to the driver. "General Quinby wants to go straight to the
_Manila_, so let's get there as fast as possible. Take-off is scheduled
in ten minutes." Then he got into the back seat himself. The one-way
glass partition that separated the back seat from the front prevented
either of the two men from looking back at their passengers.

Seven minutes later, the staff car was rolling unquestioned through the
main gate of Waikiki Spaceport.

It was all so incredibly easy, MacMaine thought. Nobody questioned an
official car. Nobody checked anything too closely. Nobody wanted to
risk his lifelong security by doing or saying something that might be
considered antisocial by a busy general. Besides, it never entered
anyone's mind that there could be anything wrong. If there was a war
on, apparently no one had been told about it yet.

MacMaine thought, _Was I ever that stubbornly blind? Not quite, I
guess, or I'd never have seen what is happening_. But he knew he hadn't
been too much more perceptive than those around him. Even to an
intelligent man, the mask of stupidity can become a barrier to the
outside world as well as a concealment from it.

* * * * *

The Interstellar Ship _Manila_ was a small, fast, ten-man blaster-boat,
designed to get in to the thick of a battle quickly, strike hard, and
get away. Unlike the bigger, more powerful battle cruisers, she could
be landed directly on any planet with less than a two-gee pull at the
surface. The really big babies had to be parked in an orbit and loaded
by shuttle; they'd break up of their own weight if they tried to set
down on anything bigger than a good-sized planetoid. As long as their
antiacceleration fields were on, they could take unimaginable thrusts
along their axes, but the A-A fields were the cause of those thrusts as
well as the protection against them. The ships couldn't stand still
while they were operating, so they were no protection at all against a
planet's gravity. But a blaster-boat was small enough and compact
enough to take the strain.

It had taken careful preparation to get the _Manila_ ready to go just
exactly when MacMaine needed it. Papers had to be forged and put into
the chain of command communication at precisely the right times; others
had had to be taken out and replaced with harmless near-duplicates so
that the Commanding Staff wouldn't discover the deception. He had had
to build up the fictional identity o