Josef Kimmensen, founder and only president of the Freemen's League, has spent twenty-eight years building a stateless society in the mountains, where every citizen carries a Direct Power side-arm capable of leveling terrain and every family is self-sufficient, needing no government, police, or army. On the day he suffers a first, concealed attack of angina, he resolves to retire, secretly writes his will, and moves to install his loyal, agreeable protégé Jem Bendix as his successor, hoping Bendix will also marry his headstrong daughter Susanne and settle the one part of his life he has never been able to control. That evening Susanne brings home Anse Messerschmidt, a magnetic, sardonic young man who has been urging the scattered Freemen families to organize an armed expedition into the northwest, where a string of homesteads have been burned. Kimmensen, whose entire political philosophy was forged in a bloody revolution against a totalitarian "old regime," recoils at the idea of any organized force, arguing that a standing army — however well-intentioned — inevitably becomes a ruling class and ends freedom itself. He also immediately senses in Messerschmidt the mocking self-assurance of a born demagogue, the very type he thought his revolution had exterminated. Susanne, chafing under her father's rigid tutelage and unimpressed by the bland, deferential Bendix, declares her interest in Messerschmidt and threatens to leave home if Kimmensen interferes. The next day Kimmensen announces his retirement and calls a snap election, gambling that a quick vote will expose Messerschmidt as a fringe agitator before he can build real support. At the public debate, Kimmensen delivers his familiar, practiced oration on liberty and the horrors of the old regime, but Messerschmidt outmaneuvers him, mocking Bendix as a colorless yes-man and reframing Kimmensen's decentralized, unorganized League as a subtler form of control — one that keeps citizens isolated, ignorant of each other's grievances, and dependent on League-run schools and hospitals. He argues that only genuine mutual organization, including a defensive force, can address the northwest raids, and he all but promises to dismantle Kimmensen's system if elected. Afterward, Messerschmidt visits Kimmensen privately, apologizes for the demagogic tone of his speech, but calmly reaffirms that he intends to lead because people already follow him, and that he must act on their behalf whether or not Kimmensen approves — an echo, to Kimmensen, of every tyrant's self-justifying logic. That night, in the tabulating room beneath the old government building, Kimmensen and Bendix wait alone with the unattended vote-counting machine. As Messerschmidt's early lead grows, Bendix — and then, despairingly, Kimmensen himself — succumb to the temptation to rig the tally, switching votes from Messerschmidt's circuit to Bendix's, rationalizing the fraud one increment at a time until they've manufactured a narrow win. Waiting outside afterward, Kimmensen finds Messerschmidt has run parallel, timed spot-checks and already knows the count was tampered with; confronted, Kimmensen admits it. Messerschmidt, coldly disappointed rather than triumphant, says only that he will have to decide what to do about it. The answer comes that night: the northwest raiders turn out to be not feuding neighbors but an organized Northwester army, which begins an open invasion, dropping troops onto the mountain and slaughtering League families who have no way to resist trained, coordinated soldiers. Bendix, frantic, flies Kimmensen toward the fighting intending to kill Messerschmidt personally, but on arrival finds Messerschmidt already organizing what defense he can — and grimly certain the untrained Freemen have no chance and will simply be pushed back to the sea and annihilated. Kimmensen, recognizing that the surviving League families trapped on the mountain are doomed regardless and that half-measures will only let the invasion spread, orders Messerschmidt's few armed men to fire indiscriminately on the mountainside itself, sacrificing everyone still up there, friend and enemy alike, to annihilate the invading force before it can disperse into the countryside. Messerschmidt executes the order. The novel closes with the mountain burning and the invasion broken, but at devastating cost. Kimmensen reflects that his old dream has, in a sense, survived — the Freemen have brutally repelled a real army, and the lesson will not be forgotten — but that he has also, in effect, lost everything: his health is failing, his daughter is aligned with his rival, his own hands are stained with both electoral fraud and mass killing, and Messerschmidt, young and undiminished, will inherit the world Kimmensen built. The final image is bitterly cyclical: Kimmensen, watching the mountain cool, imagines addressing Bausch, the tyrant he once helped overthrow, suggesting that every revolution — his own included — carries forward the compromises and violence of the one it replaced, and that no leader, however principled, ever fully escapes that inheritance.
By Algis Budrys · First published 1957 · Genre: Science Fiction, Political Fiction, Philosophical Fiction · 7 chapters