The simple sentence broke the silence in the room, and then the silence closed in around it again and the sentence seemed to be repeated, to be echoed in the silence. Buchalter's eyes were on Clyde's blank face, and presently Clyde raised his eyes from the uniform to meet the German's gaze and said with no emotion, "My mother died in London, beneath the Luftwaffe."

A flicker of sympathy crossed Buchalter's ruddy face, and he started to speak and then saw the expression on Clyde's face, a cold contempt, a bitter hatred. The German stiffened visibly and said coldly, "It is to be regretted that some must suffer, but when one's end is so eminently desirable one must employ the means at hand, secure in the knowledge that the means will be justified-"

"And the end?" the Englishman interrupted, and the challenge in his voice was unmistakable, "the end that could so easily justify wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter, pillage and rape and treachery-?"

"A world of beauty!" Buchalter said loudly, his ruddy face deepening in color, his bright blue eyes blazing, "a world of beauty and cleanliness and fitness, with the ugliness and the filth and the unfit removed; with plenty for the fit to share, and none but the fit to share it. Can you not see it, you dull English, can you not see the desirability of destroying that which is ugly before it drains life from the beautiful?"

The Englishman waited, his gaze fixed on the German's face, and his voice was so low as to be barely audible when he answered, "My mother was an extremely ugly woman."

The silence had hardly closed in on that sentence, the thing that was in the Englishman's face and growing in the German's had barely showed itself to the rest of us, when old Soong spoke, and they both turned to him involuntarily, startled to realize that they were not alone in the room.

"An Englishman gentleman," the old Chinese purred, "and a German gentleman. Ideologically different, but gentlemen both; and gentlemen, here, should be allies. On the other hand, there is the Code of Honor-might a Chinese gentleman - pardon! - propose a Russian gentleman's method to settle your differences in a way that will leave my little organization one sound pilot of the two?"