VII + 

The delay was partly due to the slowness with which I had to work, even after a plan had been laid. I could only do a little at a time, and the times had to be well separated. Each day brought the moment of onslaught closer, but I dared not hurry myself. If they caught me at my work, there would be an end of all things. + 

But I cannot swear that my own mind did not prompt me to an unnatural slowness and caution. I was only human, and every day was one more memory. + 

They had all been very good to us; our friends had a party to celebrate our engagement and we were universally congratulated and all the rest of it. Yes, Kane was there too, shaking my hand and wishing me all the luck in the world. Afterward he went back to his work and his pilot’s practice with a strange fierceness. + 

If at times I fell into glum abstraction, well, I had always been a little moody and Barbara could tease me out of it. Most of the times I was with her, I didn’t think about the future at all. + 

There had been a certain deep inward coldness to her. She had carried the old wound of her losses with bitter dignity. But as the days went on, I saw less and less of it. She would even admit that individual Valgolians might be fine fellows and that the Empire had done a few constructive things for Earth. But it was more than a change of attitude. She was thawing after a long winter, she laughed more, she was wholly human now. + 

Human⁠— + 

We sat one evening, she and I, in one of the big lounges the base had for its personnel. There were only one or two muted lights in the long quiet room, a breathing of music, snatches of whispering like our own. She sat close against me, and my lips kept straying down to brush her hair and her cheek. + 

“When we’re married⁠—” she said dreamily. Then all at once: “Con, what are we waiting for?” + 

I looked at her in some surprise. + 

“Con, why do we assume we can’t get married before the war’s over?” Her voice was low and hurried, shaking just a little. “The base here has chaplains. It’s less than a month now till the business starts. God knows what’ll happen then. Either of us might be killed.” I heard her gulp. “Con, if they killed you⁠—” + 

“They won’t,” I said. “I’m kill-proof.” + 

“No, no. We have so little time, and it may be all we’ll ever have. Marry me now, darling, dearest, and at least there’ll be something to remember. Whatever comes, we’ll have had that while.” + 

“I tell you,” I insisted, with a sudden hideous dismay, “there’s nothing to worry about. Forget it.” + 

“Oh, I’m not asking for pity. I’ve more happiness now than is right. Maybe that’s why I’m afraid. But, Con, they killed my father and they killed my mother and they killed Jimmy, and if they take you too, it’ll be more than I can stand.” + 

The savage woe of an old Earthly poet lanced through my brain: + 

The time is out of joint + 

O cursèd spite, + 

That ever I was born + 

To set it right! + 

And then, for just a moment, there came the notion of yielding. You love the girl, Conru. You love her so much it’s a pain in you. Well, take her! Marry her! + 

No. I was not excessively tender of heart or conscience, but neither was I that kind of scoundrel. + 

I kissed her words away. Afterward, alone in the darkness of my room, I realized that Conrad Haugen had no good reason to hang back. It was true, all she said was true, and no other couple was waiting for an uncertain future. + 

It was the time for action. + 

I had been ready for days now, postponing the moment. And those days were marching to the time of war, the rebels were quivering to go, a scant few weeks at most lay between me and the ruin of Valgolian plans and work and hope. + 

In my steadily expanding official capacity, I could go anywhere and do almost anything in an engineering line. So, bit by bit, I had tinkered with the base’s general alarm system. + 

We had scoutships posted, of course, but by the very nature of things they had to be close to the planet or an approaching enemy would slip between them without detection. And the substantial vibrations of a ship traveling faster than light do not arrive much ahead of the ship itself. Whatever warning we had of a hypothetical assault would be very short. It would be signaled to all of us by a siren on the intercommunications system, and after that it would be battle stations, naval units to their ships and all others to such ground defenses as we had. + 

But modern warfare is all to the offense. There is no way of stopping an attack from space except by meeting it and annihilating it before it gets to its destination. The rebels were counting on that fact to aid them when they struck, but it would, of course, work against them if their enemy should happen to hit first. Everyone was understandably nervous about the chance of our being discovered and assailed. + 

Working a little at a time, I had put a special switch in the general alarm circuit. It showed up merely as one of many on a sector call board near my room; no one was likely to notice it. And my quarters were not those originally given me. I had moved to a smaller place farther from Barbara, ostensibly to be near my work at the shipyards, actually to be near the base’s ultrabeam shack. + 

Now it was time to act. + 

I needed an excuse for not going to the gun turret where I was assigned. That involved faking a serious fever, but like all Intelligence men, I had been trained to full psychosomatic integration. The same neural forces that in hysteria produce paralysis, stigmata, and other real symptoms were under my conscious control. I thought myself sick. By morning I was half delirious and my veins were on fire. + 

The surgeon general came to see me. “What the hell’s the trouble?” he wondered. “This place is supposed to be sterile.” + 

“Maybe it’s too damn sterile,” I murmured with a perfectly genuine weakness. Then, fighting the lightheadedness that hummed and buzzed in me: “Tsitbu fever, Doc. I’m sure that’s what it is.” + 

“Can’t say I’ve ever heard of it.” + 

“You’ll find it in your medical books.” He would, too. “It’s found on the planet Sirius V, where I once visited. Filter-passing virus, transmitted by airborne spores. Not contagious here. In humans it becomes chronic; no ill effects except a few days’ fever like this every few years. Now go ’way and lemme die in peace.” I closed my eyes on the distorted and unreal world of sickness. + 

Later Barbara came in, pale and with her hair like a rumpled halo. I had to assure her many times that I was all right and would be on my feet in two or three days. Then she smiled and sat down on the bunk and passed a cool palm over my forehead. + 

“Poor Con,” she said. “Poor squarehead.” + 

“I feel fine as long as you’re here,” I whispered. + 

“Don’t talk,” she said. “Just go to sleep.” She kissed me and sat quiet. Hers was the rare gift of being a definite personality even when silent and motionless. I clasped her hand and pretended to fall into uneasy sleep. After a while she kissed me again, very softly, and went out. + 

I told my body to recover. It took time, hours of time, while the stubborn cells retreated to a normal level of activity. I lay there thinking of many things, most of them unpleasant. + 

It was well into the night, the logical time to act even if the factories did go on a twenty-four hour basis. + 

I got up, still swaying a little with weakness, the dregs of the fever ringing in my head. After I had vomited and swallowed a stimulant tablet, I felt better. I put on my uniform, but substituted a plain service jacket without insignia of rank for the tunic. That should make me fairly inconspicuous in the confusion. + 

Strength came. I glanced cautiously along the dim-lit corridor, and it was empty and silent. I stole out and hurried toward the ultrabeam shack. My hidden switch was on the way; I threw it and ran on with lowered head. + 

The siren screamed behind me, before me, around me, the howling of all the devils in hell⁠—Hoo! hoo! Battle stations! Strange ships approaching! Battle stations! All hands to battle stations! Hoo-oo! + 

I could imagine the pandemonium that erupted, men boiling out of factories and rooms, cursing and yelling and dashing frantically for their posts⁠—children screaming in terror, women white-faced with sudden numbness⁠—weapons manned, instruments sweeping the skies, spaceships roaring heavenward, incoherent yelling on the intercoms to find out who had given that signal. With luck, I would have fifteen minutes or half an hour of safe insanity. + 

A few men raced by me, on their way to the nearest missile rack. They paid me no heed, and I hurried along my own path. + 

The winding stair leading up to the ultrabeam shack loomed before me. I went its length, three steps at a time, bounding and gasping with my haste, up to the transmitter. + 

It was the tenuous link binding together a score of rebel planets, the only communication with the stars that glittered so coldly overhead. The ultrabeam does not have an infinite velocity, but it does have an unlimited speed, one depending solely on the frequency of the generating equipment, and since it only goes to such receivers as are tuned to its pattern⁠—there must be at least one such tuned unit for the generator to work⁠—it has a virtually infinite range. So men can talk between the stars, but are their words the wiser for that? + 

Up and up and up, round and round, up and up, metal clanging underfoot and always the demon screech of the siren⁠—up! + 

I sprang from the head of the stairs and crossed the areaway in one leap to the open door of the shack. There was only one operator on duty, a slim boyish figure before the glittering panel. He didn’t hear me as I came behind him. I knocked him out with a calculated blow to the base of the skull. He’d be unconscious for at least fifteen minutes and that was time enough. I heaved his body out of the chair and sat down. + 

The unit was set for the complicated secret scrambler pattern of the Legion, one which was changed periodically just in case. I twirled the dials, adjusting for the pattern of the set I knew was kept tuned for me at Vorka’s headquarters. + 

The set hummed, warming up. I lifted my eyes and stared into the naked face of Boreas. The shack was above ground, itself dominated by the skeletal tower of the transmitter, and a broad port revealed land and sky. + 

Overhead the stars were glittering, bright and hard and cruel, flashing and flashing out of the crystal dark. The peaks rose on every side, soaring dizziness of cliffs and ragged snarl of crags, hemming us in with our tiny works and struggles. It was bitterly, ringingly cold out there; the snow screamed when you walked on it; the snapping thunder of frost-split rock woke the dull roar of avalanches, and there was the wind, the old immortal wind, moaning and blowing and wandering under the stars. I saw them running, little antlike men spilling from their nest and racing across the snow before they froze. I saw the ships rise one after the other and rush darkly skyward. The base had come alive and was reaching up to defy the haughty stars. + 

The set buzzed and whistled, warming up, muttering with the cosmic interference whose source nobody knows. I began to speak into the microphone, softly and urgently: “Calling Intelligence H.Q., Sol III, North America Center. Captain Halgan Conru calling North America Center. Come in, Center, come in.” + 

The receiver rustled with the thin dry voice of the stars. Dimly, I could hear the wind outside, snarling around the walls. + 

“Come in, Center. Come in, Center.” + 

“Captain Halgan!” The voice rattled into the waiting stillness of the shack. “Captain Halgan, is it really you?” + 

“Get General Vorka at once,” I said. “Meanwhile, are you recording? All right, be sure you get this.” + 

I told them everything I knew. I told them what planet this was, and where we were on its surface, and what our strength and plans were. I gave them the disposition of the scoutship pickets, as far as those were known to me, and the standard Legion recognition signals. I finished with an account of the savage differences still existing between Earthman and Earthman, and Earth and its treacherous allies. And all the time I was talking to a recording machine. Nobody was listening. + 

When I was through, I waited a minute, not feeling any particular emotion. I was too tired. I sat there, listening to the wind and the interstellar whistling, till Vorka spoke to me. + 

“Halgan! Halgan, you’ve done it!” + 

“Shut up,” I said. “What’s coming now?” + 

“I checked the Fleet units. We have a Supernova with escort at Bramgar, about fifteen light-years from where you are. You are at their base, aren’t you? Can you hold out for two days more?” + 

“I think so.” + 

“Better get into the hills. We may have to bombard.” + 

“Go to hell.” I turned off the set. + 

Now to get back. They must already know it was a trick; they must be scouring the base for the saboteur. As soon as all loyal men were back, the hunt would really be on. + 

I had, of course, worn gloves. There would be no fingerprints. And the operator wouldn’t know who had attacked him. + 

I changed the scrambler setting to one picked at random. And in a corner, as if it had fallen there by accident, I dropped a handkerchief stolen from Wergil of Luron. The tiny fragments of tissue which adhere to such a thing could easily be proven to be from him or one of his associates, for the basic Luronian life-molecules are all levorotatory. It might help. + 

I slipped back down the stairs, quickly and quietly. It was over. The base was as good as taken. But there was more to be done. Apart from the saving of my own life, there was still a desperate need for secrecy. For if the rebels knew what was coming, they might choose to stand and fight, or they might flee into the roadless wildernesses of space. Whichever it was, all our work and sacrifice would have gone for little. + 

The provocateur policy is the boldest and most farsighted enterprise ever undertaken. It is the first attempt to make history as we choose, to control the great social forces we are only dimly beginning to understand, so that intelligence may ultimately be its own master. + 

Sure. Very fine and idealistic, and no doubt fairly true as well. But there is death and treachery in it, loneliness and heartbreak, and the bitterness of the betrayed. Have we the right to set ourselves up as God? Can we really say, in our omniscience, that everyone but us is wrong? There were sane, decent, intelligent folk here on Boreas, the ones we needed so desperately for all civilization. Did we have to make them our enemies, so that their grandchildren might be our friends? + 

I didn’t know. Wherever I turned, there were treason and injustice. However hard I tried to do right, I had to wrong somebody. + 

I ran on, back to my cabin. I peeled off my clothes and dived into bed, and by the time they looked in on me I had worked back most of my fever. + 

Don’t think, Conru. Don’t think of this new victory and the safety of the Empire. And, perhaps, a step closer to the harshly won unity of Earth. Don’t think of the way the light catches in Barbara’s hair and gets turned into molten gold. You’ve got a fever to create, man. You’ve got to think yourself sick again. That ought to be easy. + 