It was exhausting, sweaty work, hauling the leaden drums into place against the heavy gravity. After a minute, Jason worked by touch through a red haze of hammering blood. He realized the job was done only when the truck suddenly leaped forward and he was thrown to the floor. He lay there, his chest heaving. As the driver hurled the heavy vehicle along, all Jason could do was bounce around in the bottom. He could see well enough, but was still gasping for breath when they braked at the fighting zone.

To Jason, it was a scene of incredible confusion. Guns firing, flames, men and women running on all sides. The napalm drums were unloaded without his help and the truck vanished for more. Jason leaned against a wall of a half-destroyed building and tried to get his bearings. It was impossible. There seemed to be a great number of small animals; he killed two that attacked him. Other than that he couldn’t determine the nature of the battle.

A Pyrran, tan face white with pain and exertion, stumbled up. His right arm, wet with raw flesh and dripping blood, hung limply at his side. It was covered with freshly applied surgical foam. He held his gun in his left hand, a stump of control cable dangling from it. Jason thought the man was looking for medical aid. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Clenching the gun in his teeth, the Pyrran clutched a barrel of napalm with his good hand and hurled it over on its side. Then, with the gun once more in his hand, he began to roll the drum along the ground with his feet. It was slow, cumbersome work, but he was still in the fight.

Jason pushed through the hurrying crowd and bent over the drum. “Let me do it,” he said. “You can cover us both with your gun.”

The man wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his arm and blinked at Jason. He seemed to recognize him. When he smiled it was a grimace of pain, empty of humor. “Do that. I can still shoot. Two half men-maybe we equal one whole.” Jason was laboring too hard to even notice the insult.

An explosion had blasted a raw pit in the street ahead. Two people were at the bottom, digging it even deeper with shovels.

The whole thing seemed meaningless. Just as Jason and the wounded man rolled up the drum, the diggers leaped out of the excavation and began shooting down into its depths. One of them turned, a young girl, barely in her teens.