A

MATTER

OF

PROPORTION

n the dark, our glider
chutes zeroed neatly
on target—only Art
Benjamin missed the
edge of the gorge.
When we were sure Invader hadn't
heard the crashing of bushes, I
climbed down after him. The climb,
and what I found, left me shaken.
A Special Corps squad leader is not
expendable—by order. Clyde Esterbrook,
my second and ICEG mate,
would have to mine the viaduct
while my nerve and glycogen stabilized.

We timed the patrols. Clyde said,
"Have to wait till a train's coming.
No time otherwise." Well, it was
his show. When the next pair of
burly-coated men came over at a
trot, he breathed, "Now!" and
ghosted out almost before they were
clear.

I switched on the ICEG—inter-cortical
encephalograph—planted in
my temporal bone. My own senses
could hear young Ferd breathing,
feel and smell the mat of pine needles
under me. Through Clyde's, I
could hear the blind whuffle of wind
in the girders, feel the crude wood of
ties and the iron-cold molding of
rails in the star-dark. I could feel,
too, an odd, lilting elation in his
mind, as if this savage universe were
a good thing to take on—spray guns,
cold, and all.

We wanted to set the mine so the
wreckage would clobber a trail below,
one like they'd built in Burma
and Japan, where you wouldn't think
a monkey could go; but it probably
carried more supplies than the viaduct
itself. So Clyde made adjustments
precisely, just as we'd figured
it with the model back at base. It was
a tricky, slow job in the bitter dark.

I began to figure: If he armed it
for this train, and ran, she'd go off
while we were on location and we'd
be drenched in searchlights and
spray guns. Already, through his
fingers, I felt the hum in the rails
that every tank-town-reared kid
knows. I turned up my ICEG. "All
right, Clyde, get back. Arm it when
she's gone past, for the next one."

I felt him grin, felt his lips form
words: "I'll do better than that,
Willie. Look, Daddy-o, no hands!"
He slid over the edge and rested
elbows and ribs on the raw tie ends.

We're all acrobats in the Corps.
But I didn't like this act one little
bit. Even if he could hang by his
hands, the heavy train would jolt
him off. But I swallowed my
thoughts.

He groped with his foot, contacted
a sloping beam, and brought his
other foot in. I felt a dull, scraping
slither under his moccasin soles.
"Frost," he thought calmly, rubbed
a clear patch with the edge of his
foot, put his weight on it, and
transferred his hands to the beam
with a twist we hadn't learned in
Corps school. My heart did a double-take;
one slip and he'd be off into
the gorge, and the frost stung, melting
under his bare fingers. He lay
in the trough of the massive H-beam,
slid down about twenty feet to where
it made an angle with an upright,
and wedged himself there. It took
all of twenty seconds, really. But I
let out a breath as if I'd been holding
it for minutes.

As he settled, searchlights began
skimming the bridge. If he'd been
running, he'd have been shot to a
sieve. As it was, they'd never see
him in the mingled glare and black.

His heart hadn't even speeded up
beyond what was required by exertion.
The train roared around a
shoulder and onto the viaduct, shaking
it like an angry hand. But as the
boxcars thunder-clattered above his
head, he was peering into the gulf
at a string of feeble lights threading
the bottom. "There's the flywalk,
Willie. They know their stuff. But
we'll get it." Then, as the caboose
careened over and the searchlights
cut off, "Well, that gives us ten minutes
before the patrol comes back."

He levered onto his side, a joint
at a time, and began to climb the
beam. Never again for me, even by
proxy! You just couldn't climb that
thing nohow! The slope was too
steep. The beam was too massive to
shinny, yet too narrow to lie inside
and elbow up. The metal was too
smooth, and scummed with frost.
His fingers were beginning to numb.
And—he was climbing!

In each fin of the beam, every foot
or so, was a round hole. He'd get one
finger into a hole and pull, inching
his body against the beam. He timed
himself to some striding music I
didn't know, not fast but no waste
motion, even the pauses rhythmic.

I tell you. I was sweating under
my leathers. Maybe I should have
switched the ICEG off, for my own
sake if not to avoid distracting
Clyde. But I was hypnotized, climbing.

In the old days, when you were
risking your neck, you were supposed
to think great solemn thoughts.
Recently, you're supposed to think
about something silly like a singing
commercial. Clyde's mind was neither
posturing in front of his mental
mirror nor running in some feverish
little circle. He faced terror as
big as the darkness from gorge bottom
to stars, and he was just simply
as big as it was—sheer life exulting
in defying the dark, the frost and
wind and the zombie grip of Invader.
I envied him.

Then his rhythm checked. Five
feet from the top, he reached confidently
for a finger hole ... No hole.

He had already reached as high
as he could without shifting his purchase
and risking a skid—and even
his wrestler's muscles wouldn't make
the climb again. My stomach quaked:
Never see sunlight in the trees
any more, just cling till dawn picked
you out like a crow's nest in a dead
tree; or drop ...

Not Clyde. His flame of life
crouched in anger. Not only the
malice of nature and the rage of
enemies, but human shiftlessness
against him too? Good! He'd take
it on.

Shoulder, thigh, knee, foot scraped
off frost. He jammed his jaw
against the wet iron. His right hand
never let go, but it crawled up the
fin of the strut like a blind animal,
while the load on his points of
purchase mounted—watchmaker co-ordination
where you'd normally
think in boilermaker terms. The
flame sank to a spark as he focused,
but it never blinked out. This was
not the anticipated, warded danger,
but the trick punch from nowhere.
This was It. A sneak squall buffeted
him. I cursed thinly. But he sensed
an extra purchase from its pressure,
and reached the last four inches with
a swift glide. The next hole was
there.

He waited five heartbeats, and
pulled. He began at the muscular
disadvantage of aligned joints. He
had to make it the first time; if you
can't do it with a dollar, you won't
do it with the change. But as elbow
and shoulder bent, the flame soared
again: Score one more for life!

A minute later, he hooked his arm
over the butt of a tie, his chin, his
other arm, and hung a moment. He
didn't throw a knee up, just rolled
and lay between the rails. Even as
he relaxed, he glanced at his watch:
three minutes to spare. Leisurely, he
armed the mine and jogged back to
me and Ferd.

As I broke ICEG contact, his
flame had sunk to an ember glow of
anticipation.

We had almost reached the cave
pricked on our map, when we heard
the slam of the mine, wee and far-off.
We were lying doggo looking
out at the snow peaks incandescent
in dawn when the first Invader patrols
trailed by below. Our equipment
was a miracle of hot food and basic
medication. Not pastimes, though;
and by the second day of hiding, I
was thinking too much. There was
Clyde, an Inca chief with a thread
of black mustache and incongruous
hazel eyes, my friend and ICEG
mate—what made him tick? Where
did he get his delight in the bright
eyes of danger? How did he gear
his daredevil valor, not to the icy
iron and obligatory killing, but to
the big music and stars over the
gorge? But in the Corps, we don't
ask questions and, above all, never
eavesdrop on ICEG.

Young Ferd wasn't so inhibited.
Benjamin's death had shaken him—losing
your ICEG mate is like losing
an eye. He began fly-fishing Clyde:
How had Clyde figured that stunt,
in the dark, with the few minutes
he'd had?

"There's always a way, Ferd, if
you're fighting for what you really
want."

"Well, I want to throw out Invader,
all right, but—"

"That's the start, of course, but
beyond that—" He changed the subject:
perhaps only I knew of his
dream about a stronghold for rebels
far in these mountains. He smiled.
"I guess you get used to calculated
risks. Except for imagination, you're
as safe walking a ledge twenty
stories up, as down on the sidewalk."

"Not if you trip."

"That's the calculated risk. If you
climb, you get used to it."

"Well, how did you get used to
it? Were you a mountaineer or an
acrobat?"

"In a way, both." Clyde smiled
again, a trifle bitterly and switched
the topic. "Anyway, I've been in
action for the duration except some
time in hospital."

Ferd was onto that boner like an
infielder. To get into SC you have
to be not only championship fit, but
have no history of injury that could
crop up to haywire you in a pinch.
So, "Hospital? You sure don't show
it now."

Clyde was certainly below par. To
cover his slip he backed into a bigger,
if less obvious, one. "Oh,
I was in that Operation Armada
at Golden Gate. Had to be patched
up."

He must have figured, Ferd had
been a kid then, and I hadn't been
too old. Odds were, we'd recall the
episode, and no more. Unfortunately,
I'd been a ham operator and
I'd been in the corps that beamed
those fireships onto the Invader supply
fleet in the dense fog. The whole
episode was burned into my brain.
It had been kamikaze stuff, though
there'd been a theoretical chance of
the thirty men escaping, to justify
sending them out. Actually, one
escape boat did get back with three
men.

I'd learned about those men, out
of morbid, conscience-scalded curiosity.
Their leader was Edwin Scott,
a medical student. At the very start
he'd been shot through the lower
spine. So, his companions put him
in the escape boat while they clinched
their prey. But as the escape boat
sheered off, the blast of enemy fire
killed three and disabled two.

Scott must have been some boy.
He'd already doctored himself with
hemostatics and local anaesthetics
but, from the hips down, he was
dead as salt pork, and his visceral
reflexes must have been reacting like
a worm cut with a hoe. Yet somehow,
he doctored the two others and
got that boat home.

The other two had died, but Scott
lived as sole survivor of Operation
Armada. And he hadn't been a big,
bronze, Latin-Indian with incongruous
hazel eyes, but a snub-nosed redhead.
And he'd been wheel-chaired
for life. They'd patched him up,
decorated him, sent him to a base
hospital in Wisconsin where he
could live in whatever comfort was
available. So, he dropped out of
sight. And now, this!

Clyde was lying, of course. He'd
picked the episode at random. Except
that so much else about him didn't
square. Including his name compared
to his physique, now I thought
about it.

I tabled it during our odyssey
home. But during post-mission leave,
it kept bothering me. I checked, and
came up with what I'd already
known: Scott had been sole survivor,
and the others were certified dead.
But about Scott, I got a runaround.
He'd apparently vanished. Oh,
they'd check for me, but that could
take years. Which didn't lull my
curiosity any. Into Clyde's past I
was sworn not to pry.

We were training for our next assignment,
when word came through
of the surrender at Kelowna. It was
a flare of sunlight through a black
sky. The end was suddenly close.

Clyde and I were in Victoria, British
Columbia. Not subscribing to
the folkway that prescribes seasick
intoxication as an expression of joy,
we did the town with discrimination.
At midnight we found ourselves
strolling along the waterfront in that
fine, Vancouver-Island mist, with
just enough drink taken to be moving
through a dream. At one point,
we leaned on a rail to watch the
mainland lights twinkling dimly like
the hope of a new world—blackout
being lifted.

Suddenly, Clyde said, "What's
fraying you recently, Will? When
we were taking our ICEG reconditioning,
it came through strong as
garlic, though you wouldn't notice
it normally."

Why be coy about an opening like
that? "Clyde, what do you know
about Edwin Scott?" That let him
spin any yarn he chose—if he chose.

He did the cigarette-lighting routine,
and said quietly, "Well, I was
Edwin Scott, Will." Then, as I waited,
"Yes, really me, the real me
talking to you. This," he held out a
powerful, coppery hand, "once belonged
to a man called Marco da
Sanhao ... You've heard of transplanting
limbs?"

I had. But this man was no transplant
job. And if a spinal cord is
cut, transplanting legs from Ippalovsky,
the primo ballerino, is worthless.
I said, "What about it?"

"I was the first—successful—brain
transplant in man."

For a moment, it queered me, but
only a moment. Hell, you read in
fairy tales and fantasy magazines
about one man's mind in another
man's body, and it's marvelous, not
horrible. But—

By curiosity, I know a bit about
such things. A big surgery journal,
back in the '40s, had published a
visionary article on grafting a whole
limb, with colored plates as if for
a real procedure[A]. Then they'd developed
techniques for acclimating a
graft to the host's serum, so it would
not react as a foreign body. First,
they'd transplanted hunks of ear and
such; then, in the '60s, fingers, feet,
and whole arms in fact.

But a brain is another story. A
cut nerve can grow together; every
fiber has an insulating sheath which
survives the cut and guides growing
stumps back to their stations. In the
brain and spinal cord, no sheaths;
growing fibers have about the chance
of restoring contact that you'd have
of traversing the Amazon jungle on
foot without a map. I said so.

"I know," he said, "I learned all
I could, and as near as I can put it,
it's like this: When you cut your
finger, it can heal in two ways. Usually
it bleeds, scabs, and skin grows
under the scab, taking a week or so.
But if you align the edges exactly,
at once, they may join almost immediately
healing by First Intent.
Likewise in the brain, if they line up
cut nerve fibers before the cut-off
bit degenerates, it'll join up with
the stump. So, take a serum-conditioned
brain and fit it to the stem of
another brain so that the big fiber
bundles are properly fitted together,
fast enough, and you can get better
than ninety per cent recovery."

"Sure," I said, parading my own
knowledge, "but what about injury
to the masses of nerve cells? And
you'd have to shear off the nerves
growing out of the brain."

"There's always a way, Willie.
There's a place in the brain stem
called the isthmus, no cell masses,
just bundles of fibers running up and
down. Almost all the nerves come
off below that point; and the few
that don't can be spliced together,
except the smell nerves and optic
nerve. Ever notice I can't smell,
Willie? And they transplanted my
eyes with the brain—biggest trick
of the whole job."

It figured. But, "I'd still hate to
go through with it."

"What could I lose? Some paraplegics
seem to live a fuller life than
ever. Me, I was going mad. And I'd
seen the dogs this research team at
my hospital was working on—old
dogs' brains in whelps' bodies, spry
as natural.

"Then came the chance. Da Sanhao
was a Brazilian wrestler stranded
here by the war. Not his war, he
said; but he did have the decency to
volunteer as medical orderly. But he
got conscripted by a bomb that took
a corner off the hospital and one
off his head. They got him into
chemical stasis quicker than it'd ever
been done before, but he was dead
as a human being—no brain worth
salvaging above the isthmus. So, the
big guns at the hospital saw a chance
to try their game on human material,
superb body and lower nervous
system in ideal condition, waiting for
a brain. Only, whose?

"Naturally, some big-shot's near
the end of his rope and willing to
gamble. But I decided it would be a
forgotten little-shot, name of Edwin
Scott. I already knew the surgeons
from being a guinea pig on ICEG.
Of course, when I sounded them out,
they gave me a kindly brush-off: The
matter was out of the their hands.
However, I knew whose hands it was
in. And I waited for my chance—a
big job that needed somebody expendable.
Then I'd make a deal, writing
my own ticket because they'd
figure I'd never collect. Did you
hear about Operation Seed-corn?"

That was the underground railway
that ran thousands of farmers out of
occupied territory. Manpower was
what finally broke Invader, improbable
as it seems. Epidemics, desertions,
over-extended lines, thinned
that overwhelming combat strength;
and every farmer spirited out of
their hands equalled ten casualties. I
nodded.

"Well, I planned that with myself
as director. And sold it to Filipson."

I contemplated him: just a big
man in a trench coat and droop-brimmed
hat silhouetted against the
lamp-lit mist. I said, "You directed
Seed-corn out of a wheel chair in
enemy territory, and came back to
get transplanted into another body?
Man, you didn't tell Ferd a word
of a lie when you said you were used
to walking up to death." (But there
was more: Besides that dour Scot's
fortitude, where did he come by that
high-hearted valor?)

He shrugged. "You do what you
can with what you've got. Those
weren't the big adventures I was
thinking about when I said that.
I had a team behind me in
those—"

I could only josh. "I'd sure like
to hear the capperoo then."

He toed out his cigarette. "You're
the only person who's equipped for
it. Maybe you'd get it, Willie."

"How do you mean?"

"I kept an ICEG record. Not that
I knew it was going to happen, just
wanted proof if they gave me a
deal and I pulled it off. Filipson
wouldn't renege, but generals were
expendable. No one knew I had that
transmitter in my temporal bone, and
I rigged it to get a tape on my home
receiver. Like to hear it?"

I said what anyone would, and
steered him back to quarters before
he'd think better of it. This would
be something!

On the way, he filled in background.
Scott had been living out
of hospital in a small apartment, enjoying
as much liberty as he could
manage. He had equipment so he
could stump around, and an antique
car specially equipped. He wasn't
complimentary about them. Orthopedic
products had to be: unreliable,
hard to service, unsightly, intricate,
and uncomfortable. If they also
squeaked and cut your clothes, fine!

Having to plan every move with
an eye on weather and a dozen other
factors, he developed in uncanny
foresight. Yet he had to improvise at
a moment's notice. With life a continuous
high-wire act, he trained
every surviving fiber to precision,
dexterity, and tenacity. Finally, he
avoided help. Not pride, self-preservation;
the compulsively helpful
have rarely the wit to ask before
rushing in to knock you on your
face, so he learned to bide his time
till the horizon was clear of beaming
simpletons. Also, he found an interest
in how far he could go.

These qualities, and the time
he had for thinking, begot Seed-corn.
When he had it convincing, he
applied to see General Filipson, head
of Regional Intelligence, a man with
both insight and authority to make
the deal—but also as tough as his
post demanded. Scott got an appointment
two weeks ahead.

That put it early in April, which
decreased the weather hazard—a
major consideration in even a trip
to the Supermarket. What was Scott's
grim consternation, then, when he
woke on D-day to find his windows
plastered with snow under a driving
wind—not mentioned in last night's
forecast of course.

He could concoct a plausible excuse
for postponement—which Filipson
was just the man to see
through; or call help to get him to
HQ—and have Filipson bark, "Man,
you can't even make it across town
on your own power because of a
little snow." No, come hell or blizzard,
he'd have to go solo. Besides,
when he faced the inevitable unexpected
behind Invader lines, he
couldn't afford a precedent of having
flinched now.

He dressed and breakfasted with
all the petty foresights that can mean
the shaving of clearance in a tight
squeeze, and got off with all the
margin of time he could muster. In
the apartment court, he had a parking
space by the basement exit and,
for a wonder, no free-wheeling nincompoop
had done him out of it
last night. Even so, getting to the
car door illustrated the ordeal ahead;
the snow was the damp, heavy stuff
that packs and glares. The streets
were nasty, but he had the advantage
of having learned restraint and foresight.

HQ had been the post office, a
ponderous red-stone building filling
a whole block. He had scouted it
thoroughly in advance, outside and
in, and scheduled his route to the
general's office, allowing for minor
hazards. Now, he had half an hour
extra for the unscheduled major
hazard.

But on arriving, he could hardly
believe his luck. No car was yet
parked in front of the building, and
the walk was scraped clean and salted
to kill the still falling flakes. No
problems. He parked and began to
unload himself quickly, to forestall
the elderly MP who hurried towards
him. But, as Scott prepared to thank
him off, the man said, "Sorry, Mac,
no one can park there this morning."

Scott felt the chill of nemesis.
Knowing it was useless, he protested
his identity and mission.

But, "Sorry, major. But you'll
have to park around back. They're
bringing in the big computer. General
himself can't park here. Them's
orders."

He could ask the sergeant to park
the car. But the man couldn't leave
his post, would make a to-do calling
someone—and that was Filipson's
suite overlooking the scene. No dice.
Go see what might be possible.

But side and back parking were
jammed with refugees from the computer,
and so was the other side. And
he came around to the front again.
Five minutes wasted. He thought
searchingly.

He could drive to a taxi lot, park
there, and be driven back by taxi,
disembark on the clean walk, and
there you were. Of course, he could
hear Filipson's "Thought you drove
your own car, ha?" and his own
damaging excuses. But even Out
Yonder, you'd cut corners in emergency.
It was all such a comfortable
Out, he relaxed. And, relaxing, saw
his alternative.

He was driving around the block
again, and noted the back entrance.
This was not ground level, because
of the slope of ground; it faced a
broad landing, reached by a double
flight of steps. These began on each
side at right-angles to the building
and then turned up to the landing
along the face of the wall. Normally,
they were negotiable; but now, even
had he found parking near them, he
hadn't the chance of the celluloid
cat in hell of even crossing the ten
feet of uncleaned sidewalk. You
might as well climb an eighty-degree,
fifty-foot wall of rotten ice. But there
was always a way, and he saw it.

The unpassable walk itself was an
avenue of approach. He swung his
car onto it at the corner, and drove
along it to the steps to park in the
angle between steps and wall—and
discovered a new shut-out. He'd expected
the steps to be a mean job
in the raw wind that favored this
face of the building; but a wartime
janitor had swept them sketchily
only down the middle, far from the
balustrades he must use. By the balustrades,
early feet had packed a
semi-ice far more treacherous than
the untouched snow; and, the two
bottom steps curved out beyond the
balustrade. So ... a sufficiently reckless
alpinist might assay a cliff in a
sleet storm and gale, but he couldn't
even try if it began with an overhang.

Still time for the taxi. And so,
again Scott saw the way that was
always there: Set the car so he could
use its hood to heft up those first
steps.

Suddenly, his thinking metamorphosed:
He faced, not a miserable,
unwarranted forlorn hope, but the
universe as it was. Titanic pressure
suit against the hurricanes of Jupiter,
and against a gutter freshet, life
was always outclassed—and always
fought back. Proportions didn't matter,
only mood.

He switched on his ICEG to record
what might happen. I auditioned
it, but I can't disentangle it from
what he told me. For example, in his
words: Multiply distances by five,
heights by ten, and slickness by
twenty. And in the playback: Thirty
chin-high ledges loaded with soft
lard, and only finger holds and toe
holds. And you did it on stilts that
began, not at your heels, at your
hips. Add the hazard of Helpful
Hosea: "Here, lemme giveya hand,
Mac!", grabbing the key arm, and
crashing down the precipice on top of
you.

Switching on the ICEG took his
mind back to the snug apartment
where its receiver stood, the armchair,
books, desk of diverting work. It
looked awful good, but ... life
fought back, and always it found a
way.

He shucked his windbreaker because
it would be more encumbrance
than help in the showdown. He
checked, shoelaces, and strapped on
the cleats he had made for what they
were worth. He vetoed the bag of
sand and salt he kept for minor difficulties—far
too slow. He got out of
the car.

This could be the last job he'd
have to do incognito—Seed-corn,
he'd get credit for. Therefore, he
cherished it: triumph for its own
sake. Alternatively, he'd end at the
bottom in a burlesque clutter of
chrom-alum splints and sticks, with
maybe a broken bone to clinch the
decision. For some men, death is
literally more tolerable than defeat in
humiliation.

Eighteen shallow steps to the turn,
twelve to the top. Once, he'd have
cleared it in three heartbeats. Now,
he had to make it to a twenty-minute
deadline, without rope or alpenstock,
a Moon-man adapted to a fraction of
Earth gravity.

With the help of the car hood, the
first two pitches were easy. For the
next four or five, wind had swept
the top of the balustrade, providing
damp, gritty handhold. Before the
going got tougher, he developed a
technic, a rhythm and system of
thrusts proportioned to heights and
widths, a way of scraping holds
where ice was not malignantly welded
to stone, an appreciation of snow
texture and depth, an economy of
effort.

He was enjoying a premature
elation when, on the twelfth step,
a cleat strap gave. Luckily, he was
able to take his lurch with a firm
grip on the balustrade; but he felt
depth yawning behind him. Dourly,
he took thirty seconds to retrieve the
cleat; stitching had been sawed
through by a metal edge—just as
he'd told the cocksure workman it
would be. Oh, to have a world where
imbecility wasn't entrenched! Well—he
was fighting here and now for the
resources to found one. He resumed
the escalade, his rhythm knocked
cockeyed.

Things even out. Years back, an
Invader bomber had scored a near
miss on the building, and minor damage
to stonework was unrepaired.
Crevices gave fingerhold, chipped-out
hollows gave barely perceptible
purchase to the heel of his hand. Salutes
to the random effects of unlikely
causes!

He reached the turn, considered
swiftly. His fresh strength was
blunted; his muscles, especially in his
thumbs, were stiffening with chill.
Now: He could continue up the left
side, by the building, which was
tougher and hazardous with frozen
drippings, or by the outside, right-hand
rail, which was easier but meant
crossing the open, half-swept wide
step and recrossing the landing up
top. Damn! Why hadn't he foreseen
that? Oh, you can't think of everything.
Get going, left side.

The wall of the building was
rough-hewn and ornamented with
surplus carvings. Cheers for the
1890s architect!

Qualified cheers. The first three
lifts were easy, with handholds in a
frieze of lotus. For the next, he had
to heft with his side-jaw against a
boss of stone. A window ledge made
the next three facile. The final five
stared, an open gap without recourse.
He made two by grace of the janitor's
having swabbed his broom a
little closer to the wall. His muscles
began to wobble and waver: in his
proportions, he'd made two-hundred
feet of almost vertical ascent.

But, climbing a real ice-fall, you'd
unleash the last convulsive effort because
you had to. Here, when you
came down to it, you could always
sit and bump yourself down to the
car which was, in that context, a
mere safe forty feet away. So he went
on because he had to.

He got the rubber tip off one stick.
The bare metal tube would bore into
the snow pack. It might hold, if he
bore down just right, and swung his
weight just so, and got just the right
sliding purchase on the wall, and the
snow didn't give underfoot or undercane.
And if it didn't work—it didn't
work.

Beyond the landing, westwards,
the sky had broken into April blue,
far away over Iowa and Kansas, over
Operation Seed-corn, over the refuge
for rebels that lay at the end of all
his roads....

He got set ... and lifted. A thousand
miles nearer the refuge! Got
set ... and lifted, balanced over
plunging gulfs. His reach found a
round pilaster at the top, a perfect
grip for a hand. He drew himself up,
and this time his cleated foot cut
through snow to stone, and slipped,
but his hold was too good. And there
he was.

No salutes, no cheers, only one
more victory for life.

Even in victory, unlife gave you
no respite. The doorstep was three
feet wide, hollowed by eighty years
of traffic, and filled with frozen drippings
from its pseudo-Norman arch.
He had to tilt across it and catch the
brass knob—like snatching a ring in
a high dive.

No danger now, except sitting
down in a growing puddle till
someone came along to hoist him
under the armpits, and then arriving
at the general's late, with his seat
black-wet.... You unhorse your foeman,
curvet up to the royal box to
receive the victor's chaplet, swing
from your saddle, and fall flat on
your face.

But, he cogitated on the bench inside,
getting his other cleat off and
the tip back on his stick, things do
even out. No hearty helper had intervened,
no snot-nosed, gaping child
had twitched his attention, nobody's
secretary—pretty of course—had
scurried to helpfully knock him down
with the door. They were all out
front superintending arrival of the
computer.

The general said only, if tartly,
"Oh yes, major, come in. You're late,
a'n't you?"

"It's still icy," said Ed Scott. "Had
to drive carefully, you know."

In fact, he had lost minutes that
way, enough to have saved his exact
deadline. And that excuse, being in
proportion to Filipson's standard dimension,
was fair game.

I wondered what dimension Clyde
would go on to, now that the challenge
of war was past. To his rebels
refuge at last maybe? Does it matter?
Whatever it is, life will be outclassed,
and Scott-Esterbrook's brand of life
will fight back.

THE END