Danton felt around, found the belt, holster, ancient revolver he had spotted earlier. He removed it, buckled it around his own waist. He was careful not to raise his head. Above him, close, he felt a ceiling rushing back. Feeling the girl beside him, the girl soldier, still alive somehow, he thought of Mara who had found him unbearable because he still had the mind of a soldier and had refused to be reconditioned. She had grown to hate him--no, not hate, revulsion. It was natural. She had been reconditioned to hate anything suggesting violence. Well, that was long ago and far away. Further away than long ago. The car slowed, tilted. Doors slid open and a soft blue radiance filtered through. Danton clung to the metal and stared down a gleaming metal chute. He began to hear incoherent sounds coming out of his own throat, uncontrollably, as the car tilted further. He grabbed desperately, hung on as the car dumped its load into the chute, down, down into a giant pit. The pit was surrounded with high mesh walls and a steel rail. And behind the rail a circular walkway, with panels, or doors, spaced at regular intervals. Maybe a hundred or more doors. And cranes, cranes lifting metal mouths full of the squirming mass in the pit, lifting them to the railing and onto moving belts that carried them through the walls and out of sight. To what? _God, to what?_ Danton thought. * * * * * Danton clung frantically to the empty car. Sweat made a stream down his chest, though the pit was refrigerated. Cold. The metal was frosted, it shone like ice. And in the pit some of the bodies moved and made sounds. The girl soldier. She got to her knees. Danton tried to crawl back, back up the slippery metal of the railcar. He sought darkness back there, a place to hide. Then he stopped trying and felt his fingers loosening as he watched the girl. Her face was unrecognizable behind a mask of blood and dirt. But she was standing up now. She raised one hand. She looked up at the many expressionless doors. The strength with which she forced the keening death-song from her body was not the strength of her body. It came from someplace else. From outside, from memory, from a last defiance that could no longer suffer punishment, from the buried ghosts of thousands of years that had died. "You sing of the great clean guns, that belch forth death at will. Oh, but the wailing mothers, the lifeless forms and still!" Danton's hands let go, and he slid down the chute. "... sing the songs of the billowing flags, the bugles that cry before. Oh, but the skeletons flapping rags, the lips that speak no more." He scarcely felt the bodies under him. He looked at the woman singing and he listened. "... sing the clash of bayonets and sabres that flash and hew, Will you sing of maimed ones, too, who die and die anew?" Danton stumbled. He reached her side.