Around him, Earthmen hurried to their homes. Night was falling. The stars blanketed the sky, white flecks against dark cloth. Many of those stars swore allegiance to Darruu. Others, to Medlin. Which was right? Which wrong? A block away, five fellow Darruui lurked, ready to come to his aid if he had any trouble in killing the Medlins. He doubted that he would have trouble, if the subsonic were as effective as Carver seemed to think. For forty Darruui years he had been trained to hate the Medlins. Now, in a few minutes, he would be doing what was considered the noblest act a Servant of the Spirit could perform--ridding the universe of a pack of them. Yet he felt no sense of anticipated glory. It would simply be murder, the murder of strangers. He entered the building. The Medlin headquarters were at the top of the building, in a large penthouse loft. He rode up in the gravshaft and it seemed to him that he could feel the pressure of the tiny subsonic generator in his thigh. He knew that was just an illusion, but the presence of the metal bead irritated him all the same. He stood for a moment in a scanner field. A door flicked back suddenly, out of sight, and a strange face peered at him--an Earthman face, on the surface of things at least. The Earthman beckoned him in. "I'm Armin Moulton," he said in a deep voice. "You're Harris?" "That's right." "Beth is waiting to see you." _The subsonic has a range of forty feet in any direction_, Harris thought. _No one Should be closer to you than three feet._ He was shown into an inner room well furnished with drapes and hangings. Beth stood in the middle of the room, smiling at him. She wore thick, shapeless clothes, quite unlike the seductive garb she had had on when Harris first collided with her. There were others in the room. Harris recognized the other Medlin, Coburn, and the giant named Wrynn who claimed to be a super-Earthman. There was another woman of Wrynn's size in the room, a great golden creature nearly a foot taller than Harris, and two people of normal size who were probably Medlins. "Well?" Beth asked. In a tight voice Harris said, "He's dead. I've just come from there." "How did you carry it out?" "Disruptor," Harris said. "It was--unpleasant. For me as well as him." He was quivering with tension. He made no attempt to conceal it, since a man who had just killed his direct superior might be expected to show some signs of extreme tension. "Eight to go," Coburn said. "And four are in another hemisphere." "Who are these people?" Harris asked. Beth introduced them. The two normal-sized ones were disguised Medlins; the giant girl was Wrynn's wife, a super-woman. Harris frowned thoughtfully. There were a hundred Medlin agents on Earth. Four of them were right in this room, and it was reasonable to expect that two or three more might be within the forty-foot range of the concealed subsonic. Not a bad haul at all. Harris began to tremble.