Light one up before you mosey out that door,

Once you cuddled ’em and kissed ’em,

But we’re bringin’ down Their system,

And it isn’t a resistance, it’s a war… .

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

These pine limbs, crackling so blue and watery, don’t seem to put out any heat at all. Confiscated weapons and ammo lie around half-crated or piled loose inside the C-Company perimeter. For days the U.S. Army has been out sweeping Thuringia, busting into houses in the middle of the night. A certain lycanthropophobia or fear of Werewolves occupies minds at higher levels. Winter is coming. Soon there won’t be enough food or coal in Germany. Potato crops toward the end of the War, for example, all went to make alcohol for the rockets. But there are still small-arms aplenty, and ammunition to fit them. Where you cannot feed, you take away weapons. Weapons and food have been firmly linked in the governmental mind for as long as either has been around.

On the mountainsides, patches will flash up now and then, bright as dittany in July at the Zippo’s ceremonial touch. Pfc. Eddie Pensiero, a replacement here in the 89th Division, also an amphetamine enthusiast, sits huddling nearly on top of the fire, shivering and watching the divisional patch on his arm, which ordinarily resembles a cluster of rocket-noses seen out of a dilating asshole, all in black and olive-drab, but which now looks like something even stranger than that, which Eddie will think of in a minute.

Shivering is one of Eddie Pensiero’s favorite pastimes. Not the kind of shiver normal people get, the goose-on-the-grave passover and gone, but shivering that doesn’t stop. Very hard to get used to at first. Eddie is a connoisseur of shivers. He is even able, in some strange way, to read them, like Säure Bummer reads reefers, like Miklos Thanatz reads whipscars. But the gift isn’t limited just to Eddie’s own shivers, oh no, they’re other peoples’ shivers, too! Yeah they come in one by one, they come in all together in groups (lately he’s been growing in his brain a kind of discriminator circuit, learning how to separate them out). Least interesting of these shivers are the ones with a perfectly steady frequency, no variation to them at all. The next-to-least interesting are the frequency-modulated kind, now faster now slower depending on information put in at the other end, wherever that might be. Then you have the irregular waveforms that change both in frequency and in amplitude. They have to be Fourier-analyzed into their harmonics, which is a little tougher. There is often coding involved, certain subfrequencies, certain power-levels—you have to be pretty good to get the hang of these.

“Hey Pensiero.” It is Eddie’s Sergeant, Howard (“Slow”) Lerner. “Getcher ass offa dat fire.”

“Aww, Sarge,” chatters Eddie, “c’mon. I wuz just tryin’ ta get wawm.”

“No ick-skew-siz, Pensiero! One o’ th’ koinels wants his hair cut, right now, an’ yer it!”

“Ahh, youse guys,” mutters Pensiero, crawling over to his sleeping bag and looking through his pack for comb and scissors. He is the company barber. His haircuts, which take hours and often days, are immediately recognizable throughout the Zone, revealing as they do the hair-by-hair singlemindedness of the “benny” habitué.