"When you're as old as he is, you'll have earned the right to be just as vain," Agnes declared.

Morrell tried to imagine himself in the early 1970s. He couldn't do it. The reach was too far; he couldn't guess what that distant future time would be like. He couldn't guess what he'd be like, either. He could see forty ahead, and even fifty. But eighty and beyond? He wondered if anybody in his family had ever lived to be eighty. He couldn't think of anyone except possibly one great-uncle.

He said, "I hope I don't have the chance to get that vain, because I'd need another war, maybe another couple of wars, to come close to doing all the things Custer's done."

"In that case, I don't want you to get old and vain, either," Agnes said at once. "As long as you have the chance to get old, you can stay modest, for all of me."

"I suppose that will do," Morrell answered. Agnes smiled, thinking he'd agreed with her. And so he had… to a point. Old men, veterans of the War of Secession, talked about seeing the elephant. He'd seen the elephant, and all the horror it left in its wake. It was horror; he recognized as much. But he'd never felt more intensely alive than during those three years of war. The game was most worth playing when his life lay on the line. Nothing felt better than betting it-and winning.

He had a scarred hollow in the flesh of his thigh to remind him how close he'd come to betting it and losing. Agnes had a scarred hollow in her heart: Gregory Hill, her first husband, had laid his life on the life-and lost it. Morrell knew he ought to pray with all his heart that war never visited the borders of the United States again. He did pray that war never visited again. Well, most of him did, anyhow.

The next morning, he put on a pair of overalls and joined the rest of the crew of the test model in tearing down the barrel's engine. They would have done that in the field, too, with less leisure and fewer tools. The better a crew kept a barrel going, the less time the machine spent behind the lines and useless.

Morrell liked tinkering with mechanical things. Unlike the fluid world of war, repairs had straight answers. If you found what was wrong and fixed it, the machine would work every time. It didn't fight back and try to impose its own will-even if it did seem that way sometimes.

Michael Pound looked at the battered engine and sadly shook his head. "Ridden hard and put away wet," was the gunner's verdict.

"That's about the size of it, Sergeant," Morrell agreed. "It does a reasonably good job of making a White truck go. Trying to move this baby, though, it's underpowered and overstrained."

"We ought to build something bigger and stronger, then," Pound said. "Have you got the three-sixteenths wrench, sir?"

"Matter of fact, I do." Morrell passed it to him. He grinned while he did it. "You always make everything sound so easy, Sergeant-as if there weren't any steps between we ought to and doing something."

"Well, there shouldn't be," Pound said matter-of-factly. "If something needs doing, you go ahead and do it. What else?" He stared at Morrell with wide blue eyes. In his world, no steps lay between needing and doing. Morrell envied him.

Izzy Applebaum, the barrel's driver, laughed at Pound. "Things aren't that simple, Sarge," he said in purest New York. His eyes were narrow and dark and constantly moving, now here, now there, now somewhere else.

"Why ever not?" Pound asked in honest surprise. "Don't you think this barrel needs a stronger engine? If it does, we ought to build one. How complicated is that?" He attacked the crankcase with the wrench. It yielded to his straightforward assault.

Morrell wished all problems yielded to straightforward assault. "Some people don't want us to put any money at all in barrels," he pointed out, "let alone into better engines for them."

"Those people are fools, sir," Pound answered. "If they're not fools, they're knaves. Hang a few of them and the rest will quiet down soon enough."

"Tempting, ain't it?" Izzy Applebaum said with another laugh. "Only trouble is, they make lists of people who ought to get hanged, too, and we're on 'em. The company's better on their list than on ours, but none of them lists is any goddamn good. My folks were on the Czar's list before they got the hell out of Poland."

"Down south of us, the Freedom Party is making lists of people to hang," Morrell added. "I don't care for it, either."

Michael Pound was unperturbed. "Well, but they're a pack of wild-eyed fanatics, sir," he said. "Go ahead and tell me you don't think there are some people who'd be better off dead."

"It is tempting," Morrell admitted. He had his mental list, starting with several leading Socialist politicians. But, as Applebaum had said, he was on their list, too. "If you ask me, it's just as well nobody hangs anybody till a court says it's the right and proper thing to do."

"Have it your way, sir," Pound said with a broad-shouldered shrug, and then, a moment later, another one. "It's the law of the land, I suppose. But if I were king-"

"If you was king, I'd get the hell out of here faster than my old man got out of Poland," Izzy Abblebaum broke in.

The gunner looked aggrieved. He no doubt thought he'd make a good king. He'd done a fine job of commanding one barrel after Morrell got "killed." That didn't mean he could run roughshod over the world leading a brigade of them, even if he thought it did. Checking a gasket, Morrell reflected that nobody could do too much roughshod running in the USA; the Constitution kept such things from happening. If it sometimes left him frustrated… he'd just have to live with it. 'This lifter is shot," he said. "We have a spare part?"

"With this budget?" Applebaum said. "Are you kidding? We're lucky we've got the one that doesn't work." Morrell spent a long time pondering that, and never did straighten it out.

Nellie Jacobs felt harassed. Once Edna got Merle Grimes to pop the question, she hadn't wasted a minute. She'd said, "I do," and moved out. That meant Nellie had to try to run the coffeehouse and keep track of Clara-who at two was into everything-all by herself Either one of those would have been a full-time job. Trying to do both at once left her shellshocked.

Every once in a while, when things got more impossible than usual, she'd take Clara across the street to Hal's shop to let her husband keep track of the kid in between half-soling shoes and occasionally making fancy boots. On those days, she ended up tired and Hal exhausted instead of the other way round.

"Now I know why God fixed it up so that young people have most of the babies," she groaned after one particularly wearing day. "Folks our age don't have the gumption to keep up with 'em."

"I wish I could tell you you were wrong," Hal answered. He looked more like a tired grandfather than a father. He wasn't Nellie's age; he was better than ten years older. Having Clara around seemed to be making both her parents older still at a faster rate than usual.

"Shall I make us some more coffee?" Nellie asked. "It's either that or prop my eyelids up with toothpicks, I reckon."

"Go ahead and make it," Hal said. "You always make good coffee. But I do not think it will keep me awake. I do not think anything will keep me awake, not any more." He sighed. "And she sleeps through the night so well now, too."

"I know." Nellie would have groaned again, but lacked the energy. "If she didn't, I wouldn't just be tired-I'd be dead."

"I do love her-with all my heart I love her," Hal said. "But you are right-she can be a handful. Two handfiils, even. I will be very glad when she stops saying no to everything we tell her."

"You mean they stop saying no?" Nellie exclaimed in surprise more or less mock. "Hard to tell, if you go by Edna."

"Edna is fine," Hal said. "There is nothing wrong with Edna. You worry about her too much."