Then I was unconscious. Blacking out, dying, I couldn’t tell. The world rushed away from me down a dark tunnel and I was left with the sensation of pain alone and then even that was gone.

When I opened my eyes I was lying on the floor and a period of unmeasured time had gone by. My thoughts were thick with sleep or something else and I had to work to dredge up the memory of what had happened. Only when the startling vision of my severed hands came to me clearly did I open my eyes and sit up, rubbing one hand with the other. They felt perfectly normal. What had happened?

“Stand up,” Kraj ‘s voice said, and I realized that I was sitting on the floor before his desk and that the collar was still in place about my neck with its wiring running up to the device on the ceiling. I stood, slowly, and looked at his clean desk. There was no blood.

“I would have sworn…” I said and my voice died away as I saw the two great grooves in the metal top of the desk as though it had been hit twice with some heavy blade. Then I lifted my hands before my face and looked at my wrists.

Each wrist was circled by a red weal of healing flesh with the sharp red points of removed stitches along the edges. Yet my hands felt as they always did. What had happened?

“Are you beginning to understand what I mean?” Kraj asked, once more seated behind the desk, his voice as gray as his clothing.

“What did you do? You couldn’t have amputated my hands and sewed them back. I could tell, it would take time, you couldn’t…” I realized that I was starting to babble and I shut up.

“You don’t believe it happened? Should I do it again?”

“No!” I said, almost shouting the word, drawing back from him. He nodded approvingly at this.

“So the training begins. You have lost a little bit of reality. You do not know what happened—but you do know that you do not wish it to happen again. This is the way it will go. Eventually you will lose all touch with the reality you have known all your life, and then will lose contact with the person you have been all your life. When you reach that state we will accept you as one of us. Then you will go into great detail about your Special Corps, not only racking your memory for crumbs of fact you may have missed, but in actively originating plans for their destruction.”

“It won’t work,” I said with a great deal more sincerity than I really felt. “I am not alone. The Corps is on to you now and actively working against you, so that it is now just a matter of time before they pull the plug and all your little invasion schemes go down the drain.”

“Quite the opposite,” Kraj said clasping his hands together on the desk before him like a teacher about to lecture a class. “We have been aware of their attention for a long time and have forestalled them at every turn. We have captured, tortured and killed a number of the Corps people to get information. We know that everything is geared to follow the lead of a field agent, such as yourself, and we have been waiting for one to come along. You have come, and we have you. It is that simple. You are the weapon with which we will destroy the Special Corps.”

He had me half believing him. The plan he proposed sounded like a reasonable one and I put that thought away as fast as it arrived. I was going to have to stop agreeing with him, attack rather than defend.

“That is very ambitious of you and I hope you don’t bite off more than you can chew. Aren’t you forgetting the hundreds of planets that support the league and what they can do to you when they find out the kind of trouble you are causing?”

“There are hundreds of planets only in theory, in reality they are just one after the other. We pluck them in that manner, they fall before us, we cannot be stopped, and the process is an accelerating one. As our empire expands we move faster and faster.”

“And there is a limit to that speed,” I broke in, trying to work a sneer into my words. “I know how your invasion technique works You don’t invade a planet until they have already lost. Isn’t that right?”

“Perfectly correct.” He nodded agreement and I rushed on.

“You find a planet that is ripe for the picking with some dissident element in the population; there are people who would complain about paradise so you have no problem in finding a group on any world. Here on Burada it was the men, the Konsolosluk party. They were hot for male rule. You backed them with whatever they needed. Your underground operators supplied them with money, weapons, propaganda, all the essentials of a takeover—and it worked. And you asked nothing in return for all this aid, other than only a token resistance when the invasion began. Your agents saw to it that the armed forces surrendered after only the briefest show of force. This invasion was won before it began! No wonder your military people aren’t used to taking losses.”

“Very observant of you. This is exactly what we do, your analysis is a masterly description of the way in which we operate.”

“There, I have you,” I said happily.

“On the contrary—we have you. You are the only one who knows about our techniques and you will never report them to your superiors.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said with a bravado I did not feel.

“Perhaps you do not know, but we do. We have intercepted the report you made and it will never be sent. They will wait in vain for any word from you and time will pass and soon it will be too late for them to do anything because we will move into phase two of our operation. With the many allies we have gained by occupying planets with governments now friendly to us, we will have a considerable number of troops available to us. Mercenaries I believe they are called. They will be invasion troops and great numbers of them will be killed, but we will always win because our supply will be relatively inexhaustible. It presents an interesting picture, does it not?”

“It will never work,” I shouted, with the sinking feeling at the same time that it would. “The Corps will stop you.” How, with their only agent run to earth and trapped? I was having a hard job convincing myself and getting nowhere at all in convincing him.

Kraj rose and started around the desk.

“Now it is time for your indoctrination to begin.”

I cannot express the fear that overwhelmed and possessed me when I heard those words.

I was taken to a cell. A bare, windowless room whose only furnishing was an empty bucket. A ceiling hook had recently been installed here and my attendant gray man obligingly hooked me up to it.

“There is little chance of my starving to death,” I told him. “Because I’ll die of thirst first.”

He gave no spoken answer but he did return with a soft plastic water bottle and a standard Cliaand field ration. Not the world’s most inspiring food, but it would keep me alive.

As I chewed and sipped I clamped hard on that last thought. Keep me alive. They would do anything except kill me. They wanted me, actually needed me. They knew that the Special Corps was breathing hot on their trail and they would have to exert an all-out effort to stop them. Kraj had talked big and half convinced me; I looked at my wrists and shuddered. He had convinced me. But why had he tried so hard?

Because I was obviously more than a pawn in this game. I was the factor that could swing the outcome either way. Right now Cliaand was doing well in the invasion business—but they could be stopped. With what I knew the Special Corps could start work as counterinsurgents and prevent expansion to other planets. Cliaand might even be stopped here. If I were to change sides my specialized knowledge might not defeat the Corps, but it could surely slow it down long enough for the second phase of the invasion operation to go into effect.