nks. Others
were firing, and this time they were shooting at the airjeep. It took
one hit from a heavy shellosaur-rifle, and immediately the driver
banked and turned away from the road, heading back.

"Dammit, why did you do that?" von Schlichten demanded, lifting his
foot from the gun-pedal. "Are you afraid of the kind of popguns those
geeks are using?"

"I am not afraid to risk my vehicle, or myself, sir," the lieutenant
replied, with the extreme formality of a very junior officer chewing
out a very senior one. "I am, however, afraid to risk my passenger.
Generals are not expendable, sir."

He was right, of course. Von Schlichten admitted it. "I'm too old to
play cowboy, like this," he said. "Back to the Reservation; telecast
station."

Looking back over his shoulder, he saw eight or ten more flares
alight, and the ground-flashes of exploding shells and rockets; the
air above the road was sparkling with gun-flames. Jarman must have had
some contragravity ready to be sent off on the instant.

* * * * *

While he had been out, somebody had gotten a TV-pickup mounted on a
contragravity-lifter and run up to two thousand feet, on the end of a
steel-tough tensilon mooring-line. The big circular screen was lit,
showing the whole Company Reservation, with the surrounding
countryside foreshortened by perspective to the distant lights of
Skilk. The map had been taken up from the floor, and a big
terrain-board had been brought in from the Chief Engineer's office and
set up in its place. In front of the screen, Paula Quinton, Barney
Mordkovitz, Colonel Cheng-Li, and, conspicuously silent, Jules
Keaveney, sat drinking coffee and munching sandwiches. Half a dozen
Terrans, of both sexes, were working furiously to get the markers
which replaced the pink and white pills placed on the board, and one
of Captain Inez Malavez' non-coms, with a headset, was getting combat
reports directly from the switchboard. Everything was clicking like
well-oiled machinery.

On the TV-screen, the Residency area was ablaze with light, and so
were the ship-docks, the airport and spaceport, the shops, and the
maintenance-yard. On the terrain-board, the latter was now marked as
completely in Company hands. The ruins of the native-troops barracks
were still burning, and there was a twinkle of orange-red here and
there among the ruins of the labor-camp. Much of the equipment for the
Polar mines had already been shifted