But the shorter man, as Kyle had known from the first moment of seeing him, was not like the busboy the Prince had decisioned so neatly. This man was thirty pounds heavier, fifteen years more experienced, and by build and nature a natural bar fighter. He had not stood there waiting to be hit, but had already ducked and gone forward to throw his thick arms around the Prince’s body. The young man’s punch bounced harmlessly off the round head, and both bodies hit the floor, rolling in among the chair and table legs.

  Kyle was already more than halfway to the bar and the three bartenders were already leaping the wooden hurdle that walled them off. The taller friend of the bullet-headed man, hovering over the two bodies, his eyes glittering, had his boot drawn back ready to drive the point of it into the Prince’s kidneys. Kyle’s forearm took him economically like a bar of iron across the tanned throat.

  He stumbled backward, choking. Kyle stood still, hands open and down, glancing at the middle-aged bartender.

  “All right,” said the bartender. “But don’t do anything more.” He turned to the two younger bartenders. “All right. Haul him off!”

  The pair of younger, aproned men bent down and came up with the bullet-headed man expertly hand-locked between them. The man made one surging effort to break loose, and then stood still.

  “Let me at him,” he said.

  “Not in here,” said the older bartender. “Take it outside.”

  Between the tables, the Prince staggered unsteadily to his feet. His face was streaming blood from a cut on his forehead, but what could be seen of it was white as a drowning man’s. His eyes went to Kyle, standing beside him; and he opened his mouth—but what came out sounded like something between a sob and a curse.

  “All right,” said the middle-aged bartender again. “Outside, both of you. Settle it out there.”

  The men in the room had packed around the little space by the bar. The Prince looked about and for the first time seemed to see the human wall hemming him in. His gaze wobbled to meet Kyle’s.

  “Outside…?” he said, chokingly.

  “You aren’t staying in here,” said the older bartender, answering for Kyle. “I saw it. You started the whole thing. Now, settle it any way you want—but you’re both going outside. Now! Get moving!”

  He pushed at the Prince, but the Prince resisted, clutching at Kyle’s leather jacket with one hand.

  “Kyle—”

  “I’m sorry, Lord,” said Kyle. “I can’t help. It’s your fight.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” said the bullet-headed man.

  The Prince stared around at them as if they were some strange set of beings he had never known to exist before.

  “No…” he said.

  He let go of Kyle’s jacket. Unexpectedly, his hand darted in toward Kyle’s belly holster and came out holding the slug pistol.

  “Stand back!” he said, his voice high-pitched. “Don’t try to touch me!”

  His voice broke on the last words. There was a strange sound, half-grunt, half-moan, from the crowd; and it swayed back from him. Manager, bartenders, watchers

  —all but Kyle and the bullet-headed man drew back.

  “You dirty slob…” said the bullet-headed man, distinctly. “I knew you didn’t have the guts.”

  “Shut up!” The Prince’s voice was high and cracking. “Shut up! Don’t any of you try to come after me!”

  He began backing away toward the front door of the bar. The room watched in silence, even Kyle standing still. As he backed, the Prince’s back straightened. He hefted the gun in his hand. When he reached the door he paused to wipe the blood from his eyes with his left sleeve, and his smeared face looked with a first touch of regained arrogance at them.

  “Swine!” he said.

  He opened the door and backed out, closing it behind him. Kyle took one step that put him facing the bullet-headed man. Their eyes met and he could see the other recognizing the fighter in him, as he had earlier recognized it in the bullet-headed man.

  “Don’t come after us,” said Kyle.

  The bullet-headed man did not answer. But no answer was needed. He stood still.

  Kyle turned, ran to the door, stood on one side of it, and flicked it open. Nothing happened; and he slipped through, dodging to his right at once, out of the line of any shot aimed at the opening door.

  But no shot came. For a moment he was blind in the night darkness, then his eyes began to adjust. He went by sight, feel, and memory toward the hitching rack. By the time he got there, he was beginning to see.

  The Prince was untying the gelding and getting ready to mount.

  “Lord,” said Kyle.

  The Prince let go of the saddle for a moment and turned to look over his shoulder at him.

  “Get away from me,” said the Prince, thickly.

  “Lord,” said Kyle, low voiced and pleading, “you lost your head in there. Anyone might do that. But don’t make it worse, now. Give me back the gun, Lord.”

  “Give you the gun?”

  The young man stared at him—and then he laughed.

  “Give you the gun?” he said again. “So you can let someone beat me up some more? So you can not-guard me with it?”

  “Lord,” said Kyle, “please. For your own sake—give me back the gun.”

  “Get out of here,” said the Prince, thickly, turning back to mount the gelding. “Clear out before I put a slug in you.”

  Kyle drew a slow, sad breath. He stepped forward and tapped the Prince on the shoulder.

  “Turn around, Lord,” he said.

  “I warned you—” shouted the Prince, turning.

  He came around as Kyle stooped, and the slug pistol flashed in his hand from the light of the bar windows. Kyle, bent over, was lifting the cuff of his trouser leg and closing his fingers on the hilt of the knife in his boot sheath. He moved simply, skillfully, and with a speed nearly double that of the young man, striking up into the chest before him until the hand holding the knife jarred against the cloth covering flesh and bone.

  It was a sudden, hard-driven, swiftly merciful blow. The blade struck upward between the ribs lying open to an underhanded thrust, plunging deep into the heart. The Prince grunted with the impact driving the air from his lungs; and he was dead as Kyle caught his slumping body in leather-jacketed arms.

  Kyle lifted the tall body across the saddle of the gelding and tied it there. He hunted on the dark ground for the fallen pistol and returned it to his holster. Then, he mounted the stallion and, leading the gelding with its burden, started the long ride back.

  Dawn was graying the sky when at last he topped the hill overlooking the lodge where he had picked up the Prince almost twenty-four hours before. He rode down toward the courtyard gate.

  A tall figure, indistinct in the predawn light, was waiting inside the courtyard as Kyle came through the gate; and it came running to meet him as he rode toward it. It was the tutor, Montlaven, and he was weeping as he ran to the gelding and began to fumble at the cords that tied the body in place.

  “I’m sorry…” Kyle heard himself saying; and was dully shocked by the deadness and remoteness of his voice. “There was no choice. You can read it all in my report tomorrow morning—”

  He broke off. Another, even taller figure had appeared in the doorway of the lodge giving on the courtyard. As Kyle turned toward it, this second figure descended the few steps to the grass and came to him.

  “Lord—” said Kyle. He looked down into features like those of the Prince, but older, under graying hair. This man did not weep like the tutor, but his face was set like iron.

  “What happened, Kyle?” he said.

  “Lord,” said Kyle, “you’ll have my report in the morning…”

  “I want to know,” said the tall man. Kyle’s throat was dry and stiff. He swallowed but swallowing did not ease it.

  “Lord,” he said, “you have three other sons. One of them will make an Emperor to hold the worlds together.”

  “What did he do? Whom did he hurt? Tell me!” The tall man’s voice cracked almost as his son’s voice had cracked in the bar.

  “Nothing. No one,” said Kyle, stiff-throated. “He hit a boy not much older than himself. He drank too much. He may have got a girl in trouble. It was nothing he did to anyone else. It was only a fault against himself.” He swallowed. “Wait until tomorrow. Lord, and read my report.”

  “No!” The tall man caught Kyle’s saddle horn with a grip that checked even the white stallion from moving. “Your family and mine have been tied together by this for three hundred years. What was the flaw in my son to make him fail his test, back here on Earth? I want to know!”

  Kyle’s throat ached and was dry as ashes.

  “Lord,” he answered, “he was a coward.”

  The hand dropped from his saddle horn as if struck down by a sudden strengthlessness. And the Emperor of a hundred worlds fell back like a beggar, spurned in the dust.

  Kyle lifted his reins and rode out of the gate, into the forest away on the hillside. The dawn was breaking.

  Editor's Introduction to:

  QUIET VILLAGE

  by David McDaniel

  I first met David McDaniel at the Chicago World Science Fiction Convention in 1962. He was not very large, and he was dressed in a sort of costume, which was unusual; in those days, “hall costumes” were not customary at SF conventions.

  “What are you?” I asked.

  “I, sir, am a Hobbit,” he solemnly informed me; and as I had not yet read Professor J.R.R. Tolkein’s epic LORD OF THE RINGS, he preceded to tell me about the books, causing me to run down to the huckster room and buy a set.

  I saw Dave off and on at conventions after that, but I didn’t get to know him well until I began to write full time. Dave was trying that too; and things were pretty grim just then. There wasn’t a lot of money in science fiction, and it wasn’t easy to break into any other kind of freelance writing. Then I had a lucky break, a chance to sell an article on the energy crisis—I think I was the first writer to use that term, way back in 1970—to American Legion magazine. Legion had a thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in those days.

  There was only one problem. They wanted photographs. Not only did I know nothing about photography, I didn’t own a decent camera.

  Dave came to the rescue. I had arranged a tour through Southern California Edison’s San Onofre plant, and Dave came with me. He took a lot of pictures. Then Edison offered to take me out to their newest coal-fired plant at Four Corners (that place where four states come together), as well as to the controversial strip mines at Black Mesa. The only problem was that the offer didn’t include Dave McDaniel.

  No matter. He loaned me his cameras—easily the most valuable things he owned—and showed me how to use them, which I did so well that I ended up selling half a dozen photographs, while they used only one that Dave had taken.

  A couple of years later I managed to sell an anthology, largely because of the rather clever title 2020 VISIONS: it consisted, of course, of stories set in the year 2020, with the stipulation that the writers were to write as realistically as possible. (The book has been revised twice, and is still in print, so we didn’t do too badly.)

  I wanted to pay Dave back for the loan of his cameras, so I foolishly offered to buy a story.

  I wasn’t foolish for wanting a McDaniel story. Dave was a story teller, as good as the best in this business. Moreover, he had some very reasonable ideas about where society was going. He was meticulous at research, so much so that he manufactured models of weapons and equipment that he thought might someday be invented. It wasn’t foolish to want a McDaniel story —but it was an act of monumental idiocy to assume that I’d get it. Dave hated to write.

  Now all writers hate to write. I know of only two exceptions, and I wonder about them. All writers love to have written, but they also hate to write. This is normal and understandable—but Dave really hated to write. I think I have never met anyone who so hated it.

  I often wonder if he’d have been that way if he’d had a computer to write on; would the attraction of the gadgetry have overcome his hatred of the typewriter? I think it might, because Dave liked to tell stories, and would sit around talking for hours; it was only when he had to put words on paper that he balked. Alas, we will never know.

  Eventually I had all the stories for 2020 except Dave’s. Worse, I’d paid him part of the money for the story, meaning that I didn’t have enough to buy something from another writer. It was McDaniel or nothing. Besides, he’d told me what he was working on, and I liked it, as indeed I still do.

  So. There was nothing for it but to bully him. I took to going to his house in the afternoons. Dave’s wife Joyce was working, so Dave was supposed to look after their son Tommy, who was then about two years old, and I could sympathize with Dave’s lament that no one could work while taking care of a two year old.

  So I babysat while Dave wrote. I’d take beer over, but I wouldn’t give him any until I saw pages of new text.

  Eventually that worked. The result was the last story Dave McDaniel ever sold, called “Prognosis: Terminal.” Before he finished his next work he was killed in a freak home accident.

  I wish he’d written many more. Meanwhile, here is one of his best.

  What the military calls the “third verse” of the Star Spangled Banner is really the fourth. The real third verse is all but forgotten, and tells a much uglier story.

  And where is that band, that so vauntingly swore

  That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,

  A home and a country shall leave us no more?

  Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution!

  No refuge could save the hireling and slave,

  From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.

  And the star spangled banner in triumph doth wave,

  O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

  The military has long stood between their homes and the war; there is another military tradition, that of the knight, whose mission is to defend the helpless; to stand between war’s desolation and all civilized homes.

  When Lord Baden-Powell formed the Boy Scouts, he intended them to be an auxiliary to the military, and for many years they served that function in both England and the United States. Explorer Scouts went on polar expeditions, Scouts were junior civil defense wardens, and in wartime England Scouts served on patrols to spot unexploded bombs.

  We have got somewhat away from that tradition in this country; but it could be revived. Periodically some idiot in National Headquarters tries to “reform” the Scouts and make them more “relevant;” fortunately, the Scoutmasters and others who actually work with boys ignore that nonsense and continue to teach the old skills of camping and woodcraft. If the Scouts are again needed…

  QUIET VILLAGE

  by David McDaniel

  The rats caught Rajer alone while he was up on the hill adjusting the ‘tenna. They surrounded him, explained the situation to him, and then burst his left eardrum to make sure he understood they meant what they were saying. They also told him why nobody had heard from Morovia recently—they had just come from there because there was nothing left worth staying for.

  “This place looks peaceful,” they told him. “We wouldn’t disturb such a nice place. All we want is a regular donation of food, water and pot. You go and tell your Block, then come back up here tomorrow afternoon and you can keep your other ear.” Then they took his tuner and let him go.

  Sereno was peaceful. About a hundred and twenty people living in thirty-some wood and adobe buildings up in Horn Canyon just north of Hunnington Trail. With a good steady spring that hadn’t gone dry but once in living memory, they got along as well as anybody else and better than some. A stage made the trip across the Valley from Malibu every new moon—it took two or three days each way depending on the weather, and brought salt from the sea to trade for the pot that grew in the hills, the leatherwork they made, and wool when they sheared.

  Blood was still trickling from Rajer’s ear and had dried on his shoulder by the time he stumbled up to Jak’s front door and fell against it, sobbing.

  “How many were there?” Jak asked him while Mona dabbed antiseptic in his ear.

  “The big one said there were fifty of them and some girls. They got my tuner so they’d hear if we tried to radio out. They’d kill us all, he said, like they did in Morovia.” He was still shaking, and his voice was unsteady.

  “How many did you see?’

  “Ten. Fifteen. I don’t know—they kept moving around me all the time. I couldn’t tell.”

  “Bobby—”

  “Yeah, Dad?”

  “Go call a meeting for tonight. And see if the stage is gone yet.”

  “It went right by me over the hill just before the rats came out,” said Rajer. “I think that was what they were waiting for. And they were wearing old streetsuits— some of them were, there’s nothing we can do. We’ve got to give them what they want!”

  “Hold still,” said Mona.

  “I can’t hear at all on that side,” Rajer sobbed. “Don’t make me go back up there alone—they’ll make me deaf!”

  “I’ll go up with you tomorrow,” said Jak. “But we’ll have to tell everybody about it tonight and see what they want to do. Mona, put him to sleep. If anybody else sees him like this, they’ll be as scared as he is.”

  Mona poured into a cup from a bottle she found in her bag, and gave it to him. He choked it down while she refolded the cloth to a clean side and held it again to his ear. The bleeding had stopped, and shortly he slept.

  Jak Mendez walked out into the hot dry afternoon and looked up at the round brown hills which guarded his home and his friends’ homes—hills which now seemed to loom around the village like enemies. The dry grasses of late summer surrounded the stumps of steel and stone which still thrust above the soil, after three hundred sun-baked summers and a thousand heavy rainstorms, to loosen the gray adobe of the hills. There were still dry rooms underground which could be defended by anyone who wished to live in darkness like vermin and prey on those who lived in the light.