in him from boiling into some unthinkable suicide. The sergeant still stood before him, the thing of awful fear deep in his eyes. "Get Major Zukow at once, sergeant." "Yes, sir. But sir--" "What is it?" His jaws hurt, and he could feel the words hissing from between his teeth. "The list, sir. We're the smallest and newest unit there is, so we'd lie right at the bottom, page fifteen. But we're not there. We're not listed at all, sir." He looked. Grady was right. And OK'd and signed by Taylor himself, no mistaking that. "Get Major Zukow, sergeant. On the double!" "Yes, sir!" The communications non-com stumbled awkwardly; acclimatization to lesser gravities came quickly only with long experience. He recovered, and then in a curious loping fashion began to run.

For terse seconds Steele spoke clipped words into a unit-communicator. And then he waited for Zukow. It would be a moment, or so yet. He looked at the message again, re-read it, tried to glean information from it that it didn't contain. It told what, but it didn't tell _why_. Nor even how. It was just a command, to be obeyed like any other command. No, it wasn't the soldier's place to question. Never the soldier's place to question. Here is an ideal, they would say. Here is the thing you must work or fight for. Here is what is worth believing in. And the soldier believed. If he did not he was fortunate, for then he just had a job to do. But if he believed, he was the most hapless creature in the Universe. For sooner or later, the ideal wore thin as a facade for the more practical expediencies which moved behind it. What true ideal there was with the soldier, yet his was not the freedom to serve it. And when the ideal was suddenly scrapped; when they said now, now it is all over, now this is what you must do--here is a new thing to believe. _Forty years, from the bogs of Venus to the wastes of Pluto_.... He looked again at the list headed _ALL UNITS_: and checked them, one by one. Grady had been right. Experimental simply wasn't there. Maybe an experimental Light Space Brigade on a dark little world like Callisto could get lost in the shuffle. But he knew better. With Earth at stake, Taylor would allow no such error. Taylor knew every one of his units by heart, he must. He thought about Taylor. He thought about him the way he had known him as both soldier and individual, as general and as a man. Character. Principle. Guts. The three biggest things about Taylor. A man who followed orders to the letter--a man who would surrender of his own volition, no matter what price to pay the piper ... that was where the principle came in; the character, the guts. He looked at Taylor's facsimile-signature again. Signed by force? By threat? 

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