tact
and moving off fast. But we got quite a shock when we found the nature
of the wreckage." The Admiral grinned.

"Of course today everybody knows all about the Mancji hive intelligence,
and their evolutionary history. But we were pretty startled to find that
the only wreckage consisted of the Mancji themselves, each two-ton slug
in his own hard chitin shell. Of course, a lot of the cells were
ruptured by the explosions, but most of them had simply disassociated
from the hive mass as it broke up. So there was no ship; just a cluster
of cells like a giant bee hive, and mixed up among the slugs, the
damnedest collection of loot you can imagine. The odds and ends they'd
stolen and tucked away in the hive during a couple hundred years of
camp-following.

"The patrols brought a couple of cells alongside, and Mannion went out
to try to establish contact. Sure enough, he got a very faint
transmission, on the same bands as before. The cells were talking to
each other in their own language. They ignored Mannion even though his
transmission must have blanketed everything within several hundred
miles. We eventually brought one of them into the cargo lock and started
trying different wave-lengths on it. Then Kramer had the idea of
planting a couple of electrodes and shooting a little juice to it. Of
course, it loved the DC, but as soon as we tried AC, it gave up. So we
had a long talk with it and found out everything we needed to know.

* * * * *

"It was a four-week run to the nearest outpost planet of the New Terran
Federation, and they took me on to New Terra aboard one of their fast
liaison vessels. The rest you know. We, the home planet, were as lost
to the New Terrans as they were to us. They greeted us as though we were
their own ancestors come back to visit them.

"Most of my crew, for personal reasons, were released from duty there,
and settled down to stay.

"The clean-up job here on Earth was a minor operation to their Navy. As
I recall, the trip back was made in a little over five months, and the
Red Tide was killed within four weeks of the day the task force arrived.
I don't think they wasted a motion. One explosive charge per cell, of
just sufficient size to disrupt the nucleus. When the critical number of
cells had been killed, the rest died overnight.

"It was quite a different Earth that emerged from under the plague,
though. You know it had taken over all of the land area e