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"Stop pacing up and down like a leopard," he said, "Sit down and take it easy."

"I won't take it easy. I'm mad. Take the Secretary of Defense. Next to the President and perhaps the Secretary of State he's the most important man in the country. He runs three departments, each five times as big as General Motors. These departments are designed to do different things in different ways, and there is more rivalry between them than there is, say, between Oldsmobile and Buick. If you were running fifteen General Motors, but each one more complex than General Motors, do you think you could spend all your spare waking hours reading everything that has ever been written, including all the classified files, about the schism between the Army and the Party in Russia, as Simmons did last week?"

"Well, you have a point," Price said. "That's something I hadn't considered."

"If you don't believe in the Intentions Groups," she demanded, "why did you join it?"

"If you'll sit down I'll tell you. You make me nervous." She sat down, irritated by the ring of military command in his voice, but obeying nevertheless. "Two reasons," he said. "First, Keatton asked me to." Keatton was General Thomas Keatton, Commander of the Air Force. "Secondly, the Air Force hasn't any place in its T.O. for one-eyed pilots. They don't let one-eyed pilots fly a B-Nine-Nine, which is what I ought to be doing to earn my pay. But they will let a one-eyed Pilot sit in on the Intentions Group, and I want to stay in the Air Force."