Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 10.djvu/109



The Leader had a purpose: he was waging war fa found a super-race. Why not ask that race to help ?

HE tense whispering in the great hall faded suddenly. The huge double doors of the Council Room swung back and, as one man, the entire assemblage of high ranking soldiers come to their feet, hands outstretched in the traditional salute, carried over from the days of the First Leader.

The Leader strode through their ranks. He was a tall man with heavy broad shoulders and thin, expressionless face. He turned and faced the room. Blue eyes, cold and unmoving, stared impassively over the expectant audience. Light hair, close cropped and straight, pressed tight about his skull like a bronze helmet.

"Soldiers," he began without preliminaries. "I have called you here from all ends of the land and sea to announce that victory, complete and final, will soon be ours. For fifty years the enemy has fought stubbornly and desperately against our strength and might. But now, in the year 1990, they are doomed to the inevitable destruction which is the end of all enemies of our State. For thirty years we have been forced to fight delaying actions in some sectors of the World because we did not have sufficient man power to wage a decisive attack. Now that difficulty has been solved.

"In a very short time we will hurl onto the field of combat thousands, millions of troops vastly superior to any which the world has known. Troops so skilled and ruthless and perfect that even our own excellent divisions could not expect to stand against them."

There was an incredulous gasp from