ms over his chest. A row of lights on the desk console
began blinking on and off, one, two, three ... down to the end of the
row, then back to the beginning again, on and off, on and off ...

And then, somehow, he could see it!

He was poised incredibly somewhere in space, and he could see it all in
a funny, blurry-double-sighted, dream-like way. He seemed to be seeing
several pictures and hearing many voices, all at once. It was all mixed
up, and yet it made a weird kind of sense.

For a panicked instant he wanted to rip the helmet off his head. _It's
only an illusion_, he told himself, forcing calm on his unwilling
nerves. _Only an illusion._

But it seemed strangely real.

He was watching the Gulf of Mexico. He could see Florida off to his
right, and the arching coast of the southeastern United States. He could
even make out the Rio Grande River.

Situation One-Two-One started, he remembered, with the discovery of
missile-bearing Enemy submarines in the Gulf. Even as he watched the
whole area--as though perched on a satellite--he could see, underwater
and close-up, the menacing shadowy figure of a submarine gliding through
the crystal blue sea.

He saw, too, a patrol plane as it spotted the submarine and sent an
urgent radio warning.

The underwater picture dissolved in a bewildering burst of bubbles. A
missile had been launched. Within seconds, another burst--this time a
nuclear depth charge--utterly destroyed the submarine.

It was confusing. He was everyplace at once. The details were
overpowering, but the total picture was agonizingly clear.

Six submarines fired missiles from the Gulf of Mexico. Four were
immediately sunk, but too late. New Orleans, St. Louis and three Air
Force bases were obliterated by hydrogen-fusion warheads.

The CIA man was familiar with the opening stages of the war. The first
missile fired at the United States was the signal for whole fleets of
missiles and bombers to launch themselves at the Enemy. It was confusing
to see the world at once; at times he could not tell if the fireball and
mushroom cloud was over Chicago or Shanghai, New York or Novosibirsk,
Baltimore or Budapest.

It did not make much difference, really. They all got it in the first
few hours of the war; as did London and Moscow, Washington and Peking,
Detroit and Delhi, and many, many more.

The defensive systems on all sides seemed to operate well, except that
there were never enough anti-missiles. Defen