himself. "I can get six or eight of
them in here in about twenty minutes; I'll have a project set up and
working in a couple of hours. There has to be somebody qualified on
duty at the plant, all the time, of course, but...."

"All right; call them in. I want the bomb finished by yesterday
afternoon. And everybody with you, and you, yourself, had better
revert to civilian status. This isn't something you can do by the
numbers, and I don't want anybody who doesn't know what it's all about
pulling rank on your outfit. Go ahead, call in your gang, and let me
know what you'll be able to do, as soon as--sooner than--it's
possible."

He turned to Hargreaves. "Les, you'll have charge of flying the
security patrols, and doing anything else you can to keep Orgzild from
bombing us before we can bomb him. You'll have priority on everything
second only to Pickering."

Hargreaves nodded. "As you say, general, we'll have to protect
Kankad's, as well as this place. It's about five hundred miles from
here to Kankad's, and eight-fifty miles from Kankad's to Keegark...."

* * * * *

He stopped talking to von Schlichten, and began muttering to himself,
running over the names of ships, and the speeds and pay-load
capacities of airboats, and distances. In about five minutes, he would
have a program worked out; in the meantime, von Schlichten could only
be patient and contain himself. He looked along the table, and caught
sight of a thin-faced, saturnine-looking man in a green shirt with a
colonel's three concentric circles marked on the shoulders in
silver-paint. Emmett Pearson, the communications chief.

"Emmett," he said, "those orbiters you have strung around this planet,
two thousand miles out, for telecast rebroadcast stations. How much of
a crew could be put on one of them?"

Pearson laughed. "Crew of what, general? White mice, or trained
cockroaches? There isn't room inside one of those things for anything
bigger to move around."

"Well, I know they're automatic, but how do you service them?"

"From the outside. They're only ten feet through, by about twenty in
length, with a fifteen-foot ball at either end, and everything's in
sections, which can be taken out. Our maintenance-gang goes up in a
thing like a small spaceship, and either works on the outside in
spacesuits, or puts in a new section and brings the unserviceable one
down here to the shops."

"Ah, and what sort of a thing is this