“Grampa Thor, you know everyone here.”

“Everybody sure knows you,” Distelhorst brayed.

Thor seated himself near the group, but not quite of it. He dwarfed any chair he might sit in, no matter how ample. There never was sufficient room for the long legs.

“I had some of that caribou steak myself for my supper,” he said. “I wish to apologize to the guests, in the name of Alaska. Tough as a blacksmith’s apron.”

They laughed a little then at his frankness and at the almost archaic figure of speech, the laugh united the company for the first time. His head cocked a little to one side he sat listening to the talk now, his calm appraising gaze went from this face to that, he listened without speaking. Hydrogen … old stuff now … Russia … shabby genteel old England … that so! The most courageous people in the world … Hungary … Poland … Czechoslovakia … Israel … Egypt … Dew Line … obsolete a week after they’re born all of them … Russians are settling their Far North region with forced slave labor forcibly transplanted … well, say, maybe that’s what we ought to do … we are already, aren’t we! But not enough of us.… You going to be a stooge Governor, Mr. Husack …?”

There was a little shocked silence. In that silence Thor Storm began to speak in that low vibrant voice which Christine had so fortunately inherited from him. It seemed to cut under and through the more plangent vocal sounds. It was almost as though he were ruminating aloud.

“It will soon be finished unless a miracle happens. I believe in miracles. Perhaps it will come from the women. If women ever realize their power and true strength they will govern the world, there will be another matriarchy. We have reached a depth of degradation such as the world has never known. Millions and billions of people are working like dumb slaves to pay for weapons which will destroy them. Every nation is armed against every other nation. Every country’s economic stability is based on the destructive apparatus of war. War is a business greater than the steel business greater than the foolish automobile business greater than commerce food clothes education health life itself. War is Death and we bend our necks to it and our backs to it, slaves. Men in the courts of law and decent women in the schoolrooms try to combat with words or with punishment the gangs of children all over the world, boys and girls, armed with knives and clubs and bottles and small guns and bits of metal, fighting against each other. But the example is a world—the entire planet Earth—one huge gangland in a race to be armed with weapons deadlier than the mind of man has ever before dreamed of in its most hideous nightmares. Men in uniform and in neat tailored suits and men in turbans and robes and even in feathers and clubs, meet and discuss this, solemnly, but not reasonably. They say they do not want this, you want it, we do not want this, you want it, each to the other, pointing, like that famous old cartoon of that brilliant cartoonist, Nast. Nast. I learned of him when I was a very young man in Norway, it was he who introduced the cartoon donkey for the Democratic party so many years ago, and the elephant for the Republican, and the tiger symbol for Tammany Hall. Perhaps another Nast could change the world now, with rapier ridicule, perhaps it could be as simple as that. Another Nast. Another Jesus, with a resurrection of the spirit. Clear-eyed simple men of good will. Now the greatest minds in the world, the magnificent brains of the scientists and the minds of inventors and of men of business and of teachers and politicians and writers and rulers and manual workers are concentrated on creating more and more deadly instruments of war. They insist that these are not instruments of war—they are instruments to prevent and forestall war. As well place a box of matches and a stick of dynamite in the hands of a child to keep him quiet. This is childish, this is madness, this isn’t proper behavior for Man, the highest form of animal life, the one creature endowed with the thing called the spirit.” He rose with effort. “I must be maundering a little, I find I do occasionally, now.” He walked through the room as though no one were there. “What a lovely world. The loveliest. We’ve had it, a gift, for a million million years, and now we’re throwing it away. A pity.” He went to the doorway, almost blindly. “Alaska, the arsenal. It should be free.”