Ellen felt a rush of gratitude. Anne was understanding beyond her years, little Anne with her piercing giggle and gay smile. Anne with a husband already a week overdue. She didn't allow herself the luxury of worry, Ellen thought enviously, but then she had been married nearly four years now. She was a veteran of a thousand nights of waiting, not a bride of four months who had only seen her husband twice since that utterly mad and beautiful honeymoon, that precious two weeks torn from a reluctant Navy. * * * * * It wasn't easy to be a Navy wife, to listen to the shriek of jetblasts that lowered ships to earth or sent them hurtling outward into the void. It wasn't easy to constantly wonder with each incoming craft "_Is it his ship? Has he come home safely once more?_" Or as the weeks passed to feel the question turn to a prayer "_Please God, make this one his,--make it his!_" This one wasn't Alton's ship. It couldn't be. He wasn't due back from patrol for another week, and until that week had passed she needn't worry. Her reaction was just the involuntary twitch of overwrought nerves. The talk began again,--the bright chatter that tried so hard to hide the constant unvoiced prayer "_Please,--oh please God--let this war end. Make this senseless killing stop. Turn the Eglani back to where they came from and let us go back to the ways of peace we know and love._" The prayer, Ellen thought bitterly, didn't have a ghost of a chance of being answered. God apparently was on the side of the biggest fleet and the best battle discipline, and neither of these was the property of the Confederation. For centuries men had travelled the starlanes unopposed. Intelligent races were seldom encountered, and those that were were always on a lower technological level than the outward-sweeping hordes of Earth. They could be safely ignored and their worlds bypassed. There were plenty of others without intelligent life. Colonies were planted. Civilizations were built. Wealth was produced, traded, and exploited. And in time a loosely organized Confederation was established,--a glorified Board of Trade that advised rather than governed. And as system after system passed by default into mankind's hands, the idea grew that the galaxy was man's oyster and the Creator had graciously provided him with a knife. At that, there was some justice in the thought. An expanding civilization meeting no obstacles for centuries is unlikely to believe the minority of Cassandras. So when the expanding front of humanity collided with that of the Eglani, the first reaction was disbelief, the second panic,--and the third grim anger. But anger was not enough. Mankind was trying desperately, but a thousand years of peaceful expansion were poor experience to pit against an organized race of warlike conquerors.