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Not at first there's hostility for a while but in the long run it gives them a new slant on us." "Then you'd better get an Earthman," Duke snapped. "You're talking to a citizen of Meloa! By choice!" "I hadn't finished my explanation," Flannery reminded. Duke snorted. "I was brought up on explanations.
Duke's head was spinning when he reached the surface again. He stopped to let it clear, wondering if he'd ever found this world home. It wouldn't matter soon, though; once he was signed up at the recruiting station, there would be no time to think. He saw the sign, only a few blocks from where the recruiting posters for Meloa had been so long ago.
He dropped the money back on the blanket beside her. She stared at him for a moment and then pulled herself up to her feet, moving toward the door. "Good-by, Duke. And get off Meloa. You can't help us any more. And I don't want you here when I get desperate enough to remember you might take me back. I like you too much for that, even now." He took a step toward her, and she ducked. "Get out!"
Sooner or later, the strain is too great, and you have a war so horrible that its very horror makes surrender impossible. You saw it on Meloa. I've seen it fifty times!" They reached the Foreign Office building and began crossing its lobby. Flannery glanced up at the big seal on the wall with its motto in twisted Latin Per Astra ad Aspera and his eyes turned back to Duke's, but he made no comment.
With more than half of the inhabited planets occupied by various monsters, it seemed obvious that the humanoid planets had to make a common stand. If Meloa fell, it would be an alien stepping stone that could lead back eventually to Earth itself.
It was the record of all the wars since Earth's invention of the high-drive nearly two hundred of them. Gimsul, Hathor, Ptek, Sugfarth, Clovis, and even Meloa the part he hadn't seen, beyond Kordule where the real damage lay; Ronda had been wrong, and cannibalism had been discovered, along with much that was worse.
"Captain," he said, "that isn't something to joke about. We won't forget that there would be no Meloa today without men like you. But we can't ask you to stay. Things have changed insanely. The news we sent to the fleet was pure propaganda!" "We guessed that," Duke told him. "We knew the Throm ships.
"You'll find a ship waiting to take you to Throm, and a man on board who'll use the trip to brief you, if you decide to take the job, Duke. As I said, it's up to you. If you still prefer your wars, come and see me next week, and maybe I can get the recruiting law set aside in your case, since you're really a citizen of Meloa. Otherwise, the ship takes off for Throm in exactly three hours."
The air was thick with the smell of late summer, and there was pleasure in that, until Duke remembered the odor of Meloa, and its cause. Later the cloying perfume of women mixed with the normal industrial odors of the city, until his nose was overdriven to the point of cutoff. He saw things in the shop windows that he had forgotten, but he had no desire for them.
He had a picture of Kloomiria under attack from it. Abruptly, he was seeing again the exploding ships of Throm, and the charnel smell of Kordule on victorious Meloa was thick in his nose. He stood up, shaking his head, and held out his hand, groping for the phrases that had been all-important once among the recruits he had joined. "Thanks, Queeth," he said finally.
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