Ish-Chayl stood there, drenched in sunlight. Head to one side, he seemed to be listening rather than looking. He reached a decision; whatever prompted it he did not share with Qazwini. He raised a hand above his head and then shot the arm forward, as if he were throwing a baseball. The General recognized the sign. “Move out!” he bellowed. “Follow me!” and trailed by the troops he trailed after the Colonel, off the road and into the boondocks.

The path was less than a hairline fracture into, of all unexpected places, a reach of woodland. Somehow, it seemed to me, we were drifting backward in time. There was no sound except for the muffled tread of the barefoot soldiers, and now and then the crack of a snapping twig. There was the smell of another world, lost, dead-aired, and ancient, the smell of a subterranean cave sealed off from sunlight, the pungency of wild apples.

We came to a clearing of sharp and oily grass, bordered on the far side by a slight depression that snaked out of one stand of dead trees and disappeared into another—probably what, in the morning of the world, had been the bed of a river. A faint insectal drone quavered in the strange, soft, airy light, but there were no insects to be seen. The drone gave way to a teasing whisper, like an echo without a source, the relic of an epoch when humanoids with flat faces and moist snouts pranced and capered among the lions and the lambs.

“We’ll set up here,” the Colonel said.

A dozen men broke out picks and shovels. When the trench was dug and the earth piled before it, Ish-Chayl moved front and center. He took one of a half dozen fragmentation grenades from his web belt. He showed them the cast-iron serrated body; carefully he pointed out the detonating fuse. He stressed the destructive potential of the bursting charge, two ounces of flaked TNT. He emphasized safety precautions. He repeated the entire procedure, this time pulling the pin, releasing the lever, throwing the bomb, and ducking behind the parapet with the rest of us.

We heard it explode forty yards away. The earth trembled; we staggered against the agitated air. Dirt and pebbles rose like a fountain from the dry riverbed where the grenade landed, and smoke curled up from the battered branches of the dead trees, a second killing.

“My turn,” the General said. His belt like Ish-Chayl’s was studded with bombs. He grabbed one, pulled the pin with his teeth—that too he had learned from the Marine movie—and threw it. I sighed with relief as it exploded not far from the Colonel’s.

Qazwini snared the arm of a recruit. “You,” he ordered, handing him an olive-drab pineapple.