"Sam, huh?" he said, with no real enthusiasm in his voice. Somehow this morning, he did not relish seeing the craggy man. But there was the matter of the missing pack and gun to be taken up with someone in authority. He suspected that West was that person. The craggy man was alone in the room to which Nedra took him when he had finished breakfast. West was standing with his back to them as they entered, staring out of a picture window that was set flush with the wall of the building. Turning, he nodded to them, then motioned to them to come and stand beside him. Kurt Zen looked out on one of the most breath-takingly beautiful scenes he had ever seen. Directly below them the cliff dropped away for hundreds of feet, a blank wall of sheer rock. To the left, climbing up into the sky, was the peak of the mountain, solid granite. They were just at the edge of timberline here. Lower, the trees began: spruce, fir, and aspen, marching downward tier on tier over a series of rolling hills that concealed more than they revealed. In the distance was the front range, a towering sweep of mountains that looked small but which Zen knew to be rugged country. He had climbed them too recently to have any doubts as to how high they were. And how rugged. In the far distance cumulus clouds were visible, thunder-storms beyond the mountains. "_Thy purple mountain's majesty above the fruited plain...._" The words of the song came unbidden into Kurt's mind. Down below him was--America. Or what was left of it. A pang came up in his throat at the thought and he felt muscles pull and knot in his stomach. He had loved this land. America had stood for freedom. Her sons had fought for it, on battlefields in every corner of the earth, from sun-baked equatorial Africa to the freezing bitter steppes of Central Asia. While her sons had found graves, fighting for freedom, something had happened to the freedom for which they fought. Nobody knew quite what had happened, but it had gone away. Possibly it had been lost as emergency followed emergency on the international scene, possibly it had been strangled in red tape as regulation followed regulation on the national scene. The time had come in America, too, as it had come to foreign lands, when all actions that were not compulsory were forbidden. Thus freedom had died. "Do you feel as bad as all that, colonel?" West said softly. The man's face was grave and each ridge on it seemed carved out of another and harder kind of granite. "It seems such a shame," Zen said. "I loved this land. It was my country. And I don't feel that I have to apologize for a gulp in my tongue as I talk about it." "It is not necessary to apologize for loving one's own land, colonel," West said, his voice softer still. "You are not alone." "Not alone?" Zen said. "From you, this talk sounds strange."