_Attention all stations, the message read. URGENT IMPERATIVE. Earth has been successfully invaded. The rapidity, timing, and infallibility of the attack has made the necessity of immediate capitulation unquestionable. The following-listed units are therefore commanded, for the good of the planet, to return to home Earth bases at once, with all armament either completely dismantled or destroyed. The conquerors have warned that failure to comply with this command will result in wholesale liquidation of Earth's populace._ The long list of outposts followed for fifteen closely-spaced pages. The message was signed _Taylor, General, New United Nations World Space Force, Commanding_. Steele suddenly felt himself struggling to keep order for full-scale attack bottled in his throat. Then he fought to keep from simply cursing. He fought to keep the hot, quick panic in him from boiling into some unthinkable suicide. The sergeant still stood before him, the thing of awful fear deep in his eyes. "Get Major Zukow at once, sergeant." "Yes, sir. But sir--" "What is it?" His jaws hurt, and he could feel the words hissing from between his teeth. "The list, sir. We're the smallest and newest unit there is, so we'd lie right at the bottom, page fifteen. But we're not there. We're not listed at all, sir." He looked. Grady was right. And OK'd and signed by Taylor himself, no mistaking that. "Get Major Zukow, sergeant. On the double!" "Yes, sir!" The communications non-com stumbled awkardly; acclimatization to lesser gravities came quickly only with long experience. He recovered, and then in a curious loping fashion began to run. * * * * * For terse seconds Steele spoke clipped words into a unit-communicator. And then he waited for Zukow. It would be a moment, or so yet. He looked at the message again, re-read it, tried to glean information from it that it didn't contain. It told what, but it didn't tell _why_. Nor even how. It was just a command, to be obeyed like any other command. No, it wasn't the soldier's place to question. Never the soldier's place to question. Here is an ideal, they would say. Here is the thing you must work or fight for. Here is what is worth believing in. And the soldier believed. If he did not he was fortunate, for then he just had a job to do. But if he believed, he was the most hapless creature in the Universe. For sooner or later, the ideal wore thin as a facade for the more practical expediencies which moved behind it. What true ideal there was with the soldier, yet his was not the freedom to serve it.... And when the ideal was suddenly scrapped; when they said now, now it is all over, now this is what you must do--here is a new thing to believe.... _Forty years, from the bogs of Venus to the wastes of Pluto_.... He looked again at the list headed _ALL UNITS_: and checked them, one by one.