"Gods couldn't be bothered with such triviality. In fact, I'd think it
unlikely they could be bothered with priests. If I was a god,
certainly I couldn't."

The boy's face was intent, its youthfulness somewhat ludicrous in view
of the dark robes he wore. He leaned forward, "Yeah, you talk about
priests and undertakers and all battening on human sorrow, but how
about you? How about the Category Military? How many men you killed,
major?"

Joe winced. "Too many," he said abruptly. The tic was at the side of
his mouth, unbeknownst to him. He added, "But mercenaries have
deliberately chosen their path. They know what they're going into and
they do it willingly, they haven't been drafted."

He thought a moment, and Phil Holland's talk about the Roman _ludi_
came back to him. He said, "It's like the difference between throwing
a bunch of Christians to some wild bulls in a Roman arena, to being a
torero in Spain, a matador who has chosen his profession and enters
the bullring to make money."

Then the boy said something that gave him greater depth than Joe had
expected. "Yeah," he said, "but maybe the torero was forced into
becoming a bullfighter on account of how bad he needed the money." In
the heat of the discussion, he was emboldened to add, "And these new
Rank Privates that go into a fracas, not knowing what it's all about,
just filled with all the stuff we see on Telly and all. How much of a
chance does one of them have if he runs into an old-timer like Joe
Mauser, out there in no-man's-land?"

_Touche_, Joe thought.

* * * * *

There was the action that sometimes came back to him in his dreams. He
had been a sergeant then, but already the veteran of five years or
more standing, and a double score of fracases. The force of which he
was a member had been in full retreat, and Joe's squad was part of the
rear-guard. The terrain had been mountainous, the High Sierra Military
Reservation. Four of his men had copped one, two so badly that they
had to be left behind, incapable of being moved. Joe, under the
pressure of long hours of retreat under fire, had finally sent the
others on back, and found himself a crevice, near the top of a sierra,
which was all but impregnable.

[Illustration]

His rifle had been a .45-70 Springfield, with its ultra-heavy slug,
but slow muzzle velocity. And Joe had a telescope mounted upon it, an
innovation that barely made the requirement of predating the