And the old man was looking down at the tabletop, his old hands suddenly clenched. After a long time, he looked up slowly.
“So you’re not really working for the Seventh Republic. You’ve been sent up here to find a useful figurehead for a new combination of power.”
Henley smiled again, easily, blandly—and looked like a man who has shot his animal and only has to wait for it to die. “I wouldn’t put it that way. Though, naturally, we wouldn’t stand for any one-man dictatorships.”
“Naturally.” One corner of the commander’s lip lifted, and suddenly Custis saw Henley wasn’t so sure. Custis saw him tense, as though a dying tiger had suddenly lashed out a paw. The commander’s eyes were narrowed. “I’m through talking to you for the moment,” he said, and Custis wondered how much of his weakness had been carefully laid on. “You’ll wait outside. I want to talk to Custis.” He motioned to the two waiting riflemen. “Take him out—put him in another hut and keep your eyes on him.”
And Custis was left alone in the hut with the old commander.
The commander looked up at him. “That’s your own car out there?”
Custis nodded.
“So you’re just under contract to the Seventh Republic—you’ve got no particular loyalty to the government.”
Custis shrugged. “Right now, there’s no tellin’ who I’m hired out to.” He was willing to wait the commander out and see what he was driving at.
“You did a good job of handling things, this morning. What are you—about twenty-nine, thirty?”
“Twenty-six.”
“So you were born four years after Berendtsen was killed. What do you know about him? What have you heard?”
“Usual stuff. After the plague, everything was a mess. Berendtsen put an army together, took over the territory, made the survivors obey one law, and strengthened things out that way.”
The commander nodded to himself—an old man’s nod, passing judgment on the far past. “You left out a lot of people between the plague and Berendtsen. And you’ll never imagine how bad it was. But that’ll do. Do you know why he did it?”
“Why’s anybody set up a government? He wanted to be boss, I guess. Then somebody decided he was too big, and cut him down. Then the people cut the somebody down. But I figure Berendtsen’s dead, for sure.”
“Do you?” the commander’s eyes were steady on Custis.
Custis tightened his jaw. “Yeah.”
“Do I look like Berendtsen?” the commander asked softly.
“No.”
“But hand-drawn portraits thirty years old don’t really mean anything, do they, Custis?”
“Well, no.” Joe felt himself getting edgy. “But you’re not Berendtsen,” he growled belligerently. “I’m sure Berendtsen’s dead.”
The old commander sighed. “Of course. Tell me about Chicago,” he said, going off in a new direction. “Has it changed much? Have they cleaned it up? Or are they simply abandoning the buildings that’re really falling down?”
“Sometimes. But they try and fix ’em up, sometimes.”
“Only sometimes.” The commander shook his head regretfully. “I had hoped that by this time, no matter what kind of men were in charge…”
“When’s the last time you were there?”
“I was never there. But I’ve seen a city or two.” The commander smiled at Custis. “Tell me about this car of yours. I used to be quite fond of mechanized equipment, once.” Now he was an old man again, dreaming back into the past, only half-seeing Custis. “We took a whole city once, with almost no infantry support at all. That’s a hard thing to do, even with tanks, and all I had was armored cars. Just twenty of them, and the heaviest weapons they mounted were light automatic cannon in demiturrets. No tracks—I remember they shot our tires flat almost at once, and we went bumping through the streets. Just armored scout cars, really, but we used them like tanks, and we took the city. Not a very large city.” He looked down at his hands. “Not very large, no. But still, I don’t believe that had ever been done before.”
“Never did any street fighting,” Custis said. “Don’t know a thing about it.”
“What do you know, then?”
“Open country work. Only thing a car’s good for.”
“One car, yes.”
“Hell, mister, there ain’t five cars runnin’ in the Republic, and they ain’t got any range. Only reason I’m still goin’ is mine don’t need no gasoline. I ran across it in an old American government depot outside Miles City. Provin’ grounds, it was. My dad, he’d taught me about runnin’ cars, and I had this fellow with me, Lew Gaines, and we got it going.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Seven years.”
“And nobody ever tried to take it away from you?”
“Mister, there’s three fifty-caliber machineguns and two 75s on that car.”
The commander looked at him from head to foot. “I see.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “And now you’ve practically handed it to me.”
“Not by a long shot, I ain’t. My crew’s still inside, and it’s kind of an open question whether you’re ready to get your troops barbecued just for the sake of killing us and making the car no good to anybody.”
The commander cocked an eyebrow at him. “Not as open as all that.”
“Open enough. You set it up so we can both pull back from each other if that turns out best; if we come to some kind of agreement.”
“You’re here. Your crew’s down the mountain.”
“My crew’s just as good without me, Mister.”
The commander let it ride, switching his tack a little. “You’ll admit you’ve come to a peculiar place for a man who only knows open country work.”
Custis shrugged. “Car needed shopwork. Chicago’s the only place with the equipment. If I use their shops, I do their work. That’s the straight up and down of it. And it’s one more reason why gettin’ the car’d be more work than it was worth to you. Anything you busted on it would stay busted for good. And you know it. You’re so fond of cars, where’s yours? Wore out, right? So now you’re walkin’.”
“Horses.”
“Horses!”
The commander smiled crookedly. “All right. It takes a good deal to budge you, doesn’t it, Custis?”
“Depends on the spot I’m in. My dad taught me to pick my spot careful.”
The commander nodded again. “I’d say so. All right, Custis, I’ll want to talk to you again, later. One of my men’ll stay close to you. Other than that, you’re free to look around as much as you want to. I don’t imagine you’ll ever be leading any expeditions up here—not if Henley’s plans work out. Or even if they don’t.”
He turned away and reached under the cot for a bottle, and Custis hadn’t found out what the old commander was driving at.
Outside, they were cooking their noon meal. The camp women were huddled around the firepits, bent shapeless as they stirred their pots with charred, long wooden spoons, and the smell of food lay over the area near the huts in an invisible cloud that dilated Custis’s nostrils and made his empty stomach tighten up. Whatever these people ate, it was hot and smelled different from the sludgy meat in the car’s ration cans.
Then he shrugged and closed his mind to it. Walking upwind, he went over to a low rock and sat down on it. One of the commander’s riflemen went with him and leaned against a boulder fifteen feet away, cradling his rifle in the crook of one thin arm and looking steadily at Custis through coldly sleepy eyes.
A bunch of kids clustered around the fires, filling oil cans that had crude handles made out of insulated wire. When they had loaded up they moved out of the little valley with a few riflemen for escort, carrying food out to the
