The Defiant Agents | Page 2

which had solved the mystery, having traced that source of knowledge not to an earlier
and forgotten human civilization but to wrecked spaceships from an eon-old galactic
empire--an empire which had flourished when glacial ice covered most of Europe and
northern America and humans were cave-dwelling primitives. Murdock, trapped by the
Russians in one of those wrecked ships, had inadvertently summoned its original owners.
They had descended to trace--through the Russian time stations--the looters of their
wrecks, destroying the whole Russian time-travel system.
But the aliens had not chanced on the parallel western system. And a year later that had
been put into Project Folsom One. Again Ashe, Murdock, and a newcomer, the Apache
Travis Fox, had gone back into time to the Arizona of the Folsom hunters, discovering
what they wanted--two ships, one wrecked, the other intact. And when the project had
attempted to bring the intact ship back into the present, chance had triggered controls set
by the dead alien commander. A party of four, Ashe, Murdock, Fox, and a technician,
had then made an involuntary space voyage, touching three worlds on which the galactic
civilization of the far past had left ruins.
Voyage tape fed into the controls of the ship had taken the men, and, when rewound, it
had almost miraculously returned them to Earth with a cargo of similar tapes found on a
world which might have been the capital for a government comprised of whole solar
systems. Tapes--each one was the key to another planet.
And that ancient galactic knowledge was treasure such as humans had never dreamed of
possessing, though many rightly feared that such discoveries could be weapons in hostile
hands. Tapes chosen at random had been shared with other nations at a great drawing.
But each nation secretly remained convinced that, in spite of the untold riches it might
hold as a result of chance, its rivals had done better. Right at this moment, Ashe knew
there were Western agents trying to do at the Russian project just what Camdon had done
there. However, that did not help in solving their present dilemma about Operation
Cochise, now perhaps the most important part of their plan.
Some of the tapes were duds, either too damaged to be useful, or set for worlds hostile to
humans lacking the special equipment the earlier star-traveling race had had at its
command. Of the five tapes they now knew had been snooped, three would be useless to

the enemy.
But one of the remaining two... Ashe frowned. One was the goal toward which they had
been working feverishly for a full twelve months. Their assignment was to plant a colony
across the gulf of space--a successful colony--later to be used as a steppingstone to other
worlds...
"So we have to move faster." Ruthven's comment reached Ashe through his stream of
memories.
"I thought you required at least three more months to conclude personnel training,"
Waldour observed.
Ruthven lifted a fat hand, running the nail of a broad thumb back and forth across his
lower lip in a habitual gesture Ashe had learned to mistrust. As the latter stiffened,
bracing for a battle of wills, he saw Kelgarries come alert too. At least the colonel more
often than not was able to counter Ruthven's demands.
"We test and we test," said the fat man. "Always we test. We move like turtles when it
would be better to race like greyhounds. There is such a thing as overcaution, as I have
said from the first. One would think"--his accusing glance included Ashe and
Kelgarries--"that there had never been any improvising in this project, that all had always
been done by the book. I say that this is the time we must take the big gamble, or else we
may find we have been outbid for space entirely. Let those others discover even one alien
installation they can master and--" his thumb shifted from his lip, grinding down on the
desk top as if it were crushing some venturesome but entirely unimportant insect--"and
we are finished before we really begin."
There were a number of men in the project who would agree with that, Ashe knew. And a
greater number in the country and Alliance at large. The public was used to reckless
gambles which paid off, and there had been enough of those in the past to give an
impressive argument for that point of view. But Ashe, himself, could not agree to a
speed-up. He had been out among the stars, shaved disaster too closely because the
proper training had not been given.
"I shall report that I advise a take-off within a week," Ruthven was continuing. "To the
council I shall say that--"
"And I do not agree!" Ashe cut in. He glanced at Kelgarries for the