He stared at her in disbelief. "You must have known I wouldn't agree--even before you asked me." "We need your help," she said steadily. "You're doing all right." "We're losing," she said, her face looking even more pale. "We've lost close to three hundred agents and we've located only ten fusion packages. I don't know your exact time table but I know it's sometime in November. It's late August now." Her face twisted. "We haven't got a chance, and you know it!" "That's right," he agreed. "You haven't got a chance. What do you want me to do? Sell out?" "You've already sold once," she said brutally. There was that hint again, he thought sharply. The hint that she knew something about himself that he didn't. Or at least, she thought she did. "Why should I sell out to a group of aliens?" he asked curiously. "Because we're not a group of aliens," she said calmly. "Because this planet is _our_ planet, everybody on it is an Aurelian. And so are you!" "You expect me to believe that?" "It's true!" she blazed. "But you've been conditioned! You believe everything the Thuscans tell you and you've never questioned it. Now it's time somebody told you the truth!" * * * * * She leaned closer to him and he caught a trace of faint perfume. "This whole world could go up in smoke, Martin, and it actually wouldn't be important. Not to the Thuscans and not to my own people. You know why? Because it's a sidelight! An unimportant little skirmish in a battle your mind couldn't even conceive of!" "You're lying," he said, without conviction. She walked to the window and gestured outside. "This Earth--it's not the home of the human race, Martin. It's a colony planet--colonized thousands of years ago, like a hundred other systems. For the last fifty thousand years, Aurelia has expanded throughout the galaxy. We don't keep contact with all the planets we've colonized--we can't. Our mission was to sow the human race far and wide and let them develope as they would. "That was a mistake." She walked back to the desk. "Eventually we ran into the Thuscans--your so-beloved friends, Martin! They were expanding too, towards us. We had to fall back to try and defend our primitive little colony planets. And that wasn't easy. It wasn't easy at all." Her face clouded and the look of sadness deepened. "We had been peaceful for too long. And we weren't professional militarists. And we were so few. So pitifully few! The most we could hope to do was to combat the Thuscan system of infiltration, and then try to convince each planet of its own peril, so they could look to their own defenses." Stan sneered. "You haven't been successful, have you?"