sive systems were expensive
compared to attack rockets. It was cheaper to build a deterrent than to
defend against it.

The missiles flashed up from submarines and railway cars, from
underground silos and stratospheric jets; secret ones fired off
automatically when a certain airbase command post ceased beaming out a
restraining radio signal. The defensive systems were simply overloaded.
And when the bombs ran out, the missiles carried dust and germs and gas.
On and on. For six days and six firelit nights. Launch, boost, coast,
re-enter, death.

* * * * *

And now it was over, the CIA man thought. The missiles were all gone.
The airplanes were exhausted. The nations that had built the weapons no
longer existed. By all the rules he knew of, the war should have been
ended.

Yet the fighting did not end. The machine knew better. There were still
many ways to kill an enemy. Time-tested ways. There were armies fighting
in four continents, armies that had marched overland, or splashed ashore
from the sea, or dropped out of the skies.

Incredibly, the war went on. When the tanks ran out of gas, and the
flame throwers became useless, and even the prosaic artillery pieces had
no more rounds to fire, there were still simple guns and even simpler
bayonets and swords.

The proud armies, the descendents of the Alexanders and Caesars and
Temujins and Wellingtons and Grants and Rommels, relived their evolution
in reverse.

The war went on. Slowly, inevitably, the armies split apart into smaller
and smaller units, until the tortured countryside that so recently had
felt the impact of nuclear war once again knew the tread of bands of
armed marauders. The tiny savage groups, stranded in alien lands, far
from the homes and families that they knew to be destroyed, carried on a
mockery of war, lived off the land, fought their own countrymen if the
occasion suited, and revived the ancient terror of hand-wielded,
personal, one-head-at-a-time killing.

The CIA man watched the world disintegrate. Death was an individual
business now, and none the better for no longer being mass-produced. In
agonized fascination he saw the myriad ways in which a man might die.
Murder was only one of them. Radiation, disease, toxic gases that
lingered and drifted on the once-innocent winds, and--finally--the most
efficient destroyer of them all: starvation.

Three billion people (give or take a meaningless hundred million