The General surged angrily to his feet. "By God, that's what's wrong with this world today!" he cried. "Nobody's interested in Defense. Spend only a measly twenty per cent of the Gross World Product on Defense, and expect to keep strong! Good God, Tom, give me a drink!" Apparently heresy had shocked him sober. Old Tom explained, "The General is a patriot. We all respect him for it." "I understand," Capt. Shaeffer said. General Reuter hammered his knuckles in rhythm on the table. "The drink, the drink, the drink! You got more in the bottle. I saw it!" Old Tom rolled his eyes Heavenward and passed the bottle across. "This is all you get. This is all I've got." The General held the bottle up to the light. "Should have brought my own. Let's hurry up and get this over with." Old Tom smiled the smile of the sorely beset and persecuted and said, "You see, Merle, there's massive discontent among the population of Itra. We feel we should send a man to the planet to, well, foment change and, uh, hasten the already inevitable overthrow of the despotic government. That man will be strictly on his own. The Government will not be able to back him in any way whatsoever once he lands on Itra." The General had quickly finished the bottle. "You she," he interrupted, "there's one thing they can't fight, an' that's an idea. Jus' one man goes to Itra with the idea of Freedom, that's all it'll take. How many men did it take to start the 'Merican Revolution? Jefferson. The Russian Revolution? Marx!" "Yes," Old Tom said. "One dedicated man on Itra, preaching the ideas of Liberty--liberty with responsibility and property rights under one God. That man can change a world." Exhausted by the purity of his emotions, Old Tom sat back gasping to await the answer. "A quarter of a million dollars a year?" Capt. Shaeffer asked at length. II The Itraians spoke a common language. It was somewhat guttural and highly inflected. Fortunately, the spelling appeared to be phonetic, with only forty-three characters being required. As near as anyone could tell, centuries of worldwide communication had eliminated regional peculiarities. The speech from one part of Itra was not distinguishable from that of another part. Most of the language was recovered from spy tapes of television programs. A dictionary was compiled laborously by a special scientific task force of the Over-Council. The overall program was directed and administered by Intercontinental Iron, Steel, Gas, Electricity, Automobiles and Synthetics, Incorporated. It took Shaeffer just short of three years to speak Itraian sufficiently well to convince non-Itraians that he spoke without accent. The remainder of his training program was administered by a variety of other large industrial concerns. The training was conducted at a Defense Facility. At the end of his training, Shaeffer was taken by special bus to the New Mexican space port. A ship waited.