about the Stinkers?" Hartford asked. "What will happen to them if we decide to axenize Kansas?"

"Maybe they'll leave," Colonel Nef said, smiling in the manner that had won him the name "Nasty." "A few more punitive expeditions like tonight's—an incendiary grenade was thrown at Kansannamura, did you know that, Lee? I threw it—and we'll have no Stinkers underfoot. We soon will be able to mop and polish this world to our own high standards. We'll walk this lovely world without safety-suits and breathe unfiltered air. We'll enter into our birthright, Lee." Nef gazed at his cigar admiringly, though it had gone out. "So much for the moment, Brother Hartford," he said. "Perhaps we'd both do well to get some sleep."

Hartford jumped to attention and formally requested permission to withdraw. Nef nodded. Hartford about-faced and left the room.

VI

The things the colonel had told him hadn't fallen into place in his mind yet. Hartford was numb of thought.

Back in his own room in B.O.Q. the numbness cleared a bit. He poured himself a drink. Somehow, he thought, he'd become fairhaired boy to an Attila the Hun, an Alaric the Goth, a Hitler, a Haman; an Ashurbanipal I, a Rameses II. For Nef was equally with these a servant of Siva the Destroyer, with his plan to make Man pure.

His purification would involve the destruction of all non-axenic men and women all the way from the Home World to the newest beach-head on the Frontier; the sterilization of a hundred worlds as culture media for the new race; and the planting on the newly axenized soil of colonies of Homo gnotobioticus, the feeder-on-hydroponic-greens, the inodorous, the thin-gutted, the strong toothed Superman.

Nef's pogrom had begun with the raid on the village, Hartford mused, his arms behind his head as he lay on his bunk. Nef had decided that this green and pleasant world belonged to the silver men, the true men, the new men. Us, Hartford thought. Earth's Stinkers, ordinary humanity with its common cold and its caries, would follow the Kansan Indigenous Hominid, and the Great Auk, into history.

The double funeral of the Lieutenants Piacentelli was to be held at Retreat, outside the Barracks. Hartford wondered a bit at the haste with which the two bodies were to be consigned to the earth of Kansas. Perhaps haste was necessary because of the micro-organisms with which poor Pia's corpse was necessarily contaminated.

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