Fallon said fiercely, “Give him a chance, will you? He hasn’t time to argue every point with you! And if you believe in this non-existent war, name one war plant that’s making anything in the shape of a weapon! Why did we never use any of our stockpiled H-bombs against the Pharigs?” “In our own atmosphere?” Kerry demanded. “If we’d done that the radioactive fallout would have endangered the lives of our own citizens!” “I _know_ what the war plants are making. Solar power packs. I’ll bet you have one on this house right now?” He mimicked Kerry’s nod. “Cheap proteins, yeast and fungi stuff, for the Famine Belt countries--” “Well, what of that? An Earth divided is an Earth--” “I’d rather you didn’t repeat that one-world propaganda excuse in my presence,” Ben said weakly. “Why didn’t we accept the risks and wallop the Pharigs right out of the Solar System?” “When we didn’t even have space flight?” Ben gave an almost inarticulate groan of protest. “We didn’t have space flight? The everlasting hell we didn’t! I developed the drive myself--my team, that is--and the Army of Earth United thanked us politely, closed down the rocket project and told me to go build solar power packs instead.” His voice failed, and Fallon took up the story. It had taken them eight years. Young Fallon did not know all of the details, but he sketched them in. Eight years of being officially dead; eight years of hiding, of working in secret. He would not name the private enterprise and industries who had financed the ship. But he was quite explicit about their reasons. They were men, and groups of men, who for one reason or another hated the new regime. They were men who had been appalled by what they considered the betrayal of the Free Americas through cooperation with the Asian Alliance and who rebelled against the military rule which the population as a whole accepted as a necessity. They were above all men who objected to the decentralized police law--for although the Army of Earth United functioned on a planet-wide scale, there was no other government more central than the local government of each city. “But why,” Kerry asked, “would anyone deliberately set out to hoax a whole world?” “Isn’t it obvious?” Ben Thrusher stirred against Ruthie’s embroidered pillowcases. “Power. The seeds were planted far back in the Third World War, when they first began giving the President special emergency powers. The Three Days’ War put the whole continent under martial law, and now their non-existent Pharig invasion has done the same for the whole world!” * * * * * Kerry was almost beyond speech. He got up and paced the room in silence. Finally he said: “It makes a kind of sense. Only maybe there was an emergency you don’t know anything about. Would you rather have the Free Americas and the Asian Alliance dropping bombs on each other? Remember the Three Days’ War--”