“Yes, Captain,” Habakkuk said; he saluted, then turned his horse and spurred it to a gallop, back toward Marshside.

By the time the fifteen minutes were past the two groups had separated completely, a widening gap forming between them, and Habakkuk was in the midst of the retreating group; he was not yet trying to turn them, but merely riding along until the moment seemed right. At the head of his own half John was trying to pick up the pace, as his reduced force was still far from any decent shelter, anything that might shield them from whatever mysterious power had sliced up a dozen men and set three score wagons ablaze.

The triangular thing had hovered overhead the entire time, occasionally changing position; now, as it hung close above the center of John's loyal troops, the voice suddenly called, “Cover your eyes! Cover your eyes!"

John glanced up and then, without thinking, covered his eyes with his arm.

Even so, he saw the flash; the light seemed to burn into his eyes, pouring around his forearm and even through it, so that for an instant he could see the shadow of his own bones.

Then the shockwave hit him, and everything vanished.

He awoke slowly and painfully, blinking unsteadily up at the uncomfortably bright, greenish-yellow glow of the ceiling.

That glow answered the first question that anyone asks when waking up somewhere different from where he or she went to sleep; John knew where he was, he was inside the Heavener stronghold.

That left a myriad of other questions, however.

How had he come here? What had happened to his men? It seemed obvious that his army had been soundly defeated; where did that leave his people? What had that flash been? Why had the flying thing shouted a warning to the attacking troops to cover their eyes? What was he doing here? And just where in the Heavener fortress was he, and how could he get out?

He turned his head; his neck was stiff, but he ignored the sharp twinge of pain.

He was lying naked in a bed, covered by a soft white sheet and surrounded by more of the familiar and hated golden plastic walls that seemed to be in everything the Heaveners built. A small table stood nearby, and the walls were dotted with various mysterious panels and protrusions. The bed was not flat; it seemed to be fitted to his body in a wholly unnatural way. It was extremely comfortable, which immediately made him suspicious. Life was not meant to be comfortable; the pleasures of the flesh were snares and delusions. They weakened a man's will.

“Please do not attempt to get out of bed,” a pleasant voice said from an unidentifiable source; it had only a trace of the Heavener accent, and John was unsure if the speaker was a man or a woman. He turned his head back the other way, looking for whoever had spoken, but the tiny room was empty save for himself, the bed, and the table. There were two doors, one opposite the foot of the bed and one to his left; to his right the center of the wall contained a large panel that might have been a shuttered window.

“Who said that?” he asked; his voice was a faint croaking. He swallowed, coughed, swallowed, and asked again, “Who said that?” This second attempt was better, but still thin and hoarse.

“Who said what?” the pleasant voice asked.

“Who are you? Who am I speaking to?"

“I'm Cuddles; I run things around here."

Another of the absurd Earther names, John thought. “Where are you?” he demanded feebly.

There was a pause before the voice replied, “I'm right here."

“Let me see you! Show yourself!” John's breath gave out after making this demand; he coughed feebly, then lay back to recover. He was still not at all sure what had happened, but he had apparently been injured somehow. This place was the Heavener infirmary, he was sure.

A panel on the wall beyond the foot of the bed glowed oddly, then seemed to vanish, leaving an opening into another room. A bland face smiled down at him. “Here I am,” Cuddles said.

John still could not be certain of the speaker's sex; the face was beardless, the black hair worn at a moderate length, the features fairly delicate but not clearly feminine. The skin was oddly dark, as if heavily tanned.

“Come in here!” John demanded.

“I can't do that,” Cuddles replied. “But someone will be there very soon. Here he is now."

The door to the left slid silently open, and John turned in time to glimpse the corridor beyond as a young man wearing a short white gown and white pants entered.

“Hlo,” he said, “I'm Liao Hasan.” The name was utterly incomprehensible to John, merely noise, even less meaningful than the other Earther names he had encountered. “I'm glad to see you awake.” The man had the thickest Heavener accent John had heard yet, and also had the same odd skin hue and eye formation as the woman who called herself Tuesday. That startled him; could Tuesday have been, not a freak, but a member of an unfamiliar race? John was familiar with the half-dozen varieties of dog on Godsworld, and had heard that on Earth there had similarly been three separate races of people, white, black, and brown, descended from Noah's three sons, but he had never before encountered any kind but his own; none of the original colonists had been Hamitic or Shemitic, though John had never heard any explanation of why the Japethitic race should be the only one to accept the true faith.

This attendant and Tuesday were surely not black, and even calling them brown would be a gross exaggeration, but perhaps they were another human variant that Godsworlders had forgotten.

“Who are you?” John demanded. “What am I doing here?” His voice cracked on the final word.

“I'm Liao Hasan; I'm a medical assistant here. You were brought here badly burned after your army was nuked three weeks ago; we've regrown your skin and repaired what other damage we found."

John ignored the claims of miraculous healing. “Nuked?” he asked.

“Yes, nuked; your army was destroyed with a clean fusion bomb. Intense heat in a very small area, but only a small shockwave, and virtually no fallout or secondary radiation at all-there's no fission, it's just an overload of a fusion power plant, not really a bomb at all."

John did not pretend to understand any of this explanation. “What happened to the others?” he asked.

Hesitantly, the man said something that John could not make out.

“It is not polite to speak in a language the patient does not understand, sir,” the neutral voice replied.

“Ah… all right, Cuddles, have it your way. Answer my question; am I authorized to tell him that?” John noticed that the ‘medical assistant’ did not look at the window when he spoke, but simply addressed the air over John's head.

“Yes, sir,” Cuddles replied calmly. “There are no additional restrictions on information for this patient."

“Well, we aren't sure how many people you had there to begin with; the central part of the advancing group was vaporized. There were even a few burns in the retreating group-that was a serious miscalculation. Out of the advancing group, we saved one hundred forty-seven men and one woman. Oh, and two horses. We aren't as good with horses-there aren't any back home."

“One hundred forty-seven men?"

“That's right."

“I had… well, after the split, I reckon I had six thousand men."

“I'm sorry."

John struggled to grasp the scope of the disaster. “The others are all dead?"

“It's possible a few fled before our rescue team arrived; I can't say for sure. The only reason you survived was that you were well ahead of the main body. The woman and about half a dozen men were up front; the rest were at the back. We were trying to avoid the retreating group."

“So I'm in your infirmary now?"

“We call it a hospital, but yes."

“And you're a doctor?"

“No, I'm a medical assistant-a nurse."