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like a mountain.The Mancji themselves weighed almost two tons each; they liked six geegravity. They blasted our communication off the air, just for practice.They talked big, too. We were invaders in their territory. They wereamused by us. So where did I get the notion that our attack would beanything more than a joke to them? That's the big question." The Admiralshook his head.

  "The answer is quite simple. In the first place, they were pulling sixgees by using a primitive dumbbell configuration. The only reason forthat type of layout, as students of early space vessel design can tellyou, is to simplify setting up a gee field effect using centrifugalforce. So they obviously had no gravity field generators.

  "Then their transmission was crude. All they had was simpleold-fashioned short-range radio, and even that was noisy and erratic.And their reception was as bad. We had to use a kilowatt before theycould pick it up at 200 miles. We didn't know then it was allorganically generated; that they had no equipment."

  The Admiral sipped his wine, frowning at the recollection. "I was prettysure they were bluffing when I changed course and started after them. Ihad to hold our acceleration down to two and a half gees because I hadto be able to move around the ship. And at that acceleration we gainedon them. They couldn't beat us. And it wasn't because they couldn't takehigh gees; they liked six for comfort, you remember. No, they justdidn't have the power."

  * * * * *

  The Admiral looked out the window.

  "Add to that the fact that they apparently couldn't generate ordinaryelectric current. I admit that none of this was conclusive, but afterall, if I was wrong we were sunk anyway. When Thomas told me the natureof the damage to our radar and communications systems, that was anotherhint. Their big display of Mancji power was just a blast of radiationright across the communication spectrum; it burned tubes and blew fuses;nothing else. We were back in operation an hour after our attack.

  "The evidence was there to see, but there's something about giant sizethat gets people rattled. Size alone doesn't mean a thing. It's ratherlike the bluff the Soviets ran on the rest of the world for a couple ofdecades back in the war era, just because they sprawled across half theglobe. They were a giant, though it was mostly frozen desert. When theshowdown came they didn't have it. They were a pushover.

  "All right, the next question is why did I choose H. E. instead of goingin with everything I had? That's easy, too. What I wanted wasinformation, not revenge. I still had the heavy stuff in reserve andready to go if I needed it, but first I had to try to take them alive.Vaporizing them wouldn't have helped our position. And I was lucky; itworked.

  "The, ah, confusion below evaporated as soon as the Section chiefs got alook at the screens and realized that we had actually knocked out theMancji. We matched speeds with the wreckage and the patrols went out tolook for a piece of ship with a survivor in it. If we'd had no luck wewould have tackled the other half of the ship, which was still intactand moving off fast. But we got quite a shock when we found the natureof the wreckage." The Admiral grinned.

  "Of course today everybody knows all about the Mancji hive intelligence,and their evolutionary history. But we were pretty startled to find thatthe only wreckage consisted of the Mancji themselves, each two-ton slugin his own hard chitin shell. Of course, a lot of the cells wereruptured by the explosions, but most of them had simply disassociatedfrom the hive mass as it broke up. So there was no ship; just a clusterof cells like a giant bee hive, and mixed up among the slugs, thedamnedest collection of loot you can imagine. The odds and ends they'dstolen and tucked away in the hive during a couple hundred years ofcamp-following.

  "The patrols brought a couple of cells alongside, and Mannion went outto try to establish contact. Sure enough, he got a very fainttransmission, on the same bands as before. The cells were talking toeach other in their own language. They ignored Mannion even though histransmission must have blanketed everything within several hundredmiles. We eventually brought one of them into the cargo lock and startedtrying different wave-lengths on it. Then Kramer had the idea ofplanting a couple of electrodes and shooting a little juice to it. Ofcourse, it loved the DC, but as soon as we tried AC, it gave up. So wehad a long talk with it and found out everything we needed to know.

  * * * * *

  "It was a four-week run to the nearest outpost planet of the New TerranFederation, and they took me on to New Terra aboard one of their fastliaison vessels. The rest you know. We, the home planet, were as lostto the New Terrans as they were to us. They greeted us as though we weretheir own ancestors come back to visit them.

  "Most of my crew, for personal reasons, were released from duty there,and settled down to stay.

  "The clean-up job here on Earth was a minor operation to their Navy. AsI recall, the trip back was made in a little over five months, and theRed Tide was killed within four weeks of the day the task force arrived.I don't think they wasted a motion. One explosive charge per cell, ofjust sufficient size to disrupt the nucleus. When the critical number ofcells had been killed, the rest died overnight.

  "It was quite a different Earth that emerged from under the plague,though. You know it had taken over all of the land area except NorthAmerica and a strip of Western Europe, and all of the sea it wanted. Itwas particularly concentrated over what had been the jungle areas ofSouth America, Africa, and Asia. You must realize that in the daysbefore the Tide, those areas were almost completely uninhabitable. Youhave no idea what the term Jungle really implied. When the Tide died, itdisintegrated into its component molecules; and the result was that allthose vast fertile Jungle lands were now beautifully levelled andcompletely cleared areas covered with up to twenty feet of the richesttopsoil imaginable. That was what made it possible for old Terra tobecome what she is today; the Federation's truck farm, and the solesource of those genuine original Terran foods that all the rest of theworlds pay such fabulous prices for.

  "Strange how quickly we forget. Few people today remember how we loathedand feared the Tide when we were fighting it. Now it's dismissed as ablessing in disguise."

  The Admiral paused. "Well," he said, "I think that answers the questionsand gives you a bit of homespun philosophy to go with it."

  * * * * *

  "Admiral," said the reporter, "you've given the public some facts it'swaited a long time to hear. Coming from you, sir, this is the greateststory that could have come out of this Reunion Day celebration. Butthere is one question more, if I may ask it. Can you tell me, Admiral,just how it was that you rejected what seemed to be prima facie proof ofthe story the Mancji told; that they were the lords of creation outthere, and that humanity was nothing but a tame food animal to them?"

  The Admiral sighed. "I guess it's a good question," he said. "But therewas nothing supernatural about my figuring that one. I didn't suspectthe full truth, of course. It never occurred to me that we were thevictims of the now well-known but still inexplicable sense of humor ofthe Mancji, or that they were nothing but scavengers around the edges ofthe Federation. The original Omega ship had met them and seen rightthrough them.

  * * * * *

  "Well, when this hive spotted us coming in, they knew enough about NewTerra to realize at once that we were strangers, coming from outside thearea. It appealed to their sense of humor to have the gall to strutright out in front of us and try to put over a swindle. What a laugh forthe oyster kingdom if they could sell Terrans on the idea that they werethe master race. It never occurred to them that we might be anything butTerrans; Terrans who didn't know the Mancji. And they were canny enoughto use an old form of Interlingua; somewhere they'd met men before.

  "Then we needed food. They knew what we ate, and that was where theywent too far. They had, among the flotsam in their hive, a few humanbodies they had picked up from some wreck they'd come across in theirtravels. They had them stashed away like everything else they could laya pseudopod on. So they stacked them the way they'd
seen Terran frozenfoods shipped in the past, and sent them over. Another of their littlejokes.

  "I suppose if you're already overwrought and eager to quit, and you'vebeen badly scared by the size of an alien ship, it's prettyunderstandable that the sight of human bodies, along with the story thatthey're just a convenient food supply, might seem pretty convincing. ButI was already pretty dubious about the genuineness of our pals, and whenI saw those bodies it was pretty plain that we were hot on the trail ofOmega Colony. There was no other place humans could have come from outthere. We had to find out the location from the Mancji."

  "But, Admiral," said the reporter, "true enough they were humans, andpresumably had some connection with the colony, but they were nakedcorpses