"Leave her out of this!" gritted Hagen. "Get back to the subject; just what do you think you're doing?" "I'm not doing anything!" roared William Wrightwood. "And no one can say that I am." "If you think for one moment that I'm going to do anything for you--" The smoothness came back into Wrightwood's voice. "I don't have to play games with new recruits," he said. "Things work out my way in the long run." "All but one," sneered Hagen; "you haven't been able to steer me." "Have I ever tried?" "Hell, yes." "Then it is the proper responsibility of any man to try to mold and direct the character of his son--" "Like Fagin, training pickpockets?" "Son, you've yet to learn that villainy is just a point of view." "So it may be--but this is my view." "Wal--Steve, if you insist--just why do you want to join the Guardians instead of taking your place as head of Interstellar?" "And command a squadron of Large Oak Desks?" "It takes your kind of brains to run a company as big as Interstellar, but any idiot can buckle on a sword and play pirate." "So--you've trained me for better things?" sneered Hagen. "Yes. I have." "I don't like it. I--" "I'm not stopping you," said Wrightwood. "Go on and play your game of fireman; I'll wait until you come to your senses. Then, as usual, I'll have my way. But remember--I did not in any way tamper with your affairs. Go look elsewhere for a reason why you were appointed to First Base." Hagen growled in his throat. "You'd not tell me if you had tinkered," he said. It was lame and he knew it. He turned on his heel and left the office in as precipitate a manner as he had arrived. * * * * * Hagen was awake when his first alarm came. For three days he had been wondering just why and how a rookie could be qualified for Base One; this had cheated him of sleep, and made his waking hours a mad pattern of hard duty and pointless wondering. But when the gong rang in his dormitory room at Base One, he reacted eagerly. Although this was Hagen's first alarm, years of precision drill had given him the instinctive pattern for action. He dressed in the required time, caught up his equipment and met the stream of men pouring out of their rooms; he followed them from the huge building, out across the spaceport, to the myriad of Guardian spacecraft that awaited them. Steve wondered where they were going, then realized that it was more than probable that the squadron commander himself did not know yet, and would not know until about one second before the flight took off for deep space. Somewhere, down in the bowels of the huge building, computers were digesting information rapidly, spilling out answers that would have to be summed into an equation before anyone would know the source of the alarm.