Chapter II

John Reilly was tired, intensely tired, beyond any feeling of exhaustion he had ever known.

The clock in his desk chimed once. He sighed and picked up his lecture notes, stuffing them into a scarred and battered case that he had been carrying since his student days at the Academy. He cast one weary glance around the cluttered office, then steeled himself into a passable imitation of military carriage as he left for the lecture hall.

The Cadet Sergeant-Major outside his door leaped to attention only a little less quickly than his regular service counterpart. Reilly returned their salutes and fell in behind them.

The lecture hall--gymnasium, really; the Academy was perennially overcrowded--was crowded, as usual. The eager young cadets filled the fifty rows of backless benches, while the overflow squatted and stood at the rear until it was impossible for a midget to find room to thread his way through the crowd. Reilly's class was well-tended for its honest popularity, not just because it was compulsory. There were many "compulsory" lectures in the curriculum that counted themselves proud to find half their audience in attendance.

Reilly stopped in the wings of the stage, listening for a moment to the comfortable discordances of the student band tuning their instruments. The regular service non-com peered through the hangings, catching the bandmaster's eye. The tuning stopped, and the band swung into a medley of old Academy drinking songs. Reilly smiled, as he remembered happier days when he had participated lustily in the drinking that went along with such music.

From the drinking songs, the band struck up the National Anthem. The noise the cadets made in rising nearly drowned out the music. After the last strains had been permitted to fade away, the bandmaster raised his baton once more and the opening bars of _Hail to the Chief!_ filled the hall. The Sergeants-Major stepped out onto the stage, Reilly following, case clasped loosely between elbow and side.

They passed in front of the half-dozen visitors and moved to either side of the podium, turning until they were facing each other, the regular service man on the right. They snapped into a salute, followed by the entire audience. Reilly lay his case on the podium, turned and bowed to the visitors, then faced the audience again and returned the salute.

Immediately two thousand arms dropped to their owners' sides and the cadets resumed their seats.

Reilly unzipped his case and drew out his notes.

He arranged them carefully on the podium, although he knew that at no time during the next hour would he so much as glance at them again. The case stowed away under the podium, he took a deep breath and placed his hands flat on the podium's surface. Technicians in the control booth over the far end of the hall trained parabolic mikes on his lips, waiting for him to begin the lecture as he had begun hundreds of other preceding lectures, before audiences much like this. The faces might change; the uniforms were the same, and so were the underlying feelings of the wearers of the uniforms, year in and year out.

"The greater good for the greater number!"

The cadets let out a mutual sigh, none aware that breath had been held.

"A motto, gentlemen: merely a motto. Like _Ad Astra per Aspera_, _E Pluribus Unum_ or _Through These Portals Pass the Most Wonderful Customers in the Galaxy_." An appreciative titter ran through the audience.

"But what is a motto?" continued Reilly, warming to his subject, overly familiar though it was. "It's more than just a snappy way of stringing words together. It has a meaning. Often the meaning, such as in the commercial example I just gave, is on the frivolous side. But more often there is something intently serious behind a motto. _Ad Astra_--'To the Stars.' For centuries this has been almost a religion for men, as our ancestors broke the bonds of a single planet and spread out into the galaxy. Libraries have been written of the heartbreaks and joys, the sorrows and jubilations that have been found in the far reaches of space.

"_E Pluribus Unum_--'United We Stand.' Even older and, if possible, dearer to the hearts of men. Our very government is based on the essential concept contained in these three words from the past.

"'The greater good for the greater number'. If government runs on one motto, then civilization is based on this!"

* * * * *

Team B was dead on its feet when the copter finally returned to Base with the first rosy glow of dawn lightening the horizon. They stumbled to the ground, as sorry a looking group as Luke Royceton had ever seen. Their masquerade of grime and war paints was nearly obscured by an honest layer of general dirt. They filed into wardrobe and stripped off their clothes, leaving them in ragged piles on the floor. Then they hit the showers, luxuriating under the needle sprays and the caress of soap sliding over their skin.

The discarded costumes were gone when they emerged, feeling closer to human, twenty minutes later. In place of the animal hides were shorts, doublets and the calf-length boots of Base-centered personnel.

All were more than happy to be back in uniform.

Luke stopped outside wardrobe for a moment, then started towards Headquarters, a building distinguished from the dozen other prefabs of Base only by the pennant flying from the peak. The buildings were arranged in an irregular circle around the copter field, nestled in the most hidden valley of the planet's single range of hills high enough to be graced with the name of mountains. The highest peak in the range, visible over the one directly behind Headquarters, toward barely a thousand feet.

On a world less primitive, the range would never have served its present duty.

The world _was_ primitive, however. Man had advanced but a few faltering steps beyond the level of the cave. Ecology had estimated the native human population not to exceed three million people over the entire globe, and cheerfully admitted that their estimate was made with every benefit of doubt given to the natives. Quite possibly not even half that number roamed the vast plains of the temperate zones, or breeded in the opulence of the equatorial jungles. As yet, population pressures had not driven men into the colder climes of the north and south. None had been spotted more than five hundred miles from the equator.

Luke checked in with the Orderly Room before reporting on to the debriefing room. He slumped onto a couch and propped his feet on a low coffee table. The other four team commanders were there ahead of him. One brought him a cup of coffee. He accepted it with thanks, and inhaled the bitter smell of the brew before draining half of it. The fiery liquid burned into his stomach and scorched away some of the tensions built up during the night.

"Rough night, Luke?" asked Andy Singer, sitting next to him.

"The roughest. We hit seventeen villages between sunset and sunrise."

"That is a load. My team only hit seven. But you were working the big river stretch, weren't you?" Luke nodded, as he sipped again at his coffee. "I thought so. We were lucky. We had the west plains. There isn't too much water over there, couple little creeks and a few holes. These locals don't stray too far from water."

* * * * *

"We hit half a dozen good-sized places," said Luke. "One of them must have had thirty-five families. For a minute, I thought we were going to have to kill a few of them, but it ended up okay. Nobody hurt, except for one of my boys who stayed a second too long in a hut." He chuckled. "Got the seat of his pants burned off--a new kid, just out from the Academy. The rest of the night, he was the fastest man I had."

"Proves what I said about water. Biggest place I hit had seven houses, and most of them only had two or three."

Luke started to say something more, but just then the door opened and the Base Commandant came in. The Team commanders stood up respectfully, but none had the energy to properly snap to attention. He smiled as he mounted the low platform to the front of the room.

"At ease, gentlemen." Gratefully, the commanders sat back down and resumed their earlier positions of comfort. The Commandant poured himself a glass of water from a ready pitcher and drank it, then gave his full attention to the room.

"First, gentlemen, let me congratulate you on a successful night's operation. I congratulate all of you, but particularly Commander Royceton and Team B. They rolled up the enviable total of seventeen villages destroyed."

Luke flushed, feeling like a fresh-out-of-Academy Cadet as the others raised their coffee cups in his direction.

"None of you spent the evening slacking, of course," continued the Commandant. He was a middle-aged man; the empty sleeve pinned to his shoulder told why he had been booted out of field duty while men twenty years his senior were still leading teams. "Total score for the night: fifty-seven villages. Commander Royceton merely had more fertile area to work in. As we move out from the Base I know you will all have equal opportunities to prove your prowess with the torch." An appreciative murmur ran through the little group.

"Now I know you're all tired, gentlemen, and anxious to hit the sack. I won't keep you much longer. I just want to emphasize the importance of our mission on this world. Many of your men don't like making these raids on the natives. They would rather be roaming the far starlanes, putting down pirates and other glorious deeds of derring-do. But you men are not cadets; there isn't a one of you without twenty years field service time. You know the real glory comes from satisfaction in a job well done. It is up to you to transfer that feeling of satisfaction to the malcontents within your ranks. Tonight you go out again; and you will continue to do so until every single village on this planet has been razed to the ground! If so much as one single village is permitted to escape, then we have failed. I do not like failure; you do not like failure. Working together, we can see to it that failure as a word disappears from the language. I thank you, gentlemen. Dismissed." He stepped down and strode rapidly from the room. Behind him the audience rose and burst into talk.