Tom hoisted the straps of his pack onto his aching shoulders and fell into file behind the other two. The heel of his left boot was wearing badly and he could sense the strain on his ankle. He tried placing his weight on the ball of his foot, but that made him limp. Then he had no time for concern with small discomforts, for the column was scattering at the distant whoosh of jets. Tom, however, got no farther than the ditch. The soldier who liked picnics had stumbled onto a discarded recoilless rifle shell ten feet from the road. It exploded at the contact. Tom did not hear the jets roar past, for the pain that had burst in his leg was deafening. Momentarily he experienced a curious detached awareness of both the agony of the wound and the contortions into which he was throwing his body. Then he collapsed on the weed-matted gravel, unconscious. He woke to find two medical aid men seated beside him. The pain had lessened and the wound was all but covered. He watched furtively as a corporal completed the job of daubing the gummy white substance from a freshly opened can of plastoderm into a raw gash below his right knee. He hoped none of the ligaments had been torn, since they would take a lot longer to evolve from the undifferentiated surrogate than would the rest of the tissues. Tentatively he flexed his foot muscles; they seemed all right. "Just lean back, buddy. You're okay, now," he was informed. "How about the jets? We hit any of them?" he asked. "Couldn't tell, but I don't think so. They got what they were after, though." "Yeah? What was that?" "Convoy of trucks comin' to pick us up. That's what I hear, anyway." Tom was silent for a while. Then he asked: "I'm not going to have any trouble with that, am I?" "No, but take it easy for the next couple of days. I'll put a bandage on it, but it takes time for that stuff to gel." He went to work on the bandage, while his companion started packing up the apparatus. Five minutes later they had gone. Tom lay thinking. None of his questions had yet been answered. He still could not think coherently about even the recent past. And nobody had been able to state clearly just whom they were fighting, though everyone agreed on the motives for the war: they were defending freedom against tyranny--it was as simple and as basic as that. However, it somehow left Tom unsatisfied. "Well, what did I tell you?" the soldier next to him remarked. "Discipline. No trucks. No picnic. Just discipline. Say, how about a cigarette. I must have dropped mine in the scramble." "Sure." Tom threw him a mashed, half-empty pack. "Hey, thanks." He lit one, carefully buttoning the rest in a pocket of his fatigue jacket. "Thanks a lot." "Okay, you guys," came the hoarse command. "Strip them butts! We're movin'." "Discipline," the soldier muttered bitterly, crushing the cigarette into the gravel. "Discipline." * * * * *