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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 begi
"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 ma
"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 ca