folded the map-table up from the wall,
and studied the coastline of Africa.

He began to feel a frightening loneliness, although scarcely two hours
had passed since his rebellious decision, and he was accustomed to long
weeks alone at sea. He scoffed at himself. He would get along okay; the
sub would take him any place he wanted to go, if he could escape
pursuit. Surely there must be some part of the world where men were not
concerned with the senseless struggle of the titans. But all such places
were primitive, savage, almost unendurable to a man born and tuned to
the violin-string pitch of technological culture.

Mitch realized dismally that he loved technological civilization, its
giant tools, its roar of mighty engines, its proud structures of
concrete and steel. He could sacrifice his love for particular people,
for particular places and governments--but it was going to be harder to
relinquish mechanical civilization for some stone-age culture lingering
in an out-of-the-way place. Changing tribes was easy, for all tribes
belonged to Man, but renouncing machinery for jungle tools would be more
difficult. A man could change his politics, his friends, his religion,
his country, but Man's tools were a part of his body. Having used a
high-powered rifle, the man subsumed the weapon, made it a part of
himself. Trading it for a stone axe would be like cutting off his arm.
Man was a user of tools, a shaper of environments.

_That was it_, he thought. The reason for his sudden rebellion, the
narrow dividing line between tolerable and insufferable wars. A war that
killed human beings might be tolerable, if it left most of
civilizations' industry intact, or at least restorable, for although men
might die, Man lived on, still possessing his precious tools, still
capable of producing greater ones. But a war that wrecked industry, left
it a tangled jumble of radioactive concrete and steel--that kind of war
was insufferable, as this one threatened to be.

The idea shocked him. Kill a few men, and you scratch the hide of
Historical Man. But wreck the industry, drive men out of the cities,
leave the factories hissing with beta and gamma radiation, and you
amputate the hands of Historical Man the Builder. The machinery of
civilization was a living body, with organismic Man as its brain. And
the brain had not yet learned to use the body for a constructive
purpose. It lacked coordination, and the ability to reason its actions
anal