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the screen.
"We have been directed by our leadership board to gather you here and play
this recording for you," tlie woman told us. "None of us have any more idea of
what it contains than you do. Therefore, we will proceed to find out as
quickly as possible. I am told that the recording card will destroy itself as
it plays, so there can be no repeats." She punched the card into the recorder,
and the screen flickered to life.
They could have saved themselves the trouble of a screen for all it was worth.
It simply showed a man, masked and robed himself, sitting at a desk. It was
impossible to tell anything about the scene, even the planet of origin, and it
was obvious from the start that even the voice was distorted.
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Medusa
"Fellow comrades in opposition to the Lords of the Diamond," he began, "I
bring you greetings. As some of you may have guessed, you are a part not only
of a planet-wide organization but a systemwide group devoted to the overthrow
of all Four Lords of the Diamond."
There were gasps and some rumbling in the crowd.
"All of you have your personal reasons for wishing to overthrow the Medusan
system, reasons we well understand. Simply because you are a part of a larger
plan, please do not for one moment think that your own hopes and objectives
are not part of that plan," the man went on. "Events have a way of overtaking
plans, however, and that has happened in this case. The Confederacy itself is
taking an active hand against the Four Lords, and has some chance of success.
It is time, therefore, to explain to you all a little of what this is about.
"An alien race, totally alien to anything we know, discovered humanity before
humanity discovered it.
That race is somehow bound up with our homeland, the Warden system itself, and
they are very clever and have a very good understanding of the way people
work. Instead of warring with the Confederacy, they contacted the Four Lords,
who jointly accepted a contract to destroy human civilization outside of the
Diamond."
A lot more whispering and rustling now, and I could hear some snatches that
included the words "mad"
and "insult" and the like. Clearly this cloistered group, few or none of whom
had ever known anyplace except the Warden Diamond, either didn't believe the
man or they couldn't care less about the aliens. This reaction was
understandable, and, I found, exactly what the speaker had anticipated. Either
he Vas a psych or he had some good ones prepare the talk.
"Now, I know this doesn't seem to apply to you, but the fact is, it does. The
Four Lords have made this contract and they are in the process of carrying it
out. Their means are irrelevant to you, since they are worked against
non-Diamond people, but those means depended on secrecy to the very last
minute. Now that secrecy is blown. The Confederacy knows. Knows, but not
enough. They are left with two options.
We are one. The Four Lords must go, and be replaced by more honest,
Warden-oriented people who will work for the Diamond and not on some sort of
mass revenge. But we are no tools of the Confederacy, I
assure you. We do this for our own good."
Nice dramatic pause here, I thought.
"The second and only remaining option as to the overthrow of the Four Lords
and the consequent flushing out of these aliens is simple. The Confederacy, if
it can not achieve or see the first, will not hesitate to do on a mass scale
what they fail to do on a simple scale. They propose to incinerate the four
Warden
Diamond worlds totally and kill every living person and thing upon them."
Another pause and much agitation and some really loud comments rose from the
crowd. It sounded angry and upset.
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Medusa
"They have the power to do this. They have the means. And those aliens won't
save us. If they could, they wouldn't have needed the Four Lords in the first
place. Therefore, this organization of good, serious men and women of the
Diamond, very different on each world but nonetheless there, was formed not to
save the Confederacy, which means nothing to us, but to save our homes, our
worlds, our very lives. The Four
Lords will not back down. They are in this to the death, since anything less
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than the aliens' total victory will destroy them. And since we know very
little about them ourselves, we have no reason to think that, even in the case
of a now improbable alien and Four Lords victory, those aliens would then be
friendly to us. We have no choice.
"However, each planet is different, and must be dealt with by different
methods and is best dealt with by th" natives of those worlds. Therefore, the
members of Medusa's Opposition must now sit back, reflect, and discuss the
situation among themselves. Cells will be asked within no more than two weeks
to propose plans for action. Those plans will be examined and coordinated by
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