"The eternal Jones. We really don't have a chance."

"Let's be like these four we just saw; let's keep trying."

"But it's true."

"It's true," Cussick agreed. "Just as it's true your mutants can't breathe out here. But we set up road-blocks anyhow; we cleared the streets and hoped to hell we pushed them back this one time."

"Have you ever seen Jones?"

"Several times," Cussick said. "I met him face to face, back in the days before he had an organization, before anybody had heard of him."

"When he was a minister," Rafferty reflected. "With a church."

"Before that," Cussick said, thinking back. It seemed impossible that there had been a time before Jones, a time when there had been no need of clearing the streets. When there had been no gray-uniformed shapes roaming the streets, collecting in mobs. The crash of breaking glass, the furious crackling of fire...

"What was he doing then?" Rafferty asked.

"He was in a carnival," Cussick said.

CHAPTER TWO

HE WAS twenty-six years old when he first met Jones. It was April 4, 1995. He always remembered that day; the spring air was cool and full of the smell of new growth. The war had ended the year before.

Ahead of him spread out a long descending slope. Houses were perched here and there, mostly privately-constructed shelters, temporary and flimsy. Crude streets, working-class people wandering... a typical rural region that had survived, remote from industrial centers. Normally there would be the hum of activity: plows and forges and crude manufacturing processes. But today a quiet hung over the community. Most able-bodied adults, and all of the children, had trudged off to the carnival.

The ground was soft and moist under his shoes. Cussick strode eagerly along, because he, too, was going to the carnival. He had a job.