They did get to us, Nicholas realized... . and even you, Talbot Yancy, our spir-pol-mil leader, brave enough to live in your surface fortress in the Rockies: even you, good friend, can't undo what's just been done.

"My fellow Americans," Yancy' s voice came, and it was not even weary. Nicholas blinked, startled by the vigor. Yancy seemed almost unaffected, to have remained true to the _stoa_, to his West Point heritage; he viewed it all, accepted and understood, but no emotion unhinged his calm reason.

"You have seen," Yancy continued in his low, late middle-age voice, that of a seasoned old warrior, ramrod in body, clear in mind; good for a few more years... not like the husk, the dying thing in the clinic bed over which Carol watched. "--a terrible thing. Nothing is left of Detroit and as you know a good deal of war material has emerged by her fair autofacs, all these years, and now that is lost. But we have sacrificed no human life, the one commodity which we cannot, will not, relinquish."

"Good point," Nunes muttered, jotting notes.

Beside Nicholas, all at once, Carol Tigh appeared, in her white smock, low shoes; he rose, instinctively, stood to face her.

"He passed away," Carol said. "Souza. Just now. I at once froze him; I was right there at the bed, so there was no time loss. Braintissue won't have suffered. He just--went." She tried to smile, and then tears filled her eyes. It shocked him; he had never seen Carol cry, and something in him was horrified, as if it was wicked, this that he saw.

"We shall endure this," the aud-track of the coax transmission from the Estes Park fortress continued, and now, on the screen, Yancy's face appeared and the war, the rolling clouds of matter in suspension or turned to hot gas, faded. And it was a stiff, firm man at a large oak desk in some hidden spot where Soviet, even the awful deadly new Sino-twenty red-dot missiles, had never found him.