"I'm sorry," said Lindsay.
"Look, Lindsay—" started Tom Lacy.
Lindsay interrupted. "Lacy, I'm the one to be sorry. I mean it. Pity—is hard to take, even to give honestly. You don't want it, yet it is there. Yes," nodded Lindsay, "if there's anything, ever, that we can do to see you straightened out, we'll do it. Now—"
The phone.
Lindsay picked up the phone and said: "Garrard got it! Where's the next one?"
Haynes said: "Take the one in the Ruhr Industrial District. How'd Garrard get it?"
"We don't know. He went out unplanned, wondering if utter secrecy mightn't be the answer."
"Too bad," said Haynes and hung up quickly. The general didn't like the tone of Lindsay's voice.
Lindsay faced them. "What do we know?" he asked. He felt that he'd been asking that question for year upon year, and that there had been no answer save a mystical, omnipotent rumbling that forboded ill—and that threatened dire consequences if asked to repeat.