"Were you informed you might have to marry Ogtate?"

"I was."

The temptation struggled on his tongue to say some stupid cliche like "But how could you?" Fighting it, he walked around his desk and sat down and put tight fists on the plastic top. "Let me get this straight. You no longer love me?"

"I never did, remember? I did say I'd marry you. I admired you more than any man in the world. I think I could respond to you with every response that marriage demands. Perhaps we could become the much-talked-about ideal of psychologists and priests: one flesh. But I never loved you."

He murmured, "That's right. I forgot. I equated your promise to marry me with a confession of love."

"That's not like you," site said. "The Old Fox never forgets, they say."

"The Old Fox has been outfoxed by the one who can do it best," Yewliss replied. "Himself." He unclenched his hands, spread them out on the desk and looked down at them. "So I've brought you here only to turn you over to the Asp? And I must do my best to see he takes you?" He struck the desk top. "I don't have to do it! Barbara, I reject you for this mission!"

She walked across the room and sat down is a chair, which remolded itself about her long curves. Many a man would obviously have liked to trade places with it. "Yew, I know you can't reject time. I sent a message to New Delphi. The Comproberators told me the girl next in line was more than fifteen points off classification. I’m the only one who has a chance for success with Ogtate. And that chance is only 60-40. Moreover," and she leaned forward so suddenly that the reluctant chair remade a popping sound. "you can't order me not to. The mission interferes with my personal rights. I'll ask the Comuprob for a review of your order, and it'll verify my stand."

He groaned, "Oh, for the good old days, when a general's word couldn't be countermanded by an unconscious electronic gadget! Very well, Barbara. I wouldn't try to force you. You're an adult, and you've free will, modified, of course, by circumstances." He rose and reached for his cap. "I still can't understand why you volunteered. I hoped I meant more to you."

She rose, too, and smoothed the top of her cap, which had been folded in her belt. "What's the most important problem of Earth today?"

"You know it's Ogtate. He must be wheedled into giving us the Belos. Otherwise, we lose the war and, quite possibly, become exterminated. The Belos is so important that the Government may pass a special case law to force Ogtate to tell. But he can't be forced. Drugs or even torture-though that, of course, is out of the question-would only scramble the equations in his mind. There's no way of breaking that post-hypnotic block."

"Then why are you so surprised that I volunteered?"

"I'm not, Barbara. It's just that one part of me, the man that loves you, can't accept it. The soldier understands."

She put her hand on his arm. "I'm really sorry," she said in her deep and soft voice. "But I'm just idealistic enough to hold Earth's welfare above mine."

He withdrew a little. "Don't feel sorry for me. This affair isn't over. You're not Ogtate's yet. Tell me, if you don't have to become aspate yourself, will you still marry me?"

"Dear Yew! I thought your pride would be so hurt that you would have no more to do with me."

"It is hurt. But I love you. And you didn't answer my question."

"If I don't have to be aspated, I'll marry you."

He clapped his hat on and said, "Good! Major Killison, will you come outside with me? The copter's ready."

"Yes, sir." She smiled a little.

Outside, they walked upon the broad field, two forms threading between shiny pools of glass blasts made by rockets. They wandered beneath an enormous Mississippi moon. Killison gazed at the many buildings and towering silver needles and said, "All this was built because of one man?"

He nodded and said, "That's how important he is. The military know it, hut we can't heat it into the heads of our citizens. Most think the war is ninety million miles off. It is, now, but any day the noses of Priami ships may materialize out of the air."

They stepped into the copier and strapped themselves in. Yewliss checked the instruments, and then lifted up the ship.

"According to my men, Ogtate flew back to his island where he'll be licking his wounds, and there we'll help him. Or, rather you will."

She placed her hand upon her doctor's kit as if to make sure it hadn't dissolved. "How do you know he's sick.

"His wife told me. Besides, the Comprob submitted he'd be most likely to break when he was sick."

"I don't think it's malaria," she said. "I understand there is still some along the Amazon and the Congo. But there hasn't been a case on this continent for forty years. His fever may be psychosomatic."

"Possibly from an allergy," he said.

She glanced at him, wondering why he'd said that. "One of the reasons I volunteered, although by no means the strongest, was to study the asps. I don't agree with my colleagues who maintain that the effect can't be wiped out."

"You'll get nowhere. We offered to place him in a lab where Earth's best brains would study him. He refused. He said they might work twenty years before they found anything. By then, the asps would have worn themselves out. Besides, they can discover as much using test animals as they could with him. He doesn't want to spend all that time behind glass windows, like an ape in a zoo."

"Or a snake in a pit," she added.

"In one way, I don't blame him. But he hasn't been at all co-operative. The main reason he wouldn't allow himself to be placed under observation is that he's afraid we'll pry the Belos out of him."

She leaned back and gazed from the window. "The night is beautiful," she said. "The moon is giving herself to every lover in sight. I've never seen a nightscape like this."

Then, as if her senses had been talking for her while she was thinking about something else, she said, "The major who met me at the transmitter briefed me. Perhaps you know more than he, a weakness of Ogtate's that you, as a psych, might have noticed."

"Tell me what you know. I'll fill in anything you've missed." As he looked at her, he fought against his consuming desire to place his arm around her shoulders. She was Diana, bright and full at tines, shadowed and crescented at others, far off yet just beyond tiptoe reach, a blend of majesty and of passion. If she were to become Ogtate's, could Yewliss find her equal? Realist that he was, he knew there were women just as beautiful and intelligent and strong; spirited. Many would gladly be his mate; many could satisfy him in every way and would make him love them. But they were not Barbara, the only one he wanted.

Closing her eyes, she talked. "The story as I know it began about three years ago. The Priami warned us to stay off Mars. Dr. Erkells, a physicist, and his assistant, Ogtate, were working on a device they thought would make interplanetary war impossible, or at least, extremely difficult."

She opened her eyes and said, "Yew, am I boring you? You know all this, of course. It is so fantastic, so fairy-like. We step into booths, sit down, and, in what seems to us the next second, we're halfway around the Earth, or on Callisto or Ceres. And Erkells was going to wave his black sorcerer's wand and put an end to that. Of course, it was for a good cause, but how many bad deeds are done for good reasons? He even would have stopped EPB-travel between Earth cities, for the Belos would have distorted the waves so much that we'd be quite scrambled by the time we arrived at our destination.

"Nobody thinks about that. If Ogtate tells us the secret, we defeat the Martians. But we also go back, for a while at least, to flight on the wings of matter. Our magical energy-chariots are grounded. Yet few realize this; they're all so blase and talk about weekends in Paris or Luna Port as if they were hot-dog stands down the street. So do I, but now and then I wake up and catch my breath and say, 'Dabs, can this be? Is this you, in this age? Why, Babs, Louis XIV or Pharaoh Cheops would give all they had to be the commonest citizen of Earth. And wouldn't Shelley or Poe or Dunsany or Li Po have signed in blood to step through the magical gate of Space and Time annihilated? How can we look around and not run screaming down the street with joy? Babs, this is you, now!' "