But maybe not this time. Maybe not again. This could be a dangerous assignment for him and Keith and Van Ness. They might never get back to Earth, and that might be all right—for them.

He would rather die fighting, as a soldier, than keep on living as someone else, someone he didn't even know.

According to Seers there was a chance that the final war had not been quite so final. The Oligarch Council had evidently escaped Earth in secretly constructed spaceships, destined for Mars. If they had actually gotten to Mars, and had survived, they were there still, and it would be only a matter of time until they returned to Earth and destroyed it.

Other factors made it even more complicated. Earth couldn't defend itself, for one thing. It had no weapons. It had no human being capable of manning a weapon if it had one. Seers had said that the sanity of the world depended on absolute secrecy. The population was never to know anything at all, never to suspect that they might be threatened. Such knowledge, Seers said, would destroy the New System. The people weren't psychologically capable of receiving knowledge of insecurity, not for a long time yet.

But what bothered Danton was—who have I been for the last hundred years?

Keith was crawling across the floor, gasping at an oxygen inhalor. The small, thin-faced and cynical soldier got up and sat down. He grinned. "Are we in Valhalla yet, Captain?"

"You still take this whole thing as a joke, Keith?"

"The psyche boys are good," Keith said. "Plenty good. And I still say this is just delusion they're feeding us, on suggestion tape, after good shots of hypnosene."

"Why would they do that?"

"They tried to recondition us, make good little workers out of us. But it didn't take. We don't remember, sure—but that's no sign we were successfully changed. I say we weren't. I got it all figured out, Captain. They're killing us. Mercifully, of course, making us die happy. But we're dying just the same, dying in a dream. A dream of soldiering, of heroics, of sacrifice and high honor. Just the way we'd want it. And instead of waking up, we'll really die, in the line of duty. Like a good soldier should."

"But—"

"I'm not blaming them. I think it's a fine idea. For one thing, we aren't sure it's 

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