Addie Barnett leaned close to Chris. “Have you heard about Bay Husack and the girl? I tried to get you on the telephone.”

“Yes.”

“Did Czar tell you!”

“No, of course not. Ott.”

“Do you mind if I let Czar know that Paul and I know? Before they land? It’s mean, but I can’t resist it.”

“Go ahead.”

A little apart stood Kinkaid Air Base Big Brass. It unbent just a little in the direction of Alaska’s First Citizen. “Mr. Kennedy,” they said. “How are you, sir.” Czar’s hand went to his head in a semimilitary salute. “General,” he said, with a kind of sweet solemnity. “Colonel … Major …”

Now the sky monster roared toward them, it touched on tiptoe. The aluminum steps were rushed up to its shining side.

Addie Barnett raised her clear incisive voice above the tumult. “Czar, isn’t it interesting that young Husack is taking over in Alaska, at last?”

A jaw muscle tightened in the old man’s face. He did not turn his head. “Well, now, I wouldn’t say taking over. Just getting the feel. Too bad you and Paul went to press yesterday. That’s the worst of a weekly, Addie. Time. Time.”

The plane door opened. Paul Barnett’s quiet voice could just be heard. “As a matter of fact, we just barely made it. Addie and I worked till three this morning, setting up the story. But the paper’s out and distributed by now.”

“Say!” Ott Decker exclaimed, beaming. “Say! When a weekly beats a daily—that’s news!”

A little cold white flame of dislike shot from beneath Czar Kennedy’s eyelids.

Two plane hostesses stood in the doorway, one blonde, one brunette, coolly pretty, very smart in their blue tailored uniforms and their slim high-heeled pumps. Good-bye now! they chirped, smiling. Good-bye now good-bye now good-bye now.

The General was the first to emerge. Paul Barnett swung his camera into action. The Lode photographer suddenly appeared from nowhere and crouched at the foot of the stairs. General Cass Baldwin appeared the man of business now, in mufti. Somehow, minus the cap with the gold snakework, and the battle blouse and all, the profile lacked that firmness, that austerity which had been so reassuring in the wartime photographs. Rather haggard and crumpled now, the face was that of any elderly passenger who had flown across a maximum of continent with a minimum of sleep. Just behind him loomed Dave Husack, vast, opulent, cuddled in cashmere. For a moment he blotted out his shadow, but it followed him as always, for where Dave Husack stood or walked, there was Sid Kleet at his side or in his footsteps. Slight, pale, impassive, Kleet seemed negligible in contrast to the monolithic males of the Northwest—unless you looked well into his eyes. Sid Kleet, in or out of the bare shabby offices of his law firm down near the waterfront in Seattle, was a general too. But Industry, not War, was his science. He marshaled millions of dollars, not millions of men. His campaigns were mapped in law offices; over a bourbon-and-water in the libraries of private homes after dinner in Seattle and Tacoma and San Francisco; at lunch in the Senate restaurant in Washington D.C. No blueprints, no mathematics, no money figured in these meetings. Everything casual, bland, friendly. To a listener the talk might have sounded like a particularly dull collection of cliches.