won't have a damn head!"

Sweeney turned and steamrollered out of the office, with every existing record past and present of General Taylor's New U. N. World Space Force under one beefy arm. For security reasons, Manning realized, there had been made but a single copy and negative for each of its units.

His desk was an old one, practically an antique dating back to the 1940's, and his sonotyper was buried deep in its insides on a wooden shelf that folded out to meet you in an awkward manner when you pushed the desk-top up, over and down.

Manning pushed, and with a couple of bronchial grunts produced the sonotyper. He fed in a continuous paper spool, turned on the current, unhooked the compact microphone from the machine's side, and began dictating the rest of his day's work.Something got kicked viciously out of the key-bed. Black, shiny squares of something. All he needed was for the sonotyper to go haywire and start shooting its complex insides all over. He stopped dictating to remove his glasses and dry his streaming eyes. His vision cleared, and for an instant settled on the shiny things that had landed near the front edge of his desk. Hunks of microfilm. He picked them up, held one to the light. Words. He fished in a drawer, found a magnifying glass that was used for half-obliterated old files. He could see the words better, but they were backwards. He had the negative. Impatiently, he grabbed the other square. And read it. And shivered. And again, it wasn't his cold that was bothering him. He would have to call Sweeney right away--... 

_Light Space Brigade, Experimental. Temporary outpost, Callisto. Force: 20 Lancer-type J-88 destroyers. Complement: 600. Commanding: Col. Geofferey Steele_--He felt his insides turning to cold jelly. He would have to call Sweeney. God! Sweeney would skin him alive. Somehow, the tail ends of one of the double-wound reels must have stuck out a little, got sliced neatly off when he'd hastily jammed its pan-cover back on after inspecting it. Then the severed squares of microfilm had slipped down, unnoticed, through one of the desk-top cracks where the sonotyper fold-away unit was. And landed in the key-bed. Only Sweeney wouldn't understand it that way. And the Joint Chiefs--Oh God no! He had to think. And he thought of that other name. On the microfilm record--Steele, it was, who commanded 600 men, twenty J-88s.... He thought of forty years of slavery. And then he was doing a crazy thing--crazy--While no one looked, Robert Manning sneezed and blew his nose and touched the flame of his cigarette lighter to the two squares 

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