"No," admitted Nolan. "It isn't."
The skipper fumed to himself.
"We might get home," he said fretfully, "and find things just as we left them. Then there'd be no harm in the mounting. We'd at least try to diddle the Coms and get it ashore without their knowing it was important. We might get home and find that war'd broken out and Earth was dead like the Third Planet back yonder, only not all yet turned to desert. Then the mounting wouldn't matter. Nothing would! Or we could find that the Coms had smashed the West and were all cockahoop about what they'd managed to do in a sneak attack. So it had better stay mounted. I covered everything, didn't I?"
Nolan wasn't feeling any better than anybody else on the Lotus. The jitters that affected everybody but conditioned Coms had been bad when the Lotus went about its business. But when the ship headed for home, nerves got visibly worse. They didn't know what they'd find there. With the third planet of Fanuel Alpha in mind, it was all too easy to believe in disaster.
"There's one thing," said Nolan painfully, "that bothers me. I've been trying to think like a Com top brass. The WDA is a well meaning organization, and it's gained time, no doubt. But aside from the Com missiles, ninety-five per cent of the atomic warheads on Earth are in the hands of just one WDA nation. It happens to be ours. It's been bearing most of the load of defense costs for the West. It's the richest country in the world. There's practically no poverty in it."
"What has poverty to do with a possible war?" demanded the skipper.
"Everything," Nolan said uncomfortably. "The Coms take over a country. They march in. There are rich people and poor people. The Coms start to humiliate and destroy the rich. The poor people hated them. So the Coms are popular long enough to get things going right. But if they tried that in our country—"
"It wouldn't work," said the skipper. "Not for a minute."
"It wouldn't," agreed Nolan. "Most of our people think of themselves as well to do, and the rest can hope to become so. So the Coms would have to try to govern two hundred million indignant and subversive underground resisters. They couldn't hold down such a country. They wouldn't try!"
The skipper blinked.