“Do it! They can set off your punishment mode if they think about it. Shut the whole system down.” He turned back to the microphone. “I must give you credit, Eric. You’ve been very clever. You didn’t even open the doors to the cafeteria or the conference room. If you had, you would have seen that we had three squads of men waiting for you in here. What did you use to knock out the whole building?”

“Major,” came the sharp reply, “you’re not here to discuss tactics. What do you want?”

“True,” the Major responded, almost amiably. “Actually, I wish to negotiate your surrender.”

“Sorry.”

“Look, Eric, you’re no fool, never have been. A wise man knows when he’s defeated.”

“True. And so far, we don’t see it that way.”

A look of exasperation briefly marred the smooth features, but the Major spoke with a tone of patient goodwill. “We can come in there, overwhelm you with sheer numbers. I have over fifty men out here. But I don’t want either my men or yours to die needlessly. You cannot win.”

“Major, that depends totally on what you mean by winning.” Now Eric’s voice was easy, almost conversational. “We have one hundred fifty pounds of plastic explosives wired up to your little machines in here. We hoped to get away clear, but our primary objective is to wipe out the heart of your little psychological dictatorship. So we haven’t really failed, have we?”

“You’re sitting right on top of those explosives. You won’t annihilate yourselves.”

“Eric!” Nicole’s whisper was muffled but still clearly understandable through the speaker, and the Major cocked his head to listen. “We have the monitors in here. We can trigger the punishment mode in Travis’s wrist computer.”

There was a moment of silence; then Eric’s voice responded in a whisper. “Get Travis on line.”

At that moment, the door opened, and Travis came back into the observation room. The Major shot him a questioning glance, and he nodded. “The monitoring terminals are shut down completely.”

The Major nodded, unable to repress a tiny smile of triumph. For several minutes things had looked bleak, but they had turned them around. “Eric, the time for bluffing is over. You have a problem and no way out of it.”

“No, Major. You have a problem. We’re not bluffing. I’d like the side hallway cleared immediately.”

“Or?”

“Or we’ll push the punishment mode on Travis’s wrist computer. We can terminate him just as you tried to terminate Cliff Cameron.”

The Major shook his head. “Nice try, Eric, but it won’t carry.”

“As soon as Travis dies, we’ll send your next man down. And the next and the next. We regret, Major, that you have been wise enough not to link yourself up to—”

A sharp cry of dismay cut him off. “The terminals are off!” Nicole cried.