I started running. By the time I had arrived, Angel had wrapped Fenrick's long extension cord around the doorknob, held it with his boxing gloves, put his foot against the door, and pulled it apart with a thick blue spark and a shower of fire. The extension cord shorted out and smoked briefly until circuit breakers shut down all public-area power to the wing.

AC/DC went dead, clearing the air for the climax of the fugue. Angel walked past the petrified Ephraim Klein and pawed at the tape deck, trying to get at the tape. Frustrated by the boxing gloves, he turned and readied a mighty kick into the cone of a sub-woofer, when finally I arrived and tackled him onto a bed. Angel relaxed and sat up, occasionally pounding his bright-red cinderblock-scarred gloves together with meaty thwats, sweating like the boxer he was, glowering at the Go Big Red Fan.

The fugue ended and Ephraim shut off the tape. I went over and closed the door. "Okay, guys, time for a little talk. Everyone want to have a little talk?"

John Wesley Fenrick looked out the window, already bored, and nodded almost imperceptibly. Ephraim Klein jumped to his feet and yelled, "Sure, sure, anytime! I'm happy to be reasonable!" Angel, who was unlacing his right boxing glove with his teeth, mumbled, "I been talking to them for two months and they don't do shit about it."

"Hmm," I said, "I guess that tells the story, doesn't it? If you two refuse to be reasonable, Angel doesn't have to be reasonable either. Now it seems to me you need a set of rules that you can refer to when you're arguing about stereo rights. For instance, if one guy goes to pee, the other can't seize air rights. You can't touch each other's property, and so on. Ephraim, give me your typewriter and we'll get this down."

So we made the Rules and I taped them to the wall, straddling the boundary line of the room. "Does that mean I only have to follow the Rules on my half of the page," asked Fenrick, so I took it down and made a new Rule saying that these were merely typed representations of abstract Rules that were applicable no matter where the typed representations were displayed. Then I had the two sign the Rules, and hinted again that I just didn't know what Angel might do if they made any more noise. Then Angel and I went down to my place and had some beers. Law, and the hope of silence and order, had been established on our wing.

Fred Fine was trying to decide whether to lob his last tactical nuke into Novosibirsk or Tomsk when a frantic plebe bounced up and interrupted the simulation with a Priority Five message. Of course it was Priority Five; how else could a plebe have dared interrupt Fred Fine's march to the Ob'? "Fred, sir," he gasped. "Come quick, you won't believe it." "What's the situation?"

"That new guy. He's about to win World War II!"

"He is? But I thought he was playing the Axis!"

Fred Fine brushed past the plebe and strode into the next room. In its center, two Ping-Pong tables had been pushed together to make room for the eight-piece World War II map. On one side stood the tall, aquiline Virgil Gabrielsen– the "new guy"– and on the other, Chip Dixon shifted from foot to foot and snapped his fingers incessantly, Because this was the first wargame Virgil had ever played, he was still only a Private, and held Plebe status. Chip Dixon, a Colonel, had been gaming for six years and was playing the Allies, for God's sake! Usually the only thing at question in this game was how many Allied divisions the Axis could consume before Berlin inevitably fell.

At the end of the map, where the lines of longitude theoretically converged to make the North Pole, Consuela Gorm, Referee, sat on a loveseat atop a sturdy table. On the small stand before her she riffled occasionally through the inch-thick rule book, punched away at her personal computer, made notes on scratch paper and peered down at Europe with a tiny pair of opera glasses. Surrounding the tables were twenty other garners who had come to observe the carnage shortly after Virgil had V-2'd Birmingham into gravel. Many stood on chairs, using field glasses of their own, and one geek was tottering around the area on a pair of stilts, loudly and repeatedly joking that he was a Nazi spy satellite. The attention of all was focused on tens of thousands of little cardboard squares meticulously stacked on the hexagonally patterned playing field. The game had been on for nine and a half hours and Chip Dixon was obviously losing it fast, popping Cheetos into his mouth faster than he could grind them into paste with his hyperactive yellow molars, often gulping Diet Pepsi and hiccuping. Virgil was calm, surveying the board through half-closed eyes, hands behind back, lips slightly parted, wandering around in a world inside his head, oblivious to the surrounding nerds. A hell of a warrior, thought Fred Fine, and this only his first game!

"Here comes the Commander," shouted the guy on stilts as he rounded the Japanese-occupied Aleutians, and the observers' circle parted so Fred Fine could enter. Chip Dixon blushed vividly and looked away, moving his lips as he cursed to himself. "Very interesting," said Fred Fine.

Great stacks of red cardboard squares surrounded Stalin-grad and Moscow, which were protected only by pitiable little heaps of green squares. In Normandy an enormous Nazi tank force was hurling the D-Day invasion back into the Channel so forcefully that Fred Fine could almost hear the howl of the Werfers and see the bodies fall screaming into the scarlet brine. In Holland, a Nazi amphibious force made ready to assault Britain. In front of Virgil, lined up on the edge of the table as trophies, sat the four Iowa-class battleships, the Hornet, and other major ships of the American navy.

Chip Dixon was increasingly manic, his blood pressure Pumped to the hemhorrage point by massive overdoses of salt and Diet Pepsi, his thirst insatiable because of the nearly empty Jumbo Paic of Cheetos. Sweat dripped from his brow and fell like acid rain on Scandinavia. He bent over and tried to move a stack of recently mobilized Russians toward Moscow, but as he shoved one point of his tweezers under the stack he hiccupped violently and ended up scattering them all over the Ukraine. "Shit!" he screamed, dashing a Cheeto to the floor. "I'm sorry, Consuela, I forget which hex it was on."

Consuela did not react for several seconds, and the reflection of the rule book in her glasses gave her an ominous, inscrutable look. Everyone was still and apprehensive. "Okay," she said in soft, level tones, "that unit got lost in the woods and can't find its way out for another turn."

"Wait!" yelled Chip Dixon. "That's not in the Rules!" "It's okay," said Virgil patiently. "That stack contained units A2567, A2668, A4002, and 126789, and was on hex number 1,254.908. However, unit A2567 clashed with Axis A1009 last turn, so has only half movement this turn– three hexes."

Cowed, Chip Dixon breathed deeply (Fred Fine's suggestion) and reassembled the stack. Unit A2567 was left far behind to deal with a unit of about twenty King Tiger Tanks which was blasting unopposed up the Dniepr. Chip Dixon then straightened up and thought for about five minutes, ruffling through his notes for a misplaced page. Consuela made a gradated series of noises intended to convey rising impatience. "Listen, Chip, you're already way over the time limit. Done?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"Any engagements?"

"No, not this turn. But wait 'til you see what's coming." Okay, Virgil, your turn."

Virgil reached out with a long probe and quickly shoved stacks of cardboard from place to place; from time to time a move would generate a gasp from the crowd. He then ticked off a list of engagements, giving Consuela data on what each stack contained, what its combat strength was, when it had last fought and so forth. When it was over, an hour later, there was long applause from the membership of MARS. Chip Dixon had sunk to the floor to sulk over a tepid Cola.