"No," Nicholas said. "They tried to contact him but they weren't able to. So they decided on their own."

"The dumb saps," Blair said, and cursed. "Lantano wouldn't have let them; I'm positive. He'd have been sore. But they were built to kill; I mean, a lot of leadies are veterans of the war: they have the reflex to destroy life. Unless their dominus tells them otherwise. But you're lucky to get away; that's dreadful--I mean, that gets me. It does."

"But," one of the other men said, "what he said about Yancy; how can that be?"

"I saw him," Nicholas repeated. "I know it was him."

Jack Blair said, quoting an obscure text, " 'I saw God. Do you doubt it? Do you dare to doubt it?' What kind of weapon did he, this guy who saved you, use? A laser pistol?"

"No. The leadies were pulverized. Into dust." He tried to make it clear, how violent and sudden an abolition of the two leadies it had been. "Just mounds," he said. "Of old dry flakes, like rust. Does that make any sense?"

"That's a Yance-man advanced type weapon, all right," Blair said, nodding slowly. "So it was a Yance-man who saved you; no extankers have that weapon; I don't even know what it's called but it's left over from the war I suppose--they've got a lot, and every now and then a couple of Yance-men who're neighbors get into a beef over the property line, you know, where one's land ends and the next guy's starts. And they make a dive for the open section of the weapons archives at the Agency in New York--that's where all that reading matter is put together--and they come flying back to their demesnes as fast as hell aboard those little flapples. And they lead their retinues of leadies into battle; it's really funny--they plug away at each other, potshot like mad, destroy a dozen or so leadies or maim them, and even a Yance-man now and then gets it. And then they send the maimed leady down below to the nearest tank to fix it up in its shops. And they're always sequestering the brand-new leadies made down below, to add to their retinues."

Another of the bearded men chimed in, "Some Yance-men at their demesnes have like two thousand leadies. A whole army."

"Brose for instance," Blair said, "he's supposed to have ten or eleven thousand, but technically _all_ the leadies in Wes-Dem are under the military command of General Holt; he can pre-empt, you know: supersede the orders of any Yance-man, any dominus of a demesne, and call for its leadies. Except of course Brose." His voice sank. "No one can supersede Brose. Brose is above them all, like for instance he's the only one who has access to the weapons archives where the advanced types, the ones that never saw action, the really terrible prototypes are, that if they had used there'd be no planet. The war just barely stopped in time. Another month and--nothing." He gestured.

"I wish," Nicholas said, "I had a cigarette."

The four bearded men consulted, and then, reluctantly, a pack of Lucky Strikes was held out to Nicholas; he carefully took only one of the cigarettes, let them regain the remainder of the precious pack.

"We're short on everything," Blair said apologetically as he lit Nicholas' cigarette for him. "See, this new dominus who's starting his demesne here, this David Lantano; he's not a bad guy. He sort of, like I said, holds his leadies back, when he's around to do it, so they don't wipe us out or get us into one of those conapts; he sort of looks out for us. He gives us food." Blair was silent for a time, then; his expression, to Nicholas, was unreadable. "And cigarettes. Yeah, he's really trying to help us. And pills; he personally drops by with anti-radiation pills; they help restore the red blood cells or something. He takes them himself. I mean, he really has to."

"He's sick," another bearded ex-tanker added. "He's badly burned; see, the law requires he's got to be here on the hot-spot twelve hours out of every twenty-four; he can't get down subsurface into cellars like we can; we stay below--we just came up because we spotted you."

To Blair he said, nervously, "In fact we better get back to the hovel right now. We've been exposed long enough for one day." He gestured at Nicholas. "And him, especially; he's been walking on the surface for hours."

"You're going to take me in?" Nicholas said. "I can live with you fellas; is that what I'm to understand?"

"Sure." Blair nodded. "That's how our colony formed, here; you think we're going to boot you out? Why would we?" He seemed genuinely angry. "For some leady to kill, or--" He broke off. "Some charity that would be. You're welcome to stay here all you want. Later, after you know more, if you want to turn yourself in, you can go live in a conapt; must be hundreds of thousands of ex-tankers in those conapts--that's up to you entirely. But _wait_. Get your bearings." He started off along a meager trail among the rubble, a sort of goat path; the others, including Nicholas, followed single file. "It takes weeks sometimes," Blair said, over his shoulder, "to really sober up, to shake off what you've been fed over what they call the 'coax' for fifteen years." Pausing, halting for a moment and turning, he said earnestly, "Intellectually maybe you accept it, but I know; emotionally you can't right away, it's just too much. There's no Yancy and never was--_never_ was, Mr. St. Nicholas--"

"No," Nicholas corrected. "Nicholas St. James."

"There never was a Yancy. There _was_ a war, though, anyhow, at first; as you can see." He gestured at the miles of ruins ahead of them. At Cheyenne. "But Yancy was made up by Stanton Brose, based on an idea of a West German film producer of the last century; you probably have heard of him, only he died before your time, but they still were showing his documentary, _The Winning in the West_, that twenty-five part series on TV about World War Two. I remember it when I was a kid."

"Gottleib Fischer," Nicholas said. "Sure." He had seen that great classic documentary, not once but several times; it was considered in the same category with _The Blue Angel_ and _All Quiet On the Western Front_ and _The Dizzy Man_. "And he made up Yancy? Gottleib Fischer?" He followed the four of them, eager and anxious; perplexed. "But why?"

"To rule," Blair said, without stopping; the four of them hurried, now, eager to get back down into what they called their hovel, their deep-chamber which had not been contaminated by the H-bombs that had made this region what it was.

"'Rule,'" Nicholas echoed, understanding. "I see."

"Only as you maybe remember, Fischer disappeared on that illfated flight to Venus; he was eager to be one of the first travelers into space, he just had to go, and that was that, because--"

"I remember," Nicholas said. The event had made huge headlines in the homeopapes at the time. Gottlieb Fischer's untimely tragic death; his spaceship's fuel igniting during reentry... Fischer had died in his late thirties, and so there had been no more documentaries, no more films equal to _The Winning in the West_. After that only nonentities had followed, except, slightly before the war, the interesting experimental films of some Russian, a Soviet film producer whose work had been banned from Wes-Dem... what had been his name?

As he struggled to keep up with the swiftly moving bearded men, Nicholas remembered the Russian film producer's name. Eisenbludt. The man Blair had just now said did the faking of the war scenes for the tankers, in both Wes-Dem and Pac-Peop, the visual "confirmation" of the lies that comprised Yancy's speeches. So at last the people of Wes-Dem had gotten to see Eisenbludt's films.

Obviously there was no more hostility between East and West. Eisenbludt was no longer an "enemy" film producer as he had been at the time Nicholas St. James and his wife Rita and his kid brother Stu had been prodded virtually at gun-point into descending into the Tom Mix for what they had believed, at the time, to be for perhaps a year at the longest... or, as real pessimists had forecast, two years.