accolade of a martyr to science.

He passed over the mentions of himself impatiently. Once he had rather liked the modicum of glory and the comfort that the Diktatura granted him in return for his work, but now he was down to basic motives, and his desire to live was largely a product of his avid curiosity to see what the offspring of his curiosity would do to mankind's world.

The picture emerged but slowly from behind the bright parade of censored reports; only for one like Euge, who had some experience of the government's inside ways and who, moreover, knew better than any other living man what to expect, did it emerge at all.

It was evident before long that the enemy's resistance was greater than anticipated. Easy to say "according to plan", but it was impossible to ignore or gloss over the news when enemy atomic rockets leaked through the defenses, and a city here or there puffed skyward in a pillar of smoke and flame. Or when highflying enemy machines sowed the seeds of a controllable, but extremely nasty epidemic, which touched even the capital.

The fifth-column offensive must have failed miserably. Naturally, the first to die in the enemy's country would have been those entrusted with spreading the plague. Euge wondered if the Dictator had found that out, and if so, what he thought about it.

Never acknowledged, but quickly apparent to the expectant Euge from certain veiled illusions, denials and instructions that came over the air, was the beginning spread of RM4, in its active and lethal form (the latent infection must be almost universal now), among the people of the Diktatura. In his head Euge kept a map, in which the increasing areas that the newscasts never mentioned were represented by creeping splotches of blackness. When he examined and revised it, he was wont to lean back with closed eyes, on his lips a faint smile that made his guards look uneasily at one another.

Immured, Euge had no means of learning directly what spirit was abroad in the masses. But he could make shrewd deductions from the changing tones of the propaganda directed at them. Within the space of less than a month, it shifted from paeans of celebration for a quick and easy conquest to the harsh task of inspiring a fiercely realistic, do-or-die determination, to which Victory was once again a far wandering fire, beckoning out of storm and darkness ahead.

Realism went as far as an admission that the initial biological attack had failed to 

 Prev. P 16/19 next