"I have one skill." In the suitcase resting on the pavement beside him he had a transmitter which, small as it was, would send out a signal which, in six months, would reach Terra.

Bending, he brought out the key, turned the lock of the suitcase. All he had to do was open the suitcase, feed an inch of punched data-tape into the orifice of the transmitter's encoder; the rest was automatic. He switched the power on; every electronic item mimicked clothing, especially shoes; it appeared as if he had come to Whale's Mouth to walk his life away, and elegantly at that.

"Why?" he asked Freya as he programmed, with a tiny scholarly construct, the inch of tape. "An army for what?"

"I don't know, Mat. It's all Theodoric Ferry. I think Ferry is going to try to outspit the army on Terra that Horst Bertold commands. In the short time I've been here I've talked to a few people, but — they're so afraid. One man thought there'd been a non-humanoid sentient race found, and we're preparing to strike for its colony-planets; maybe after a while and we've been here — "

Matson peered up and said, "I've encoded the tape to read, Garrison state. Sound out Bertold. It'll go to our top pilot, Al Dosker, repeated over and over again, because at this distance the noise-factor — "

A laser beam removed the back of his head.

Freya shut her eyes.

A second beam from the laser rifle with the telescopic sight destroyed first one suitcase and then its compa­nion. And then a shiny, spic-and-span young soldier walked up, leisurely, the rifle held loosely; he glanced at her, up and down, carnally but with no particular pas­sion, then looked down at the dead man, at Matson. "We caught your conversation on an aud rec." He pointed, and Freya saw, then, on the overhang of the roof of the Telpor terminal building, a netlike inter­woven mesh. "That man" — the soldier kicked — actually physically kicked with his toe — the corpse of Matson Glazer-Holliday — "said something about 'our top pilot.' You're an organization, then. Friends of a United People? That it?"

She said nothing; she was unable to.

"Come along, honey," the soldier said to her. "For your psych-interrogation. We held it off because you were kind enough — dumb enough — to inform us that your husband was following you. But we never — "

He died, because, by means of her "watch" she had released the low-velocity cephalotropic cyanide dart; it moved slowly, but still he had not been able to evade it; he batted at it, childishly, with his hand, not quite alarmed, not quite wise and frightened enough, and its tip penetrated a vein near his wrist. And death came as swiftly and soundlessly as it had for Matson. The soldier swiveled and unwound and unwound in his descent to the pavement, and Freya, then, turned and ran —

At a corner she went to the right, and, as she ran down a narrow, rubbish-heaped alley, reached into her cloak, touched the aud transmitter which sent out an all-points, planet-wide alarm signal-alert; every Lies In­corporated employee here at Whale's Mouth would be picking it up, if this was not already apparent to him: if the alarm signal added anything to his knowledge, that which had probably come, crushingly, within the first five minutes here on this side — this one-way side — of the Telpor apparatuses. Well, anyhow she had done that; she had officially, through technical channels, alerted them, and that was all — all she could do.

She had no long-range inter-system transmitter as Matson had had; she could not send out a macrowave signal which would be picked up by Al Dosker at the Sol system six months hence. In fact none of the two thousand police agents of Lies Incorporated did. But they had weapons. She was, she realized with dread and disbelief, automatically now in charge of those of the organization who survived; months ago Matson had set her up legally so that on his death she assumed his chair, and this was not private: this had been circulated, memo-wise, throughout the organization.

What could she tell the police agents who had gotten through — tell them, of course, that Matson was dead, but what would be of use to them? What, she asked her­self, can we do?

Eighteen years, she thought; do we have to wait for the Omphalos, for Rachmael ben Applebaum to arrive and see? Because by then it won't matter. For us, any­how; nor for this generation.

Two men ran toward her and one bleated, "Moon and cow," shrilly, his face contorted with fear.

"Jack Horner," she said numbly. "I don't know what to do," she said to them. "Matson is dead and his big transmitter is destroyed. They were waiting for him; I led them right to him. I'm sorry." She could not face the two field reps of the organization; she stared rigidly past them. "Even if we put our weapons into use," she said, "they can take all of us out."

"But we can do some damage," one of the two police, middle-aged, with that fat sparetire at his mid­dle, a tough old vet of the '92 war, said.

His companion, clasping a valise, said, "Yes, we can try, Miss Holm. Send out that signal; you have it?"

"No," she said, but she was lying and they knew it. "It's hopeless," she said. "Let's try to pass as authentic emigrants. Let them draft us, put us into the barracks."

The seasoned, hard-eyed, paunchy one said, "Miss Holm, when they get into the luggage, they'll know."To his companion he said, "Bring it out."

Together, as she watched, the two experienced field reps of Lies Incorporated assembled a small intricate weapon of a type she had never seen before; evidently it was from their advanced weapons archives.

To her the younger man said quietly, "Send the signal. For a fight. As soon as our people come through; keep the signal going so they'll pick it up as they emerge. We'll fight at this spot, not later, not when they have us cut down into individuals, one here, one there."

She. Touched. The. Signal-tab.

And then she said, quietly, "I'll try to get a message-unit back to Terra via Telpor. Maybe in the confu­sion — " Because there was going to be a lot of confu­sion as the Lies Incorporated men emerged and immedi­ately picked up the fracas-in-progress signal. " — maybe it'll slip by."

"It won't," the hard-eyed old tomcat of a fighter said to her. He glanced at his companion. "But if we focus on a transmission station maybe we can take and keep control long enough to run a vid track through. Pass it back through the Telpor gate. Even if all two thous of us were to — " He turned to Freya. "Can you direct the reps to make it to this point?"

"I have no more microwave patterns," she said, this time truthfully. "Just those two."

"Okay, Miss Holm." The vet considered. "Vid trans­missions through Telpor are accomplished over there." He pointed and she saw an isolated multi-story struc­ture, windowless, with a guarded entrance; in the gray sun of midday she caught a glint of metal, or armed sen­tries. "You have the code for back home you can trans­mit?"

"Yes," she said. "One of fifty. Mat and I both had them; committed to memory. I could transmit it by aud in ten seconds."

"I want," the wary, half-crouching veteran police­man said, "a vid track of this." He swung his hand at the landscape. "Something that can be spliced into the central coaxial cable and run on TV. Not just that we know but that they know." They. The people back home — the innocents who lay beyond the one-way gate; forever, she thought, because eighteen years is, really, forever.

"What's the code?" the younger field rep asked her.

Freya said, " 'Forgot to pack my Irish linen handker­chiefs. Please transmit via Telpor.' " She explained, "We, Mat and I, worked out all logical possibilities. This comes the closest. Sparta."

"Yep," the older vet said. "The warrior state. The troublemaker. Well, it is close geographically to Athens, although not quite close enough." To his companion he said. "Can we get in there and transmit the aud signal?" He picked up the weapon which they had assembled.