mentality-type, and a definite mentality-type produced a definite way of thinking. The intellectuals were similar in body and mind, and their answers were often too similar. When the UN wanted a different answer, it called upon men such as Donovan.

And Donovan had a new problem.

He lit a cigarette without looking away from the ruins. The ruins of Fort Meade; he could see at a glance that it had been a direct hit. Every building had been leveled, the ground scorched and fused into weird glass-like substances. There had been no burial details: of all the thousands of soldiers at the Fort, there had been no remains to bury.

He had no special purpose in viewing the ruins except to goad his mind. Reports on his desk in the New Pentagon had informed him of the facts: seven military bases such as Fort Meade had been bombed by the Antarians. All direct hits.

It meant one of two things. One: the Antarians could take a photograph of Earth from a thousand miles and spot military installations on that photograph. Two: they had tortured prisoners and learned the locations. Number one was improbable; number two was very probable.

He wondered, How do you prevent a man from giving information? It was an important problem. There seemed to be no way to prevent the Antarians from taking prisoners, no way to prevent them from torturing prisoners. If they captured enough prisoners, they could learn the location of every military base and war plant on Earth. Every soldier knew the location of something vital; almost every soldier could point to it on an aerial map. It was a simple matter of spotting rivers and mountain ranges and judging distances.

The possibilities of preventing their men from talking were few, he realized. There was the standard answer: give a pill to every soldier and tell him to swallow the pill if he's captured. But that was the wrong answer. It had been used before, but only in the case of espionage agents. Used on an army of men, it would have a demoralizing effect. It would imply that you expected them to be captured. And what percentage of men would commit suicide? Besides that, the news would sooner or later leak out to the civilian population and have a demoralizing effect upon them. How would millions of mothers and wives feel if they knew their sons and husbands had been ordered to kill themselves if captured?

No, suicide pills were not the answer. It had to be something different, something original, and as 

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