“That’s right. It doesn’t happen. But do you know what to do about it? No. None of us do. But now, after everything else, I’m convinced that unless the plan includes active, physical resistance, it isn’t going to work. It’s like the defense industry is the British before the revolution—they control us in the same way—and we’re the small landowners in Virginia and Massachusetts, determined to take our lives into our own hands again. We being a group of Americans who are determined to fight the military-industrial complex on every front. There are lobbying groups in Washington, there are newsheets and videos and posters, and now there’s an active arm, dedicated to physical resistance that hurts nothing but weaponry. Since there’s so much public about this group, it’s absolutely necessary to keep the active arm of it secret. So. I know a couple of people—just a couple—who supply me with the equipment, and the intelligence necessary to carry out the operations. That’s all I really know. We don’t have a name. But you can tell by the public statements, really, who we’re a part of.”

Jim nods.

Arthur watches him closely. “So. Is it okay?”

“Yeah,” Jim says, convinced. “Yeah, it is. I was worried by how little I really knew. But I understand, now.”

“Just think of it as you and me,” Arthur suggests. “A personal campaign. That’s what it all comes down to in the end, anyway. Not the name of the organization that you belong to. Just people doing what they believe in.”

“True.”

And so that night they track into the warren of streets behind the City Mall, to the little parking lot between the warehouses at Lewis and Greentree. There they flash their headlights three times and meet the same four men and their station wagon full of boxes, and the four men help them load the boxes into Arthur’s car. Their leader pulls Arthur aside for a brief muttered conversation.

And then they track into the Anaheim Hills, putting on another pair of stealth suits as they take the Newport and Riverside freeways north. Once off the freeway they track up to the edge of a tiny park in an applex, one dotted with long-neglected slides and swings and benches. They crawl to the edge of the park, where a small slope of grass overlooks the Santa Ana Canyon. Below them and across the freeway-filled gorge, on a knoll, sprawls the big manufacturing plant of Northrop. And in the northeast corner of the expanse of buildings, all lit by blazing xenon lights, with a perimeter fence that is swept by roving searchlights, are the three long warehouselike buildings that hold the production facilities for the third tier, midcourse layer of the ballistic missile defense—that is to say, space-based chemical lasers, which will be transported to Vandenberg and hauled up into orbit. The “High Fire” system.