“No, of course not, my friend. And when we chose you to lead our combined forces, we could not have chosen better. Without you—and Valti—there would still be war on the eastern front. We…I…we think of you as our deliverer, just as if we were the humblest peasant given back his own plot of earth. But you have not been right.”

  “We all make mistakes.” Reinach actually smiled. “I admit my own. I bungled badly in cleaning out those communists at—”

  Fourre shook his head, stubbornly. “You don’t understand, Jacques. It isn’t that kind of mistake I mean. Your great error is that you have not realized we are at peace. The war is over.”

  Reinach lifted a sardonic brow. “Not a barge goes up the Rhine, not a kilometer of railroad track is relaid, but we have to fight bandits, local war lords, half-crazed fanatics of a hundred new creeds. Does that sound like peacetime?”

  “It is a difference of…of objectives,” said Fourre. “And man is such an animal that it is the end, not the means, which makes the difference. War is morally simple: one purpose, to impose your will upon the enemy. Not to surrender to an inferior force. But a policeman? He is protecting an entire society of which the criminal is also a part. A politician? He has to make compromises, even with small groups and people he despises. You think like a soldier, Jacques, and we no longer want or need a soldier commanding us.”

  “Now you’re quoting that senile fool Valti,” snapped Reinach.

  “If we hadn’t had Professor Valti and his sociosymbolic logic to plan our strategy for us—we would still be locked with the Russians. There was no way for us to be liberated from the outside, this time. The Anglo-Saxon countries had too much to do in Asia, besides all their internal difficulties. We had to liberate ourselves, with ragged men and bicycle cavalry and aircraft patched together out of wrecks. If it weren’t for Valti’s plans—and, to be sure, your execution of them—we could never have done it.” Fourre shook his head again. He would not get angry with Jacques. “I think such a record entitles the professor to respect.”

  “It did…then,” said Reinach. His tone lifted and grew rapid. “But he’s senile now, I tell you. Babbling of the future, of long-range trends—Can we eat the future? People are dying of plague and starvation and anarchy now!”

  “He has convinced me,” said Fourre. “I thought much the same way, too, a year ago. But he instructed me in the elements of his science, and he showed me the way we are heading. He is an old man, Eino Valti, but there is still a brain under that bald pate.”

  Reinach relaxed. A tolerant warmth played across his lips. “Very well, Etienne,” he asked, “what way are we heading?”

  Fourre looked past him, into night. “Toward war,” he said, quite softly. “Another nuclear war, some fifty years hence. It isn’t certain the human race itself can survive that.”

  Rain stammered on the windowpanes. It was falling hard now, and wind hooted in the empty streets. Fourre glanced at his watch. There wasn’t much time left. He fingered the police whistle hung about his neck.

  Reinach started. Then, gradually, he eased back. “If I thought that were true,” he replied, “I would resign this minute.”

  “I know you would,” mumbled Fourre. “That is what makes my task so hard for me.”

  “But it isn’t true,” said Reinach. His hand waved as if to brush away a nightmare. “If only because people have had such a grim lesson that—”

  “People, in the mass, don’t learn,” Fourre told him. “The only way to prevent future wars is to set up a world-peace authority—to reconstitute the United Nations and give it some muscles. And Europe is crucial to that enterprise. North of the Himalayas and east of the Don there is nothing any more—howling cannibals. It will take too long to civilize them again. It is we who must speak for the whole Eurasian continent.”

  “Very good, very good,” said Reinach impatiently. “Granted. But what am I doing that is so wrong?”

  “A great many things, Jacques. I could give you a long list.” Fourre’s head turned, slowly, as if it creaked on its neckbones, and locked eyes with the man behind the desk. “It is one thing to improvise in wartime. But you are improvising the peace. You forced the decision to send only two men to represent all our nations at the conference planned in Rio. Why? Because we’re short on transportation, clerical help, paper—even on decent clothes! The problem should have been studied. It may be all right to treat Europe as a unit—or it may not; perhaps this decision will only exacerbate nationalism. You made the decision in one minute when the question was raised, and you would not even hear debate.”

  “Of course not!” said Reinach harshly. “If you remember, that was the day we learned of the Neofascist coup in Corsica.”

  “Corsica could have waited a while. It would have been more difficult to win back, yes, if we hadn’t struck at once—but this business of our UN representation could decide the entire future of—”

  “I know, I know! Valti and his theory about the ‘pivotal decision.’ Bah!”

  “The theory happens to work, my old.”

  “In its proper place. I’m a hard head, Etienne, I admit it.” Reinach leaned across the desk, chuckling. “Don’t you think the times demand a hard head? When hell is romping loose, it is no time to spin fine philosophies…or try to elect a parliament, which I understand is another of the postponements Dr. Valti holds against me.”

  “It is,” said Fourre. “Do you like roses?”

  “Why, why…yes.” Reinach blinked. “To look at, anyway.” Wistfulness crossed his eyes. “Now that you mention it, it’s been many years since I last saw a rose.”

  “But you don’t like gardening. I remember that from…old days.” The curious tenderness of man for man, which no one has ever quite understood, tugged at Fourre. He cast it aside, not daring to do otherwise, and said impersonally: “And you like democratic government, too, but were never interested in the grubby work of maintaining it. There is a time to plant seed? If we delay, it will be too late, strong-arm rule will have become too much of a habit.”

  “There is also a time to keep alive. Just to keep alive, nothing else.”

  “I know. Jacques, I can’t accuse you of hard-heartedness. You are a sentimentalist: you see a child with belly bloated from hunger, a house marked with a cross to show that the Black Death has walked in—and you feel too much pity to be able to think. It is…Valti, myself, all of us…who are cold-blooded—who are prepared to sacrifice a few thousand more lives now, by neglecting the immediately necessary, for the sake of saving all humankind fifty years hence.”

  “You may be right,” said Reinach. “About your cold souls, I mean.” His voice was so low that the rain almost drowned it.

  Fourre looked at his watch. Scant time remaining—this had been taking longer than expected. He said in a slurred, hurried tone: “What touched off this affair was the Papandrou business.”

  “I thought so,” agreed Reinach evenly. “I don’t like it either. I know as well as you do that Papandrou is a murderous crypto-communist scoundrel whose own people hate him. But curse it, man—don’t you know rats do worse than steal food and gnaw the faces of sleeping children? Don’t you know they spread plague? And Papandrou has offered us the services of the only efficient rat-exterminating force in Eurasia. All he asks is that we recognize his Macedonian Free State and give him a seat on the Council.”

  “It is too much to pay,” said Fourre. “In one or two years we can bring the rats under control ourselves.”

  “And meanwhile?”

  “Meanwhile, we must hope that nobody we love is taken sick.”

  Reinach grinned without mirth. “It won’t do,” he said. “I can’t agree to that. If Papandrou’s squads help us, We can save a year of reconstruction, a hundred thousand lives—”

  “And throw away lives by the hundred millions in the future!”

  “Oh, come now! One little province like Macedonia?”

  “One very big precedent,” said Fourre. “We will not merely be conceding a petty war lord the right to his loot. We will be conceding”—he lifted hairy hands and counted off on the fingers—“the right of any dictatorship, anywhere, to exist at all—which might, if yielded, means war and war and war again; the fatally outmoded principle of unlimited national sovereignty; the friendship of an outraged Greece, which is sure to invoke that same principle in retaliation; the inevitable political repercussions throughout the Near East, which is already turbulent enough; therefore war between us and the Arabs, because we must have oil; a seat on the Council to a clever and ruthless man who frankly, Jacques, can think rings around you—No!”

  “You are theorizing about tomorrow,” said Reinach. “The rats are already here. What would you have me do instead?”

  “Refuse the offer. Let me take a bicycle brigade down there. That will be enough to knock Papandrou to hell—unless we let him get too strong first.”

  Reinach shook his head, good-naturedly. “Who is the war monger now?” he laughed.

  “I never denied there is still a great deal of fighting ahead of us,” said Fourre. Sadness tinged his voice, he had seen too many men spilling their life blood on the ground. “I only want to be sure it will serve the final purpose—that there shall never again be a world war. That my children and grandchildren will not have to fight at all.”

  “And Valti’s equations show the way to achieve that?” asked Reinach quietly.

  “They do.”

  “I’m sorry, Etienne.” Reinach shook his head. “I simply cannot believe it. Turning human society into a…what is it?…a potential field, and operating on it with symbolic logic—it’s too remote. I am here, in the flesh—such of it as is left on our diet—not in a set of scribbles made by some gang of long-haired theorists.”

  “It was a similar gang which, well, discovered atomic energy,” said Fourre. “Yes, Valti’s science is young. But within its admitted limitations, it works. If you would only study it—”

  “There’s too much else to do.” Reinach shrugged. A blankness seemed to draw across his face. “We’ve wasted too much time already. What is it you, your group of generals, wants me to do?”

  Fourre gave it to him, as he knew his comrade would wish it, hard and straight like a bayonet thrust. “We ask for your resignation. Naturally, you’ll keep a seat on the Council, but Professor Valti will assume the chairmanship and set about making the reforms we want. We will issue a formal promise to have a constitutional convention in the spring and dissolve the military government within one year.”

  Then he bent his head and looked at the time. There was a minute and a half remaining.

  “No,” said Reinach.

  “But—”

  “Be still!” The Alsatian stood up. The single lamp threw his shadow grotesque and enormous across the dusty books. “Do you think I didn’t see this coming? Why do you imagine I only let one man at a time in here, and disarm him? The devil with your generals! The common people know me, they know I stand for them first—and hell take your misty futures! We’ll meet the future when it comes!”

  “That is what man has always done,” said Fourre. He spoke like a beggar. “And that is why the race has always blundered from one catastrophe to the next. This may be our last chance to change the pattern.”

  Reinach began pacing, up and down behind the desk. “Do you think I like this miserable job?” he answered. “It simply happens that no one else can do it.”

  “So now you are the indispensable man,” whispered Fourre, “I had hoped you would escape that.”

  “Go on home, Etienne.” Reinach halted, and there was kindness returning to him. “Go back and tell them I won’t hold this against them personally. You had a right to make your demand. Well, it has been made and refused.” He nodded to himself, thoughtfully, “There will have to be some changes in our organization, though. I don’t want to be a dictator, but—”

  Zero hour. Fourre felt very tired.

  He had been refused, and so he had not blown the whistle that would stop the rebels, and it was out of his hands now.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Sit down, Marius, and let us talk about old times for a while.”

  Reinach looked surprised. “Marius? What do you mean?”

  “Oh…it was an example from history which Professor Valti gave me.” Fourre considered the floor. There was a cracked board by his left toe. Cracked and crazy, a tottering wreck of a civilization…how had the same race built Chartres and the hydrogen bomb?

  His words dragged out of him: “In the second century before Christ, the Cimbri and their allies, Teutonic barbarians, came down out of the north. For a generation they wandered about, ripping Europe apart. They chopped up the Roman armies sent to stop them. Finally they invaded Italy. It did not look as if they could be halted before they took Rome itself. But there was one general by the name of Marius who rallied his men: He met the barbarians and annihilated them.”

  “Well…thank you.” Reinach sat down, puzzled. “But—”

  “Oh, never mind.” Fourre’s mouth twisted into a smile. “Let us take a few minutes free and just talk. Do you remember that night after the Second War, we were still just boys freshly out of the Maquis, and we tumbled around the streets of Paris and toasted the sunrise from Sacre Coeur?”

  “Yes…to be sure. That was a wild night!” Reinach laughed. “How long ago it seems! What was your girl’s name? I’ve forgotten.”

  “Marie. And you had Simone…a beautiful little baggage, Simone. I wonder whatever became of her?”

  “I don’t know. The last I heard—No. Remember how bewildered the waiter was when—”

  A shot cracked through the rain, and then the wrathful clatter of machine guns awoke. Reinach was on his feet in one tiger bound, pistol in hand, crouched by the window. Fourre remained seated.

  The noise lifted, louder and closer.

  Reinach spun about and his gun muzzle glared emptily at Fourre.

  “Yes, Jacques.”

  “Revolt!”

  “We had to.” Fourre discovered that he could again meet Reinach’s eyes. “The situation was that crucial. If you had yielded…if you had even been willing to discuss the matter…I would have blown this whistle and nothing would have happened. Now it’s too late, unless you want to surrender. If you do, our offer still stands. We still want you to work with us.”

  A grenade blasted somewhere nearby.

  “You—”

  “Go on and shoot. It doesn’t matter very much.”

  “No—” The pistol wavered. “Not unless you—Stay where you are! Don’t move!” The hand Reinach passed across his forehead shuddered. “You know how well this place is guarded. You know the people will rise to my side—”

  “I think not. They worship you, yes, but they are tired and starved. Just in case, though, we staged this for the nighttime. By tomorrow morning it will all be over.” Fourre spoke like a rusty machine. “The barracks have already been seized. Those more distant noises are the artillery being captured. The University is surrounded, and cannot stand against an attack.”

  “This building can!”

  “So you won’t give up, Jacques?”

  “If I could do that,” said Reinach, “I wouldn’t be here tonight.”

  The window broke open. Reinach whirled. The man who was vaulting though shot first.

  The guard outside the door looked in. His rifle was poised, but he died before he could use it. Then men with black clothes and blackened faces were swarming across the sill.

  Fourre knelt beside Reinach. A bullet through the head—it had been quick, at least. But if it had struck farther down, perhaps Reinach’s life could have been saved. Fourre wanted to weep, but he had forgotten how.

  The big man who had killed Reinach ignored his commando to stoop over the body with Fourre. “I’m sorry, sir,” he mumbled. It was hard to tell whom he was speaking to.

  “Not your fault, Stefan.” Fourre’s tone jerked.

  “We had to run through the shadows, up under the wall…I got a boost through this window—there wasn’t time to take aim. I didn’t even realize who it was till—”

  “It’s all right, I said. Go on, now, take charge of your party, get this building cleaned out. Once we hold it, the rest of his boys should give up pretty soon.”

  The big man nodded and went out into the corridor.

  Fourre crouched by Jacques Reinach while a sleet of bullets drummed on the outer walls. His heard them only dimly. Most of him was wondering if perhaps this hadn’t been the best ending. Now they could give their chief a funeral with full military honors, and later they would build a monument to the man who saved the West, and—

  And it might not be quite that easy to bribe a ghost. But you had to try.

  “I didn’t tell you the rest of the story, Jacques,” he said. His hands were like a stranger’s, using his jacket to wipe up the blood, and his voice ran on of itself. “I wish I had…maybe you would have understood…and maybe not. Marius went into politics afterward, you see. He had all the prestige of his victory behind him, he was the most powerful man in Rome, but he did not understand politics. There followed a witch’s dance of corruption, murder, and civil war…fifty years of it, the final extinction of the Republic. Caesarism only gave a name to what had already been done.

  “I would like to think that I helped to spare Jacques Reinach the name of Marius.”

  Rain slanted in through the broken window. Fourre’s hands reached out and closed the darkened eyes. He wondered if he would ever be able to close them within himself.

  HOME

  Like a bullet, but one that hunted its own target, the ferry left the mother ship and curved down from orbit. Stars crowded darkness, unwinking and wintry. Jacob Kahn’s gaze went out the viewport over the pilot board, across thirty-three light-years to the spark which was Sol. Almost convulsively, he looked away again, seeking the clotted silver of the Milky Way and the sprawl of Sagittarius. There, behind dust clouds where new suns were being born, lay the galaxy’s heart.

  Once he had dreamed of voyaging there himself. But he had been a boy then, who stood on a rooftop and peered through city sky glow and city haze. Afterward the dream struck facts of distance, energy and economics. The wreck had not gone under in an instant. His sons, his grandsons—