We hurried across the lobby to the second elevator bank and went down to the underground garage, where the attendant brought Harry's hovercar, accepted a tip, and stepped back as we drove out of that great, sparkling building. In the street, we both sighed, as if some weight had been lifted from us, and we began to talk for the first time, out of the range of those microphones which infest any government building.
'You'll tell me about it now,' he said, his eyes flicking from the shifting layers of new snow on the street to where I sat against the far door. 'They wouldn't let me up to see you but once a week, you know.'
'You'd only have been looking at flesh and blood,' I said. 'All this time, I've been inside of Child, locked down there in his mind.'
'As I figured,' he said. 'But those'-he jerked his thumb behind us, twisting his face up to look disgusted' those pretty boys in their uniforms, I just don't trust.'
'They didn't exercise my body properly. And they didn't take any precautions against stomach shrinkage.
Otherwise, I'm fine.'
He snorted. 'So tell me,'
'You first. I've spent a month in that place, and I don't have the foggiest notion what has happened out here.
When I went in, war had all but been declared. The Chinese and the Japanese had crossed the Soviet border, maybe nuked a town?'
He looked grim, stared at the street unfolding before us for a long time before he said anything. It was dark, and the crisp blue arc lights sent fantastic shadows wriggling between the heavy fall of snowflakes. The streets seemed almost empty of traffic.
'War was declared two days later,' he said.
'And we won?'
'Partly.'
I looked around at the streets, all undamaged, all occupied by our own troops, our own police. Indeed, I saw now that the amount of occupation of our territory spelled some sort of trouble. Every other street corner contained coppers parked in squad-carrying howlers, surveying the dark boulevard. They watched us go by with quick, dark glances, though they offered no pursuit.
'Partly?' I asked.
As we flitted across the city, he summed up the developments of the month-long war:
The Chinese had indeed nuked Zavitaya, for there was nothing there any longer but powdered stone, splintered wood, and the ruins of a very few outlying structures. Of the moderately large population, there were six hundred survivors.
Belogorsk was taken, its laboratories seized and impressed into the service of the People's Army of China-a euphemism for the military strong-arm of the Peking dictatorship and its Japanese allies. Within a day, hover-trucks had taxied Chinese troops into Svobodnyy and Shimanovsk, thereby effectively isolating one small sector of the Soviet Union.
In this time, the Western Alliance had been making preparations and issuing stern warnings to the Chinese, who had ignored them imperiously, sparing no effort to make it apparent that they considered the West with scorn. The United Nations was petitioned by every Western Alliance nation, and the world organization replied by trade sanctions against China. These too were laughed off. The land of the dragon was feeling its muscle for the first time in many centuries, and its egotism threatened to carry it to the brink of world destruction and beyond. Yet the Alliance held off, well aware that the electronic shield envisioned by Child and later torn from Ms mind by my own extrasensory powers was reaching midpoint in its hasty construction. There was no sense, the strategists agreed, in helping to escalate a mini-war into a major conflagration until our side was immune to attack behind its shield generators and victory was assured the West.
Two weeks after the start of the war, the Chinese were still consolidating territorial gains, moving more troops into the captured Russian territory. All the while, they pointed to their Dragonfly and made lightly veiled threats.
They made false promises that this was all the land they Wanted. And they followed such worthless assurances with warnings that they could easily survive a nuclear-bacteriological war, for their population was so much greater than ours that it could not help but outlast us.
The Alliance, furious, bided time.
Then, unexpectedly, Japanese forces had landed on Formosa, coming in from the sea with destroyers and landing craft. While the guns and the forces were aimed at China, the back door was entered and the house secured by the enemy. The Alliance forces quartered on that strategic airbase were systematically slaughtered. Both the Chinese and the Japanese denied having anything to do with it.
But reconnaissance planes reported Japanese ships, sans the rising sun, harbored in the islands.
The following day, with even the peace criers united behind the government, the crash force working to erect electronic shields over all the strategic areas of the Western Alliance, the last of the invisible shells of stretched molecules in place and the generators backed with a second set to prevent disaster, the Alliance declared war on China and Japan.
We struck out with nuclear stockpiles at the major industrial centers of both enemy nations. In hours, billions in property and hundreds of thousands of lives were wiped out in gushes of mile-high flame. The enemy was prepared for this, and it retaliated with its own nuclear weaponry.
But the shields worked, the Alliance cities remained intact. Again and again, the People's Army rained missiles upon points in Russia, Europe, and North America. Not one of them did damage. Since all sides had long ago, for obvious strategic reasons concerned with occupying captured territory, gone to the construction of 'clean' bombs, even the spill radiation did not kill people living in the countryside beyond the shelter of the unseen domes of molecules which had been stretched to stunningly large dimensions, their surface tension curiously increased and not decreased by that expansion.
In desperation, plague drops were made on the cities of the Alliance, but even these did not penetrate. In the countryside, people died, but even many of these were saved by immunization teams from the cities. Property damage, at this point, was zero.
The Chinese nuked the small, unprotected towns in a final spasm of fury, but they had little firepower left.
The Japanese had already surrendered in order to protect what little unmolested lands the home islands still contained.
The Chinese command center was discovered at last, destroyed with a vengeance, and the war brought to and end. Or so everyone thought
'Thought?' I asked.
'We have ambitious men for our military leaders,'
Harry explained. His tone was none too pleasant.
'Go on.'
'We made a mistake with the voluntary, reformed military service laws,' he said.
'How so?'
'Try to envision these men, Sim. They're well-paid professionals. There hasn't been a draft within the Alliance for twenty-four years. They enlist because they like to be a part of a protective Big Brother sort of organization — and because combat and planning for combat excites them. We turned ourselves over to those who enjoy war, and we gave them the machines to wage it. Now, with all this hardware and all this education in the ways of dealing death, they had had to sit through fourteen years of cold war where guns were never fired. And before that, there were two decades of total peace, where nations hardly even exchanged angry words. They've never had the chance to prove themselves, and since they are basically the sort of men who need to prove themselves for their own benefit, they've been driven up the wall by brinksmanship and peace.'
I felt ill, without exactly understanding why. The night seemed darker and colder, and I had a sudden and furious need for Melinda, for the touch of her and the warmth, the seeking together and the final closeness. It was such an intense desire that I grew dizzy with it.
'So?' I managed to ask.
'So, they didn't want to stop. They were moving, living their dreams, and loving it. They were on the edge of
