The possibilities of preventing their men from talking were few, he realized. There was the standard answer: give a pill to every soldier and tell him to swallow the pill if he's captured. But that was the wrong answer. It had been used before, but only in the case of espionage agents. Used on an army of men, it would have a demoralizing effect. It would imply that you expected them to be captured. And what percentage of men would commit suicide? Besides that, the news would sooner or later leak out to the civilian population and have a demoralizing effect upon _them_. How would millions of mothers and wives feel if they knew their sons and husbands had been ordered to kill themselves if captured? No, suicide pills were not the answer. It had to be something different, something original, and as foolproof as anything could be. Preferably a way to kill a captured soldier--a way that the soldier was not aware of. Death seemed the only solution. Any man, tortured hard enough and long enough, would talk. How could you keep that man from talking except by killing him? And still, it wasn't _right_ to kill your own men! _How_, he thought, _can you kill a man without killing him?_ * * * * * Hank was pacing the floor. "We're on our way, Murph. Back to Earth. No more combat. We'll train other guys how to fight. Instructors. What a deal! Weekend passes, girls, beer, fried chicken, real milk--" "Lay off," Murphy said. "We aren't there yet." Sitting there on the edge of the cot, he struggled for a sense of reality. Nothing seemed real. Nothing had seemed real since they left the foxhole. There everything had seemed real: the coldness and wetness of the mud beneath them, the stars in the sky above them, a thousand other things. But, in the tank, there had been nothing but darkness and voices in the darkness. The tank had broken through the Antarian lines and taken them directly to a spaceport. There, in a thick fog--so thick that you could see only a few feet in any direction--they had boarded the ship. In the darkened ship, they had been led to this compartment. They had seen only two men aboard the ship. One crew member--seen at a distance--and Gregg, the ship's captain. Now they were in outer space, in a small compartment aboard a huge ship. It didn't seem real, and he felt as if they were walking through a shadowy dream. The door opened and Captain Chester Gregg stepped into the room.