"You have heard what you must do?"
"Never!" cried Borisu, blustering defiance. "Never will I betray my people!"
"It is written," said Kang quietly, "'Only the fool rejects the inevitable.' You are no fool, Borisu. Will you proclaim an armistice? Or for stubborn pride will you witness the destruction of your empire?"
Borisu blubbered, "Better to go down fighting than abjectly. If I bid my people lay down their arms, your hordes will sweep in and destroy them."
"That," Kang assured him, "they will not do. In conference we have already discussed this with the Gogeans. Much have our two races to hate yours for, Borisu. Theirs for years of life-in-death in the darkling wastes of Magog; ours for impelling upon us centuries of premature death and a dwindling doom.
"Even so, we will not sow the seeds of new conflict in the peace of the old. Lay down your arms in peaceful surrender and I offer you the pledge of two worlds that about the conference table shall be reasoned the merits of a new and lasting peace for all concerned."
"And if I do not?" demanded Borisu.
"Then," Kang promised him, "you shall surely die. And as for your city—" He paused and gestured toward the visionplate. Words were needless in the face of that which might there now be seen. The silver tube of the Liberty, shimmering faintly in the atmosphere of Magog, surrounded with its impenetrable force-shield, flying supremely aloft above the capital city, coming to sedate rest directly over the citadel. "There is your answer, Borisu. The decision is yours. There is little time in which to make it. Speak, or—"
And Borisu capitulated. With a grinding cry, he reached for the diaphragm Kang offered him. The Martian doctor depressed a series of studs, and instantaneously, in a thousand chambers and corridors scattered throughout the whole of the Palace Royal, there appeared on vision plates before the startled eyes of all the embattled Magogeans an image of him who was a kraedar supreme in the Inner Council of Magog. And they heard his cracked voice crying out its message.