"You would have," snorted Vzryvov. "Russia would have. Any nationalism of that time, given such a power, would have behaved the same."
"I don't know," faltered Manning. "You may be right, but I can't imagine...."
"Anyway," Kane's tone grew bitter, "the Germans have made the world into what they wanted, and they've made us what we are. And now we're going to smash their world. Maybe something better will come out of its destruction. Maybe not. If not—revenge will have to be enough for us."
VI
The captain of the Siegfried squinted at the tables the navigator had handed him, mentally translating their figures into acceleration units. The ship was only an hour from the assigned point in space, and it was necessary to make a final, ultimately correct alignment, in which seconds of arc meant miles of displacement in the dispersion of the dust on Earth's surface.
The captain's concentration was disturbed by the nagging conviction that something was amiss—or had been amiss a minute or so earlier—about his familiar control room. For a moment he had fancied that the door to the sternward-descending stairshaft was standing open; but it was obviously closed....
He put the doubts angrily out of his mind, frowned at the papers, and ordered the expectant pilot: "Funf Minuten sechsunddreissig Sekunden dritter Geschwindigkeit dem Backbordgetriebe!"
They were not very inspired last words, but he had no chance to make additions, for in the next instant Kane's sharp knife sank between his ribs. The captain gurgled in an oddly muffled fashion and would have fallen, save that invisible hands caught and lowered him.
The navigator, looking straight at him, finally realized something had happened. He opened his mouth to cry out, but his throat was cut from ear to ear and no sound emerged.