It was as though the side wall of my apartment had dissolved, and we looked into a large room or office which had no walls or ceiling, these being replaced by the interior surface of a hemisphere, which was in fact a vast viewplate on which those in the room could see in every direction. Some 200 staff officers had their desks in this room. Each desk was equipped with a system of small viewplates of its own, and each officer was responsible for a given directional section of the "map," and busied himself with teleprojectoscope examination of it, quite independently of the general view thrown on the dome plate. At a raised circular desk in the center, which was composed entirely of viewplates, sat the Executive Marshal, scanning the hemisphere, calling occasionally for telescopic views of one section or another on his desk plates, and noting the little pale green signal lights that flashed up as Sector Observers called for his attention. * * * * * Members of Strategy Board, Base Commanders of military units, and San-Lan himself, I understood, sat at similar desks in their private offices, on which all these views were duplicated, and in constant verbal and visual communication with one another and with the Executive Marshal. The particular view which appeared on my own wall fortunately showed the east side of the dome viewplate and in one corner of my picture appeared the Executive Marshal himself. Although I was getting a viewplate picture of a viewplate picture, I could see the broad, rugged valley to the east plainly, and the relatively low ridge beyond, which must have been some thirty miles away. It was beyond this, evidently far beyond it, that the scene of the action was located, for nothing showed on the plate but a misty haze permeated by indefinite and continuous pulsations of light, and against which the low mountain ridge stood out in bold relief. Somewhere on the floor of the Observation room, of course, was a Sector Observer who was looking beyond that ridge, probably through a projectoscope station in the second or third "circle," located perhaps on that ridge or beyond it. At the very moment I was wishing for his facilities the Executive Marshal leaned over to a microphone and gave an order in a low tone. The hemispherical view dissolved, and another took its place, from the third circle. And the view was now that which would be seen by a man standing on the low distant ridge. There was another broad valley, a wide and deep canyon, in fact, and beyond this still another ridge, the outlines of which were already beginning to fade into the on-creeping haze of the barrage. The flashes of the great detonating rockets were momentarily becoming more vivid. "That's the Gok-Man ridge," mused the Han officer beside me in the apartment, "and the Forest Men must be more than fifty miles beyond that." "How do you figure that?" I asked curiously.