Hanging on

sadists. Come on, now. Everyone laughs. No one's ever sympathetic."
        "Nothing to be sympathetic about," Kelly said. "You have ordinary-"
        "There!" Dew said, pointing and grinning. "That's better! Laugh. Go on, don't worry, laugh your head off. That's the way!"
        Kelly looked around the blanket-walled room. Only the two of them were there, and neither of them was laughing. "I'm not laughing," he said.
        "That's it!" Danny went on. He slapped the table, grinning and nodding his head. "Laugh it up. I told you they were funny!"
        "But-"
        "Well, now, try to be decent about it," Danny Dew said, no longer grinning. "You don't have to laugh that hard. You'll make yourself sick if you keep it up, for Christ' sake. Now, stop it!"
        "Who's laughing?" Kelly wanted to know. He wasn't laughing at all.
        "Stop it, you bastard!" Danny said. "Come on, Kelly!" He put his balls away and zipped his fly, stepped back against the blanket. "I'm going to leave if you don't stop. You ought to be ashamed. Do you laugh at cripples and blind men?" He lifted the blanket flap. "You get hold of yourself. I'll expect an apology." He left.
        To the empty room, Kelly said, "But I wasn't laughing, Danny."
        It was a shame, the major thought later, that Danny Dew-who could think himself into being anyone else in the world-could not pretend himself another set of balls if he thought his own were funny. Not even Danny Dew, who could become a white man at will, not even Danny could escape everything.
        So thanks to Danny Dew, the bridge was completed at two o'clock in the morning, twenty-six hours after the unit set to work on it. The last of the men staggered out of the ravine like the dead returning from hell. They had worked a sweltering day and a muggy night, and they could hardly see where they were going. Most of them trudged back to the main bunker, but no one wanted to sleep underground. They fell down in the grass and looked at each other and mumbled about the heat and fell asleep. A few men could not sleep, at first. They had been driven to the limits of their endurance, and they had come around the bend of exhaustion to a sort of manic insomnia. But in an hour, lulled by the snores of their fellows, they too slept.
        A score of men went to the rec room where there was ice for cold drinks that Maurice supplied. Privates Hoskins and Malzberg were trying to start a poker game in the rec room, even though they were almost too tired to shuffle the cards. The men slumped on the benches and floor and looked at Hoskins and Malzberg as if they were insane. Actually, they were.
        Hoskins sat at a scarred table talking to the men. "You worked hard," he told them. "You deserve a little fun, an interesting game."
        Malzberg, the tallest in the unit, stood in the middle of the room and spread his arms despairingly. "We're doomed anyway," he said, in a rumbling voice full of the sadness of ages. "We've no chance. We're all dead men. We can't afford to throw away our last precious hours of life in sleep."
        By the time he'd finished, all the men in the room had fallen asleep.
        "Blackjack?" Hoskins asked.
        Malzberg sat down, dwarfing the table. "Deal," he said.
        Fifteen minutes later, even they were asleep.

----

    6
        
        "Kelly, wake up."
        The major snorted, blinked, opened his eyes and looked directly into Private Tooley's flashlight. "Turn that thing off!"
        Tooley turned it off, blinding both of them. They were only inches away from each other, but it was like being sealed up in two separate cans side by side on a grocery shelf. Talking from his can, the pacifist said, "I have something to tell you."
        Kelly sat up on his cot, felt the canvas shift under him and the spindly frame twist with his weight. He smacked his lips. "What time is it?"
        "Four in the morning."
        "What morning?" Kelly asked.
        "I know you just got to sleep," Tooley said. "So did I. But this is important. Kowalski just sat up in bed and warned me about another raid. He was shouting so loud he woke me."
        Kelly tried to think who Kowalski was, but he couldn't get his mind functioning. The room was too hot. His undershorts were pasted to him with sweat, and even the cot canvas was damp and slippery. "Another air attack?"
        "Yes, sir," Tooley said. "His exact words were: 'Rising sun, bombs