same pace with which the world grew more complicated. But Jim wouldn’t have that time to learn by practice what he didn’t understand by instinct. He was too young, and Matt was too old to give him that time.
What the hell, this was supposed to be a republic, wasn’t it? A republic lived by developing different kinds of leaders as it needed them.
But he didn’t like the idea, nevertheless. He’d have to think it over, think it out, before he could accept it.
“Might as well get some sleep, Jim,” he said. “Looks like we’ve closed up the big shop for the night. I’ll take the first watch.”
“Okay.” Jim rolled over gratefully, and pillowed his head on his arms. Ted checked the action on his .45, which had jammed on him twice already. He handled the truckhorse of a gun distastefully. The only good thing about it was the same thing that was good about Matt’s magnum rifle, which he wouldn’t handle either. The things kicked like bombs, burned out their barrels, took nonstandard ammunition, were nuisances to maintain, and had all the subtlety of a club. But hit a man anywhere at all on his body with a bullet from one of them, and hydrostatic shock would knock him out, if not kill him. Which, to Ted’s mind, was rarely an advantage. There was no point in killing a potentially good man if you could put him out of action some other way.
None of which instruction-manual thinking, Ted reflected, was really effective in keeping him from worrying about his big problem. He was beginning to understand why Jack Holland had never really teamed up with Jim on any job. Once you considered things in the proper light, all sorts of evidence began turning up.
Jack Holland. He hoped it would be Jack Holland who would be taking over from Matt, when the inevitable time came.
A week, now. Jack had finally had to abandon the planned straight-forward sweep, block by parallel block, and had sent his right flank out to clean up as many of the uptown blocks east of Ninth Avenue as it could. On that side of what had become the border of the warehouse gangs’ territory, the Republic’s men had made contact with McGraw’s group—Ryder’s now—which had executed a duplicate movement. But, effectively, as far as the warehouse gangs were concerned, Garvin’s forces were bogged down at Nineteenth Street and Thirty-first Street, with only minor penetrations into the periphery west of Ninth Avenue. Matt’s personal forces were moving slowly out of Greenwich Village, with isolated pockets still to be mopped up in the almost ideal defensive positions that twisted alleys and cross-streets provided. But there, too, the actual core of resistance had hardly been bruised, for almost all the heavily built docks, warehouses, and docked ships were still holding out.
Somehow, Ted had acquired a squad of his own from men who had fallen in with him. They were apparently willing to follow his suggestions without debating them, and, as long as he didn’t seem to be making costly mistakes, he was perfectly willing to let it ride that way. They certainly weren’t hindering him and Jim any. All of them were heavily stubbled and ragged by now, and none of them had had much sleep. The latter probably fogged their judgment, and the former operated in his favor as well, since his own beard, augmented by grime, was enough to hide the boyish roundness of his face.
But the ammunition was running low.
His head dropped forward and he jerked it up again, coming out of his doze. Jack twisted a grin at him. “Kinda tiresome, ain’t it?”
Ted grunted. “What d’you hear on the box?” he said, motioning toward the radio.
“Ryder’s coming down, Matt’s coming up. We’re going west. Speed: six inches per hour.”
“They tried that stunt with the PT’s?”
Holland snorted. “Ever try to torpedo a warehouse? They knocked out most of the freighters in the channel, which doesn’t help us a goddamned bit.”
“We’ve got to crack those birds soon, Jack.”
“I know. We’ll be firing Roman candles at them if this keeps up. You got any ideas?”
“No.” He dozed off again, leaning on a garbage can.
Ten days, and he reached his conclusion. It was not an idea, he recognized, no more than Austerlitz or the shelling of Monte Cassino were ideas. It was a calculated decision based on the problem before him, reached in the light of the urgent necessity for the problem’s solution. Again, as with many of his recent decisions, he did not like it when he came to it. But it was the product of logical extrapolation, based on rational thinking and personal knowledge which he could honestly believe he had analyzed completely. Once he recognized this last, he knew he had given himself no choice.
“Problem is to get in close enough to dynamite the warehouses, right?” he said to Jack.
“Ahuh. Been that way for some time, now. They’ve got those boys on the roofs of the houses all around them. They can cover them, and the lads in the houses keep us back. We clean out a house, they toss dynamite down and blow the house to shreds, leaving an exposed area we can’t cross anyway. Can’t go in at night, because this is their territory, booby-trapped. So?”
“Wait for an east wind. Get one, and burn the houses. Go in under the smoke. Blow your way into the first floor, sit back, and wait for them to come out. They don’t come out, blow the second floor.”
Holland whistled. He looked at Ted thoughtfully. “Kind of mean, isn’t it? The guys in those houses get it either way—they come out while we’re waiting in the street, or they burn.”
“Jesus Christ!” Jim said, staring at Ted.
Berendtsen swayed wearily on his feet. Suddenly, he realized that he had done something neither Jack Holland nor Matt Garvin’s son were capable of. He had reached a decision he hated, but would carry out, given the opportunity, because he knew that whether it was right or wrong on some cosmic balance scale, he believed it to be right. Or, not right—necessary. And he could trust that belief because he trusted himself.
“All right,” he said, his voice calm, “let’s get on that radio and talk to Matt. We’ve got an old precedent for all this, you know,” he added dryly.
He led his sooty, weary men back along the broad length of Fourteenth Street, his left hand lost in a bulbous wrapping of bandage, his empty pack flapping between his shoulder blades. He and Jim and the rest of his squad were lost in the haphazard column of Matt Garvin’s men, but his mind’s eye separated his own from the rest. All the men were shuffling wordlessly up the street, weary past the bone, but he tried to read the faces of his squad. There had been many more men in the firing and dynamiting parties, but these had been the ones he led.
He tried to discover whether the men who followed him thought he was right or wrong. But their faces were blank with exhaustion, and he could not let his own expression disclose the slightest anxiety. And then he realized what the hard part of being a man was.
When they reached Stuyvesant at last, he found Matt Garvin. They looked at each other, he with his wounded hand and Matt with a shoulder almost dislocated by the magnum’s repeated detonations. He drew one corner of his mouth up crookedly, and Matt nodded and smiled faintly.
Now I know, Berendtsen thought.
Silently, Ted Berendtsen walked up the stairs while Jim hung back. He ran his hand over his jaws, and his cheeks, under their temporary gauntness, were just as soft. His feet stumbled on the steps.
Jesus Christ, I’m only sixteen! he thought. He grimaced faintly, at this last, illogical protest. Matt had a few more years.
CHAPTER FIVE
Matt Garvin had grown old, for his time. His oldest son, Jim, was twenty-two, and his daughter, Mary, was twenty. His youngest son, Robert, was a little past fifteen. And the civilization he had seen re-established now held all of Greater New York.
It was enough. He could sit at his window, looking out over Stuyvesant Town where the building generators had put lights back in the windows, and nod slowly to himself. It was done. Up and down the coast, where his scouting boats had wandered, he knew there were other cities shining once more beside the broad ocean. In those cities there must be other men like himself, satisfied with what they had accomplished. Soon, now, the cities would
