from the mere analysis of the forces and fields we used clear through to the production
and installation of enough weapons to stop this whole fleet?”
“It surely won’t. They’ve had the absorption principle for ages. Remember that first,
ancient skeleton that drained all the power of our suits and boats in nothing flat? From
there it isn’t too big a jump. And as for producing stuff, uh uh! If there’s any limit to what
they can do, I don’t know what it is. If we don’t slug ’em before they get it, it’s curtains.”
“I see . . . I’m afraid. We’re almost there, darling”.
He glanced at the chronometer. “About eleven minutes. And of course I don’t need to
ask you to stay out of the way.” “Of course not. I won’t interfere, no matter what
happens. All I’m going to do is hold your hand and pull for you with all my might.”
“That’ll help, believe me. I’m mighty glad you’re along, sweetheart. Even though both of
us know you shouldn’t be.”
The task force emerged. Each ship darted toward its preassigned place in a
mathematically exact envelope around the planet Strett.
Hilton sat on a davenport strained and still. His eyes were closed and every muscle
tense. Left hand gripped the arm-rest so fiercely that fingertips were inches deep in the
leather covered padding.
The Stretts knew that any such attack as this was futile. No movable structure or any
combination of such structures could possibly wield enough power to break down
screens powered by such engines as theirs.
Hilton, however, knew that there was a chance. Not with the first-stage boosters, which
were manipulable and detonable masses of ball lightning, but with those boosters’
culminations, the Vangs, which were ball lightning raised to the sixth power and which
only the frightful energies of the boosters could bring into being.
But, even with twenty-thousand-plus Vangs-or any larger number-success depended
entirely upon a nicety of timing never before approached and supposedly impossible.
Not only to thousandths of a microsecond, but to a small fraction of one such
thousandth: roughly, the time it takes light to travel three-sixteenths of an inch.
It would take practically absolute simultaneity to overload to the point of burnout to
those Strett generators. They were the heaviest in the Galaxy.
That was why Hilton himself had to be there. He could not possibly have done the job
from Ardvor. In fact, there was no real assurance that, even at the immeasurable
velocity of thought and covering a mere million miles, he could do it even from his
present position aboard one unit of the fleet. Theoretically, with his speed-up, he could.
But that theory had yet to be reduced to practice.
Tense and strained, Hilton began his countdown.
Temple sat down beside him. Both hands pressed his right fist against her breast. Her
eyes, too, were closed; she was as stiff and as still as was he. She was not interfering,
but giving; supporting him, backing him, giving to him in full flood everything of that
tremendous inner strength that had made Temple Bells what she so uniquely was.
On the exact center of the needle-sharp zero beat every Kedy struck. Gripped and
activated as they all were by Hilton’s keyed-up-and-stretched-out mind, they struck in
what was very close indeed to absolute unison.
Absorbing beams, each one having had precisely the same number of millimeters to
travel, reached the screen at the same instant. They clung and sucked. Immeasurable
floods of energy flashed from the Strett generators into those vortices to form twenty
thousand-plus first-stage boosters.
But this time the boosters did not detonate.
Instead, as energies continued to flood in at a frightfully accelerating rate, they turned
into something else. Things no Terran science has ever even imagined; things at the
formation of which all neighboring space actually warped, and in that warping seethed
and writhed and shuddered. The very subether screamed and shrieked in protest as it,
too, yielded in starkly impossible fashions to that irresistible stress.
How even those silicon-fluorine brains stood it, not one of them ever knew.
Microsecond by slow microsecond the Vangs grew and grew and grew. They were
pulling not only the full power of the Ardan warships, but also the immeasurably greater
power of the strainingly overloaded Strettsian generators themselves. The etheral and
sub-etheral writhings and distortions and screamings grew worse and worse; harder
and even harder to bear.
Imagine, if you can, a constantly and rapidly increasing mass of-plutonium-a mass
already thousands of times greater than critical, but not allowed to react! That gives a
faint and very inadequate picture of what was happening then.
Finally, at perhaps a hundred thousand times critical mass, and still in perfect sync, the
Vangs all went off.
The planet Strett became a nova.
“We wont We won!” Temple shrieked, her perception piercing through the hellish murk
that was all nearby space.
‘Not quite yet, sweet, but we’re over the biggest hump,” and the two held an
impromptu, but highly satisfactory, celebration.
Perhaps it would be better to say that the planet Strett became a junior-grade nova,
since the actual nova stage was purely superficial and did not last very long. In a couple
of hours things had quieted down enough so that the heavily screened warships could
approach the planet and finish up their part of the job.
Much of Strett’s land surface was molten lava. Much of its water was gone. There were
some pockets of resistance left, of course, but they did not last long. Equally of course
the Stretts themselves, twenty-five miles underground, had not been harmed at all.
But that, too, was according to plan.
Leaving the task force on guard, to counter any move the Stretts might be able to
make, Hilton shot the Sirius out to the planet’s moon. There Sawtelle and his staff and
tens of thousands of Omans and machines were starting to work. No part of this was
Hiltons job; so all he and Temple did was look on.
Correction, please. That was not all they did. But while resting and eating and loafing
and sleeping and enjoying each other’s company, both watched Operation Moon
closely enough to be completely informed as to everything that went on.
Immense, carefully placed pits went down to solid bed-rock. To that rock were
immovably anchored structures strong enough to move a world. Driving units were
installed-drives of such immensity of power as to test to the full the highest engineering
skills of the Galaxy. Mountains of fuel concentrate filled vast reservoirs of concrete.
Each was connected to a drive by fifty-inch high-speed conveyors.
Sawtelle drove a thought and those brutal super-drives began to blast.
As they blasted, Strett’s satellite began to move out of its orbit. Very slowly at first, but
faster and faster. They continued to blast, with all their prodigious might and in carefully
computed order, until the desired orbit was attained-an orbit which terminated in a
vertical line through the center of the Stretts’ supposedly impregnable retreat.
The planet Strett had a mass of approximately seven times ten to the twenty-first
metric ton. Its moon, little more than a hundredth as massive, still weighed in at about
eight times ten to the nineteenth-that is, the figure eight followed by nineteen zeroes.
And moon fell on planet, in direct central impact, after having fallen from a height of
over a quarter of a million miles under the full pull of gravity and the full thrust of those
mighty atomic drives.
The kinetic energy of such a collision can be computed. It can be expressed. It is,
however, of such astronomical magnitude as to be completely meaningless to the
human mind.
Simply, the two worlds merged and splashed. Droplets, weighing up to millions of tons
each, spattered out into space; only to return, in seconds or hours or weeks or months,
to add their atrocious contributions to the enormity of the destruction already wrought.
No trace survived of any Strett or of any thing, however small, pertaining to the Stretts.
EPILOGUE
As had become a daily custom, most of the Ardans were gathered at the natatorium.
Hilton and Temple were wrestling in the water-she was trying to duck him and he was
hard put to it to keep her from doing it. The platinum-haired twins were—oh, ever so
surreptitiously and undetectably!-studying the other girls.
Captain Sawtelle- he had steadfastly refused to accept any higher title-and his wife
were teaching two of their tiny grandchildren to swim.
In short, everything was normal.
Beverly Bell Poynter, from the top platform, hit the board as hard as she could hit it;
and, perfectly synchronized with it, hurled herself upward. Up and up and up she went.
Up to her top ceiling of two hundred ten feet. Then, straightening out into a shapely
arrow and without again moving a muscle, she hurtled downward, making two and a
half beautifully stately turns and striking the water with a slurping, splashless chug!