at wasn't what I meant.
It was this Terran Federation thing," the major said, a trifle too
quickly and too smoothly. He turned to Chalmers. "You never did any
work for PSPB; did you ever talk to anybody who did?" he asked.

"I don't even know what the letters mean," Chalmers replied.

"Politico-Strategic Planning Board. It's all pretty hush-hush, but
this term Terran Federation is a tentative name for a proposed
organization to take the place of the U. N. if that organization
breaks up. It's nothing particularly important, and it only exists on
paper."

It won't exist only on paper very long, Chalmers thought. He was
wondering what Operation Triple Cross was; he had some notes on it,
but he had forgotten what they were.

"Maybe he did pick that up from somebody who'd talked indiscreetly,"
Whitburn conceded. "But the rest of this tommyrot! Why, he was talking
about how the city of Reno had been destroyed by an explosion and
fire, literally wiped off the map. There's an example for you!"

He'd forgotten about that, too. It had been a relatively minor
incident in the secret struggle of the Subwar; now he remembered
having made a note about it. He was sure that it followed closely
after the assassination of Khalid ib'n Hussein. He turned quickly to
Weill.

"Didn't you say you had to go to Reno in a day or so?" he asked.

Weill hushed him urgently, pointing with his free hand to the
recorder. The exchange prevented him from noticing that Max Pottgeiter
had risen, until the old man was speaking.

"Are you trying to tell these people that Professor Chalmers is
crazy?" he was demanding. "Why, he has one of the best minds on the
campus. I was talking to him only yesterday, in the back room at the
Library. You know," he went on apologetically, "my subject is Medieval
History; I don't pay much attention to what's going on in the
contemporary world, and I didn't understand, really, what all this
excitement was about. But he explained the whole thing to me, and did
it in terms that I could grasp, drawing some excellent parallels with
the Byzantine Empire and the Crusades. All about the revolt at
Damascus, and the sack of Beirut, and the war between Jordan and Saudi
Arabia, and how the Turkish army intervened, and the invasion of
Pakistan...."

"When did all this happen?" one of the trustees demanded.

Pottgeiter started to explain; Chalmers realized, sickly, how much of
his future history he had poured into the trusting