What Aron had done by ingenuity, luck, daring and careful planning was finished. It was now nature's turn. * * * * * The next night after his one man attack on the base, Aron had a visitor at his weather station. The visitor was in sad shape. His clothing was disheveled, his face dirty and unshaven, his eyes bloodshot and he seemed to be on the verge of a mental collapse with a frantic gleam to his eye. But he held a pistol in his hand and Aron didn't. He was an officer of the Intelligence Corps of the People's Republic. It was not the officer who had first visited Aron, but one of the others that Aron had come vaguely to know, like picking out sheep from a flock. He had been away from the base on a planetary reconnaissance mission the night before. Since then he had gone through a nightmare ordeal. He had returned to his base to find sixty ships of the People's Republic about to fall into enemy hands without a struggle, because 200,000 men were dead or dying of chlorine gas poisoning. The gas that had come pouring out of the warehouse at the head of the valley last night. It had billowed down the valley, its streamers and tentacles pushed by the gentle wind bringing the sleeping men awake coughing and gasping only to fall asleep again--permanently. It had seeped through the barracks, the warehouses and into the open airlocks of ships, while dying men tried frantically to close those locks. They wouldn't close though, and the spacemen died puzzled as to why not. In galactic warfare, with the emphasis on speed, maneuverability, range and power of space cannon, et cetera, everyone had forgotten an archaic weapon--gas. Aron hadn't. After the horror of this discovery, the Intelligence officer had taken a flier to Aron's station. He was feeling justifiably sorry for himself and his empire's thwarted plans for conquest, now completely impossible since the United Empire had been notified of the impending attack, and since the most strategic part of that attack, the Kligor task force, had been destroyed. His military mind refused to admit that one man, the Traitor, Aron, could have caused this tragic defeat. He was willing, however, to vent his desire for revenge on this one man. Aron was unmoved by his threats and denunciations. The Intelligence man was going to kill him, certainly, but the officer wanted to make him suffer first, to make him squirm. When one man has defeated and completely made fools of a galactic empire, killing is too simple. "We weren't stupid enough to try to coerce you with pure logic," the agent was saying to Aron. "We knew you must have a large amount of patriotism to even take such a thankless job as this Kligor post." "There had to be something else, some stronger reason to make you reject your empire."