The Victorious opposition

"I won't be bringing back a treaty or anything of the sort, will I?" A

"Unofficial as can be," Featherston agreed. "There's a time to shout and yell and carry on, and there's a time to keep quiet. This here is one of those last times. No point to getting the United States all hot and bothered, not as far as I can tell. So will you take care of this for me?"

A

"What's that?" the president asked.

"Why, it gets me out of the country for a while," A

"Yes. I don't mind that. I'm not ashamed to admit it to you, either," Jake Featherston said. "I will be damned if I know what to make of you, or what I ought to do about you." Again, he sounded as if he meant, what I ought to do to you. "If you can do something that's useful to the country, and do it where you can't get into much mischief, that works out fine for me. Works out fine for both of us, as a matter of fact."

Again, A

Colonel Irving Morrell watched from the turret of the experimental model as barrels chewed hell out of the Kansas prairie. Fortunately, Fort Leavenworth had a lot of prairie on its grounds to chew up. Once upon a time, it had occurred to Morrell that the traveling forts might find it useful to make their own smoke: that way, enemy gu

Most of these barrels were the slow, lumbering brutes that had finally forced breakthroughs in the Confederate lines during the Great War. They moved at not much above a walking pace, they had a crew of eighteen, they had ca

The experimental model had been a world-beater when Morrell designed it early in the 1920s. Rotating turret, separate engine compartment, wireless set, reduced crew… In 1922, no other barrel in the world touched this design.

But it wasn't 1922 any more. The design was a dozen years older now. So was Irving Morrell. He didn't show his years very much. He was still lean and strong in his early forties, and his close-cropped, light brown hair held only a few threads of gray. If his face was lined and ta

A Model T Ford in military green-gray bounced across the prairie toward the experimental model. One of the soldiers inside the motorcar waved to Morrell. When he waved back, showing he'd seen, the man held up a hand to get him to stop.

He waved again, then ducked down into the turret. "Stop!" he bawled into the speaking tube that led to the driver's seat at the front of the barrel.

"Stopping, yes, sir." The answer was ti

"What's up, sir?" Sergeant Michael Pound, the barrel's gu

"I don't know," Morrell answered. "They've just sent out an auto to stop the maneuvers."

Sergeant Pound's wide shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. "Maybe the powers that be have gone off the deep end. Wouldn't surprise me a bit." Spending his whole adult life in the Army had left him endlessly cynical-not that he didn't seem to have had a good ru

That same thought had been in Morrell's mind, too. "It would be sooner than I expected if it is, Sergeant. When was the last time those people up in Pontiac ever turned something out sooner than anyone expected?"

"I'm afraid that's much too good a question, sir." Pound pointed to the hatchway in the top of the commander's cupola. "Pop your head out and see, though, why don't you?" He made out sound almost like oat, as a Canadian would have; he came from somewhere up near the border. What used to be the border, Morrell reminded himself.

No matter what he sounded like, he'd given good advice. Morrell did stand up again in the turret. Any barrel commander worth his salt liked to stick his head out of the machine whenever he could. You could see so much more of the field that way. Of course, everybody on the field could also see you-and shoot at you. During the Great War, Morrell had often been forced back into the hell that was the interior of an old-style barrel by machine-gun fire that would have killed him in moments if he'd kept on looking around.

By the time he did emerge from the experimental model, the old Ford had come up alongside his barrel. The soldier who'd waved to him-a young lieutenant named Walt Cressy-called, "Sir, you might want to take your machine back to the farm."

"Oh? How come?" Morrell asked.

Lieutenant Cressy gri

That made Morrell grin, too. Maybe they really had been working overtime up in Pontiac. Maybe the combination of war with Japan-not that it was an all-out, no-holds-barred war on either side-and a Democratic administration had got engineers and workers to go at it harder than they were used to doing. "All right, Lieutenant," Morrell said. "I'll do that."

Sergeant Pound whooped with glee when Morrell gave the order to break off from maneuvers and go back to the farm. "It has to be!" he said. "By God, it has to be."

"Nothing has to be anything, Sergeant," Morrell said. "If we haven't seen that over the past ten years and more of this business…"

That made even Pound nod thoughtfully. Barrels had probably been the war-wi

The experimental model easily outdistanced the leftovers from the Great War, though they carried two truck engines apiece and it had only one. It was made from thin, mild steel, enough to give an idea of how it performed but not enough to stand up to bullets. It had plainly outdone everything else in the arsenal, and by a wide margin, too. For more than ten years, nobody'd given a damn. Now…

Now Morrell's heart beat faster. It he was right, if the powers that be were waking up at last… Sergeant Michael Pound said, "Maybe seeing Jake Featherston snorting and stomping the ground down in Richmond put the fear of God into some people, too."

"It could be," Morrell said. "I'll tell you something, Sergeant: he sure as hell puts the fear of God into me."

"He's a madman." As usual, everything looked simple to Pound.

"Maybe. If he is, he's a clever one," Morrell said. "And if you put a clever madman in charge of a country that has good reason to hate the United States… Well, I don't like the combination."

"If we have to, we'll squash him." Pound was confident, too. Morrell wished he shared that confidence.