Other factors made it even more complicated. Earth couldn't defend itself, for one thing. It had no weapons. It had no human being capable of manning a weapon if it had one. Seers had said that the sanity of the world depended on absolute secrecy. The population was never to know anything at all, never to suspect that they might be threatened. Such knowledge, Seers said, would destroy the New System. The people weren't psychologically capable of receiving knowledge of insecurity, not for a long time yet. But what bothered Danton was--_who have I been for the last hundred years?_ * * * * * Keith was crawling across the floor, gasping at an oxygen inhalor. The small, thin-faced and cynical soldier got up and sat down. He grinned. "Are we in Valhalla yet, Captain?" "You still take this whole thing as a joke, Keith?" "The psyche boys are good," Keith said. "Plenty good. And I still say this is just delusion they're feeding us, on suggestion tape, after good shots of hypnosene." "Why would they do that?" "They tried to recondition us, make good little workers out of us. But it didn't take. We don't remember, sure--but that's no sign we were successfully changed. I say we weren't. I got it all figured out, Captain. They're killing us. Mercifully, of course, making us die happy. But we're dying just the same, dying in a dream. A dream of soldiering, of heroics, of sacrifice and high honor. Just the way we'd want it. And instead of waking up, we'll really die, in the line of duty. Like a good soldier should." "But--" "I'm not blaming them. I think it's a fine idea. For one thing, we aren't sure it's not really happening, so we'll have to accept it as truth. It's the real thing any way you look at it." Danton saw the grin fade slowly across the mask of Keith's face. "Are we really here, Captain?" Danton peered into the scope again. "Yes," he whispered. "Mars, the god of war," Keith said, "awaits his favorite sons." A big dull reddish ball, like an eyeball, a blood-shot eye. The cone of its giant shadow streaming out, a quadrant of the heavens. And then all at once, as if the eye were closing, it darkened except where the sun splattered down on its far half, a pool of sickly light radiating outward into dissipating orange and brown. Danton thought of the Oligarchs down there, or what remained of them. The Oligarchs and the slaves they would have brought with them in their ships. In a hundred years they could have multipled considerably. And the Oligarchs themselves, the last of the old world type of faithless human madness--essentially amoral, no empathy, tremendous egotism--filled with the old ideas of class superiority. They destroyed with utter casualness. What advanced stage had their paranoid culture reached in a century? It wasn't something one wanted to think about.