Shortly thereafter, the gun-cutter broke loose from the tender and began to approach the fleet.

"General, I must protest again against your doing this," Air-Commodore Hargreaves said. "There"s simply no sense in it. That bomb can be dropped without your personal supervision aboard, sir, and you"re endangering yourself unnecessarily. That infernal-machine hasn"t been tested or anything; it might even let go on the catapult when you try to drop it. And we simply can"t afford to lose you, now."

"No, what would become of us, if you go out there and blow yourself up with that contraption?" Buhrmann supported him. "My G.o.d, I thought Don Quixote was a Spaniard, instead of a German!"

"Argentino," von Schlichten corrected. "And don"t try to sell me that Irreplaceable-Man, either. Them M"zangwe can replace me, Hid O"Leary can replace him, Barney Mordkovitz can replace him, and so on down to where you make a second lieutenant out of some sergeant. We"ve been all over this last evening. Admitted we can"t take time for a long string of test-shots, and admitted we have to use an untested weapon; I"m not sending men out under those circ.u.mstances and staying here on this ship and watch them blow themselves up. If that bomb"s our only hope, it"s got to be dropped right, and I"m not going to take a chance on having it dropped by a crew who think they"ve been sent out on a suicide mission. What happened to the _Gaucho_ when she blew the _s.m.u.ts_ up is too fresh in everybody"s mind. But if I, who ordered the mission, accompany it, they"ll know I have some confidence that they"ll come back alive."

"Well, I"m coming along, too, general," Kent Pickering spoke up. "I made the d.a.m.ned thing, and I ought to be along when it"s dropped, on the principle that a restaurant-proprietor ought to be seen eating his own food once in a while."

"I still don"t see why we couldn"t have made at least one test shot, first," Hans Meyerstein, the Banking Cartel man, objected.

"Well, I"ll tell you why," Paula Quinton spoke up. "There"s a good chance that the geeks don"t know we have a bomb of our own. They may believe that it was something invented on Niflheim for mining purposes, and that we haven"t realized its military application.

There"s more than a good chance that the loss of the _Jan s.m.u.ts_ has temporarily demoralized them. Personally, I believe that both King Orgzild and Prince Gorkrink were aboard her when she blew up. That"s something we"ll never know, positively, of course. That ship and everything and everybody in her were simply vaporized, and the particles are registering on our geigers now. But I"m as sure as I am of anything about these geeks that one or both of them accompanied her."

"Paula knows what she"s talking about," King Kankad jabbered in the Takkad Sea language which they all understood. "Just like Von saying that he has to go on our cutter, to encourage the crew. They always insist that their kings and generals go into battle, particularly if something important is to be done. They think the G.o.ds get angry if they don"t."

"And we have to hit them now," von Schlichten said. "They still have a couple of bombs left. We haven"t been able to locate them with detectors, but those geeks Kankad"s men caught on that commando-raid, last night, say that there were at least three of them made. We can"t take a chance that some fanatic may load one into an aircar and make a kamikaze-raid on Gongonk Island."

The _Elmoran_ ran alongside, with her Masai-warrior figure-head and the black cylinder on her catapult aft. Somebody had painted, on the bomb: DIRE DAWN _by Hildegarde Hernandez. Compliments of the author to H. M. King Orgzild of Keegark._ A canvas-entubed gangway was run out to connect the ship with the cutter. Von Schlichten and Kent Pickering went down the ladder from the bridge, the others accompanying them.

As he stepped into the gangway, Paula Quinton fell in behind him.

"Where do you think you"re going?" he demanded.

"Along with you," she replied. "I"m your adjutant, I believe."

"You definitely are not going along. Personally, I don"t believe there"s any danger, but I"m not having you run any unnecessary risks...."

"Von, I don"t know much about the way Terrans think, except about fighting and about making things," Kankad told him. "And I don"t know anything at all about the kind of Terrans who have young. But I believe this is something important to Paula. Let her go with you, because if you go alone and don"t come back I don"t think she will ever be happy again."

He looked at Kankad curiously, wondering, as he had so often before, just what went on inside that lizard-skull. Then he looked at Paula, and, after a moment, he nodded.

"All right, colonel; objection withdrawn," he said.

Aboard the _Elmoran_, they gave the bomb a last-minute inspection and checked the catapult and the bomb-sight, and then went up on the bridge.

"Ready for the bombing mission, sir?" the skipper, a Lieutenant (j.g.) Morrison, asked.

"Ready if you are, Lieutenant. Carry on; we"re just pa.s.sengers."

"Thank you, sir. We"d thought of going in over the city at about five thousand for a target-check, turning when we"re half way back to the mountains, and coming back for our bombing-run at fifteen thousand. Is that all right, sir?"

Von Schlichten nodded. "You"re the skipper, lieutenant. You"d better make sure, though, that as soon as the bomb-off signal is flashed, your engineer hits his auxiliary rocket-propulsion b.u.t.ton. We want to be about fifteen miles from where that thing goes off."

The lieutenant (j.g.) muttered something that sounded unmilitarily like, "You ain"t foolin", brother!"

"No, I"m not," von Schlichten agreed. "I saw the _Jan s.m.u.ts_ on the TV-screen."

The _Elmoran_ pointed her bow, and the long blade of the figure-head warrior"s spear, toward Keegark. The city grew out of the ground-mist, a particolored blur at the delta of the dry Hoork River, and then a color-splashed triangle between the river and the bay and the hills on the landward side, and then it took shape, cross-ruled with streets and granulated with buildings. As they came in, von Schlichten, who had approached it from the air many times before, could distinguish the landmarks--the site of King Orgzild"s nitroglycerine plant, now a crater surrounded by a quarter-mile radius of ruins; the Residency, another crater since Rodolfo MacKinnon had blown it up under him; the smashed _Christian De Wett_ at the Company docks; King Orgzild"s palace, fire-stained and with a hole blown in one corner by the _Aldebaran"s_ bombs.... Then they were past the city and over open country.

"I wish we had some idea where the rest of those bombs are stored, sir," Lieutenant Morrison said. "We don"t seem to have gotten anything significant when we flew reconnaissance with the radiation detectors."

"No; about all that was picked up was the main power-plant, and the radiation-escape from there was normal," Pickering agreed. "The bombs themselves wouldn"t be detectable, except to the extent that, say, a nuclear-conversion engine for an airboat would be. They probably have them underground, somewhere, well shielded."

"Those prisoners Kankad"s commandos dragged in only knew that they were in the city somewhere," von Schlichten considered. "How about midway between the Palace and the Residency for our ground-zero, lieutenant? That looks like the center of the city."

The cutter turned and started back, having risen another ten thousand feet. Morrison pa.s.sed the word to the bombardier. The city, with the sea beyond it now, came rushing at them, and von Schlichten, standing at the front of the bridge, discovered that he had his arm around Paula"s waist and was holding her a little more closely than was military. He made no attempt to release her, however.

"There"s nothing to worry about, really," he was a.s.suring her.

"Pickering"s boys built this thing according to the best principles of engineering, and the stuff they got out of that big-economy-size shilling-shocker all checked mathematically...."

The red light on the bridge flashed, and the intercom shouted "_Bomb off!_" He forced Paula down on the bridge deck and crouched beside her.

"Cover your eyes," he warned. "You remember what the flash was like in the screen, when the _Jon s.m.u.ts_ blew up. And we didn"t get the worst of it; the pickup on the _Gaucho_ was knocked out too soon."

He kept on lecturing her about gamma-rays and ultraviolet rays and X-rays and cosmic rays, trying to keep making some sort of intelligent sounds while they clung together and waited, and, with the other half of his mind, trying not to think of everything that could go wrong with that jerry-built improvisation they had just dumped onto Keegark.

If it didn"t blow, and the geeks found it, they"d know that another one would be along shortly, and....

An invisible hand caught the gun-cutter and hurled her end-over-end, sending von Schlichten and Paula sprawling at full length on the deck, still clinging to one another. There was a blast of almost palpable sound, and a sensation of heat that penetrated even the airtight superstructure of the _Elmoran_. An instant later, there was another, and another, similar shock. Two more bombs had gone off behind them, in Keegark; that meant that they had found King Orgzild"s remaining nuclear armament. There were shattering sounds of breaking gla.s.s, and heavy thumps that told of structural damage to the cutter, and hoa.r.s.e shouts, and lurid cursing as Morrison and his airmen struggled with the controls. The cutter began losing alt.i.tude, but she was back on a reasonably even keel. Von Schlichten rose, helping Paula to her feet, and found that they had been kissing one another pa.s.sionately. They were still in each other"s arms when the pitching and rolling of the cutter ceased and somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

He came out of the embrace and looked around. It was Lieutenant (j.g.) Morrison.

"What the devil, lieutenant?" he demanded.

"Sorry to interrupt, sir, but we"re starting back to _Procyon_. And here; you"ll want this, I suppose." He held out a gla.s.s disc. "I never expected to see it, but at that it took three A-bombs to blow you loose from your monocle."

"Oh, that?" Von Schlichten took his trade mark and set it in his eye.

"I didn"t lose it," he lied. "I just jettisoned it. Don"t you know, lieutenant, that no gentleman ever wears a monocle while he"s kissing a lady?"

He looked around. They were at about eight hundred to a thousand feet above the water, with a stiff following wind away from the explosion area. The 90-mm gun, forward, must have been knocked loose and carried away; it was gone, and so was the TV-pickup and the radar. Something, probably the gun, had slammed against the front of the bridge--the metal skeleton was bent in, and the armor-gla.s.s had been knocked out.

The cutter was vibrating properly, so the contragravity-field had not been disturbed, and her jets were firing.

"It was the second and third bombs that did the damage, sir," Morrison was saying. "We"d have gone through the effects of our own bomb with nothing more than a bad shaking--of course, on contragravity, we"re weightless relative to the air-ma.s.s, but she was built to stand the winds in the high lat.i.tudes. But the two geek bombs caught us off balance...."

"You don"t need to apologize, lieutenant. You and your crew behaved splendidly, lieutenant-commander; best traditions, and all that sort of thing. It was a pleasure, commander; hope to be aboard with you again, captain."

They found Kent Pickering at the rear of the bridge, and joined him, looking astern. Even von Schlichten, who had seen H-bombs and Bethe-cycle bombs, was impressed. Keegark was completely obliterated under an outward-rolling cloud of smoke and dust that spread out for five miles at the bottom of the towering column.

There had been a hundred and fifty thousand people in that city, even if their faces were the faces of lizards and they had four arms and quartz-speckled skins. What fraction of them were now alive, he could not guess. He had to remind himself that they were the people who had burned Eric Blount and Hendrik Lemoyne alive; that two of the three bombs that had contributed to that column of boiling smoke had been made in Keegark, by Keegarkans, and that, with a few casual factors altered, he was seeing what would have happened to Konkrook. Perhaps every Terran felt a superst.i.tious dread of nuclear energy turned to the purposes of war; small wonder, after what they had done on their own world.