even faster, and I will show you a new wonder. I will show you
the Sky Fire rising in the west; it and the Always-Same will seem to go
backward in the sky. This will not be for real; it will only be seen so
because we will be traveling faster. Watch, now, and see." He called the
bridge for full speed, and then told them to look at the Sky-Fire and
then see in the screens where it stood over Bluelake.

That was even better; now they were racing with the Sky-Fire and
catching up to it. After half an hour he left them still excited and
whooping gleefully over the steady gain. Five hours later, when he came
back after a nap and a hasty breakfast, they were still whooping. Edith
Shaw was excited, too; the shoonoon were trying to estimate how soon
they would be back to Bluelake by comparing the position of the Sky Fire
with its position in the screen.

General Maith received them in his private office at Army HQ; Foxx
Travis mixed drinks for the four of them while the general checked the
microphones to make sure they had privacy.

"I blame myself for not having forced martial rule on them hundreds of
hours ago," he said. "I have three brigades; the one General Gonzales
had here originally, and the two I brought with me when I took over
here. We have to keep at least half a brigade in the south, to keep the
tribes there from starting any more forest fires. I can't hold Bluelake
with anything less than half a brigade. Gonzales has his hands full in
his area. He had a nasty business while you were off on that world
cruise--natives in one village caught the men stationed there off guard
and wiped them out, and then started another frenzy. It spread to two
other villages before he got it stopped. And we need the Third Brigade
in the northeast; there are three quarters of a million natives up
there, inhabiting close to a million square miles. And if anything
really breaks loose here, and what's been going on in the last few days
is nothing even approaching what a real outbreak could be like, we'll
have to pull in troops from everywhere. We must save the Terran-type
crops and the carniculture plants. If we don't, we all starve."

Miles nodded. There wasn't anything he could think of saying to that.

"How soon can you begin to show results with those shoonoon, Mr.
Gilbert?" the general asked. "You said from twenty-five to thirty hours.
Can you cut that any? In twenty-five hours, all hell could be loose all
over the continent."