A final war like the last one, destructive beyond memory anyway, was one most of the survivors had been more than happy to forget. They had welcomed reconditioning, the moving into the PLAN, into the New World system of non-violence. People became, largely, depending on the amount of reconditioning necessary, someone else. You can't change solidly laid foundations of thought and still be the same person. So it was a New World. In it the people were New. Everything starting over again from scratch. A small decentralized population. Beneficent leaders, masters of psychology. No weapons, not even in museums, no conception of war, no fears of tomorrow. There were no enemies on Earth. In fact, the mind was conditioned so that the concept of an enemy was impossible. Outer space was merely a region of lovely stars on clear nights. Of the few New System soldiers left, most were willing to be reconditioned. Three of them hadn't been willing. Richard Danton, Don Keith, Dwight Van Ness. They had degenerated into drunken pariahs, people without a group with which to identify themselves, lonely, lost, aging and ailing. Finally they did accept reconditioning. Not because they wanted to. But because they had to or go completely insane. Seers, Secretary of Social Security, said this was bad, but that they might be able to bring about an adjustment. It would be difficult, he said, because of involuntary conditioning, but he would see what he could do. Evidently he had done all right. Danton couldn't remember the subsequent hundred years. But he had been someone. They had blotted him out, fixed him up with another name, twisted ganglia, altered synapsis, probed lobotomy here and there. Everything went, name, identity, the entire business inside and out. But all the time, Richard Danton had been there, a pattern. A circuit disconnected. When they had needed him, they had merely twisted ganglia back, altered synapsis, probed lobotomy again. And after a hundred years here he was again, resurrected, like a ghost. And when they were done with him, after his assignment was finished, he would go back into the grave, and that someone else would go on living. But maybe not this time. Maybe not again. This could be a dangerous assignment for him and Keith and Van Ness. They might never get back to Earth, and that might be all right--for them. He would rather die fighting, as a soldier, than keep on living as someone else, someone he didn't even know. According to Seers there was a chance that the final war had not been quite so final. The Oligarch Council had evidently escaped Earth in secretly constructed spaceships, destined for Mars. If they had actually gotten to Mars, and had survived, they were there still, and it would be only a matter of time until they returned to Earth and destroyed it.