"Uh-uh. I sealed it up proper. It and the window."
The door between the rooms slammed shut but not before half a dozen bombs had got through. Ric slammed the shutters too. They waited.
"If it doesn't kill them it'll put them to sleep for hours. Basically, from Starr's dossiers on the Kiriki, they have all the vulnerable points of our grasshoppers. And fire will destroy them utterly. I'm afraid we can't take chances, so this cabin will have to go. Match?"
They watched it burn down to the last slab of stilted-up planking. Max stared down at the two small charred remainders of the Kiriki advance guard and shuddered.
On the road back to New York, Max said: "Do you think they'll try it again?"
"The Kiriki? Not for a while. Like you said, they dislike war. They like it the easy way."
"Propaganda. Invasion of minds. Well, two can play at that. We'll keep Orion going—only we'll print the real story. We'll make men detest and despise the Kiriki so that any feelers they send down will send them hopping to the furthest end of space. Maybe we can get somebody started on that telepathic wave interrupter of yours, too. So if they do land we can cut them off from each other. We'll work on this reverse propaganda hard."
Max jerked his eyes back on the road and put his foot on the gas hard. Sure he would work, work to save his sanity, too.
It wasn't going to be easy to forget a lost dream—a dream that had lived and breathed and promised a lifetime of patterned contentment. It would take a lot of mental welding to hold back the horror of that kiss.