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the last war. The rest were T-54s, with a curved turtleback turret and a bigger, more powerful gun. They all looked as if they were going somewhere important, and wasting no time doing it.
    Looks, of course, could be deceiving. The commander in the lead tank rode head and shoulders out of the turret, so he could see more. Good commanders did that even in battle. It was one reason you went through a lot of good tank commanders.
    This fellow spied Ihor. His tank swerved toward the
kolkhoznik.
The rest of the big, growling machines followed. Ihor could have done without the honor, not that he had a choice.
    “Hey, you!” the tank commander shouted as his machine slowed to a stop. “Yeah, you! Who else would I be talking to?”
    Ihor thought about playing dumb. If he answered in broad Ukrainian, he might convince the tank commander he knew no Russian. But the bastard might decide that made him a Banderist and have the gunner give him a machine-gun burst. The risk wasn’t worth it. “Waddaya want?” Ihor would never speak
good
Russian, but his stint in the Red Army had sure beaten bad Russian into him.
    “Where’s the nearest railhead?” the soldier asked. “Fuck my mother if the map I’ve got is worth shit.”
    If he’d said
Fuck
your
mother,
Ihor would have sent him in the wrong direction. As things were, he pointed west and said, “That way—four or five kilometers.”
    “Thanks,” the tanker told him. “I didn’t want to break radio silence to ask the brass. They wouldn’t like that, know what I mean?”
    “Oh, yeah,” Ihor said in a way that showed he’d done his bit. Because he’d done the commander a good turn, he asked, “Why are you guys on the move, anyhow?”
    “Whole Kiev Military District is on the move,” the man answered, not without pride. “The imperialists are stirring up trouble against the peace-loving socialist nations. We’ve got to be ready to show them they can’t get away with that crap, right?”
    “Uh, right,” Ihor said. No other reply seemed possible.
    “So—” With a wave, the tank commander got his monster moving. The rest followed. Ihor coughed. The stinking diesel exhaust was fouler than the cheapest, nastiest
makhorka
you could smoke.
    The whole Kiev Military District? That was a couple of Guards Tank Armies, some of the best troops the Soviet Union owned. Ihor’s shiver had nothing to do with the snow on the ground.

THIS IS THE WAY
the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.
Bill Staley remembered being impressed with “The Hollow Men” when he first ran into it. Amazing that the fellow who wrote black verse like that and “The Waste Land” could also turn out silly poems about cats. There you were, though.
    And there T. S. Eliot was, in London. As far as Bill knew, he was alive and well and still writing poetry.
Good for him,
the copilot thought, hurrying toward the big tent where General Harrison was in the habit of addressing his aircrews.
    Eliot was alive and well for the moment, anyhow. If he was in London, how long he would stay that way might be anybody’s guess. “The Hollow Men” was a hell of a piece of poetry—no two ways about it. But Eliot hadn’t got everything in it right. By all the signs, the world was getting ready to go out with a whole bunch of bangs.
    Other Air Force men were also heading for the tent. Bill didn’t like the looks on their faces. They had the air of people heading for the doctor’s office expecting to hear bad news. He wouldn’t have been surprised if his own mug bore the same apprehensive expression.
    He ducked inside. There was a seat next to Major Hank McCutcheon, who piloted the B-29 where Bill had the right-hand seat. McCutcheon took a Hershey bar out of his pocket and disposed of it in two bites. “The condemned man ate a hearty meal,” he said.
    “We can do whatever they tell us to do,” Bill said, hoping he didn’t sound too much like a man whistling past the graveyard.
    Maybe he did, because