sixty years after the influx, it became clear to thinking people that action had to be taken. For the New Republic of South American had developed the same weapons which had decimated the Old World and threatened the Republic with nuclear war. At home, the Godless Communists were in the process of taking over. The Communist Party was predicted to win the Presidential election of 2058, having come close in 2054. Almost one half of the elected representatives on a federal level were Communist, members of the American Party. They were in favor of treating with the Republic of South American, of appeasement.» The next part was Luke's favorite part of the film. «God in his all-knowing wisdom, deemed it not to be. God acted through Colonel Ed Baxley, an obscure Army officer with engineering training. God inspired the colonel to make the most significant technological breakthrough in the history of mankind. Colonel Baxley himself admitted that he had no idea that his experiments in a dimly lit cellar outside Washington would result in the invention of the fire gun. In an attempt to explain it, Colonel Baxley said, 'God works His wonders in mysterious ways.' But God did work and, armed with the ultimate weapon, a weapon spaceborne on a giant space station assembled at tremendous cost, the Brothers marched to victory. Sanity was returned to the Republic.» There were also films of the march into Washington. The colonel was a young man, handsome, impressive at the head of his column of uniformed men. Behind him came the big fire cannon, towed by a huge halftrack. Luke, while watching the films of the march, always looked for his father, thought, once, that he saw him, but on rerunning the film, he couldn't be sure. What was sure was the overwhelming success of the revolution. The film showed Baxley and some of the Brothers confronting armed government troops in front of the old Capitol Building. The huge fire cannon was pointed directly toward the troops. The man who talked told how Colonel Baxley explained the fire gun, talked seriously of his fears that, once fired in atmosphere, the chemical fire could continue to burn until the entire nation was destroyed, perhaps even the continent, the world. During a period of negotiation, while the colonel's troops faced the regular Army and kept their fingers on fire gun triggers, the colonel and his committee of Brothers took the President and the top generals to the caverns and demonstrated the fire gun in the relative safety of the bowels of the Earth, where solid rock damped the fearful rays and stopped them, but only after great chunks were eaten from the walls of the cavern. The First Republic surrendered. The new government, with Colonel Baxley acting as Commander in chief, quickly sent the huge fire cannon into orbit aboard the space station and delivered an ultimatum to the Republic of South American. For one long day, while the new government flew in representatives of the enemy government and demonstrated the ultimate weapon, the world was close to one last cataclysm. Then the Republic of South American surrendered, the wall of isolation was established midway down the Central American isthmus, and the Second Republic started its great reforms. When Luke first learned, during his early days at the University, that
forty million people died during the first five years of the Second Republic, he was shocked. True, there were over a billion people on the North American continent and forty million was only a small portion of the sum total, an acceptable
sacrifice for the good of the whole. He could see that and agree with it, but still he was shocked to learn that the Brothers had eliminated the opposition by violence and by starvation. Yet, it was for the good of all. «Would you want to be forced to go to school if you didn't want to?» his instructor asked. «I guess not,» Luke admitted. «Would you like to see masses of people hungry?» «No.» «Would you think it fair for the Techs to have two cars while the Fares and the Tireds had only one?» «Of course not,» Luke said. The right to own a car was one of the more basic freedoms, something not to be tampered with. «Some of the Techs, back in the old days, had as many as three or even four cars,» the instructor said. «They, some of them, lived in penthouses, whole floors of buildings for maybe two or three people.» That Luke couldn't imagine. Whole floors? He and his father shared a tiny ten-by-ten cubicle. Their common bath was shared by perhaps two dozen families. A whole floor for two or three people? Waste. Unheard-of waste. «Would you like to hear one of your instructors stand before this class and tell you that God is dead?» «Oh, no,» Luke said, horrified, looking up nervously to see if the sky were going to fall even at such a supposition. «They did. They said God was dead. They outlawed God in the classroom and in public places. They said man had the freedom not to believe in Him.» «Gee,» Luke said. Because he was not a Brother by birth, Luke was determined to show them at the University how the son of one of the members of Baxley's Army could achieve. He chose the roughest course of all, a course which required that he learn the meaning of the archaic lettering on paper. Reading, they called it. Look, Look, see the car? The car goes fast. And he would have made it if the other cadets hadn't made life a misery for him. He was getting to the point where he could make some sense out