“He’s hurt pretty bad,” Johnny said when they hurried over to examine the injured man. “This compress hasn’t been changed in days.”

Gordon had seen plenty of wounded men in the years since his sophomore class had been drafted into the militia. He had learned a lot of bush diagnosis while serving with Lieutenant Van’s platoon. A glance told him that this fellow’s bullet wounds might have healed, eventually, with proper treatment. But the smell of death now hung over the still figure. It rose from limbs suppurated with marks of torture.

“I hope he lied to them,” Johnny muttered as he labored to make the dying prisoner comfortable. Gordon helped fit their blankets around him. He was puzzled over where the fellow had come from. He did not look like a Willametter. And unlike most Camas and Roseburg men, he had obviously been clean shaven until recently. In spite of his ill treatment, there was too much meat on his bones for him to have been a serf.

Gordon stopped suddenly, rocking back on his haunches. His eyes closed and opened. He stared. “Johnny, look here. Is this what I think it is?”

Johnny peered where he pointed, then pulled back the blankets for a better view. “Well I’ll be… Gordon, this looks like a uniform!”

Gordon nodded. A uniform… and clearly one of postwar making. It was colored and cut totally unlike anything the Holnists wore, or for that matter, anything either of them had ever seen in Oregon before.

On one shoulder, the dying man wore a patch embroidered with a symbol Gordon recognized from long ago… a brown grizzly bear striding upon a red stripe… all against a field of gold.

A while later word arrived that Gordon was wanted again. The usual escort came for him by torchlight. “That man in there is dying,” he told the head guard.

The taciturn, three-earring Holnist shrugged. “So? Woman’s comin’ to tend him. Now move. General’s waitin’.”

On their way up the moonlit path they encountered a figure coming down the other way. The slope-shouldered drudge stepped aside and waited for the men to pass, eyes downcast to the tray of rolled bandages and unguents she held. None of the aloof guards seemed to notice her at all.

At the last moment, however, she looked up at Gordon. He recognized the same small woman with gray-streaked brown hair, the one who had taken and repaired his uniform some days back. He tried to smile at her as they passed, but it only seemed to unnerve her. She ducked her head and scuttled back into the shadows.

Saddened, Gordon continued up the path with his escort. She had reminded him a little of Abby. One of his worries had to do with his friends back in Pine View. The Holnist scouts who discovered his journal had corne very close to the friendly little village. It wasn’t only the frail civilization in the Willamette that was in terrible danger.

Nobody anywhere was safe anymore, he knew — except, perhaps, George Powhatan, living safe atop Sugar-loaf Mountain, tending his bees and beer while the rest of what was left of the world burned.

“I’m getting tired of your stalling, Krantz,” General Macklin told him when the guards had left the book-lined former ranger station.

“You put me in a hard position, General. I’m studying the book Colonel Bezoar lent me, trying to understand—”

“Cut the crap, will you?” Macklin approached until his face was two feet from Gordon’s. Even looking upward, the Holnist’s strangely contorted visage was intimidating. “I know men, Krantz. You’re strong all right, and you’d make a good vassal. But you’re all mucked up with guilt and other ‘civilized’ poisons. So much so that I’m beginning to think maybe you’ll be useless, after all.”

The implication was direct. Gordon forced himself not to show the weakness in his knees.

“You can be the Baron of Corvallis, Krantz. A senior lord in our new empire. You can even hold onto some of your quaint, old-fashioned sentiments, if you want… and if you’re strong enough to enforce them. You want to be nice to your own vassals? You want post offices?

“We might even find a use for that ‘Restored United States’ of yours.” Macklin gave Gordon a toothy, odorous smile. “That’s why only Charlie and I know about that little black journal of yours, until we can check the idea out.

“It’s not because I like you, understand. It’s because we’d benefit a little if you cooperated. You might rule those techs in Corvallis better than any of my boys could. We might even decide to keep that Cyclops machine going, if it paid its keep.”

So the Holnists hadn’t yet pierced the legend of the great computer. Not that it mattered much. They never had really cared about technology, except what was necessary to make war. Science benefitted everyone too much, especially the weak.

Macklin picked up the fireplace poker and slapped it into his left palm. “The alternative, of course, is that we’ll take Corvallis anyway, this spring. Only if we have to do it our way, it’ll burn. And there won’t be no post offices anywhere, boy. No smart-ass machines.”

With the poker Macklin reached out and touched a sheet of paper on the desk. A pen and ink pot lay next to it. Gordon well knew what the man expected of him.

If all he had to do was agree to the scheme, Gordon would have done so at once. He would have played along until he had a chance to make a break for it.

But Macklin was too canny. He wanted Gordon to write to the Council in Corvallis, convincing them to surrender several key towns as an act of good faith before he would be released.

Of course he had only the General’s say-so that he would be made “Baron of Corvallis” after that. He doubted Macklin’s word was any better than his own.

“Perhaps you don’t think we’re strong enough to take your pathetic ‘Army of the Willamette’ without your help?” Macklin laughed. He turned to the door.

“Shawn!”

Macklin’s burly bodyguard was in the room so swiftly and smoothly it seemed almost a blur. He closed the door and marched up to the General, snapping stiffly to attention.

“I’m going to let you in on something, Krantz. Shawn and I, and that mean cat who captured you, are the last of our kind.”

Macklin confided. “It was really hush-hush stuff, but you might have heard some of the rumors. The experiments led to some special fighting units, unlike any ever known before.”

Gordon blinked. Suddenly it all made sense, the General’s uncanny speed, the tracery of scars under his skin and his two aides’,

“Augments!”

Macklin nodded. “Smart boy. You paid attention good, for a college kid weakening his mind with psychology and ethics”

“But we all thought they were only rumors! You mean they really took soldiers and modified them so—”

He stopped, looking at the strangely knotted muscles along Shawn’s bare arms. As impossible as it seemed, the story had to be true. There was no other rational explanation.

“They tried us out for the first time in Kenya. And the government did like the results in combat. But I guess they weren’t too happy with what happened after peace broke out and they brought us home.”

Gordon stared as Macklin held out the poker to his bodyguard, who took one end — not in his massive fist but between two fingers and a thumb. Macklin took the other end in a similar grip.

They pulled. Without even breathing hard, Macklin kept talking. “The experiment went on through the late eighties and early nineties. Special Forces, mostly. They chose gung ho types like us. Naturals, in other words.”

The steel poker did not rock or shake. Almost totally rigid, it began to stretch.

“Oh we tore up those Cubans good,” Macklin chuckled, looking only at Gordon. “But the Army didn’t like how some of the vets acted when the action ended and we all went home.