He stooped and went inside.
Four men were sitting at a table, drearily playing cards. One of them put down his hand and rose. 'Any word, General?'
The general shook his head. 'They should be coming soon, Doc. Everything all set?'
'We've been ready for some time,' said the psychiatrist. 'We'll bring the boys in here and check them over as soon as they arrive. We've got the stuff all set. It won't take long.'
'That's fine. I want to get off this rock as quickly as I can. I don't like the feel of it.'
'There's just one thing…'
'What's that?'
'If we only knew how many they are handing back.'
The general shook his head. 'We never could find out.
'They're not so hot on figures. And you'd think, wouldn't you, that math would be universal?'
'Well,' said Doc resignedly, 'we'll do the best we can.'
'There can't be many,' the general said. 'We're only giving back one Flyer and one ship. How many humans do you figure a ship is worth to them?'
'I wouldn't know. You really think they'll come?'
'It's hard to be certain that they understood. When it comes to sheer stupidity…'
'Not so stupid,' Doc replied, quietly. 'We couldn't learn their language, so they learned ours.'
'I know,' the general said impatiently. 'I realize all that. But that armistice business?it took days for them to get what we were driving at. And the time reckoning system still more days. Good Lord, man, you could do better using sign language with a Stone Age savage!'
'You should,' said Doc. 'The savage would be human.'
'But these Flyers are intelligent. Their technology, in many ways, has us beaten seven ways from Sunday. They fought us to a standstill.'
'They licked us.'
'All right, then, they licked us. And why not? They had this weapon that we didn't have. They were closer to their bases. They had no logistics problem to compare with ours. They licked us, but I ask you, did they have the sense to know it? Did they take advantage of it? They could have wiped us out. They could have laid down peace terms that would have crippled us for centuries. Instead, they let us go. Now how does that make sense?'
'You're dealing with an alien race,' said Doc.
'We've dealt with other aliens. And we always understood them. Mostly, we got along with them.'
'We dealt with them on a commercial basis,' Doc reminded him. 'Whatever trouble we might have had with them came after a basic minimum of understanding had been achieved. The Flyers are the first that ever came out shooting.'
'I can't figure it,' the general said. 'We weren't even heading for them. We might have passed them by. They couldn't have known who we were. Point is, they didn't care. They just came piling out and opened up on us. And it's been the same with everyone else who came within their reach. They take on every comer. There's never a time when they aren't fighting someone?sometimes two or three at once.'
'They have a defensive complex,' said Doe. 'Want to be left alone. All they aim to do is keep others off their planets. As you say they could have wiped us out.'
'Maybe they get hurt real easy. Don't forget we gave them a bloody nose or two?not as much as they busted us, but we hurt them some. I figure they'll come out again, soon as they can cut it.'
He drew a deep breath. 'Next time, we have to be ready for them. Next time, they may not stop. We have to dope them out.'
It was tough work, he thought, to fight an enemy about which one knew next to nothing. And a weapon about which one knew absolutely nothing.
There were theories in plenty, but the best no more than educated guesses.
The weapon might operate in time?hurling its targets back into unimagined chaos. Or it might be dimensional. Or it might collapse the atoms in upon themselves, reducing a spaceship to the most deadly massive dustmote the universe had known.
One thing for certain?it was not disintegration, for there was no flash and there was no heat. The ship just disappeared and that was the end of it?the end and all of it.
'There's another thing that bothers me,' said Doc. 'Those other races that fought the Flyers before they jumped on us. When we tried to contact them, when we tried to get some help from them, they wouldn't bother with us. They wouldn't tell us anything.'
'This is a new sector of space for us,' lhe general said. 'We are strangers here.'
'It stands to reason,' argued Doe, 'they should jump at the chance to gang up on the Flyers.'
'We can't depend on alliances. We stand alone. It is up to us.'
He bent to leave the tent.
'We'll get right on it,' said Doc, 'soon as the men show up. We'll have a preliminary report within an hour, if they're in any shape at all.'
'That's fine,' the general said and ducked out of the tent.
It was a bad situation, blind and terrifying if one didn't manage to keep a good grip on himself.
The captive humans might bring back some information, but even so, you couldn't buy it blind, for there might be a gimmick in it as there was a gimmick in what the captive Flyer knew.
This time, he told himself, the psych boys might hay managed to outsmart themselves.
It had been a clever trick, all right?taking the captive Five on that trip and showing him so proudly all the barren, no-good planets, pretending they were the showplaces of the Confederacy.
Clever?if the Flyer had been human. For no human would have fought a skirmish, let alone a war, for the kind of planet he'd been shown.
But the Flyer wasn't human. And there was no way of knowing what kind of planet a Flyer might take a fancy to.
And there always was the chance that those crummy planets had given him the hunch that Earth would be easy prey.
The whole situation didn't track, the general thought. There was a basic wrongness to it. Even allowing for all the difference which might exist between the Flyer and the human culture the wrongness still persisted.
And there was something wrong right here.
He heard the sound and wheeled to stare into the sky.
The ship was close and coming in too fast.
But even as he held his breath, it slowed and steadied an came to ground in a perfect landing not more than a quarter of a mile from where the Earth ship stood.
The general broke into a run toward it, then remembered and slowed to a stiff military walk.
Men were tumbling out of tents and forming into lines. A order rang across the area and the lines moved with perfect drill precision.
The general allowed himself a smile. Those boys of his were good. You never caught them napping. If the Flyers had expected to sneak in and catch the camp confused and thus gain a bit of face, it was a horse on them.
The marching men swung briskly down the field. An ambulance moved out from beneath its tarp and followed. Drums began to roll and the bugles sounded clear and crisp in the harsh, cold air.
It was men like these, the general told himself with pride, who held the expanding Confederacy intact. It was men like these who kept the peace across many cubic light-years. It was men like these who some day, God willing, would roll back the Flyer threat.
There were few wars now. Space was too big for it. There were too many ways to skirt around the edge of war for it to come anything but seldom. But something like the Flyer threat could not be ignored. Some day, soon or late, either Earth or Flyer must go down to complete defeat. The Confederacy could never feel secure with the Flyers on its flank.
Feet pounded behind him and the general turned. It was Captain Gist, buttoning his tunic as he ran. He fell in beside the general.
'So they finally came, sir.'
