Someone called, “You are a soldier? Don’t you know you could be killed in this action?”
Hale nodded solemnly into the screen, then said, “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, sir, but you can get killed crossing the street—anyway, you could in the good old days—and I think what my buddies and me are doing here is more important than a whole lot of streets.”
“And you are confident this operation will succeed?”
The soldier nodded. “Yes, sir, I am. There’s a whole bunch of good guys wrapped up in this thing, and . . .”
Peters became aware that the soldier’s voice was fading, and with it his image on the screen.
“. . . all of us know . . .” It was barely audible. The screen went white, dazzlingly bright.
“What is this?” a new voice asked. The voice was young, unpolished, and unprofessional, the muttering of the new tenant next door to himself, heard through the walls at 11:00 P.M.
Lewis said, “I’m afraid we’re having some communications problems here, gentlemen; you’ll have to bear with us.” Addressing the disembodied voice: “Is this Grizzly Bear?”
“Ken!”
“Grizzly Bear One—General Virdon—come in, please.”
As though drawn long ago in invisible ink and only now called up by heat or the ammoniacal fumes of blood, a face materialized. Peters had expected a beard and the conventional exotic, vaguely erotic, jewelry, but the boy was too young for the first and had removed—if he ever wore it—the second, save for the rhinestoned frames (each weeping a crystal acrylic tear) of thick glasses. “Well,” he said, and then, “ken.” He moved toward his screen, appearing to lean out of the illusion, his thin, unlined face suspended above them as it might have been over a cage of white rats. Then his eyes left them and he looked toward the window that was the west wall of the room, and the tossing Atlantic.
“Who are you?” Lewis asked.
“Philadelphia,” the boy answered simply. Peters saw Lewis wince; Philadelphia was in radical hands.
From the floor someone called, “We were watching the attack on Detroit.”
“Oh,” the boy said. And then, “I can get you Detroit. Wait a minute.”
The screen flashed, and was filled with a young man whose forehead was painted with hieroglyphics. He said, “This is Free Michigan Five with uninterrupted battle coverage, music, and macrobiotic diet tips, except when we are interrupted. Did everyone get to see the pig plane that crashed in Dearborn Heights?”
Someone called, “No!” but the young man appeared not to have heard. “I guess you’ve got the news that six kenkins are going to donate their bodies to Peace, and we’re going to give you that live right now. Hold on.”
A bigger man, with a bushy beard, his hair held back by a beaded band. Behind him four men and two women sat cross-legged on ground littered with rubble, their heads bent. “No Roman circus,” the bearded man said. “If you’re not considering doing this yourself, please tune out.”
“This is a television picture,” Lewis said at the front of the room. “That’s what’s giving the streaky effect. Vidlink does not do this.”
“Over there”—the bushy-bearded man waved an arm—“is what they call Cougar. That’s the big pig force attacking us from the south. I think you can hear the shooting.”
They could. The distant whine of ricocheting bullets, the nervous chattering of assault rifles and machine guns; and below all this (like the bass section of an orchestra, in which iron-souled strings, and horns, and wild kettledrums inherited from Ottoman cavalry speak of the death of spring and heroes) the doubletoned pounding of the quad-fifties—four fifty-caliber machine guns mounted together on a combat car and controlled by a single trigger—as they chewed down stone and brick and sandbags to splash the blood and brains of lonely snipers across the debris.
“It’s strictly voluntary whether you talk or not,” the man with the beard said. “We’ve asked everyone who isn’t actually thinking about doing this themselves to tune out, but probably there are a lot of them still on. You know how it is. Anybody want to talk?”
For a moment no one moved; then a thin young man with a curly beard stood up. He was wearing only undershorts, boxer shorts dotted with a pattern of acorns. The interviewer said, “This is great, man. In the last two batches nobody would talk.” He smiled. He had bad teeth and a good smile.
The curly-bearded young man in shorts said, “What do you want to know?”
The bearded man said, “I guess most of all why.”
“If you don’t know I can’t tell you. Yes, I can; because I want to turn things around. Like, everybody all the time only does it for himself or something he sees being part of him only bigger, an empire or a church, like that. I’m doing it for ants, to set us loose.”
The bearded man said, “You stoned?”
“Sure I’m stoned. Ken, I’m stoned blind.”
“You don’t look stoned, man.”
“Trust me.”
“You believe in more life after you die?”
The curly-bearded young man in boxer shorts shook his head. “That isn’t what it means. When there’s no more, that’s Death.”
“Just the big dark?”
He nodded. “The big dark.”
One of the girls stood. She was a thin and rather flat-chested girl, with straggling brown hair and the large,
