ty
milk-tins, stood at the end of a corridor formed by two face-to-face
ranks of BSG Officer-Candidates. The OCS-men wore dress greens and
Academy helmets, and about the waist of each hung a saber. Consumers
stood gray and inconspicuous behind the two rows of uniformed men,
silent, unsmiling, like onlookers at an accident. Captain Winfree looked
over this civilian crowd. Each person wore, pinned to a lapel, perched
in a hatbrim, or worn like a corsage, a small white feather. "We'd best
hurry, Peggy," he said, urging her toward the gantlet.

* * * * *

The Officer-Candidates, on a signal from Major Dampfer, snicked their
ceremonial sabers from their scabbards and presented them, blade-tip to
blade-tip, as an archway. The BSG Band-and-Glee-Club, playing and
singing, "Potlatch Is Comin' to Town," stood in the doorway. Captain
Winfree, clasping Peggy's gloved hand tightly, led her through the
saber-roofed aisleway as rapidly as he could. "What's the rush, Wes?"
she asked. "We'll get married only once, and I'd like to see the
ceremony well enough to be able to describe it to our eventual children,
when they ask me what it was like."

Winfree opened the door of their car. "We'd better get out of here," he
said. "I smell a riot brewing; and I don't want you to have to describe
that to our children."

Peggy scooted into the car just as the District Headquarters building
burped out a giant bubble of smoke. An arm reached out to Winfree's
lapel and tugged him back from the car. "You're going nowhere, buddy," a
civilian growled at him. The man, Winfree saw, was wearing the
ubiquitous white feather in his lapel. As Winfree shook himself free
from the civilian, the arch of sabers above them collapsed. The
BSG-OCS-men were tossed about in a mob of suddenly screaming consumers,
waving their weapons as ineffectively as brooms. Fragments were spun off
the whirl of people, bits of BSG uniforms torn off their wearers and
tossed like confetti. A huge pink figure, clad in one trouser-leg and a
pair of shorts, smeared across the chest and face with soot, dashed
toward Winfree, waving a .45 pistol. "Stop this violence!" he screamed
at the consumers in his way, leveling his pistol. "Maintain the peace,
dammit! or I'll shoot!"

"That idiot!" Winfree said. He slammed the door of the car to give Peggy
a little protection, then scooped up a handful of snow from the gutter
to pound into a ball and toss like a gr