He felt his insides turning to cold jelly. He would have to call Sweeney. God! Sweeney would skin him alive. Somehow, the tail ends of one of the double-wound reels must have stuck out a little, got sliced neatly off when he'd hastily jammed its pan-cover back on after inspecting it. Then the severed squares of microfilm had slipped down, unnoticed, through one of the desk-top cracks where the sonotyper fold-away unit was. And landed in the key-bed. Only Sweeney wouldn't understand it that way. And the Joint Chiefs-- Oh God no! He had to think. And he thought of that other name. On the microfilm record--Steele, it was, who commanded 600 men, twenty J-88s.... He thought of forty years of slavery. And then he was doing a crazy thing--crazy-- While no one looked, Robert Manning sneezed and blew his nose and touched the flame of his cigarette lighter to the two squares of microfilm. * * * * * The white-faced communications sergeant stood just inside the door, and this time he failed to be impressed with the unusual smartness of the Colonel's acknowledging salute. The thick sheaf of yellow papers he held in his left hand was trembling visibly, noisily, and he couldn't make it stop. "Well, Grady, what is it? You look as though you'd picked up a telepath message from one of our Callistan cap-crawlers, or something--" He reached out for the quaking message the sergeant held, and the communications man smiled nervously and held it out to him. "Sorry, sir. I--I guess I just--" "No trouble, boy?" The stocky black-and-silver uniformed figure paused in its movement, the thick pile of yellow papers momentarily forgotten. All of Steele's personnel seemed like sons to him. Even the raw recruits who had previously never been further out than Earth's own Moon. Sometimes, during the lonely hours there had been in the fastnesses of Space, he had surmised it was because there had never been a real son of his own with whom to share the adventures of his calling. But hadn't it been Space itself that had denied him those many things other men could take for granted--the things for which he had never quite been able to trade? Forty years of it. Venus to Pluto. Deep Space at the System's rim and beyond, to the very edge of Infinity itself. Sometimes this deep hurt within him seemed too great. And yet, somehow, it seemed always worth the venture. One day, no matter the cost or the hurt, men's outposts would be flung to the stars themselves. This thing he knew. The sergeant was speaking, and there was a fear in his eyes. "Something's--happened, home, sir. You'd better read this right away. All the way to the very end, sir." Steele ran a freckled, stub-fingered hand slowly and deliberately along the close-cropped iron-gray side of his squarish skull.