d
battle. You live for your uniforms and the distinction those uniforms
bring you. You live to fight and die, to spend your spare time in dank,
noisy holes like this. Drinking and lying to each other about your
adventures and love-life.

"Then you try to judge galactic politics and the decisions of a man
caught up in the rip tides of these politics, when all you know is your
own vicious lives. You are traitors as much as any man, for you have
sacrificed your normal lives to dedicate yourself to the violent
dead-end of a soldier of space.

"Yes, you know what I am talking about, the Fermi radiations! The hard
radiations of space that make every person who stays in space any length
of time a sure candidate for an early grave.

"You're young now, so terribly young, only twenty or so years old in a
possible life-span of a hundred years.

"You are traitors to yourselves by rejecting this life-span for a few
brief years of glory as a soldier, then a slow decay for ten years till
you are in a grave at thirty or forty.

"Your motto ought to be, 'live fast, fight hard, die young and have a
radiation-rotted corpse'.

"And yet you condemn a man because he tries to seek a few comforts from
an uncomfortable, implacable universe."

They didn't get it. They never get it, he thought ruefully. They
continued in their cat and mouse game until they realized the mouse
refused to be terrified, then they let him go.

During the next few weeks, someone started the rumor that the Traitor
was actually a native of the People's Republic who had been trained and
then planted in the United Empire's TA to do this job for Intelligence.
The soldiers quickly believed it and almost came to respect the Traitor.

* * * * *

From the way that the Intelligence officers freely talked about
classified information with him in his weekly visits, Aron was aware
that they would probably kill him once his usefulness was over. He was
devising ways, though, to get around that at the last minute.

From this knowledge that had been blatantly tossed in front of him, he
knew how strategic Kligor was in the stalemated war between the empires.

The People's Republic now had a fair-sized striking force based there,
so that when an all-out offensive, which was scheduled in a few weeks,
started, this hidden force could attack United Republic's squadrons from
the rear and be doubly effective because of surprise.

So the weeks tro