The fifth-column offensive must have failed miserably. Naturally, the first to die in the enemy's country would have been those entrusted with spreading the plague. Euge wondered if the Dictator had found that out, and if so, what he thought about it. Never acknowledged, but quickly apparent to the expectant Euge from certain veiled illusions, denials and instructions that came over the air, was the beginning spread of RM4, in its active and lethal form (the latent infection must be almost universal now), among the people of the Diktatura. In his head Euge kept a map, in which the increasing areas that the newscasts never mentioned were represented by creeping splotches of blackness. When he examined and revised it, he was wont to lean back with closed eyes, on his lips a faint smile that made his guards look uneasily at one another. Immured, Euge had no means of learning directly what spirit was abroad in the masses. But he could make shrewd deductions from the changing tones of the propaganda directed at them. Within the space of less than a month, it shifted from paeans of celebration for a quick and easy conquest to the harsh task of inspiring a fiercely realistic, do-or-die determination, to which Victory was once again a far wandering fire, beckoning out of storm and darkness ahead. Realism went as far as an admission that the initial biological attack had failed to fulfill the hopes pinned on it. The plague had taken hold and spread slowly, but, on the bright side, it was doing its work now all the more thoroughly.... There followed a map, showing the estimated extent of plague areas in the enemy lands, and an extrapolation by noted pathologists of the time that must pass, the time that must be endured with courage, fortitude and hard work, before the foe would be blotted from the face of the Earth. Euge closed his eyes and made comparisons with his private map and with his extrapolations from it, and he smiled unpleasantly yet again. He asked for and received a bundle of newspapers; it was among those there chanced to be an ill-printed pamphlet issued by the Witnesses of the Lord, which stated positively that, had the original experiments been correctly understood, it would have been plain at once that RM4 was the Judgment Virus, come to slay the wicked and spare the righteous, whose lintels were sprinkled with blood.... Euge read the pamphlet through with a sharp quickening of interest, but when he had finished he shook his head sadly. * * * * * He was brought before the Dictator for the last time. The leader's eyes were sunken and spoke of sleepless nights. They rested on Euge with the cold impersonal enmity of a snake's. "You lied to me," he stated flatly. "No," denied the scientist. "I let you interpret the data in your own way. It is not my fault that you believed what you wanted to believe."