“You won’t be able to eat chocolate here, either.”

“What a hell of a world!” O’Brien said. “What a hell of a world!”

“We’re here. We might as well make the best of it.”

He stopped talking because a number of strangers had come into the room. There were twenty, most of them dark-skinned and dark-haired, but a few had coloring pale as O’Brien’s. They were in light green uniforms and brown leather knee-length boots. Their trousers were skin-tight and piped with gold thread along the seam. The coats were swallow-tailed, loose around the chest and sleeves, with four large button-down pockets. Their helmets were conical, like Chinese coolie hats but curving downward in the back to protect the neck. The officers wore symbolic feathers of steel affixed to the helmet front. All carried breech-loading single-shot rifles and slightly curving swords about four feet long. All were beardless.

Their commanding officer talked for a while with Dzikohses. He looked frequently at the Americans. The officer, a kidziaskos (from the Greek chiliarchos), suddenly frowned. He left Dzikohses and strode to the fliers. He demanded that Two Hawks hand over his gun. Two Hawks hesitated, then shrugged. He had to comply. After making sure that the safety of the automatic was on, he handed the gun to the officer. The kidziaskos turned it over and over and finally stuck it in his belt.

Dzikohses and his guerrillas left; the fliers and Ilmika Thorrsstein were escorted from the house by the soldiers. Again, they marched by night and slept as well as they could during the day. Apparently, the enemy had overrun this area but did not have a tight control as yet. The party avoided all Perkunishan patrols but could not get away from the swarms of huge mosquitoes. All were forced to apply a thick coating of the stinking grease every day.

Two days after they had separated from the guerrillas, O’Brien began to suffer from chills, fever, and sweating. Two Hawks thought the sergeant had malaria. The medico with the troops confirmed his diagnosis.

“For God’s sake, don’t they have any quinine?” O’Brien said. “You’d think that in a country where they have malaria, they’d...”

“There isn’t any,” Two Hawks said. “It was unknown on our Earth until after South America was discovered. So...”

“What’d they do before Columbus? They must’ve had something!”

“I don’t know. Whatever they had, it wasn’t very effective.”

He did not tell O’Brien that malaria had been a great killer in the Mediterranean region of their Earth. In fact, it still took a large annual toll. He was worried, not only for O’Brien but for himself.

The malaria parasite could kill a man if he got no medical aid, especially since the parasite of this world might be even more deadly than those of his.

The soldiers made a rude stretcher from two branches and a blanket. The sergeant was placed on it; Two Hawks took one end of the stretcher and a soldier the other. The troops relieved each other at fifteen-minute intervals, but Two Hawks had to stay at his task until his hands could lock themselves around the branches no more, his legs were like stone, and his back felt as if it would unhinge at the next step.

The medico gave O’Brien water and two large pills, one red, one green, every hour. Whatever the ingredients, they had little effect. O’Brien continued to chill, burn, and sweat in turn for four hours. Then the attacks ceased, as could be expected. Although he was weak, he was forced to rise and walk, with Two Hawks supporting him. The officer made it plain that he wanted no lagging. Two Hawks urged O’Brien to keep going. The officer would have no compunctions about killing a possible spy who was holding them up. His main concern evidently was in getting the Blodland woman through the enemy and to the capital city.

After four days of travel, during which O’Brien became sicker and weaker, they came to their first village. They walked during the daytime hours the last 12 hours. The enemy must not have advanced very near to this point. Here Two Hawks saw the first railroad and locomotive. The locomotive looked like an engine circa 1890, except that the huge smokestack was shaped like a demon’s face. The cars of the train were painted scarlet and covered with good luck signs, including the swastika.

The village was the terminus for the line. Thirty houses and stores were parallel with both sides of the tracks. Two Hawks gazed curiously at the houses and the people who ran out to greet them. The buildings reminded him of the false-fronted structures seen in Western movies. However, each had a wooden and brightly painted carving of a tutelary spirit in front of it and also one like a ship’s figurehead near the top of the false front. The men wore heavy boots and shirts of cloth or cowhide or deerskin. The shirts hung outside their belts. The women wore bead-fringed, low-cut blouses of cloth and ankle-length skirts. Small stone carvings or sea shells were sewn in various patterns on the skirts. Both sexes had long hair falling to the shoulders; the German-helmet haircuts of the guerrillas and the soldiers, Two Hawks thought, must be military requirements.

There were a few old men and women, all of whose faces and hands were tattooed in blue and red. He supposed that this skin decoration had been a universal custom among the Hotinohsonih. Something, possibly the influence of the white West European nations, had caused the tattooing to die out.

The officer politely asked the Thorrsstein woman to step aboard a passenger car. He was not so polite to the two Americans. He shouted at them to go three cars back. Two Hawks pretended not to understand, since he did not want his captors to know he was gaining fluency in their tongue. Some soldiers shoved the two toward the car. Two Hawks, assisting the chattering shaking sergeant, went up the steps and into the mobile prison.

The car was bare of furniture and crowded with wounded soldiers. Two Hawks found a place for O’Brien to stretch out on the wooden floor. Then he looked for water for O’Brien, but discovered that it was available only in the next car. A man with an arm in a bloody sling and a bloody bandage around his head accompanied Two Hawks. The wounded man held a long knife in his good hand and promised to cut Two Hawks’ throat if he so much as looked like he meant to escape. He did not leave the side of the prisoners during the rest of the long trip to ‘Estokwa.

This took five days and nights. Many times, the train was shifted to a sidetrack to allow trains loaded with soldiers to pass westwards. During one day, nobody in the hospital car had water.

O’Brien almost died that day. But the train finally stopped near a creek, and the bottles and canteens were refilled.

The car was jammed, hot, noisy, and malodorous. A man with a badly gangrened leg lay next to the sergeant. His stench was so nauseating that Two Hawks could not eat. The third day, the soldier died and was buried four hours later in the woods near the tracks while the locomotive puffed impatiently on a spur.

Surprisingly, O’Brien improved. By the time they got to ‘Estokwa, the fever, chill, and sweating were gone. He was pale, weak, and gaunt, but he had beaten his sickness. Two Hawks did not know whether the recovery was due to the Irishman’s basic toughness, the pills which the medico had continued to dose him with, or a combination of the two. It was also possible that he had been afflicted with something besides malaria. It did not matter; he had health again, even if only a precarious one.