HE bomb as long as some nearsighted chap watching through a satellite relay might mistake it for something nuclear - and give the order to push one of those buttons.

This left, generally speaking, the infantry.

But what infantry it was! A platoon of riflemen was twenty-three men and it owned roughly the firepower of all of Napoleon’s legions. A company comprised some twelve hundred and fifty, and it could singlehanded have won World War one.

Hand weapons spat out literally sheets of metal, projectiles firing so rapidly one after another that you didn’t so much try to shoot a target as to slice it in half. As far as the eye could see, a rifle bullet could fly. And where the eye was blocked by darkness, by fog or by hills, the sniperscope, the radarscreen and the pulsebeam interferometer sights could locate the target as though it were ten yards away at broad noon.

They were, that is to say, very modern weapons. In fact, the weapons that this infantry carried were so modern that half of each company was in process of learning to operate weapons that the other half had already discarded as obsolete. Who wanted a Magic-Eye Self-Aiming All-Weather Gunsight, Mark XXII, when a Mark XXIII, with Dubl-Jewelled Bearings, was available?

For it was one of the triumphs of the age that at last the planned obsolescence and high turnover of, say, a TV set or a Detroit car had been extended to carbines and bazookas.

It was wonderful and frightening to see.

It was these heroes, then, who went off to war, or to whatever might come.

Major Commaigne (so he says in his book) took a full company of men, twelve hundred and fifty strong, and started out for Pung’s Corners. Air brought them to the plains of Lehigh County, burned black from radiation but no longer dangerous. From there, they journeyed by wheeled vehicles.

Major Commaigne was coldly confident. The radioactivity of the sands surrounding Pung’s Corners was no problem. Not with the massive and perfect equipment he had for his force. What old Mr. Coglan could do, the United States Army could do better; Coglan drove inside sheet lead, but the expeditionary force cruised in solid iridium steel, with gamma-ray baffles fixed in place.

Each platoon had its own half track personnel carrier. Not only did the men have their hand weapons, but each vehicle mounted a 105-mm explosive cannon, with Zip-Fire Auto-Load and Wizardtrol Safety Interlock. Fluid mountings sustained the gimbals of the cannon. Radar picked out its target. Automatic digital computers predicted and outguessed the flight of its prey.

In the lead personnel carrier. Major Commaigne barked a last word to his troops:

‘This is it, men! The chips are down! You have trained for this a long time and now you’re in the middle of it. I don’t know how we’re going to make out in there -’ and he swung an arm in the direction of Pung’s Corners, a gesture faithfully reproduced in living three-dimensional colour on the intercoms of each personnel carrier in his fleet – ‘but win or loose, and I know we’re going to win, I want every one of you to know that you belong to the best Company in the best Regiment of the best Combat Infantry Team of the best Division of -’

Crump went the 105-mm piece on the lead personnel carrier as radar range automatically sighted in and fired upon a moving object outside, thus drowning out the tributes he had intended to pay to Corps, to Army, to Group and to Command.

The battle for Pung’s Corners had begun.

6

Now that first target, it wasn’t any body.

It was only a milch cow, and one in need of freshening at that. She shouldn’t have been on the baseball field at all, but there she was, and since that was the direction from which the invader descended on the town, she made the supreme sacrifice. Without even knowing she’d done it, of course.

Major Commaigne snapped at his adjutant. ‘Lefferts! Have the ordnance sections put the one-oh-fives on safety. Can’t have this sort of thing.’ It had been a disagreeable sight, to see that poor old cow become hamburger, well ketchuped, so rapidly. Better chain the big guns until one saw, at any rate, whether Pung’s Comers was going to put up a fight.

So Major Commaigne stopped the personnel carriers and ordered everybody out. They were past the dangerous radio active area anyway.

The troops fell out in a handsome line of skirmish; it was very, very fast and very, very good. From the top of the Presbyterian Church steeple in Pung’s Corners, Jack Tighe and Andy Grammis watched through field glasses, and I can tell you that Grammis was pretty near hysterics. But Jack Tighe only hummed and nodded.

Major Commaigne gave an order and every man in the line of skirmish instantly dug in. Some were in marsh and some in mud; some had to tunnel into solid rock and some - nearest where that first target had been - through a thin film of beef. It didn’t much matter, because they didn’t use the entrenching spades of World War II; they had Powr-Pakt Diggers that clawed into anything in seconds, and, what’s more, lined the pits with a fine ceramic glaze. It was magnificent.

And yet, on the other hand -

Well, look. It was this way. Twenty-six personnel carriers had brought them here. Each carrier had its driver, its relief driver, its emergency alternate driver and its mechanic. It had its radar-and-electronics repairman, and its radar-and-electronics repairman’s assistant. It had its ordnance staff of four, and its liaison communications officer to man the intercom and keep in touch with the P.C. commander.

Well, they needed all those people, of course. Couldn’t get along without them.

But that came to two hundred and eighty-two men.

Then there was the field kitchen, with its staff of forty-seven, plus administrative detachment and dietetic staff; the headquarters detachment, with paymaster’s corps and military police platoon; the meteorological section, a proud sight as they began setting up their field teletypes and fax receivers and launching their weather balloons; the field hospital with eighty-one medics and nurses, nine medical officers and attached medical administrative staff; the special services detachment, prompt to begin setting up a three-D motion-picture screen in the lee of the parked personnel carriers and to commence organizing a handball tournament among the off-duty men; the four chaplains and chaplains’ assistants, plus the Wisdom Counsellor for Ethical Culturists, agnostics and waverers; the Historical Officer and his eight trained clerks, already going from foxhole to foxhole bravely carrying tape recorders, to take down history as it was being made in the form of first-hand impressions of the battle that had yet to be fought; military observers from Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, the Scandinavian Confederation and the Soviet Socialist Republic of Inner Mongolia, with their orderlies and attaches; and, of course, field correspondents from Stars & Stripes, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Scripps-Howard chain, five wire services, eight television networks, an independent documentary motion-picture producer, and one hundred and twenty-seven other newspapers and allied public information outlets.

It was a stripped-down combat command, naturally. Therefore, there was only Public Information Officer per reporter.

Still…

Well, it left exactly forty-six riflemen in line of skirmish.

Up in the Presbyterian belfry, Andy Grammis wailed: ‘Look at them, Jack! I don’t know, maybe letting advertising back into Pung’s Corners wouldn’t be so bad. All right, it’s a rat race, but-’

‘Wait,’ said Jack Tighe quietly, and hummed.

They couldn’t see it very well, but the line of skirmish was in some confusion. The word had been passed down that all the field pieces had been put on safety and that the entire firepower of the company rested in their forty-six rifles. Well, that wasn’t so bad; but after all, they had been equipped with E-Z Fyre Revolv-a-Clip Carbines until ten days before the expeditionary force had been mounted. Some of the troops hadn’t been fully able to familiarize themselves with the new weapons.

It went like this:

‘Sam,’ called one private to the man in the next foxhole. ‘Sam, listen, I can’t figure this something rifle out. When the something green light goes on, does that mean that the something safety is off?’

‘Beats the something hell out of me,’ rejoined Sam, his brow furrowed as he pored over the full-coloured, glossy-paper operating manual, alluringly entitled, The Five-Step Magic-Eye Way to New Combat Comfort and Security. ‘Did you see what it says here? It says, “Magic-Eye in Off position is provided with positive Fayl-Sayf action, thus assuring Evr-Kleen Cartridge of dynamic ejection and release, when used in combination with Shoulder-Eez Anti-Recoil Pads.”‘

‘What did you say, Sam?’

‘I said it beats the something hell out of me,’ said Sam, and pitched the manual out into no-man’s-land before him.

But he was sorry and immediately crept out to retrieve it, for although the directions seemed intended for a world that had no relation to the rock-and-mud terra firma around Pung’s Comers, all of the step-by-step instructions in the manual were illustrated by mockup photographs of starlets in Bikinis - for the cavern factories produced instruction manuals as well as weapons. They had to, obviously, and they were good at it; the more complicated the directions, the more photographs they used. The vehicular ones were downright shocking.

Some minutes later: ‘They don’t seem to be doing anything,’ ventured Andy Grammis, watching from the steeple.

‘No, they don’t, Andy. Well, we can’t sit up here forever. Come along and we’ll see what’s what.’

Now Andy Grammis didn’t want to do that, but Jack Tighe was a man you didn’t resist very well, and so they climbed down the winding steel stairs and picked up the rest of the Pung’s Corners Independence Volunteers, all fourteen of them, and they started down Front Street and out across the baseball diamond.

Twenty-six personnel carriers electronically went ping, and the turrets of their one-oh-fives swivelled to zero in on the Independence Volunteers.

Forty-six riflemen, sweating, attempted to make Akur-A-C Greenline Sighting Strip cross Horizon Blue True-Site Band in the Up-Close radar screens of their rifles.

And Major Commaigne, howling mad, waved a sheet of paper under the nose of his adjutant. ‘What kind of something nonsense is this? he demanded, for a soldier is a soldier regardless of his rank. ‘I can’t take those men out of line with the enemy advancing on us!’

‘Army orders, sir,’ said the adjutant impenetrably. He had got his doctorate in Military Jurisprudence at Harvard Law and he knew whose orders meant what to whom. ‘The rotation plan isn’t my idea, sir. Why not take it up with the Pentagon?’

‘But, Lefferts, you idiot, I can’t get through to the Pentagon! Those something newspapermen have the channels sewed up solid! And now you want me to take every front-line rifleman out and send him to a rest camp for three weeks -’

‘No, sir,’ corrected the adjutant, pointing to a line in the order. ‘Only for twenty days, sir, including travel time. But you’d best do it right away, sir, I expect. The order’s marked “priority”.’

Well, Major Commaigne was no fool. Never mind what they said later. He had studied the catastrophe of Von Paulus at Stalingrad and Lee’s heaven-sent escape from Gettysburg, and he knew what could happen to an expeditionary force in trouble in enemy territory. Even a big one. And his, you must remember, was very small.

He knew that when you’re on your own, everything becomes your enemy; frost and diarrhoea destroyed more of the Nazi Sixth Army than the Russians did; the jolting wagons of Lee’s retreat put more of his wounded and sick out of the way than Meade’s cannon. So he did what he had to do.

‘Sound the retreat!’ he bawled. ‘We’re going back to the barn.’

Retire and regroup; why not? But it wasn’t as simple as that.

The personnel carriers backed and turned like a fleet in manoeuvres. Their drivers were trained for that. But one PC got caught in Special Service’s movie screen and blundered into another, and a flotilla of three of them found themselves stymied by the spreading pre-fabs of the field hospital. Five of them, doing extra duty in running electric generators from the power takeoffs at their rear axles, were immobilized for fifteen minutes and then boxed in.

What it came down to was that four of the twenty-six were in shape to move right then. And obviously that wasn’t enough, so it wasn’t a retreat at all; it was a disaster.

‘There’s only one thing to do,’ brooded Major Commaigne amid the turmoil, with manly tears streaming down his face, ‘but how I wish I’d never tried to make lieutenant colonel!’

*

So Jack Tighe received Commaigne’s surrender. Jack Tighe didn’t act surprised. I can’t say the same for the rest of the Independence Volunteers.

‘No, Major, you may keep your sword,’ said Jack Tighe kindly. ‘And all of the officers may keep their Pinpoint Levl-Site No-Jolt sidearms.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ wept the major, and blundered back into the officer’s club which the Headquarters Detachment had never stopped building.

Jack Tighe looked after him with a peculiar and thoughtful expression.

William LaFarge, swinging a thirty-inch hickory stick - it was all he’d been able to pick up as a weapon - babbled: ‘It’s a great victory! Now they’ll leave us alone, I bet!’

Jack Tighe didn’t say a single word.

‘Don’t you think so, Jack? Won’t they stay away now?’

Jack Tighe looked at him blankly, seemed about to answer and then turned to Charley Frink. ‘Charley. Listen. Don’t you have a shotgun put away somewhere?’

‘Yes, Mr. Tighe. And a .22. Want me to get them?’

‘Why, yes, I think I do.’ Jack Tighe watched the youth run off. His eyes were hooded. And then he said: ‘Andy, do something for us. Ask the major to give us a P.O.W. driver who knows the way to the Pentagon.’

And a few minutes later, Charley came back with the shotgun and the .22; and the rest, of course, is history.

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