happening there ... what they're doing—" He seemed to strangle on his fury. "Our children are lost to us. They've disowned us. They'd destroy us and our wives, and they destroy themselves, and they will destroy our grandchildren—We fight!"

Murgatroyd climbed into Calhoun's lap and cuddled close against him. Tormals are peaceful little animals The fury and the bitterness in Walker's tone upset Murgatroyd. He took refuge from anger in closeness to Calhoun.

"So the war's between you and your children and grandchildren," observed Calhoun. "As a Med ship man—what's happened to date? How has the fighting gone? What's the state of things right now?"

"We've accomplished nothing," rasped Walker. "We've been too soft-hearted! We don't want to kill them—not even after what they've done! But they are willing to kill us! Only a week ago we sent a cruiser in to broadcast propaganda. We considered that there must be some decency left even in our children! No ship can use any drive close to a planet, of course. We sent the cruiser in on a course to form a parabolic semiorbit, riding momentum down close to atmosphere above Canopolis, where it would broadcast on standard communication frequencies and go on out to clear space again. But they used the landing-grid to strew its path with rocks and boulders. It smashed into them. Its hull was punctured in fifty places! Every man died!"

Calhoun did not change expression. This was an interview to learn the facts of a situation in which the Med Service had been asked to act. It was not an occasion in which to be horrified. He said:

"What did you expect of the Med Service when you asked for its help?"

"We thought," said Walker, very bitterly indeed, "that we would have prisoners. We prepared hospital ships to tend our children who might be hurt. We wanted every possible aid in that. No matter what our children have done—"

"Yet you have no prisoners?" asked Calhoun.

He didn't grasp this affair yet. It was too far out of the ordinary for quick judgment. Any war, in modern times, would have seemed strange enough. But a full-scale war between parents and children on a planetary scale was a little too much to grasp in all its implications in a hurry.

"We've one prisoner," said Walker scornfully. "We caught him because we hoped to do something with him. We failed. You'll take him back. We don't want 

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