"Something like that," Grady agreed. "We limp back to Pearl Harbor if we can, we go into dry-dock for six months or however long it takes to patch us up again, and then we go back to war." His features, lean, scholarly-more a professor's face than a naval officer's-went grim. "We got off lucky. They sank the Denver, and it doesn't look like many of her crew had time to get off before she went down. Not a better cruiser in the Pacific Fleet than the Denver."

"They were laying for us," Carsten said. "They showed the fleet and the aeroplane to bring us out, and then-"

"I'd say you're right," Grady replied. "The ships kept the submarines in fuel and supplies, too: not likely they'd have the range to go from Manila to here and back without stocking up along the way. I hope the rest of the fleet manages to punish them. We're out of the fight for now."

Out of the fight. The words seemed to echo in the sponson as Grady left to pass the news to the rest of the gun crews under his command. The Dakota swung through a long, slow turn, as awkward as a horse with a lame hind leg, and began limping back toward Pearl Harbor. They hadn't done anything wrong except pursue too eagerly, but they were, sure as hell, out of the fight.

"Fuck it. We're alive," Luke Hoskins said.

Sam looked back at the doorway one last time. He wouldn't have to run out through it, hoping he could make it up on deck before water or fire engulfed him. When you got down to it, that wasn't such a bad bargain. "We're alive," he repeated, and the words sounded very fine.

Mary McGregor bounced up and down on the seat of the wagon beside her father. "What are we going to get?" she said. She'd been saying that ever since they'd left the farm for the trip into Rosenfeld, Manitoba.

As he'd done every time she asked, Arthur McGregor answered, "I don't know. You're the one who's turning seven today. I've got fifty cents in my pocket, and you can spend it any way you please."

"I'll get a store doll, one with real glass eyes," Mary declared. Then she shook her head, making her auburn curls fly around her face. "No, I won't. I'll get candy. How much candy can I get for fifty cents, Pa?"

"Enough to make you sick for a week," McGregor answered, laughing. His youngest child was full of extravagant notions. He figured a few more years of living on the farm would cure her of most of them.

Off to the north, artillery rumbled. Mary took no notice of it, prattling on cheerfully about everything on which she might spend her half-dollar. If she got everything she wanted, it could easily have cost McGregor fifty times that. Moreover, her choice was liable to be severely limited: if Henry Gibbon didn't have it in his general store, she couldn't get it. Her father let her go on all the same. Dreams were free, even if presents weren't.

The artillery rumbled again. Arthur McGregor sighed. Though dreams were free, they didn't always come true. When the Anglo-Canadian offensive opened and pushed the Americans south from Winnipeg, he'd dreamt they would throw the Yankees out of Canada altogether. But Rosenfeld had never seen a single khaki uniform, not unless the Yanks had shipped prisoners through. The town and his farm hadn't even come within artillery range of the front. It was high summer now, and everything around these parts remained under the muscular thumb of the

Coming into Rosenfeld, he saw just how muscular that thumb had be come. Soldiers in green-gray crowded the streets, some no doubt going up toward the front, some coming back for relief. Their boots, and the tires of motorcars and great grunting White trucks, made dust swirl like fog all through the town.

They had soldiers serving as traffic policemen, now halting a stream of trucks so an officer in an automobile could cut across, now halting a column of men who looked fresh off the train so more trucks could get through, and now holding up McGregor to let another column of soldiers, these men veterans, go by. From the veterans, whose uniforms were sun-bleached and imperfectly clean, rose a smell that put him in mind of the farmhouse the morning before the bathtub got filled. He'd smelled it in barracks, too, and especially out on manoeuvres-men on the front line had little incentive and less ability to keep clean.

"Get off the main road, Canuck," one of the soldiers called, pointing the wagon onto a little side street. There wasn't any particular animosity in the or der. McGregor could even see the need for it. But "What's a Canuck, Pa?" Mary asked as he stopped disrupting traffic.

"You are," he answered, getting out of the wagon to tie the horse to a hitching post. "I am." He picked her up and put her down on the plank sidewalk. "It's what Americans call Canadians when they don't like us much."

"Oh." She thought about that, then nodded. "You mean the way we call them goddamn stinking Yanks?"

"Yes, just like that," he said, and coughed. "But we don't call them that where they can hear us. And, for that matter, who called them that where you could hear him?"

"It wasn't a him-it was Ma," Mary answered, which made McGregor cough all over again. He'd have to have a talk with Maude when he got home. Mary went on, "How come they get to call us names whenever they please and we don't get to call them names whenever we please? That's not fair."

"Because they have more guns than we do, and they drove our soldiers out of this part of the country," he told her. "If you have more guns in a war, you get to say what's fair."

She chewed on that. To his relief, she didn't argue with him about it. He took her hand and walked toward the general store. Several U.S. soldiers smiled at her along the way. A lot of them weren't far from McGregor's age: reservists called up for the war, probably with daughters as old as Mary or maybe even older. She took no notice of the Americans. She made a point of taking no notice of the Americans.

"Mornin', Arthur," Henry Gibbon said when they went into the general store. Gibbon beamed down at Mary. "And a good mornin' to you, little lady."

"Good morning, Mr. Gibbon," she answered, very politely: the storekeeper, being a Canadian, deserved not only notice but respect.

"Reason we're here," McGregor said, "is that somebody here just turned seven years old, and she's got half a dollar to spend however she pleases. She'll be wanting to look at your toys and dolls and candy, unless I miss my guess."

"We can probably do somethin' along those lines," Gibbon said. He beck oned Mary over to the jars of sweets on his counter. "Why don't you have a look at these here, little lady, and I'll see what I've got in the way of toys." He glanced up at Mary's father. "We're apt to be a bit picked over, things bein' like they is."

"I understand that," he answered. "But if anybody in Rosenfeld has anything good, you're the man."

"That I am," the storekeeper agreed solemnly. He had just turned around to see what a pasteboard box held when something exploded across the street. The plate-glass window at the front of the general store shattered, fragments flying inward. One glittering shard flicked McGregor's sleeve; another stuck out of the floor boards bare inches from his foot.

Mary screamed. He ran to her and scooped her up, afraid some of the shrapnel-like slivers of glass had cut or stabbed her. But she wasn't bleeding anywhere, though glass dust sparkled in her hair like diamonds. She trembled in his arms.

"Holy Jesus!" Henry Gibbon said. He looked at what had been his window and said "Holy Jesus!" again, louder. Then he looked out through what had been his window and said "Holy Jesus!" a third time, louder still. This time, he amplified it somewhat: "That's the Register office, blown to hell and gone."