hopelessness in his eyes.

Then the newsmen walked from the room. Slowly and silently.

Robert Manning, civilian Pentagon clerk, told himself that the Invaders might better kill everybody off and get it over with than to just regiment the hell out of everything. A man couldn't even stay home so his wife could take care of his cold for him.

He sneezed. If allowed to live it, there were perhaps forty years of life yet for him. Forty years, and they would be slave years. It was all too damned new and just hadn't got through to him yet. What in God's name was it going to be _like_....

There was a sickness in his stomach, and he knew it was not from his cold.

"Manning--"

He looked up. It was Sweeney, the chief clerk. Manning always thought of him as a man who should've been a first-sergeant somewhere. He was big enough and loud enough, and certainly had temper enough.

"Yes, Mr. Sweeney?"

"Need these damn records right away. They all here? Each reel double-wound with positive and negative both?"

"Yes, sir." Sweeney picked up the bundlesome stack of microfilm reels. "Mr. Sweeney--"

"What is it?"

"Are--are _They_ going to get 'em? All of Earth's Space outpost and military records--_every_thing?"

"After the Joint Chiefs make out emergency recall orders for every last damn unit, they are. They will check each set of orders against every unit record here, all the way from Corps down to each individual ship." Sweeney grunted. "Then they'll burn 'em, positives, negatives, everything ... then when the ships come in, they will destroy them too."

Manning felt something turn over inside him. "General Taylor,--"

"What the hell can Taylor do? Christ, you're better off than he is. Once every ship is back here and busted up, he won't even have a job. Maybe not even a head."

"Every ship. They're all there, Mr. Sweeney. Positives and negatives double-wound on every reel."

"They better be. Or _you_ 

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