The President pressed the scrambler button and then spoke. The words came out of the amplifier. "Three tons of butter unloaded a fast curve day before tomorrow because the baby was yelling for its morning high-ball. The soap-suds are thick enough for whipping but who knows where or when." The President leaned back and smiled. "That's an order to all sixteen thousand mutants over the country to be on the alert at their predetermined stations." Hoshawk frowned. "But everybody's been evacuated." "Not the mutants. You see General, we ourselves haven't trusted Forgacs." Hoshawk's grim face lighted up. "Do you mean you have secretly made some fighting equipment?" Wadsworth shook his head. "No. We could have. There's a loophole in the Twenty-one Eighteen Agreement. But we have observed the spirit--ah!" Up on the ground-glass screen, purple lights had been flashing on at intervals over the United States, until now there were nineteen, and Wadsworth spoke: "Those represent transmitter stations equally spaced over the country. They are all manned by mutants." Hoshawk actually snorted. "Transmitter stations! You can't fight with words! And, anyway, there won't be any power at all within a half hour." "They each have their own power-plant," The President said quietly. Hoshawk looked at the map again and groaned. The nation was almost covered by a canopy of orange lights marked with black crosses. "There must be at least a million bombers over us! They'll wipe out the whole country within an hour. If there's anything you can do, _do it_!" The President was pale, but he sat quietly. "Stalled," Hoshawk thought sardonically. It took something besides smartness to win a war. It took character, too. Wadsworth pointed to the American shores. Long lines of green and white and black and yellow dots coming from the sea, crawling in among the orange lights that swarmed over America like a gigantic swarm of hornets. "Submarines, amphibian battleships, flame-throwers, tanks," he said. Hoshawk stood erect. "If it were not against regulations, Sire, I would be tempted to blow my head off. We shall be destroyed as a people and as a continent." The President's hands were clenched, but he answered slowly, "As a continent, perhaps. But the buildings can be built again. As a people--no, I don't think so. As a civilization, I hope we can be saved." Hoshawk's eyes narrowed. "How?" he demanded. "Those purple lights represent sonic transmitters. In other words, generating stations for sound frequencies above the narrow band which can be heard by humans. They were developed, built, and financed by graduate mutants. They broadcast on different frequencies that we have determined most effective in upsetting the equilibrium of unstable chemical compounds." "Do you mean," asked Hoshawk, "that you are going to try to detonate the explosives carried by Forgacs' planes?"