foolproof as anything could be. Preferably a way to kill a captured soldier—a way that the soldier was not aware of. Death seemed the only solution. Any man, tortured hard enough and long enough, would talk. How could you keep that man from talking except by killing him? And still, it wasn't right to kill your own men!

How, he thought, can you kill a man without killing him?

Hank was pacing the floor. "We're on our way, Murph. Back to Earth. No more combat. We'll train other guys how to fight. Instructors. What a deal! Weekend passes, girls, beer, fried chicken, real milk—"

"Lay off," Murphy said. "We aren't there yet."

Sitting there on the edge of the cot, he struggled for a sense of reality. Nothing seemed real. Nothing had seemed real since they left the foxhole. There everything had seemed real: the coldness and wetness of the mud beneath them, the stars in the sky above them, a thousand other things. But, in the tank, there had been nothing but darkness and voices in the darkness. The tank had broken through the Antarian lines and taken them directly to a spaceport. There, in a thick fog—so thick that you could see only a few feet in any direction—they had boarded the ship. In the darkened ship, they had been led to this compartment. They had seen only two men aboard the ship. One crew member—seen at a distance—and Gregg, the ship's captain. Now they were in outer space, in a small compartment aboard a huge ship. It didn't seem real, and he felt as if they were walking through a shadowy dream.

The door opened and Captain Chester Gregg stepped into the room.

Gregg, Murphy reflected, looked as if he had been taken apart and put together again. There were lines in his face: not lines that came from facial muscles, but the clean-cut lines of a surgeon's scalpel—lines that divided his face into small sections. And the flesh from his forehead to his chin did not change shade gradually. Each section was a slightly different shade than the section next to it. Not a hideous effect, but noticeable when you looked at him closely. Gregg was evidently conscious of his appearance, for he stayed in the shadows as much as possible.

Gregg glanced around the room and grinned. "How do you like your quarters? Fancy, huh?"

"Great," Murphy said. "Almost as good as the Ritz. Are we the only passengers?"

Gregg nodded his head affirmatively. "We had to leave in a 

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