gone. In a moment he was back. "Excuse me, gentlemen," he begged. "I've got to see the squad. Just figured out a way to beat the Blues. If you—"

He stopped, frowned.

He had felt it before they did—a distant blast. Then they heard it—a dull explosion through three hundred feet of solid rock above them. The floor shuddered under their feet.

It came again, and again, farther away. A pattern. Then off somewhere else came another string of explosions.

The forty august heads stared at the ceiling. Mouths were open, but the President's mutant brain in seconds analyzed the possibilities and came up with the answer:

"Atom-bombs!"

"Impossible!" growled Hoshawk. "Forgacs' Chamber was destroyed."

The President was already back in the Chamber. He pressed a key.

"Starter," came the answer. "Forgacs' Chamber is destroyed. You have won the war."

Hoshawk was behind him. "But he's still firing, isn't he?"

"No." The President was icily alert. He pointed to the big map. There were no red pin-points that would indicate rockets or bombs coming from the European continent. "The Chamber is gone. Undeniably gone."

A new pattern of bomb-bursts came from above. "Chicago must be destroyed by now," said the President harshly. He pointed to a blacked-out area on the ground-glass screen above. "There are no detector tubes left above us. But look—orange lights. Thousands of them coming from the sea on the Maryland coast. And look there, to the right. One—two—fifteen thousand bombers coming!"

Hoshawk nodded as if he had known it all the time. "Sure. He has men in those planes. Live men who can observe and act independently. He's throwing hundreds of thousands of planes and submarine tractors and mobile bomb-throwers at us—all operated by men. And Forgacs himself is here, leading them. We're whipped, Sire! Where is your civilization now?"

Wadsworth was calm. He was taking it like a man, anyway. He threw a lever and poised at the great keyboard, then his mutant fingers began to work in blurred movement.

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