SOS the Rope by Piers Anthony Page B

onset of night would multiply the chances for a fatal culmination, that nobody wanted. The battle would have to be stopped.
        It was a situation no one had imagined, and they could think of no ethical way to handle it. In the end, they decided to stretch the circle code a bit.
        The staff squad took the job. A phalanx of them charged into the circle, walling off the combatants and carrying them away. "Draw!" Sav yelled. "Tie! Impasse! Even! No decision!"
        Bog picked -himself up, confused.
        "Supper!" Sos yelled at him. "Sleep! Women!"
        That did it. "Okay!" the monster clubber agreed.
        Sol thought about it, contemplating the extended shadows. "All right," he said at last.
        Bog went over to shake hands. "You pretty good, for little guy," he said graciously. "Next time we start in morning, okay? More day."
        "Okay!" Sol agreed, and everyone laughed.
        That night Sola rubbed liniment into Sol's arms and legs and back and put him away for a good twelve hours' exhaustion. Bog was satisfied with one oversized meal and one sturdy well-upholstered lass. He disdained medication for his purpling bruises. "Good fight!" he said, contented.
        The following day he went his way, leaving behind the warriors he had conquered. "Only for fun!" he explained.
        "Good, good."
        They watched him disappear down the trail, singing tunelessly and flipping his club end-over-end in the air.
     
        CHAPTER TEN
     
        "My year is up," Sos said.
        "I would have you stay," Sol replied slowly. "You have given good service."
        "You have five-hundred men and an elite corp of advisors. You don't need me."
        Sol looked up and Sos was shocked to see tears in his eyes. "I do need you," he said. "I have no other friend."
        Sos did not know what to say.
        Sola joined them, hugely pregnant. Soon she would travel to a crazy hospital for delivery. "Perhaps you have a son," Sos said.
        "When you find what you need, come back," Sol told him, accepting the inevitable.
        "I will." That was all they could say to each other.
        He left the camp that afternoon, travelling east. Day by day the landscape became more familiar as he approached the region of his childhood. He skirted the marked badlands near the coast, wondering what mighty cities had stood where the silent death radiated now, and whether there would ever be such massive assemblages of people again. The books claimed that nothing green had grown in the centers of these encampments, that concrete and asphalt covered the ground between buildings and made the landscape as flat as the surface of a lake, that machines like those the crazies used today had been everywhere, doing everything. Yet all had vanished in the Blast. Why? There were many unanswered questions.
        A month of hiking brought him to the school he had attended before beginning his travels as a warrior. Only a year and a half had elapsed, but already it had become a entirely different facet of his existence, one now unfamiliar to him and strange to see again. Still, he knew his way around.
        He entered the arched front doorway and walked down the familiar, foreign hall to the door at the end marked "Principal." A girl he did not remember sat at the desk. He decided she was a recent graduate, pretty, but very young. "I'd like to see Mr. Jones," he said, pronouncing the obscure name carefully.
        "And who is calling?" She stared at Stupid, perched a ever upon his shoulder.
        "Sos," he said, then realized that the name would mea nothing here. "A former student. He knows me."
        She spoke softly into an intercom and listened for th reply. "Doctor Jones will see you now," she said, an smiled at him as though he were not a ragged-bearded dirt-encrusted pagan with a mottled bird on his shoulder.
        He returned the gesture, appreciating her attention though he knew it was