Opening the communications channel, he listened to the other 'hot' Hornets checking off.

"427."

"Ready out."

"493."

"Ready out."

"495."

"Ready sir. Out."

"501."

"My fuel gauge doesn't register, sir."

"Scratch 501. 503."

"Ready out," replied Cressey. He wondered what was wrong with 501. No fuel? Or gauge just out of whack somehow? The way the Hornets were built, you could never be sure of anything. They were made for one trip, no more. No matter how the intercept worked out, they never went home again. There was not much money wasted in their construction. Mackley had easily justified that, too.

Cressey, you must understand one thing. We are desperate. The Outspacers caught us totally unprepared, and some of the measures we must resort to are not what we would normally desire.

When the Outspacers came into the system, six years ago, we had only two manned satellites in operation. Within two years this was increased to six, and it was still inadequate. For this reason, another ring of stations was set up, this time one-man Detector Posts. There are twelve of them, two reporting to each Satellite Base. Their orbit is roughly half-way between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Two concentric circles about the Earth, do you see? When an Outspacer crosses D-line, a signal is flashed to the nearest Satellite Base and the Hornets launched.

The point I'm trying to make, Cressey, is this: it took nearly forty years to set up the first manned satellite, and that after all the means were in our hands. Then, in just over two years, we put up four more satellites and twelve D-Posts. We were not geared for that effort.

Translated into personal terms, Mackley had meant that the planet could not afford to enclose Cressey in an adequate ship. Too much would be lost if the Outspacer weapons caught it.

The loading crew had retreated into the sealed cubicle from which they would watch the launching. The huge, curved walls of the hull began to roll back, and even in the cockpit, Cressey could hear the air roar out into space with a brief explosion of sound. The air hissed out of his cockpit, and his suit inflated full. Still no leak.

He felt a momentary panic as the launching rack swung him out, pointed away from the Satellite directly into the emptiness of space. Now he could not see the reassuring bulk of the mother ship. He was alone, with only the incredible myriads of stars before him, and the two needle points of the Stingers projecting full into their mass. The tens of thousands of bright specks that seemed so close gave no comfort. His eyes told him space was full, crammed to bursting with stars, and his mind told him it was as empty as death.

Pointed out into loneliness, riding the two graceful arrows, Cressey heard the Communicator rasp, "Gentlemen, you are on an intercept to an Outspace ship. The safety of your world rides with you. Do your job well." The hypocritical son-of-a-bitch, thought Cressey angrily, sitting in his snug control room telling us to do our job! Well, maybe it made an impression on the first-timers, he couldn't remember. This was his third, and he could no longer remember any farther back than when he climbed into the cockpit. It was better not to remember his other missions, much better.

The roar seemed to come a split second before the pressure, and then Cressey was slammed into his acceleration cradle by the sudden impact. His body suddenly weighed over a thousand pounds, and his blood sloshed wearily in his veins as a straining heart refused to pump such a load.

"Captain Mackley," said Cressey, "I've heard it said that Earth is the aggressor in this war."

"Have you ever seen the London Crater?" asked the Information Officer.

"Pictures, yes, but what I want to know is, who attacked first?"

"It doesn't really matter, does it Cressey? There is a war, and we've got to fight it, no matter how it started."

"Yes sir," said Cressey, "but I wanted to know."

"All right, I'll tell you then. The Outspacers contacted this system roughly six years ago. The first eighteen months they spent on the outer planets. During the second year they came in as far as Mars, and established a base there. Six months later, one of their ships left on an obvious course toward Earth. It was destroyed by a missile launched from Satellite II." Mackley shrugged. "You know the rest. They retaliated. Satellite II was vaporized."

"But Earth fired first?"

"I told you, it doesn't make any difference now. One Outspacer later got through the defense rings, and now there's nothing from London to Cambridge but glass. Whatever the hell they use for weapons, they're effective."

"So we don't know whether or not they were originally hostile."

"No, we don't. It had to be assumed they were. We were not in a position to make allowances. You must realize, Cressey, we were dealing with something totally unprecedented, a completely unknown force. Common sense is enough to tell you the Outspacer had to be considered inimical to us, until proven otherwise."

"They weren't given much of a chance to prove it."

"That may be. The point is irrelevant at the moment. We are committed to a line of action, and we must follow it through. On their part, the Outspacers are doing the same."

Cressey was silent for a moment, and Mackley continued in a softer voice. "Look here, son. I don't have to tell you all this. I could just as easily shoot you full of starry-eyed patriotism and send you out to save the world from the Bug-Eyed Monsters, but the military isn't doing things that way any more. There is a possibility that we've made a mistake, I'll admit that, but we're stuck with the consequences of the original action. We're defending our planet with everything we've got. The Hornets are the only weapon that has proven even remotely effective."

"I'll have to think it over, Captain."

"Of course," said Mackley. "It's not an easy decision to make. Come back again, any time you like, and we'll talk it over some more."

And Cressey had gone back.

Acceleration pressure abated, and Cressey's face resumed its normal shape. The red haze in front of his eyes cleared, and he could see out through his canopy again. The thick blanket of stars remained motionless, though he knew he was moving with tremendous speed toward the Outspace ship.

In front of him behind the instrument panel, he could hear the insect-like buzzing as his course computer was fed information from his Base Satellite. With both the outer D-Post and the Satellite tracking the enemy, fairly precise positioning was possible. Unfortunately, because of the enormous distances involved, not precise enough to pinpoint the Stingers themselves. You had to be closer to do that, and the way to get closer was in a Hornet.

For a few minutes now, Cressey had only to watch his own scope for the first pip, and consider his insane position. It was his third mission. Of nearly a thousand Hornetmen, forty-three had more than one mission. If he got out of this one, he had two more before compulsory retirement. He was not sure he could go two more missions, even if he survived physically.

Five missions, then retirement. It had looked good to him, a year ago. When he left college for Primary Interceptors, it had seemed the very best kind of an idea. Five missions as a Hornetman, then home. Home as a hero, as a king. At twenty-one he would never have to worry about anything again. The pension Mackley had mentioned was so high as to be inconceivable. And that was just from the government. Being a hero had other, less official compensations. A shack in Beverly Hills, worth a hundred thousand or so? Hell, they'd force it on him, just for being a hero. A woman? What woman could resist a five-mission Hornetman? Every daydream he'd ever had, and a hundred he'd not thought of, free for nothing. Or free for running five intercepts.

It had looked good to him until his first mission. Then it had suddenly lost its charm. He had learned why, so far, there were no five-mission Hornetmen.

Abruptly he heard the "ping" telling him his radar was tracking. The Satellite had guided him true enough. He was within the limited range of his own radar.

"Radar contact made," he said into the lip mike. "503 going on manual control. Out." He clicked the Com switch and settled down to fixing on his target.

From the size of the blip on the screen, he could see the Outspace ship was huge, as all of them were. Funny, there had not even been enough contact to know how many different sorts of ship the Alien had. They were not battleships, nor cruisers, nor anything else specific. They were simply Outspace, and he had to seek them out and destroy them.

A single ship, as usual. He wondered why they had never sent more than one ship at a time. Perhaps their thinking was so completely foreign it had never occurred to them. No one knew anything about how they thought, except that they retaliated when attacked.

Cressey wondered how the conflict looked through Outspacer eyes. Perhaps they were completely bewildered by attack. Perhaps those god-awful disruptor beams were meant for some other, more peaceful purpose, and were being pressed into use as an emergency weapon by frightened beings. It was even possible the aliens did not know they were under attack by sentient creatures, and wrote off the loss of their ships to natural calamity of some unknown nature.

There were a thousand maybes. It was useless to speculate in the total absence of data. You couldn't be sure of anything, so you couldn't take any chances. You had to act as though they were hostile just to be on the safe side. The malignant neurosis of humanity, making it behave as though all things unknown were dangerous. Or perhaps just realistic thinking. You couldn't know, unless you knew all about the universe. Perhaps the idea of conscious animosity was incomprehensible to the Outspacers, but there was no way to tell. He reached between his legs to the cockpit floor and threw the switches there, arming the Stinger warheads.

On his first mission he had actually gotten within visual range of the Outspace ship, launching the Stingers at not more than three miles range. The ship had been bulky, almost grotesque by his own standards, covered with lumps and bulges of indeterminate purpose. There had been no lights visible, no ports. Perhaps the Aliens did not see in our spectrum, or perhaps they had radiation screens across the ports, there was no way to tell.

Cressey smiled ruefully. This miserable war was turning him into a philosopher.

On his second mission he had not seen his target. He had launched at six miles, out of fear, trusting to the followers in the Stingers' noses to track. He did not know what the result had been either time. He had turned and run for home at full acceleration, and he fully intended to do the same on this mission. There was such a thing as pushing your luck too far, and he needed all he had.

The pip on his screen drifted to the left, and he gave a short burst to center it. He begrudged having to use his infinitesimal fuel on tracking when he needed it so desperately to go home. He looked through the canopy, but saw nothing, and returned his eyes to the screen. The telltale pip had drifted slightly to the right. He had overcorrected. Cursing, he fired another burst, shorter this time, with the left bank, and watched the pip center. That was good enough.

His ranging said only twelve miles, his speed two mps, relative to target. One second, two seconds, three—there it was, occulting a tiny area of star patched sky.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a bright flare as some other Hornet disappeared in the wave of energy released by its molecular disruption. Then another, in another quadrant. The Alien was fighting back. He jabbed violently at the Stinger release, and saw the two pencils roar fiercely out ahead of him on their own power. He cut his flimsy launching rack into as tight a turn as it would take. The familiar red haze clouded his vision, and just before blacking out he fired another last long burst on the rockets to head him toward home.

"You understand," said Mackley, "that the amount of fuel we can pack into a Hornet is severely limited by the size of the craft. There is not enough to perform the complicated braking maneuvers necessary to return to the Satellite.

"Therefore, the Hornets make no attempt to return to the Satellite from which they were launched. Instead, they return directly to Earth. This may sound contradictory, but remember that the planet has a heavy envelope of air, which the Satellite Bases, of course, have not. We use that air to brake the ships, through friction."

"But Captain, wouldn't the Hornet burn as soon as it touched atmosphere?"

"Ordinarily, if it plunged directly in, yes. But there are techniques for slowing your flight through friction without heating excessively. Basically, the operation is the same as skipping a flat stone on a lake. The Hornet actually only skims the atmosphere, entering at a very shallow angle. The entire delta-wing of the ship is a control surface. That much area, even at such extreme heights, gives a certain amount of control, and the pilot can pull up out of the atmosphere again before heating has become too extreme. He has also been considerably slowed by the same friction which causes the heating. Do you follow me?"

"Yes, I suppose so, but it seems pretty tricky."

"It is tricky, Cressey, and you never want to forget it. It takes a very considerable amount of piloting skill, but it can be done."

"Captain, how many Hornets do you lose trying to get in like that?"

Mackley hesitated momentarily. "Our losses are right around thirty-seven percent. That's due to enemy fire. It's high, but under the circumstances, it isn't extreme. We're fighting at a disadvantage, and combat is not a gentle affair. Men's lives are lost. That's been true ever since two cave men took after each other with stone axes. It was true with bows and arrows and muzzle loaders. It was true with tanks and machine guns, and it is true now.

"It is expected in a combat situation that men will die. One of the aims of military strategy has always been to keep as many of your own men alive as possible. This has not changed either. But combat is, after all, combat; and there are some unavoidable risks."

"What's the total loss, Captain? I mean from enemy action and from the hazards of this skip approach you were talking about?"

The Information Officer stared at Cressey for what seemed like a long time before he answered. "Our total losses, Mr. Cressey, are roughly ninety-three percent."

When Cressey regained consciousness, the Earth was a great globe, filling his entire field of vision. He could not estimate his distance, though he thought he was within the Satellite ring. His speed would plunge him into atmosphere shortly, too shortly.

Within seconds he began to feel the warmth as he entered the region where a few air molecules began to brush over the surfaces of his ship. He rotated the delta-wings full, but there was no response. He was not yet deep enough into the sea of air for the control surfaces to react. He watched the tips of the wings, so ridiculously close to him, though he knew he would not be able to see anything. Soon he began to feel a gentle bucking motion as the wings met resistance. He flattened them out, horizontal, and began to draw them up again slowly, so they would move the tiny ship upward instead of simply tearing off at the roots.

The heat was already uncomfortable, and he was slowing. Now he was pressed forward against the seat belt as deceleration increased. The control surfaces bit into the thin air more solidly now, and Cressey thought the nose had come up a bit, but it was so slight he couldn't be sure. The bucking motion was more pronounced, but there was nothing he could do about that.

Slowly, slowly. The wings had to tilt so very slowly, or they would be ripped from the pod-like hull, leaving it to plummet into thick air and glow briefly like a cigarette in the dark before it plunged down to earth. His face was wet behind the fish-bowl, but he could not reach it to wipe the sweat away. Nor could he have taken his hands away from the controls in any case.

The nose had come up, he was certain of that now. He was definitely rising, but the heat was becoming unbearable. Imperceptibly, a thin shrieking had arisen in the cabin, almost out of sonic range, just enough to make a man's nerves feel as if they had been dragged across a rough file. The heat transmitted through the body of the pod and into the bucket was beginning to burn his legs. He was being held out of the seat itself by the force of his deceleration, but the backs of his calves still touched metal. He thought he could smell the fabric of his suit burning, but realized it was probably his overwrought imagination.

His cheeks felt too large, puffed out, as though strong, implacable hands were pulling all his loose flesh forward. His eyes strained forward, threatening to come out of their sockets. The red haze began, and he had a sudden frightening thought that he might lose consciousness before the Hornet had well begun its rise out of atmosphere. The red darkened into black.

He regained consciousness. The first skip had been made. The ship began to settle back into atmosphere again, and now its speed was lower. With each pass the heat would become more intense, as the plane would not have a chance to cool completely before it began to heat again. He had to maintain a delicate balance between going deep enough to slow him, but not so deep he couldn't bring the ship up before it burned, cherry-red. His body was drenched as by a shower, and the inner lining of his suit felt soggy from sweat.

The second skip was worse than the first, and he lost consciousness almost too soon. The third was worse than the second. After the fourth, he could not lift high enough to clear atmosphere. He had gone too deep, and was now bound by the great mass of Earth below.

He was still at a shallow angle, relative to the ground. He estimated he would make at least one complete orbit, perhaps two, before his spiralling trajectory brought him to the contact point on the surface. If he were still conscious, he would leave the aircraft at 30,000 feet, and hope. He knew his speed was still too high, well over Mach 2, higher than it had been on either of his other approaches. The ship was threatening to tear apart under the furious pounding it was taking from air and shock waves.

Hobson's choice. Bail out high, and suffocate because the automatic chute release would not allow him to make a delayed opening. Bail out low, and the thick air would pound his body to a pulp, and below the steel webbed chute would hang nothing but a suit, full of a still, red messiness.

The timing had to be precision itself, but it had to be done by guesswork. There was no training that could prepare a man for this. It was all new. He uncoupled the air hose leading to his suit, and placed his hand on the ejector lever. He knew he was too high, but the wings showed quivering signs of buckling under the strain.

He pulled the lever, releasing the canopy and arming the seat cartridge. The canopy disappeared miraculously from over his head. He was deafened by the thunderous roar of air that entered the cramped cockpit, like an explosion peak that remained constant, not diminishing. Instinctively, he ducked his head, recoiling at the sound. He did not remember triggering the seat ejector.

Cressey fell. The seat dropped away from him, the incredibly strong parachute opened, all automatically. He fell forty-five thousand feet into the Pacific Ocean, unconscious. His face was battered by windblast almost beyond recognition, and his body equally so. When the rescue team pulled him from the water, three hours later, they thought he was an old man. His eyes were a mass of red, from dozens of sub-conjunctival hemorrhages. He would see again, but not until after weeks of near blindness.

But he was alive. When he woke up in the California hospital four days later, he considered ruefully that that was about the best one could expect in his business.

"Cressey, can you hear me?"

"Yes, I can hear you. Who is it?"

"It's Captain Mackley. I've come to see you."

"Well—thanks, Captain."

"You got the Outspacer, Cressey. I thought you'd like to know."

"Frankly, Captain, I couldn't care less. But thanks for telling me, anyway."

"It means a lot, Cressey. There were a lot of people's lives riding with you."

Yeah, I'm a hero. I'm a Hornetman.

"Thanks, Captain."

"Was it pretty rough?"

Rough? Like birth and death and all of life, rolled into minutes.

"No more so than I expected, Captain. Pretty much routine. Routine for a Hornetman."