For many weeks the production of Ardan warships and missiles had been spiraling

upward.

 Half a mountain range of solid rock had been converted into fabricated super-steel and

armament. Superdreadnoughts were popping into existence at the rate of hundreds per

minute. Missiles were rolling off the ends of assembly lines like half-pint tin cans out of

can-making machines.

 The Strett warcraft, skeletons and missiles, would emerge into normal space anywhere

within a million miles of Ardvor. The Ardan missiles were powered for an acceleration of

one hundred gravities. That much the Kedy brains, molded solidly into teflon-lined,

massively braced steel spheres, could just withstand.

 To be certain of breaking the Strett screens, an impact velocity of about six miles per

second was necessary. The time required to attain this velocity was about ten seconds,

and the flight distance something over thirty miles.

 Since the Stretts could orient themselves in less than one second after emergence,

even this extremely tight packing of missiles-only sixty miles apart throughout the entire

emergence volume of space-would still give the Stretts the initiative by a time-ratio of

more than ten to one.

 Such tight packing was of course impossible. It called for many billions of defenders

instead of the few millions it was possible for the Omans to produce in the time they

had. In fact, the average spacing was well over ten thousand miles when the invading

horde of Strett missiles emerged and struck.

 How they struck!

 There was nothing of finesse about that attack; nothing of skill or of tactics: nothing but

the sheer brute force of overwhelming superiority of numbers and of over-matching

power.

 One instant all space was empty. The next instant it was full of invading missiles-a

superb exhibition of coordination and timing.

 And the Kedy control, upon which the defenders had counted so heavily, proved

useless. For each Strett missile, within a fraction of a second of emergence, darted

toward the nearest Oman missile with an acceleration that made the one

hundred-gravity defenders seem to be standing still.

 One to one, -missiles crashed into missiles and detonated. There were no solid or

liquid end-products. Each of those frightful weapons carried so many

megatons-equivalent of atomic concentrate that all nearby space blossomed into su-

peratomic blasts hundreds of times more violent than the fireballs of lithium-hydride

fusion bombs.

 For a moment even Hilton was stunned; but only for a moment.

 "Kelly!." he barked. "Get your big stuff out there! Use the boosters!" He started for the

door at a full run. "That tears it-that really tears it! Scrap the plan. I'll board the Sirius

and take the task-force to Strett. Bring your stuff along, Skipper, as soon as you're

ready."

 Ardan superdreadnoughts in their massed thousands poured out through Ardvor's

one-way screen. Each went instantly to work. Now the Kedy control system, doing what

it was designed to do, proved its full worth. For the weapons of the big battle-wagons

did not depend upon acceleration, but were driven at the speed of light; and Grand

Fleet Operations were planned and were carried out at the almost infinite velocity of

thought itself.

 Or, rather, they were not planned at all. They were simply carried out, immediately and

without confusion.

 For all the Kedys were one. Each Kedy element, without any lapse of time whatever for

consultation with any other, knew exactly where every other element was; exactly what

each was doing; and exactly what he himself should do to make the maximum

contribution to the common cause.

 Nor was any time lost in relaying orders to crewmen within the ship. There were no

crewmen. Each Kedy element was the sole personnel of, and was integral with, his

vessel. Nor were there any wires or relays to impede and slow down communication.

Operational instructions, too, were transmitted and were acted upon with thought's

transfinite speed. Thus, if decision and execution were not quite mathematically

simultaneous, they were separated by a period of time so infinitesimally small as to he

impossible of separation.

 Wherever a Strett missile was, or wherever a Strett skeleton-ship appeared, an Oman

beam reached it, usually in much less than one second. Beam clung to

screen-caressingly, hungrily-absorbing its total energy and forming the first-stage

booster. Then, three microseconds later, that booster went off into a ragingly

incandescent, glaringly violent burst of fury so hellishly, so inconceivably hot that less

than a thousandth of its total output of energy was below the very top of the visible

spectrum!

 If the previous display of atomic violence had been so spectacular and of such

magnitude as to defy understanding or description, what of this? When hundreds of

thousands of Kedys, each wielding world-wrecking powers as effortlessly and as deftly

and as precisely as thought, attacked and destroyed millions of those tremendously

powerful war fabrications of the Stretts! The only simple answer is that all nearby space

might very well have been torn out of the most radiant layers of S-Doradus itself.

 Hilton made the hundred yards from office door to curb in just over twelve seconds.

Larry was waiting. The car literally burned a hole in the atmosphere as it screamed its

way to Ardane Field.

 It landed with a thump. Heavy black streaks of synthetic rubber marked the pavement

as it came to a screeching, shrieking stop at the flagship's main lock. And, in the instant

of closing that lock's outer portal, all twenty-thousand-plus warships of the task force

took off as one at ten gravities. Took off, and in less than one minute went into

overdrive.

 All personal haste was now over. Hilton went up into what he still thought of as the

"control room," even though he knew that there were no controls, nor even any

instruments, anywhere aboard. He knew what he would find there. Fast as he had

acted, Temple had not had as far to go and she had got there first.

 He could not have said, for the life of him, how he actually felt about this direct

defiance of his direct orders. He walked into the room, sat down beside her and took

her hand.

 "I told you to stay home, Temple," he said:

"I know you did. But I'm not only the assistant head of your Psychology Department. I'm

your wife, remember? 'Until death do us part.' And if there's any way in the universe I

can manage it, death isn't going to part us-at least, this one isn't. If this is it, we'll go

together."

 "I know, sweetheart." He put his arm around her, held her close. "As a psych I wouldn't

give a whoop. You'd be expendable. But as my wife, especially now that you're

pregnant, you aren't. You're a lot more important to the future of our race than I am."

 She stiffened in the circle of his arm. "What's that crack supposed to mean? Think I'd

ever accept a synthetic zombie imitation of you for my husband and go on living with it

just as though nothing had happened?"

 Hilton started to say something, but Temple rushed heedlessly on: "Drat the race! No

matter how many children we ever have you were first and you'll stay first, and if you

have to go I'll go, too, so there! Besides, you know darn well that they can't duplicate

whatever it is that makes you Jarvis Hilton."

 "Now wait a minute, Temple. The conversion . . ."

 "Yes, the conversion," she interrupted, triumphantly. "The thing I'm talking about is

immaterial-untouchable-they didn't-couldn't--do anything about it at all. Kedy, will you

please tell this big goofus that even though you have got Jarvis Hilton's brain you aren't

Jarvis Hilton and never can be?"

 The atmosphere of the room vibrated in the frequencies of a deep bass laugh. "You

are trying to hold a completely untenable position, friend Hilton. Any attempt to convince

a mind of real power that falsity is truth is illogical. My advice is for you to surrender."

 That word hit Temple hard. "Not surrender, sweetheart. I'm not fighting you. I never

will." She seized both of his hands; tears welled into her glorious eyes. "It's just that I

simply couldn't stand it to go on living without you!"

 "I know, darling." He got up and lifted her to her feet, so that she could come properly

into his arms. They stood there, silent and motionless, for minutes.

 Temple finally released herself and, after feeling for a handkerchief she did not have,

wiped her eyes with a forefinger and then wiped the finger on her bare leg. She grinned

and turned to the Omans. "Prince, will you and Dark Lady please conjure us up a

steak-and-mushrooms supper? They should be in the pantry . . . since this Sirius was

designed for us."

 After supper the two sat companionably on a davenport. "One thing about this

business isn't quite clear," Temple said. "Why all this tearing rush? They haven't got the

booster or anything like it, or they'd have used it. Surely it'll take them a long time to go

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.