"Gentlemen, the President-General of the United Earth Republics!"
Silence. Then the crashing noise of a thousand men getting to their feet. A small, gray-looking man with a prematurely bald head crossed the front of the great chamber flanked by his Secretaries of State and Defense, then mounted the podium alone.
And the emergency session of the Senior Congress of the United Earth Republics was begun.
Senator Martin Stine was the tenth man to be recognized.
He rose quickly and plucked the jeepmike from its recessed spot in his desktop.
"So far," he began, omitting even to begin his remarks with the traditional salutation to the President and the group as a whole, "I have heard ten recommendations for procedure in the present crisis, and each one has been about as jelly-kneed as the one before it! There's one solution to this thing and only one. If we don't want this planet to be scattered to the four corners of Space within the next 72 hours we must get Project AA underway and damn quick! I've been informed that there is a Tinker ship within thirty hours' flight of this system. If we act now, and call them in as we should've, on an ESR, five years ago, we still might be able to get out of this one with whole skins. Some of us, anyway. Gentlemen, the casualty lists as of an hour ago weren't very encouraging."
"Will the Senator from Penn-York yield for a question?"
Stine's cold blue eyes snapped. "Yield for one minute to the Senator from Texamerica."
"The ITA effected a Project AA for this system about eleven years ago, did they not? And have answered exactly seven Emergency Service Requests in the last one hundred twenty years, have they not? In view of such frequent assistance, it would seem—"