"Hi," the colonel said. "Wonderful--a ship like this!" "I've forgotten your last name." "Chris." "Oh. I don't believe I've had the pleasure--?" The man held out his hand. "We've met. It was long ago, though." Colonel Calm had the momentary sensation of remembering. Seen him somewhere--that's a fact. Chris was smiling. "My being along was arranged late." "I see." "You'll want to look over my papers, perhaps? My orders, I should say." "Yeah. White House stuff?" The man shrugged. "Pretty high up, I'll admit." He began unbuttoning his coveralls. The colonel wished the man would stop looking so directly at him. Powerful eyes--like a lot of those scientific birds. They could, with a glance, give you an impotent sensation--a feeling that you weren't in command at all. A feeling that they commanded a force which could outlast you and would defeat you in the end. They made you feel--Christ bite them!--like a tin soldier, sometimes. And yet--high up. VIP. This was a trick mission--the trickiest of the war. You couldn't afford to make a fool of yourself. "Never mind," the colonel said. "My major probably checked you in--and forgot to mention it. The strain--" "I know your major, yes. Sad." "Sad? Greatest flying officer who ever took a plane off a base!" "Cold-blooded." "Right! Veins full of liquid helium. Have to be!" "Have to be? Perhaps. I always hesitated--though--to think of men as numbers." The colonel felt relieved. Major Waite's discussion of flight plans--his harangues in the briefing rooms--sometimes left the colonel a little chilled. Emptied-out. Obviously this Chris knew the major. He wasn't--fantastically--impossibly--an agent of the enemy. Now the colonel gestured toward the bomb bay--the radioactive uterus of the plane. "You--helped put it together?" The man seemed to grow pale. His smile disappeared. "No." "Then what--? In God's name what--?" "I am here," Chris said in so low a tone his voice scarcely carried through the pulsing air, "because I promised." "Promised? Promised who--when--?" "Because I said it. Lo, I shall be with you always, even unto the end of the world." The colonel stared--and remembered. He turned the color of ashes. His right hand, ungoverned, made upon brow, shoulders and chest the sign of the Cross. His knees bent tremblingly. But before he could genuflect the man called Chris touched his arm. "Don't, colonel!" The officer, in his distraction, was muttering a woman's name, over and over. Chris smiled painfully. "I am here." He glanced, then, at the watching gunners. The colonel looked that way, too, and recovered something of his fighting smile. They were--after all--his command. It wouldn't do to let them see him prostrate. The gunners responded to the direct glance--and the return of the smile--by a brightening of their eyes and a faint curving of the corners of their mouths; their attention went back to duty--the duty of scanning the void outside the domes of plexiglass.