He studied her eyes until she looked away. His hands found her shoulders. "Sue, there are forces at work about which you've never even dreamed. We need time. We need more manpower. We have to go on working. The only thing that can defeat us ultimately is here on this planet. It is our morale. As long as it is high we'll keep on sending ships out. The moment it breaks we are lost."
Sue had noticed the tension and constraint in his voice that she had come to associate with the talking of men among themselves when they thought no woman or child was within hearing.
Always they stopped talking when a girl approached, and put on a cheerful front. She wondered if they knew of some dark terror yet to be faced, so horrible that it couldn't be confided to their women and children. Would a knowledge of that dreadful thing, she asked herself, break the morale on the home planet?
Wilson had changed the subject. He told her about the fine things he had read in books and heard from older men of that past before the beginning of the struggle. It reminded her of the fairy tales she had read as a child. It seemed impossible that a girl could have fine clothes and a house and a husband and children all her own. She couldn't grasp it. She felt that she wouldn't know how to live if there weren't rules to go by. She remembered vaguely when she was very small, that her mother prepared meals in a big white kitchen, but there was little reality in the memory.
He accompanied her back to the dorm and on the way talked of things that stirred forlorn unrest in her body. It was a sense of tingling, suppressed under memory of Darth Brady.
Lifting her to the windowsill, he pressed his lips against her ear and whispered, "I've made another request of the Council to send me out." His arms held her tight enough to stop her trembling. Then he released her and was gone.
Food became scarcer as summer became fall and fall became winter. Monkey meat was served twice a week. Hydroponics were the main diet and the bulk had to be made up of edible leaves and woodfibre.
First news of the big break-through came on Christmas Eve. The bulletin was not supposed to go up until all in the factory had had an hour to sing carols or do whatever they wished. But somebody made a mistake. Under the wreaths of holly on the bulletin board it told in a few words how Sector One had been breached. It told of withdrawals, reorganization and shortening of defenses.
On Christmas Day the story was worse. It was not definite as bulletins usually were, but it gave the information that Sector Two was crumbling.