She took him to a room on the first floor of the hotel. The air, when he opened the door, was stale. The full moon behind the Venetian blinds made an unpleasant symbolic shadow pattern of prison bars on the carpet. Greg ripped open the zipper of his flight jacket; his chest was wet with sweat. The woman turned to go and he caught her arm, pulling her toward him. "This much at least hasn't changed," he grinned. She neither resisted nor responded. She stood looking up into his face. Her eyes were cold and tired. "I have to go back to Adrian, Captain Greg. He's frightened when I leave him alone too long." "That doddering graybeard--" "None of the things that used to be so important matter any more. All we have left is our love for each other. Adrian and I have that; I don't want to lose it." She glided away from him. Angrily Greg jerked up the blinds--to erase the prison symbol--and ground open the windows. The hot desert wind whispered through the screen. Greg stripped off his uniform and lay naked on the bed. After a time he slept--fitfully, caught in a confusion of fragmentary dreams. The hope of yesterday and the disillusionment of now; his pride as a pioneer; and the pain of his responsibility for what his frontier had created. Out of the chaos a pattern of action slowly emerged. Sometime in the small hours before the dawn Greg made up his mind what he would do. It would be futile to try to arouse the colonies to attack the earth. Each man in his own soul might admit the truth, but as a culture they would all reject it. They needed to keep the symbol of earth as home, though they might never return to it. Even if that psychological objection could be overcome, war was not the answer. Only if the children were taken completely by surprise--given no time to use their alien abilities--could they be effectively destroyed. Greg knew how that could be done. A decade before his pioneer flight to Mars, the first artificial satellite had been sent up in an orbit around the earth. A purely military weapon--capable of destroying any objective on the surface of the earth--the satellite had overturned the balance of power and forced the creation of a united world. The resources of a planetary government had made Greg's first flight possible. Afterward, in the excitement of exploiting the new frontier, the satellite had been forgotten. But it was still there, still armed with a firepower capable of wiping the earth clean of life. It would be the murder of a world--but murder to save human kind. Greg could do it alone. His only problem was to lift his ship without the children knowing what was in his mind. He felt no guilt, no pang of conscience. Once the decision was made, Greg slept easily; and he awoke completely refreshed, with only a slight headache from the liquor he had drunk the night before.