plane would be overhead inside two minutes to bomb them.

That would take place by order of the Diktatura, that is: by the sovereign will of the People, expressed by its Executive Council, which was responsible directly to the Dictator.

Naturally it was the People's will that no one come out of a plague spot, for the People feared death.

Joseph Euge said as much to the pale, underfed-looking young man who crouched beside him in the bed of the truck. "The gasproof clothing," he added, "protects nothing but morale, and these men's morale needs to last only until—their job is done."

The young man looked at him fixedly, seeing gray hair, a firm-lined face, and a suit that had been expensively respectable. They did not know each other's names. All the trials had been separate; each prisoner had been told that the others—whom, for the most part, he had never heard of—had confessed the whole plot.

"What makes you think so?"

"I know a good deal of the Dictator's ways," said Euge quietly; "I used to be well acquainted with him."

"You were close to him—who are you?"

"My name is Joseph Euge."

"Doctor Euge." The pale young man's eyes widened as he repeated the name the way the newspapers had printed it so often; he edged a little away from the other, jostling the woman beside him. She, too, stared with haunted eyes, and her lips framed the name in a whisper; the rest of the condemned—a large rough man in a workman's faded blue, a little Jew with twitching hands, and another youth who, like Euge's neighbor, had evidently been a student—looked at him also, with an expression compounded of wonder, fear, and hate.

Behind their masks, fixed eyes and bayonets gleaming, the guards sat stony-faced. They were trained to be blind, deaf, and dumb—and on occasion oblivious of smells—in the stern fulfillment of duty.

"You are the Dr. Euge?" whispered the woman with a flicker of interest. "The man who loosed the plague on the world?"

He nodded and stared at his knees. "It is true," he said slowly, "that I was a military bacteriologist—one of the best; it is only an accident that I was anything more. I have made my share of mistakes. Most of us have been patriots at one time or another, else there could have been no 

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