Hanging on

covered with tar, thick and rippled, lumped with muscle. He could do more work than any three men when a bridge needed to be repaired, and he never once complained about the eighteen-hour days a repair job might sometimes require. No one could understand, then, why Private Tooley was a chickenshit pacifist.

Sergeant Coombs, as bewildered about Tooley as everyone else, confronted the private in the HQ rec room one night, over a bottle of Jack Daniels. They had both been sitting in the small, board-walled room, sprawled on benches, backs against the wall, drinking and counting the spiders on the ceiling. The air was hot and thick, the night silence even thicker, and eventually they could not ignore each other any longer. At first, their conversation had been gruff, unconnected, meandering. With more liquor, and once they had all the spiders counted, it got spirited.

“What would you do if someone attacked your grandmother?” Sergeant Coombs wanted to know. “You're a pacifist, so what would you do?”

“Who would want to attack my grandmother?” Tooley had asked.

“Let's say it isn't sexual.”

“She isn't rich, either,” Tooley said.

“Seriously, suppose you were there, and someone attacked your grandmother with a gun. Would you shoot him first?”

“Do I have a gun too?”

Coombs nodded. “Yes.”

“I wouldn't have a gun.”

“Why not?”

“I'm a pacifist.”

Coombs had reddened, but he said, “Suppose, just for the sake of this discussion, that you had a gun, a real gun.” He took a pull of the whiskey, keeping his eyes on Tooley.

“How good am I with the gun?” Tooley asked.

Anticipating a loophole, Coombs said, “You're an excellent shot.”

“Then I'd shoot the gun out of his hand.”

Coombs took another drink, looked at the spiders, kept Ms temper in check, and said, “You're a lousy shot.”

“You just said I was an excellent shot.”

“I take it back.”

“If I was a lousy shot, I wouldn't try to kill him,” Tooley said. “I wouldn't dare try.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I might hit my grandmother instead.”

Coombs stared at the bottle for a long time. When Tooley was about to touch him to see if he had passed out, the sergeant said, “Suppose you were driving a truck on a cliff road, too fast to stop. A little girl suddenly appears on the road, just around a bend. You either hit the little girl or drive over the cliff and kill yourself. You either crush and mangle this beautiful, blue-eyed, curly-headed little child — or you drive over the cliff. What would you do?”

“What happened to the man with the gun?” Tooley asked. “What did he do to my grandmother?”

“Forget him,” Coombs said.

“How can I forget him? What if he kills Grandma while I'm out driving this truck?”

“Forget the first example,” Coombs said. “Let's pretend you're in that truck. What would you do?”

“I'd blow my horn for the little girl to get out of the way.”

“Your horn doesn't work.”

“I'd wave and yell at her,” Tooley said, raising his voice, almost as if the child were in front of him, as if this bench were the seat of a wildly careening truck.

“She couldn't hear you above the roar of the truck!” Sergeant Coombs said, standing, waving his fists for emphasis.

“Jesus Christ!” Tooley screamed. “How stupid is this kid? If she sees a truck bearing down on her, isn't she going to run for the bank and get out of the way?”

Triumphant, still standing, jumping up and down a little in his excitement, Coombs said, “She's too young to walk.”

“Can she crawl?”

“No!”

“I'd drive over the cliff!” Tooley shouted. He grabbed the liquor, rocking the entire bench on which he sat, his eyes squinted tightly shut, waiting for the crash.

Coombs said, “Suppose your mother was in the truck with you?”

“My mother?” His eyes snapped open.

“Your mother.”

“What the fuck would my mother be doing with me, in a truck, driving along a sheer cliff on a narrow road at sixty miles an hour? Why the hell isn't she back there helping my grandmother who's being attacked by the man with the gun who doesn't want to rape her?”

“I don't know anything about your family,” Coombs said. “I only want to see how your chickenshit pacifism gets you out of this one?”

Tooley leaned back, hugging the liquor bottle to his chest. His eyes were white, unblinking. He licked his lips. Tense, thinking furiously, he was still a huge man, but he resembled a child. A frightened child. He said, “I'd slam on the brakes!” He leaned forward, as if hit in the pit of the stomach. “I'd try to stop before I hit the kid!”

“Hah!” Coombs roared.

“Hah?”

“You should hit the kid and save yourself and your mother. What the hell does a stranger mean to you, anyway?”

“But if I braked in time…?”

“Hah! You'd slam on the brakes, going at sixty on a narrow road, send your mother through the windshield and kill her instantly. Bam. Dead. You'd fishtail past the little girl, smash her to jelly, plummet over the damn cliff, and crash through your grandmother's house and kill the old woman and yourself and several innocent bystanders. That's what would happen, and all because of your chickenshit pacifism!”

Tooley huddled into himself even more, stunned at the crisp, awful vision of ultimate catastrophe which he had been given.

“No, Tooley,” Coombs had assured him, “it won't work. Pacifism is a wonderful idea, but it just isn't applicable to the real world.”

Then he got up and walked out of the rec room, leaving Tooley glued to the bench.

However, Sergeant Coombs didn't manage to make Tooley change his outlook. The private still refused to pack a gun and spent most of his time helping the wounded in the hospital — especially Kowalski, who was the second patient, a regular zombie.

Fresh from talking with Nurse Pullit, Major Kelly walked to the end of the bunker and sat down next to Tooley on a gray cot which was drawn up close to Kowalski's cot. He pointed at the mute figure between the sheets, and he said, “How's your zombie doing today?”

“Same as usual,” Tooley said, though he was disturbed by the major's choice of words.

Kowalski was lying quietly, his head heavily bandaged, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. He had collected a piece of bridge support in the back of his head when the British bombed the gorge four weeks ago, and he had not moved or spoken to anyone in all the days since. He stared at the ceiling and dirtied his pants and took food from Tooley which, once he had digested it, he craftily employed to dirty his pants again.

“There's a plane coming in tonight,” Kelly told Tooley. He saw a fat centipede skitter along the floor, near the end of the bunker. It gained a shadowed wall and disappeared, probably on its way to the ceiling. He wondered if there were anything clinging to the ceiling just above his own head.

The pacifist looked at the zombie and then at the major, and he said, “Do you think they would take him back where he can get good medical attention?”

“You know what they'd do with him, even if they did agree to take him. They'd open the bay doors and dump him out at twenty thousand feet”