swarm
of steel-helmeted Army riflemen and tommy-gunners guarding the transfer
platforms and the vehicles gate. A string of trucks had been passed
under heavy guard into the clearance compound: they were now unloading
supplies onto a platform, at the other side of which other trucks were
backed waiting to receive the shipment. A hundred feet of bare concrete
and fifty armed soldiers separated these from the men and trucks from
the outside, preventing contact.

"And still they can't stop leaks," Karen said softly. "And we get blamed
for it."

MacLeod nodded and started to say something, when his attention was
drawn by a commotion on the driveway. A big Tucker limousine with an
O.D. paint job and the single-starred flag of a brigadier general was
approaching, horning impatiently. In the back seat MacLeod could see a
heavy-shouldered figure with the face of a bad-tempered great
Dane--General Daniel Nayland, the military commander of Tonto Basin. The
inside guards jumped to attention and saluted; the barrier shot up as
though rocket-propelled, and the car slid through; the barrier slammed
down behind it. On the other side, the guards were hurling themselves
into a frenzy of saluting. Karen made a face after the receding car and
muttered something in Hindustani. She probably didn't know the literal
meaning of what she had called General Nayland, but she understood that
it was a term of extreme opprobrium.

Her husband contributed: "His idea of Heaven would be a huge research
establishment, where he'd be a five-star general, and Galileo, Newton,
Priestley, Dalton, Maxwell, Planck and Einstein would be tech
sergeants."

"And Marie Curie and Lise Meitner would be Wac corporals," Karen added.
"He really hates all of us, doesn't he?"

"He hates our Team," MacLeod replied. "In the first place, we're a lot
of civilians, who aren't subject to his regulations and don't have to
salute him. We're working under contract with the Western Union, not
with the United States Government, and as the United States participates
in the Western Union on a treaty basis, our contract has the force of a
treaty obligation. It gives us what amounts to extraterritoriality, like
Europeans in China during the Nineteenth Century. So we have our own
transport, for which he must furnish petrol, and our own armed guard,
and we fly our own flag over Team Center, and that gripes him as much as
anything else. That and the fact that we're foreigners. So woul