But something must have surfaced in his voice, something that revealed his true feelings—utter loathing, and fear of what these ignorant peasants would do with so much power. Thor must have detected something in his manner. Because he got up and put an arm over Buck’s shoulder so he could whisper in his ear. “In case you’re thinking of pulling out a gun and hurting somebody, please remember that Uncle Alf could whip the gun out of your hand or make it jam. Auntie Gerd could stop your heart with a bolt of lightning. And I could pound you to a pulp with my hammer.”

So he did have a hammer!

Thor burst out laughing. “Lighten up, my man, don’t be so grim. We’re going to help you be victorious in all your confrontations. We’ll save hundreds of thousands of lives. Not all at once, but in the long run.”

“I’m sure you will,” said Buck.

The four-star took them out of Buck’s office, and Buck slumped down on the couch. “Those are seriously dangerous people,” he murmured to the junior officer who had happened to be in the outer office waiting for him when the Norths arrived. “I can’t tell anybody what I saw because they’ll assume I’m out of my mind.”

“But you’re going to do as they said, isn’t that right, sir?”

“‘One nation under God,’” said Buck. “But now I think that might need changing. To the plural.”

Chapter 6

6

Danny North had never thought of his life as particularly boring until now, when he was a mere spectator, forced to endure the company of people he did not like, while finding the words coming from his own mouth to be stupid and unfeeling.

Whether Set was deliberately making Danny sound mean, vain, and unwitty in order to punish him, or because Set was incapable of better, was a matter of no importance. Danny only thought about it because there was so little else to think of. What good is it to wonder about this or that, when he had no means of finding out the answer. As for changing what Set used his mouth to say and his body to do, Danny was nearly powerless. Only when Set had determined to sleep with every girl who seemed interested, was Danny able to interfere with him, and then only in the crudest way, by thinking of the aunts and the cousins back on the North Family compound, which made his body incapable of any kind of romantic involvement.