The news was flashed to the four corners of the earth, and almost simultaneously a flight of United States military jets took off from the Lake Superior airport to explore the wreckage.

The first message from the flight commander, Lieutenant Colonel Hackett, came five hours later. It was tense, grim and it minced no words. "Wreckage radioactive. Main cargo uranium in a rough ore state. Explosion and subsequent intense radioactivity apparently caused by an auxiliary cargo of highly unstable uranium isotopes. If the freighter had berthed at the Station the dangerous character of its cargo could not have escaped detection. We have every reason to believe that it intended to berth at the Station. Its signals to the Station, before some undeterminable shipboard accident sent it out of control, confirm this. We must therefore assume complicity of a double nature: by the freighter's commanding officer, Captain James Summerfield, and by someone in a position of high command on the Station."

After that, there was no silencing the slow, relentless events on Earth.

A week after the tragedy, a U. S. Marine corporal stationed at Port Forrestal, Wisconsin, put through a late afternoon phono-view call to his wife. His face on the screen was haggard with strain, and he seemed not to want to meet his wife's gaze.

"We've been ordered out into space," he said.

"You mean they're sending you out to take over the Station?"

"They're sending out five thousand United States Marines," the corporal said. "We all knew it was coming. We expected it when that Governmental Investigating Committee was turned back."

"But it doesn't make sense. I can't understand it. Why should the Commander of the Station refuse to permit a Governmental Investigating Committee to land?"

"We don't know. He must have something to conceal, and you can be pretty sure it's an ugly something. When that freighter disaster got into every daily press conference of the high brass I knew this was coming. I felt it in my bones."

"But what will happen if the Commander refuses to let even the Marines land? What will happen then?"

"We may have to open fire on the Station," the corporal said. "If the Station is in criminal hands we'll have no alternative."

"You talk as if you were in command."

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