"Sometime soon, in a few days, maybe--a rocket will take off for somewhere in Germany and proceed to a point in space about fifty thousand miles from the Earth. There it will discharge fifteen hundred metric tons of radioactive dust--a new mixture of ingredients having a few days' half life, for initial devastating effect, and of others with a period of about a year--to take care of anybody that tries to sit it out underground. The dust will drift toward Earth in an expanding cloud, whose size and shape they've calculated down to the last decimal, and which, when it falls on Earth's surface, will cover an area a little larger than the United States. It will be spread thin by then--about one gram to the acre--but that will be enough." * * * * * Manning sat silent. The idea of these new ways of all-compassing destruction was too much for a mind that had learned to regard high explosives, machine guns and flame throwers as adequately murderous. And the plan for exterminating a nation was too monstrous to think about, unless in the same light as it must be seen by the minds that conceived it--as something like dusting a field of grain to kill off insects whose only crime is that they eat what men want to eat. "And you've known about this, and haven't stopped it?" he asked at last. "They've been busy making and refining the dust for a year now, and we've known about it almost that long. And we've tried to stop them. "We've tried to assassinate the men responsible for the plan. But the ruling clique, like your acquaintance, Schwinzog, aren't under any illusions and they aren't going to yield any power. We've tried to get them and mostly failed. "Finally, one of our men got inside the Reichministerium fur Raumschiffahrt and learned that the space ship _Siegfried_ had been assigned for conversion to the uses of the project. The raid you stumbled into was trying to locate and destroy it, but they didn't find it and blew up a building instead. That's our last chance even to gain time--if we can't wreck the dust ship, I don't know what we can do." Igor Vzryvov broke his brooding silence. "You will do as we did," he proclaimed with flat conviction. "Save what you can of your organization by flight to other lands, whence you will carry on the fight--to the death, without the crippling reservations imposed by millions of hostages." Kane looked at him with smoldering eyes. "What would be left to fight for?" "Wait and see," insisted the Russian implacably. "You will really begin to fight when there is no more America to be saved, only Germany to be destroyed." Manning put in hastily, "Your men didn't locate the--space ship. How do you know it's even in the Black Forest?" Kane frowned, then shrugged. "We don't. But there's nowhere else it can be. We've checked every spaceport in the Reich." "Maybe it's outside Germany."