“Oh, a special engineer task force did it in—let me see, now—” The MP lieutenant, a Chinese girl in her late teens, pursed soft, coral lips at his graying hair. “Less than five hours, figuring from the moment they arrived. The biggest problem was finding a cell in the neighborhood that was big enough to hold the prisoner. This cave was perfect.”

Mardin looked up at the ledge above their heads. Every ten feet, a squad of three men, highly polished weapons ready for instant action. Atomic cannon squads alternating with men bent down under the weight of dem-dem grenades. Grim-faced young subalterns, very conscious of the bigness of the brass that occupied the platform at the far end of the cave, stamped back and forth along the ledge from squad to squad, deadly little Royster pistolettos tinkling and naked in their sweating hands. Those kids, he thought angrily, so well adjusted to it all!

The ledge ran along three sides of the cave; on the fourth, the low entrance from which Mardin had just come, he had seen five steel Caesars implanted, long, pointed snouts throbbingly eager to throw tremendous gusts of nuclear energy at the Jovian’s rear. And amid the immense rock folds of the roof, a labyrinth of slender, pencil-like bombs had been laid, held in place by clamps that would all open simultaneously the moment a certain colonel’s finger pressed a certain green button…

“If our friend in the tank makes one wrong move,” Mardin muttered, “half of South America goes down the drain.”

The girl started to chuckle, then changed her mind and frowned. “I’m sorry, Major Mardin, but I don’t like that. I don’t like hearing them referred to as ‘friends.’ Even in a joke. Over a million and a half people—three hundred thousand of them Chinese—have been wiped out by those—those ammoniated flatworms!”

“And the first fifty of which,” he reminded her irritably, “were my relatives and neighbors. If you’re old enough to remember Mars and the Three Watertanks Massacre, young lady.”