He stubbed out his cigarette and prowled about the cluttered, dusty office. “I’ll agree, ten million men, loosely organized, without an H-bomb to their name, can’t overthrow a planet-wide empire as things are now. But you see, Lewisohn, we aren’t just going to pit submachine guns against tanks. We’re going to be equipped with a weapon that will make the tanks and bombs obsolete, worse than useless! And that’s where you come in.”

  Let it be clearly understood, Hare was not a dog unleashed from hell. He was a strong, intelligent, not unkindly man who wrought enormous good. Don’t forget, it was his work that the East and West coasts are again inhabited. Even though the radioactivity was gone, people were afraid to move back. He forced them back, gave them plows in their hands and earthworms in their soil, and regained a quarter of the continent.

  I think, now, that Hare or someone like him was inevitable. After World War III, if you can call a few days of nuclear butchery followed by several years of starvation and chaos a war, the world power which is safety waited for the first country to become civilized again. Hare, an obscure brigadier, used his tattered command as a starting point. People came to him because he offered food and hope. So did other war lords, but Hare whipped them. Hare also whipped China and Egypt, when they made their own tries at supremacy, and turned all Earth into the Protectorate.

  Yes, he was a dictator. But nothing else was possible. I had supported him myself, even fought in his army two decades ago. We needed a Cincinnatus—then.

  “For the duration of the emergency,” read the Act of Congress. There was a handpicked Congress in Bloomington, and a frightened little shadow of a President, and a rubber-stamp Supreme Court. Under the law, Hare was only Commander-in-Chief of the National Safety Corps, an executive arm in the Department of Defense & Justice. His nominal superior was appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. He had retired from the Army to “maintain civilian control of government.”

  However, for the duration of the emergency the Cinc possessed extraordinary powers. And now we had rebuilt a great deal, and the world—if not quiet or content—was safely under guard, and one might think the emergency was past.

  Only somehow…well, there was the mutant typhus epidemic, and next year there was an uprising in Indonesia, and next year the Colorado Valley Authority needed five million laborers, and next year there was a big scare about subversives, and so it went for twenty years.

  Somehow, Cincinnatus never had gone back to his plow.

  I didn’t know the details of Committee organization. I didn’t care to, wasn’t allowed to, and didn’t have time to. Let it merely be said that this was as carefully planned a coup as history has ever seen.

  Not yet thirty, Achtmann was the revolution. Of course, he didn’t handle all the details—he had staffs for the military, economic, and political aspects. But he kept his finger on everything, the flow of memos from his desk was incredible, and it was to him we all turned in our need.

  Things just happened to work out that way. Achtmann’s father had been the guiding genius of the early days, and the son had grown up at the father’s side. When the old man was found dead over his desk one morning, the young man had naturally been called on for advice—nobody else knew as much of all the ramifications—and suddenly, two years later, the Board of Directors realized that they hadn’t yet elected a new president and unanimously called on the boy-wonder.

  The force shield was Achtmann’s baby. His unappeasable reading appetite turned up an obscure article in a physics journal, published just before the war broke out, concerning an anomalous effect observed when an electric field of a certain high strength pulsated in a certain complex pattern of high frequencies. Achtmann called in one of his tame physicists, asked him what equipment would be needed, and had the equipment stolen piecemeal and smuggled to the Hideout. After two years of work, the possibility of a force shield became clear. In the next five years, the engineering details were hammered forth. A year later, a screen generator tested out successfully. Now, two years afterward, the parts were ready for assembly.

  We didn’t have the facilities to machine every part into identity. Therefore each unit had to be separately phased in, a delicate operation requiring a high-speed computer plugged into the generator circuit. I was there to serve the computer.

  I forgot about sleeping, almost, for the next three weeks. It was freedom I worked for, and my sons where they huddled in fear, and the memory of old Professor Biancini. The Ns might have found it necessary to string Biancini to a lamp post, but soaking him with gasoline and igniting him had been pure, pointless enthusiasm…

  Achtmann looked at me across the desk. His broad square face was very white, he was one of those who never dared go above ground. “Coffee?” he asked. “It’s mostly chicory, but it’s at least warm and wet.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “And you’re really all done.” His hand shook a little as he poured for me. “It seems hard to believe.”

  “The last unit was mounted and tested an hour ago,” I said. “The trucks are already on their way.”

  “D-day.” His eyes were empty, staring at the clock on the wall. “In forty-eight hours, then.”

  Suddenly he lowered his face into his hands. “What am I going to do?” he whispered.

  I blinked at him. “Why…lead the revolution…aren’t you?” I said after a long stillness.

  “Oh, yes. Yes. But after that?” He leaned over the desk, shivering. “I like you, Professor. You’re very like my father, did you know that? Only a more kindly man. My father was nothing but Revolution, the great holy cause. Can you imagine growing up under a man who was not a man but a disembodied will? Can you imagine never once, in fifteen years of youth and young manhood, never once laying down the load to have a glass of beer with your friends, kissing a girl, hearing a concert, steering a sailboat over blue water? I was seventeen years old when a young couple on a day’s outing blundered into Virginia City and saw too much—I ordered them shot—me, seventeen years old.” His face sank back into his hands. “A lot of decent people are going to die in the next week or so…not just on our side. My God, do you think after ordering that I can retire to—to—what am I able to become?”

  It grew very quiet, below his heavy breathing.

  “Get out,” he said finally, not looking at me. “Report to General Thomas, logistics office. You’ll be needed. We’ll all be needed.”

  As civilians—on trains, buses, planes, trucks, from the whole continent, from scattered posts of empire around the planet—our army closed in on Bloomington. The movement was not caught by the usual traffic analysis, because a carefully engineered revolt had begun in Mexico. It was a revolt doomed and damned from the start, a diversion where ragged peons met flamethrowers, but such are the necessities of war.

  At various points, small towns, farms, weed-grown fields not yet resettled, our units formed themselves and moved against the Capitol.

  I am not a tactician, and I still don’t know the details. My department was only the force screens. Each unit was centered around a heavy truck carrying a micropile to power a shield generator. Overhead went our aircraft, ridiculous little cubjets and limping machines salvaged from junk-heaps…but in every squadron, one ship bore a generator.

  The screen, when created, is only visible through a faint glow of ionization, as a sphere up to half a mile across. It permeates solid matter without noticeable, effect. But it is a force of the same order as that which binds atomic nuclei together. And it forbids velocities above a few feet per second. A particle which travels faster and encounters the field is stopped cold, its energy of motion converted into heat.

  So bullets, shells, shrapnel melt and fall to the ground. The detonation of a bomb, nuclear or chemical, involves high-speed molecules or electrons in the arming mechanism, so a bomb will not explode within the field. Radioactive dust and gas disintegrate as usual, but the energetic fragments which would normally kill a man emerge as harmless ions. Chemical toxins remain effective, but are easily guarded against.

  We had machine guns and light artillery electronically coupled to the screen generators. At the moment of firing, the screens went off for the few milliseconds needed to pass through a burst aimed at the enemy.

  The N Corps had armored vehicles. They lurched, huge and threatening, up into the field; and their motors stopped and their guns wouldn’t shoot. Our troops would plant a magnetic mine next to such a tank and continue. As soon as their progress carried the field beyond the stalled vehicle, the mine went off.

  The screens were carefully heterodyned; they did not affect the motors of our own army, or the various cybernetic controls. We did use some rather primitive methods of communication, though, since field telephones and radio were nullified.

  Destroying without being destroyed, we slugged our way into Bloomington. A thousand planes were called, and broke themselves against our impervious little air force. We commanded land and sky, and could not be stopped.

  But it was a slow and brutal way to travel. The Ns and some Army units blocked us with sheer mass. We trampled them down, and men with bayonets rose to meet us inside our own screens, and we ran them down with tanks. A small atomic bomb exploded just outside the shield of our forward unit. Its gases and ions didn’t get through, but the fireball light blinded some men, the infrared cooked others, the gamma radiation condemned a few to a long dying.

  The bomb also removed several residential blocks, since by that time we had entered the city. Thereafter the enemy had to contend with mass panic.

  Elsewhere in the nation, TV stations were seized and the film record of Achtmann played over and over. He was not a good speaker, but perhaps that only underlined the sincerity of what he told the world, that he had come to deliver men from slavery.

  I rode in a jeep with Kintyre—maintenance division—as the inevitable shocks and accidents caused our generators to misbehave. It was bitterly cold inside the field, which strained out all the warm-air molecules. Afterward you could trace our course by the sere grass and trees autumnal in midsummer. Racing from unit to unit, over smashed homes and ripped corpses, shell-pocked streets and disputed basements, I went from winter to summer and back again, and it seemed curious that we, in our springtime of hope, should bring this cold.

  We bumped up to the Capitol through twilight. It was burning. A sentry passed us, and we entered the grounds. Our tires bit into lawns and flattened rose-beds. The familiar shield van was parked massive in the backyard, etched against the roar of heat and flame.

  “It just quit on us,” said the man with the colonel’s brassard over sooty working clothes. “We want to put out this damn fire—hell, the records’re in there, maybe Hare himself. The screen’ll stop the fire, but we can’t get a flicker out of the generator.”

  I called for a lantern and went to look into the van. When I plugged in my testing unit, the problem was clear enough, the soldered connection of Tube 36 had broken loose. “Easy to fix,” I grumbled in my weariness, “but I’m getting tired of it. All day it’s been nothing but Tube 36 here, Tube 36 there.”

  “That’s one of the bugs we can iron out later,” said Kintyre.

  “Later?” I began unscrewing the main plate. “Does there have to be a later? I thought—”

  “Lot of holdouts, all over the world,” said Kintyre. “Maybe you know more about it, Colonel, but I think we’ll have a lot of stubborn little N fortresses to squelch.”

  “Oh, yes.” The officer looked away from the flames. “Just got word there’s an armored brigade on its way. It’ll be here before sunrise, and we’ll have to be ready to meet it.”

  “We seem to hold the city, though,” drawled Kintyre. “What’s left of it.”

  “I suppose we do. Messy business. Never thought it’d be this messy. But I’m only a general superintendent in a cannery. Heck of a note, ain’t it, taking a cannery superintendent and slapping a brassard on him and calling him Colonel?”

  I pulled away the faceplate and joined the broken connection and called for my soldering iron. A man handed it to me. He: had a rifle in his other hand, and there was a smear of blood across his face.

  “Wonder if old Hare got away,” said Kintyre.

  “Doubt it,” said the colonel. “Not a plane of theirs got off the ground here. He’s probably roasting right in this house. He had his own apartment in the Capitol, you know.” He shifted on his feet and groped for a cigarette. “Damn it to hell,” he said querulously, “we’ve got the lousiest QM in history. I ordered coffee half an hour ago.”

  I got the generator going. The temperature skidded down toward freezing and the flames went out as if a giant had snuffed them. Under the glare of headlights, men moved forward to probe the ruins.

  “We’d better get back,” said Kintyre to me.

  “Wait a bit,” I requested. “I’d like to know what became of Hare. He murdered quite a few good friends of mine.”

  The body was in the west wing apartment. It was not so burned as to be unrecognizable. He had shot his wife, to save her from the fire, but had met it himself.

  The colonel looked away, sickly. “Wish they’d hurry up that coffee,” he said. “All right, Sergeant, take a squad and put this thing up in front of the gates.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Achtmann’s orders. He says we can’t have a story growing up about Hare not being dead after all.”

  “Grisly thing to do,” I said.

  “Yeh,” said the colonel. “But this is an emergency, you know, and we’ll all have to do a lot of things we’d rather not, for the duration. Sergeant…no, he’s busy…you there, Corporal, go find out what the hell became of that coffee.”

  I met my sons one by one, as they came out of hiding in response to the broadcasts. I could have kissed Achtmann’s feet.

  Then I returned to the University. I had my old room back, though so much housing had been destroyed in the revolution that I had to double up with another man.

  The President had been killed by a stray bomb at Bloomington…poor little guy, nobody hated him. The Vice President and Cabinet had been strong Hare men. So Achtmann appointed a new executive branch. He himself refused all offices, and spent a month or so touring the country and receiving all the honors he could be given; then he returned to the capital. An election was to be held next year when things had quieted down.

  In the meantime, of course, it was necessary to stamp out the remaining N bands, and the new Federal police had to be granted special powers if they were to track down all the Hareists hidden among ordinary folk. Some units of the Army attempted a counter-revolution and were suppressed. A crop failure in China required that a great deal of rice be requisitioned from Burma, which touched off a small but bloody war with the Burmese nationalists.

  I hated to think of that. I had hoped we would get off the sorry road of empire and return to the rest of the world its freedom. A new party, the Libertarian, was being formed to run a slate for national office; its chief plank was the abolition of the Protectorate. I helped organize it locally. Our opponents were the more conservative Federationists. The government in Bloomington was non-partisan, a steering committee for the duration only; but of course it could not sit on its hands, it had to take some kind of positive action in every emergency. And we had an emergency every day, it seemed.

  In December the A.A.A.S. held a convention in Bloomington and I went, mostly to get away from the roommate assigned to me. We didn’t like each other much.

  I left the barracks and walked out into the grimy slush of winter streets. A few tattered Christmas decorations had been strung up, but there was no real sales campaign—there was no merchandise to speak of. However, the day before there had been a colorful military parade.

  I walked under a low leaden sky, huddled into my overcoat. There weren’t many people around, and none of them looked very cheerful. Well, that was understandable, with half the city still charred wreckage. But I missed the Salvation Army and their Christmas carols. Hare had done away with them years ago, on the grounds that private charity was too inefficient, and the new government had apparently not gotten around to rescinding his edict. The Salvation Army people had played badly and gallantly on winter corners when I was young, and it would have been pleasant to have them back.

  I passed the Capitol. A new one was rising on the ruins of the old. It was supposed to be a very ornate and beautiful structure, which sounded odd when people were living in tarpaper shacks, but there was still only a steel skeleton, cold against the sky.

  I wasn’t going any special place. There were no meetings this afternoon which interested me. I only felt like walking. It was a shock when two large men grabbed my arms.

  “Where you think you’re going?”

  I blinked. There was a high stone wall enclosing a large house to my left. “No place,” I said. “Just out for a walk.”

  “Yeah? Let’s see your ID.”

  I showed it to them. A car went past us, through the gates, with a bristling escort of armed men in gray uniforms. Maybe the new President lived here. I hadn’t seen a newscast in weeks, too busy. Hands patted me, feeling for weapons. “I guess he’s okay,” said one of the men.

  “Yeah. On your way, Lewisohn, and don’t come through this block again. Restricted. Didn’t you see the signs?”