head. "When we divert contragravity to
security-patrol work, the ground action'll slow up a little, of
course. But the geeks are about knocked out, now."

"The hell with it, then. I doubt if we'd be able to buy much time from
Orgzild by delaying victory in the city, and we'll probably need the
troops as workers over here." He turned to Pickering. "Dr. Pickering,
what sort of a crew can you scrape together to design a bomb for us?"
he asked.

"Well, there's Martirano, and Sternberg, and Howard Fu-Chung, and Piet
van Reenen, and...." He nodded to himself. "I can get six or eight of
them in here in about twenty minutes; I'll have a project set up and
working in a couple of hours. There has to be somebody qualified on
duty at the plant, all the time, of course, but...."

"All right, call them in. I want the bomb finished by yesterday
afternoon. And everybody with you, and you, yourself, had better
revert to civilian status. This isn't something you can do by the
numbers, and I don't want anybody who doesn't know what it's all about
pulling rank on your outfit. Go ahead, call in your gang, and let me
know what you'll be able to do, as soon as possible."

He turned to Hargreaves. "Les, you'll have charge of flying the
security patrols, and doing anything else you can to keep Orgzild from
bombing us before we can bomb him. You'll have priority on everything
second only to Pickering."

Hargreaves nodded. "As you say, general, we'll have to protect
Kankad's, as well as this place. It's about five hundred miles from
here to Kankad's, and eight-fifty miles from Kankad's to Keegark...."

He stopped talking to von Schlichten, and began muttering to himself,
running over the names of ships, and the speeds and pay-load
capacities of airboats, and distances. In about five minutes, he would
have a programme worked out; in the meantime, von Schlichten could
only be patient and contain himself. He looked along the table, and
caught sight of a thin-faced, saturnine-looking man in a green shirt,
with a colonel's three concentric circles marked on the shoulders in
silver-paint. Emmett Pearson, the communications chief.

"Emmett," he said, "those orbiters you have strung around this planet,
two thousand miles out, for telecast rebroadcast stations. How much of
a crew could be put on one of them?"

Pearson laughed. "Crew of what, general? White mice, or trained
cockroaches? There isn't room inside one of those things for anything
big