country wants a piece out o' the next one's hide—or his poke—and they won't give an inch except in talk; they won't really buckle down to stop a war. Never. Not if they can't get what they want by talk." He looked at the card again, just in case—a four, sure enough. "Only time there's never a war is when everybody has what they want, or figure they can get it without killing somebody. But the second they see that's the only way, then it's war. War, war, war. It's a rotten way to run a world, killing to decide who's right or wrong ... 'specially killing people who got damn little say about it. But I seen three-four wars now, and they don't look to stop soon, judging." He shook his head wonderingly. "Put half the money they spend on killing toward curing, instead, and helping them that wants, and finding out all about diseases and such ... why, shucks, it'd be a brand-new world."

"I seen five," Jim Liddel said. "I seen wars come and go. I fought in one. Afterwards, every time, they say everything's fine. The war to save this or that's over, and things are fine. Then somebody wants something somebody else has, and they're at it again, like two bulls trying to hump the same heifer. Bulls don't have enough sense to know there's enough cows to go around; but people ought. It's a big enough world." He worked those hands of his together until they were clasped, and he pushed them that way against the table-edge until the overgrown knuckles looked like chalk. "When I think o' that noise, and that cloud, ... how we come running and screaming back here into all the dust and mess, and all them bodies ... I ... Ben, I...."

"You lost heavy, Jim," Ben said. He let smoke out of his lungs, and it curled off into the broad beam of sunlight that came through the window, and it looked like the smoke that had shadowed a murdered town. "Heavy. You lost heavier'n any of us."

"You can't count it," old Jim said, and the chalk was whiter. "We all lost the same; I just had more of it. Our kids and their kids—and their kids ... lost heavy? What can a man lose more'n his life?... And if you're as old as us, what's your life except the family you made out o' your own flesh? What else's a man got when he's eighty or a hundred?"

Tom Pace said, "Ruth and Dave and their kids. I remember little Davey. He called me Tom Peach. I bought him a toy plane for his birthday. That was a couple days before the real planes come. I buried it with him ... I think. I think it was him I put it with. It mighta been Joey ... they looked alike."

"A man ain't 

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