"Yes, there's something wrong!" Stan swung around and grabbed Tanner by the lapels, crossing his hands so the cloth was drawn tight around Tanner's throat and his knuckles dug into the flesh. "I haven't been getting the answers," he said in a thin voice. "The girl's no ape--she knows too much, her weapons are too far advanced, her men are too well organized!" His voice started to shake with nervous reaction. "I'm supposed to be running the operation down here and I don't even know what's going on!" "The answers should have occurred to you," Tanner said, his face a mask. "We're not the only ones who want this planet, Martin!" Not the only ones! Stan relaxed his grip and let his arms hang limply at his side. "Avis is an Aurelian," Tanner went on. "Her system and ours have fought many bloody battles for this planet. We're still fighting them--down here, now." He paused. "You haven't been told everything--operators are fed knowledge bit by bit, when they can fit it in. As a Thuscan agent, Martin, you're told just as much as the high command thinks necessary!" His voice softened, became more persuasive. "We kill but not blindly, Stan. This is an important war--it's a war for an entire planet. We have to be brutal but the stakes are high. We're fighting to capture this planet for our own ... flesh and blood." "I'm sorry," Stan whispered. "Forget what I did." He wouldn't make the same mistake again, he thought. He'd do what he was told and he wouldn't forget that Avis and all of her kind were his implacable enemies, the enemies of his people. But there was still something that bothered him. In talking to him, Tanner had sounded like somebody he had heard once before.... CHAPTER IX The nightmares started in Beirut. Stan's apartment was a modern one, just a block from the American University. He had opened the wood-slat Venetian blinds and had gone to bed, feeling dead tired. It was late August and things had not gone too well. Agents had disappeared. Fusion packages had disappeared from their hiding places. But worries could not compete with physical exhaustion. He was asleep as soon as he hit the pillow. The nightmares were terrifying. He was no longer Stanley Martin, patriotic agent for the planet Thusca. He was 17 years old once more, playing in the city streets of Chicago and fighting in a pillow fight with his older brother and running errands for his mother or watching her while she made meat loaf and took loaves of freshly baked bread from the ovens. And then there was the smell of printing ink on freshly printed papers and reporters yelling "Copy boy!" at him and the twice weekly trips to the stockyards to pick up the live-stock reports. The stockyards. He had stopped by an alley one morning and three men had jumped him, slugging him in the stomach and kidneys and hitting ... hitting ... hitting....