"Get teams to each of those hatches. If they can't be opened manually, blast them open!"

The captain unplugged the communications line from his helmet, leaving it dangling across Giap's shoulder, and trotted off, fumbling in his thigh pouch for his own comm line.

This is absurd, Giap fumed. We are reduced to speaking to each other like children with a couple of paper cups connected by a length of string.

Everything took so damnably long! Commands had to be relayed from one officer to the next, down the chain of command, one person at a time. Fuming inside his spacesuit, Giap summoned a sergeant from the squad waiting as reserves.

Not bothering with the comm line, Giap pressed his helmet against the sergeant's, like embracing a loved one.

"Sergeant, pick six troopers and bring them to me. I will use them as runners."

"Runners, sir?"

"To carry messages, fool!"

"Ah! Runners! Yes, sir. Right away, sir.' The sergeant was still babbling as he headed back to his squad.

Everything slowed down to the pace of a nightmare. Giap ordered a runner to find out what the captain was doing at the airlock hatches. It took long minutes before the woman came back, puffing, picked up the colonel's comm line and plugged it into her own helmet.

"The captain says the inner airlock hatches are closed, but they don't appear to be locked or sealed. He thinks he can open them manually."

"Why hasn't he already opened them?" Giap demanded.

"He's waiting for your orders, sir."

"Tell him to open those hatches and get the second wave into the base! And I want a report on what the first wave has accomplished."

"Yessir."

The trooper hustled off across the garage floor, looking to Giap more like a white humpbacked alien cyclops than a human being.

Edging closer to the wide-open hatch of the main airlock, Giap once again put his binoculars to his visor. It took agonizingly long, but at last the sergeant seemed to have gotten his order across to the captain. Gesticulating severely, the captain motioned one of his troopers to work the controls of the inner airlock hatch.

Giap saw the trooper step into the metal chamber and tap a button. At last! he thought, as the inner hatch started to slide open.

A ghostly gray mist seemed to waft out of the darkness from beyond the hatch. The trooper inside the airlock, the captain standing just outside it, the runner and several other troopers nearby began to paw at their visors. Giap watched as they staggered backward, gloved hands swiping at their visors like people trying to knuckle dust from their eyes.

Then they stretched their arms out, tottering uncertainly like blind men. The captain bumped into the runner and fell backwards in a dreamy, lunar slow motion until his rump bounced on the smooth rock floor of the garage.

Horrified, Giap shouted inside his helmet, "What's happened to them? They act as if they're blind!"