Hanging on

almost more effort than he could endure. "They're so tired and terrified of attracting night planes that they aren't getting anything done, anyway. And if you expect them to achieve anything tomorrow, you have to let them rest tonight."
        Kelly knew the pacifist was right. "Dammit!" He sighed. "Okay. It's all useless anyway. It's a fairy tale. It can't be real. Tell them to knock off. We couldn't finish it in time even if they worked twenty-four hours a day."
        By eleven o'clock, the camp was dark and still. Rushing silently westward, marshmallow mountains of cumulus clouds obscured the moon and stars. The shadows had all run together in one inky pool. A few tent flaps rustled in the variable wind which had sprung up halfheartedly from the east, and the crickets chirruped softly and intermittently in the nearby woods.
        Neither the wind nor the crickets was sufficient to rouse the men. Those not yet asleep soon would be, when weariness became greater than fear.
        The roof was off the main bunker, and none of the men could see much sense in sleeping in a roofless bunker. It would be like wearing a bulletproof vest made of cardboard, or like wearing cotton galoshes in a rainstorm, or like dating your own sister. Therefore, they had put up the tents, most of them precisely large enough to accommodate two men in complete discomfort, though a few-like Major Kelly's-were spacious. Because they were temporary and did not deserve much planning time, the tent rows were haphazardly drawn, an intriguing maze that confused and confounded everyone. The pegs were makeshift and poorly wedged, while the taut guide ropes made a treacherous tangle in the darkness. Still, the tents were better than the roofless bunker. As Kelly had said, "As long as you can't see the sky, you can pretend that you're shielded by sheets of steel. You can pretend the tent is made of heavy armor. You can trick yourself into sleeping better."
        But Major Kelly was one of the few men who was unable to trick himself into sleeping better. Or at all. He lay in his tent, in the diffused orange light of a single, oily candle, and he worried about everything: the Germans, Hagendorf, the Germans, Lieutenant Beame, the Germans, the romance between Angelli and Pullit, the strike and the possibility that he would have to give away Dew's bulldozer, the Germans…
        Suddenly, Private Tooley, breathing like a spent horse, poked his head through the unsecured tent flaps and cried, "Major!"
        Kelly sat straight up, smacking his head into a tent pole.
        "It's awful!" Tooley gasped.
        "What? What?" Kelly rubbed his head and stumbled to his feet.
        "Kowalski just made another prediction. It's horrible!"
        "You broke in here to tell me about that bag of shit?" Kelly asked, incredulous.
        "He's been right before," Tooley said. "In fact, he's never been wrong."
        Major Kelly was worried in spite of himself. "What's he saying now?"
        "Come quick and see!" Tooley said, dropping the flaps and disappearing.
        "Tooley!" Kelly pushed out of the tent, looked around. The pacifist was twenty yards away, running towards the hospital bunker. "Damn!" Kelly said.
        Two minutes later, he stumbled down the hospital's uneven, earthen steps, breathing like a horse that had been in the same race as Tooley. He struck his shoulder on the door frame, staggered inside. The lights were dimmer and the stench twice as bad as he remembered them. A veritable flock of centipedes scattered in front of him. He shivered, went down the aisle to the end of the bunker where Pullit, Lily, Liverwright, and Tooley stood by the mad Pole's bed.
        Kowalski was rigid, eyes wide and tongue lolling. He had a fat, pale tongue, utterly disgusting. He was sitting in a steaming puddle of his own urine, and he looked curiously as if he belonged there.
        "What's he saying?" Kelly asked, wheezily.
        As if on cue, Kowalski said: "Too little time… no time… less than we need… never build town… never… too little time… less than we think…"
        "He means the Panzers," Lily said. Her face was drawn and fearful-and sexy.
        "If we don't have time to build the fake town," Tooley said, "there will be bloodshed." Despite his muscles, Tooley sounded like a frail spinster facing a gang of undiscrim-inating rapists. "What are you going to do about it, Major?"
        "He means the strike will