“When I finished I read it over and realized it was a farce.” He tossed the manuscript on the desk as if he were discarding unwanted fourth class mail.

“You see, I confused the tactical with the strategic. I think we all did. The truth is this. Once both sides had maximum capability in hydrogen weapons and efficient means of delivering them there was no sane alternative to peace.

“Every maxim of war was archaic. The rules of Clausewitz, Mahan, all of them were obsolete as the Code Duello. War was no longer an instrument of national polity, only an instrument for national suicide. War itself was obsolete. So my `Footnote’ deals with tactical palavers of no real importance. We might as well have been playing on the rug with lead soldiers.”

The admiral rose and unkinked his back. “I think most of us sensed this truth, but we could not accept it. You see, no matter how well we understood the truth it was necessary that the Kremlin understand it too. It takes two to make a peace but only one to make a war. So all we could do, while vowing not to strike first, was line up our lead soldiers.”

“That was all you could do?” Lib asked.

“All. The answer was not in the Pentagon, or even in the White House. I’m looking elsewhere. One place, here.” He tapped Gibbon. “There are odd similarities between the end of the Pax Romana and the end of the Pax Americana which inherited Pax Britannica. For instance, the prices paid for high office. When it became common to spend a million dollars to elect senators from moderately populous states, I think that should have been a warning to us. For instance, free pap for the masses. Bread and circuses. Roman spectacles and our spectaculars. Largesse from the conquering proconsuls and television giveaways from the successful lipstick king. To understand the present you must know the past, yet it is only part of the answer and I will never discover it all. I have not the years.”

Randy saw that the Admiral was tired. “I guess we’d better get back,” he said. “Thanks for an entertaining evening.”

“Next time you come over,” Hazzard said, “I want you to look at my invention.”

“Are you inventing something too? Everybody’s inventing something.”

“Yes. It’s called a sailboat. It is a means of propulsion that replaces the gasoline kicker. I sacrificed my flagpole and patio awning to make it. The cutting and sewing was done by Florence

Wechek and Missouri and Hannah Henry. I can now recommend them as experienced sailmakers.”

“Thanks, Sam.” Randy grinned. “That’s a wonderful invention and will become popular. I know I’m going to get one right away, and I will use your firm of sailmakers.”

They walked to the path along the river bank. Swinging at its buoy Randy saw the Admiral’s compact little cruiser with covered foredeck, useless kicker removed, a slender mast arcing its tip at a multitude of stars. There were many sailboats on Florida’s lakes, but Randy had seen very few in the upper reaches of the St. Johns, or on the Timucuan.

“I love the Admiral,” Lib said. “I worry about him. I wonder whether he gets enough to eat.”

“The Henrys see that he eats. And Missouri keeps his place neat. The Henrys love him too.”

“As long as we have men like that I can’t believe we’re so decadent. We won’t go like Rome, will we?”

He didn’t answer. He swung her around to face him and circled her waist with his hands. His fingers almost met, she was so slim. He said, “I love you. I worry about you. I wonder whether I tell you enough how I love you and want you and need you and how I am diminished and afraid when you are not with me and how I am multiplied when you are here.”

His arms went around her and he felt her body arch to him, molding itself against him. “There never seems to be enough time,” he said, “but tonight there is time. When we get home.”

She said, “Yes, Randy.” They walked on, his arm around her waist. “This is a bad time for love,” she said. “Oh, I don’t mean tonight is a bad time, I mean the times. When you love someone, that should be what you think of most, the first thing when you wake in the morning and the last thing before you sleep at night. Before The Day that’s how I thought of you. Did you know that? First in the morning, last at night.”

Randy knew, without her saying it, that it must be the same for her as it was for him. At day’s end a man was exhausted physically, mentally, emotionally. Each sun heralded a new crisis and each night he bedded with old, relentless fears. He awoke thinking of food and fell onto his couch at night still hungry, his head whirling with problems unsolved and dangers unparried. The Germans, in their years of methodical madness, had discovered in their concentration camps that when a man’s diet fell below fifteen hundred calories his desire and capacity for all emotions dwindled. Randy guessed that he managed to consume almost fifteen hundred calories each day in fish and fruit alone. His vigor was being expended in survival, he decided. That, and worry for the lives dependent upon him. Even now, he could not exclude worry for Dan Gunn from his mind.

The hodgepodge outlines of the Henry place loomed out of the darkness above them. They were within fifty yards of the barn and Ben Franklin was somewhere in that shadow, shotgun over his knees, enjoined to silence, alert to shoot anything that moved; and they were moving, silhouetted against the star-silvered river. He stopped and held Lib fast. “Ben!” he called. “Ben Franklin! Do not answer. Do not answer. This is Randy. We’re on our way home.”

They walked on.

“You know, you sounded just like that radio call on the Air Force frequency,” Lib said.

“I did sound like that, didn’t I?” He smiled in the darkness, snapped his fingers, and said, “I think I know now what was going on. It wasn’t the way Sam thought. It was just the other way around. Big Rock was the plane, and Sky Queen the base. Big Rock had been somewhere and was coming home and was telling Sky Queen not to shoot, just like I told Ben Franklin.”

“Perhaps you’re right. Not that it matters to us. I’ve heard them up there on still nights, but they never come low enough to see. The Admiral hears them talk on the radio but they never have a word for us. Maybe they’ve forgotten us. Maybe they’ve forgotten all the contaminated zones. We’re unclean. It makes me feel lonely and, well, unwanted. Isn’t that silly? Does it make you feel like that?”

“They’ll come back,” he said. “They have to. We’re still a part of the United States, aren’t we?”

They came to the path that led though their grove from house to dock. “Let’s go out on the dock,” Lib said. “I like it out there. No sound, not even the crickets. Just the river whispering around the pilings.”

“All right.”

They turned left instead of right. As their feet touched the planking the ship’s bell spoke. It clanged three times rapidly, then twice more. It kept on ringing. “Oh, damn it to hell!” Randy grabbed her hand and they started the run for the house, an uphill quarter mile in sand and darkness. After a hundred yards she released his hand and fell behind.

By the time he reached the back steps Randy couldn’t climb them. He was wobbling and his knees had jellied, but before The Day he could not have run the distance at all. He paused, sobbing, and waited for Lib. The Model-A wasn’t in the driveway or the garage. He concluded that Dan hadn’t returned and something frightful had happened to Helen, Peyton, or Bill McGovern.

He was wrong. It had happened to Dan. Dan was in the dining room, a ruined hulk of man overflowing the captain’s chair, arms hanging loose, legs outstretched, shirt blood-soaked, beard blood-matted. Where his right eye should have been, bulged a blue-black lump large as half an apple. His nose was twisted and enlarged, his left eye only a slit in swollen, discolored flesh. He’s wrecked the car, Randy thought. He went through the windshield and his face took along the steering wheel.