song, a kind of chant, more like a dirge.

"Shut up! You'll get us shot!"

"Borkan's back there. He can't hear."

Danton listened. His stomach went hollow and icy at the song. It was old. It was full of ghosts, ghost treads, and ghost shadows marching out of the past, out of the present.

"Shut up!"

"Shut up, I tell you! We'll be shot! If you—"

The song faded slowly, died out. It seemed to die of weariness, to run down. And Danton kept on hearing it—circling mournfully through his head like swirling muddy water round a stake.

One thing he was seeing now, graphically so that he would never forget: Wars weren't all the same. Sometimes fighting-men hated war. He had known only the swift clean war, the septic war, a gigantic street-cleaning machine with a ray gun in front and a rotary brush in the back, with individuals turned abruptly into the earth from which they had come, and no one knowing the difference.

But in different times and places, wars could be different.

The amtrac stopped. "Let's get 'em out of here!"

Danton was thrown up, over, out and down, and other forms fell around him. He heard a moan from something not quite dead. Metal clanged. Machinery whirred. He thought of the mart, disposal mart. He thought of dropping through a hole maybe into a pit of fire, or into a vat of something. All through him as from an intravenous injection—horror.

He looked. A mound of metal, as though a bald giant had been buried up to his eyebrows. Metal corroded with green slime. And there, an opening appearing as heavy metal doors slid open. A railcar with a spherical truck bed emerging from the opening and waiting with an eery suggestion of eager sentience in its cold metal.

The men throwing the bodies into the railcar.

"What happens to them?"

"Who knows? No one ever hears of them again. Morlan mentioned it the other day. He said the Powers demand sacrifice, like gods maybe. I'm not superstitious or anything, but—"

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