aid, wetting my lip.

"Then that's the first thing I'd best teach you. Anything you see in the
haze from now on will be from Savannah. You must shoot it down."

CHAPTER 5

_And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night._

--Dover Beach,
_by Matthew Arnold_

I am not going to try to describe point by point all that happened the
next half hour because there was too much of it and it involved all
three of us, sometimes doing different things at the same time, and
although we were told a lot of things, we were seldom if ever told the
why of them, and through it all was the constant impression that we
were dealing with human beings (I almost left out the "human" and I'm
still not absolutely sure whether I shouldn't) of vastly greater
scope--and probably intelligence too--than ourselves.

And that was just the _basic_ confusion, to give it a name. After a
while the situation got more difficult, as I'll try to tell in due
course.

* * * * *

To begin with, it was extremely weird to plunge from a rather leisurely
confab about a fairy-tale fellowship of non-practicing murderers into a
shooting war between a violet blob and a dark red puddle on a shadowy
fluorescent map. The voice didn't throw any great shining lights on this
topic, because after the first--and perhaps unguarded--revelation, we
learned little more of the war between Atla-Hi and Savannah Fortress and
nothing of the reasons behind it. Presumably Savannah was the aggressor,
reaching out north after the conquest of Birmingham, but even that was
just a guess. It is hard to describe how shadowy it all felt to me;
there were some minutes while my mind kept mixing up the whole thing
with what I'd read long ago about the Civil War: Savannah was Lee,
Atla-Hi was Grant, and we had been dropped spang into the middle of the
second Battle of the Wilderness.

Apparently the Savannah planes had some sort of needle ray as part of
their armament--at any rate I was warned to watch out for "swinging
lines in the haze, like straight strings of pink stars" and later told
to aim at the sources of such lines. And naturally I guessed that the
steel cubes must be some crucial weapon for Atla-Hi, or ammunition for a
weapon, or parts for some essential instrume