Well, that was what the test model was for: to discover all the things he hadn't thought of, and nobody else had, either. With luck, he'd be able to get rid of them before the new model went into production. He knew perfectly well that he wouldn't find them all; he was human, and therefore fallible. But he'd do the best job he could.

He'd do the best job he could of getting this beast off the flatcar, too. All he had to do was back straight. If he looked ahead, he ought to be able to judge how well he was doing that. And he couldn't keep sitting up here forever. His left foot came down on the clutch. He threw the shift lever into reverse and gave the barrel a little gas.

It was peppier than the ones in which he'd fought the Great War: not peppy like a fancy motorcar, not peppy enough to suit him, but peppier. It went down the ramp faster than he'd expected. Almost before he knew it, he was on the ground. From the flatcar, Major Wilkinson waved and Lieutenant Jenkins gave him a thumbs-up.

"Come on!'" he shouted to Jenkins over the rumble of the engine-which seemed a lot louder with his head out the hatch. The lieutenant jumped down from the train, clambered up the side of the barrel, and scrambled into the turret through a hatch on the roof.

"There's no ammunition in here," he said indignantly. Morrell snorted-as if anyone would be crazy enough to put ammunition in a barrel that would be traveling by train. Accidents didn't happen very often, but who would take the chance on sending an expensive test model up in smoke? Then Jenkins went on, "I wanted to shoot up the landscape as we drove along," and Morrell snorted again, this time on a different note. His subordinate was just acting like a kid again.

Morrell put the barrel into the lowest of its four forward speeds. It rattled over the railroad tracks and off toward the muddy prairie northwest of Fort Leavenworth. He built up to full speed as fast as he could. If the speedometer wasn't lying, he was doing better than ten miles an hour, more than twice as fast as a Great War barrel could manage on similar ground. The power-to-weight ratio of the test model was supposed to be the same as that of the eventual production machine. If so, these barrels would do tricks their ancestors had never imagined. They still weren't fast enough to suit him.

"Hell of a ride!" Jenkins shouted, sounding as exhilarated as a skilled horseman on a half-broken stallion. "Hell of a ride! Now we've got the cavalry back again, by Jesus!"

"That's part of the idea," Morrell said. Men on horseback had been poised throughout the Great War, ready to exploit whatever breakthroughs the infantry could force. But infantry alone hadn't been able to force breakthroughs, and cavalry melted under machine-gun fire like snow in Death Valley summer. The old barrels had broken through Confederate lines, but hadn't always been swift enough to exploit to the fullest the breaches they made.

Maybe these machines would, even in their present state. In his mind's eye, Morrell saw barrels clawing at the flank of a foe in retreat, shooting up his soldiers, wrecking his supply lines, keeping reinforcements from reaching the field, pushing the front forward by leaps and bounds, not plodding steps.

It was a heady vision, so heady it almost made Morrell see with his mind's eye to the exclusion of the pair at the front of his head. Had he not paid attention to the gauges in front of him, he would have missed noting how little fuel the test model carried in its tank. Stranding himself out on the prairie was not what he had in mind when it came to getting acquainted with the new machine. Reluctantly, he steered for the muddy field where half a dozen survivors of the Great War sat.

He turned off the engine, climbed out of the hatch, and got down off the test model. Lije Jenkins came down beside him. The youngster looked from the new barrel to the old ones. "It's like stacking the first Duryea up against an Oldsmobile, isn't it, sir?" he said.

"Something like that, anyway," Morrell said. "Of course, there is one other difference: there really are Oldsmobiles, but this baby"-again, he remembered in the nick of time not to rap his knuckles on the hull-"is just pretend, for now."

"I hope we don't take twenty years to get the real ones, sir," Jenkins said.

"So do I, Lieutenant, with all my heart. We may need them sooner than that," Morrell said. He started off toward the barracks. Jenkins tagged along after him.

As Morrell walked, he wondered what he could tell Agnes Hill about his new toy. She knew, in a general way, what his duties were. Being a soldier's widow, she also knew not to ask too many questions about what exactly he did. But the next time he saw her, he was going to be excited. He wanted to share that excitement. He also needed not to talk too much. He was awfully glad he'd gone to that dance with Jenkins. He wanted to go right on being glad. The only place where taking chances was a good idea was on the battlefield.

A fat man with a nasty cough came up to the counter of the drugstore where Reggie Bartlett worked. "Help you?" Reggie asked.

"Hope to God you can/' the man answered, hacking again. "If I don't shake this damn thing, it's going to drive me right up a tree." He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and tapped one in the palm of his hand.

"Here you go." Reggie handed him a box of matches with HARMON'S DRUGS printed on the top-good advertising. He waited till the man lit up, then went on, "I can give you a camphorated salve to rub on your chest and under your nose. And we've got a new cough elixir in. It's got a kind of denatured morphine in it-not nearly as strong, and not habit-forming, but it does the job."

"Give me some of the salve, and a bottle of that stuff, too," the sufferer said. He coughed some more and shook his head. "This is killing me. I can't even enjoy my smokes any more."

"Another thing you can do is, you can set a pot of water on the stove to boil, put in some of the salve, and breathe in the steam," Bartlett said. "That'll help clear out your lungs, too."

"Good idea," the fat man answered. His face took on a kind of apprehension that had nothing to do with his ailment. "Now- what do I owe you?"

"Two thousand for the salve," Reggie said. The customer nodded in some relief. Reggie continued, "The elixir, though, it's new stuff, like I said, and it's expensive: $25,000."

"Could be worse," the fat man said. He took three $10,000 banknotes from his wallet and shoved them across the counter at Bartlett. Reggie gave him three $1,000 banknotes in change. As the fat man tucked them away, he shook his head in wonder. "It's like play money, ain't it? Reckon I'm a millionaire, and a whole hell of a lot of good it's doing me." He coughed again, then picked up the squat blue bottle of salve and the taller one of the elixir. "Much obliged to you, young fellow, and I hope these here give me some relief." As he headed for the door, he called a last word over his shoulder: "Freedom!"

Bartlett started violently. He had all he could do to hold his tongue, and indeed to keep from running after the fat man and screaming curses at him. "Christ!" he said. His hands were trembling.

Jeremiah Harmon looked up from the tablets he was compounding. "Something troubling you, Reggie?" He was in his late forties, with a brown mustache beginning to go gray, and so quiet Bartlett was always straining to hear him. That wasn't bad, not so far as Reggie was concerned. He'd walked out on McNally, his previous employer, because the man wouldn't stop riding him.

"Yes, sir," he answered. "That fellow who just left used the Freedom Party salute when he went out the door. I don't fancy those people, not even a little I don't."

"Can't say I do, either," Harmon said, "but I doubt they're worth getting very excited about." As far as he was concerned, nothing was worth getting very excited about.