Yet it was nothing new. It had been like this at some point in every civilization and on every continent. There were human jackals for every human disaster.

The electric pumps stopped, and when the pumps stopped the water stopped and when the water stopped the bathrooms ceased functioning.

be followed. At the corner a scrawny boy of eighteen urinated against a lamp post,

“We won it. We really clobbered ’em!” Hart’s eyes lowered and his arms drooped. He said, “Not that it matters.”

Yesterday, he would have stopped instantly. There would have been no question about it. When there was an accident, and someone was hurt, a man stopped. But yesterday was a past period in history, with laws and rules archaic as ancient Rome’s. Today the rules had changed, just as Roman law gave way to atavistic barbarism as the empire fell to Hun a

Conquerors knew or sensed this. Caesar had done it, Xerxes, Napoleon, and Hitler failed. “If Xerxes had won at Salamis,” he said, “we’d all be speaking Persian—but that was a long time pre-Sputnik, and pre-ICBM. I thought the fight, now, was for control of space. Who controls space controls the world.”

Says why worry about something you can’t see, feel, hear, or smell? Says it’s just as bad to frighten people to death as kill them with radiation, and I must say that I agree with him.”

Hearing nothing that sounded immediately alarming for Fort Repose, he reminded Henrietta that nothing drastic had occurred after Pearl Harbor. On the Monday after Pearl Harbor there had been no runs, and no panic.

“We’re going to have to be tough. We’re going to have to be catfish.”