Infinity One by Robert Hoskins (Ed.)

noted that the unearthly canine choruses that had been plaguing Wilmington ended with that unscheduled concert.
    But sometimes now when Pete Roberts is walking the beat with his K-9 partner, Wizard will suddenly start acting itchy and nervous. He whines and pulls, straining against the leash.
    “Heel,” says Pete stolidly, pretending nothing’s happened.
    One of these days I’ll really put on the pressure.

Kris Neville and K. M. O'Donnell represent two faces of the same coin—each brings an incisive and satiric wit to science fiction. Neville became instantly famous with the appearance of Cold War twenty years ago; O'Donnell wth the appearance of Final War in 1968. That each should have chosen to attack the same theme in their springboards to acclaim is another similarity in their character; hopefully, the collaboration begun with the following story will be repeated many times in the future.

PACEM EST
Kris Neville and K. M. O’Donnell

    God, in his heavens, was lonely.
I
    For four days the dead nun lay under the barbed wire in a cold luminescence that seemed to be candlelight. In a stricken way, she seemed at peace; she seemed to have located an answer.
II
    Hawkins was himself obsessed with answers at that period and he passed her twice each day, admiring the way she had taken to death: the cold frieze of her features under the stars, the slight, stony chasms of her cheek coming out against the wide brown eyes. Someone, probably a detail sergeant, had clasped hands over the chest after she died and so there was a curious air of grace and receptivity to her aspect; almost, Hawkins thought, as if she were clutching the lover, Death, to herself past that abandoned moment when he had slammed into her. His reactions to the nun comprised the most profound religious experience of his life.
    She lay there for four days and might have been there a week if Hawkins had not taken up the issue himself with the company chaplain, insisting that something be done because such superstitious and unsettling events could turn the platoon under his command into demoralized savages.
    The chaplain, head of the corpse detail, carried a large cane and believed in the power of the cane to raise the dead and create spells.
    The next morning, when Hawkins took his men out on a patrol, the nun was gone and the barbed wire with her; in her place they had put a small block of wood on the fields; it gave her name and dates of birth and death and said something in Latin about being in memoriam. Hawkins felt much better, but later, implications of the bizarre four-day diorama exfoliated in his thoughts, and he decided that he didn’t feel so good after all.

III
    SISTER ALICE ROSEMARIE, etc, etc, the wood said. GONE TO HER REST, 2196. BORN SOMETIME, AROUND 2160, WE THINK.
    IN QUONIBUS EST HONORARVM DE PLUMUS AU CEROTORIUM MORATORIUM.
    Caveat emptor.

IV
    The nuns were always there, administering comfort to the men and helping the chaplain out at services and even occasionally pitching in on the messline, although the men could have done without that part of it nicely. Someone in the company who was Catholic said that it was one of the most astonishing displays of solidarity with battle the Church had ever given anyone. Hawkins imagined, like himself, that the nuns were simply moving around on assignments. When the next one came through, they would get out.
    The nun who had been killed had, apparently, wandered out for some private religious ritual and met stray silver wisps of the enemy gas which traveled from the alveoli of the lungs to become exploding emboli in the roiling blood of the ventricle, leaving her outward appearance unchanged. The other nuns, Hawkins supposed had wanted to pick her up but feared to defy the hastily erected signs saying AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY PERMITTED INTO THE KILLING AREA and that had led to the whole complication of getting rid of the body. All of it still would not have been so particularly distressing to him if