"You're tired, Molly," snapped Vanger. "Perhaps you should go to your room."

The woman's painted nails bent against the glass of the table beside her. She looked like a tigress about to spring. Why? Ricker almost forgot his own plight at the sudden change in her manner.

"Don't shoot that man," she said slowly. "I'm not—"

"Leave the girl here, Vanger," Trexel interrupted her with dead eyes. "Maybe I'd like to talk with her awhile. You go ahead and follow orders."

"Yes, sir," said the Martian, reluctantly. He pushed the gun into Ricker, forced him around to the door as he looked back at the woman with a puzzled expression on his dusky face.

They passed out of the room into the long darkened corridor.

Ricker's mind was an ant hill of thought as Vanger marched him down the hall. His bluff had worked. Trexel feared his whereabouts was known. But the bluff, in working so well, had precipitated an early start of their scheme—and sounded taps for himself. Oddly, as the Martian pushed open the door and the yellow light of the heat units burst into his eyes, his own death didn't matter much, his dying didn't seem very real. In his brain was the vision of those charred bodies in the liner—they were real. And he could picture that same scene in each ship of Earth as thousands of egg-shaped craft met them in terrestial space, blasted a path of hell to the cities below.

Even his failure to "get the story" seemed insignificant. This thing was bigger than himself.

Ricker felt the pistol withdrawn from his side, glanced back at the Martian. The man's beady eyes fixed on him like a snake's.

As Ricker stared back, almost absently, Vanger's left fist whipped up, banged into his chin, knocked him backward upon the hard ground.

Stunned by the unexpected blow, Ricker got to his hands and knees shakily. He rubbed his numb jaw, gazed at the Martian through a quick red film of rage.

Vanger took careful aim at him. "Die, Earthman," he said softly. "Die with a blackened face, as all your brothers will."

Ricker didn't wait. The crouch he found himself in was not unlike the position in four years of college football. He hurtled at the man like a blocking-back gone wild.

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