small spaceship, now?"

"A thing like a pair of fifty-ton lorries, with airlocks between, and
connected at the middle; airtight, of course, and pressurized and
insulated, like a spaceship. One side's living' quarters for a six-man
crew--sometimes the gang's out for as long as a week at a time--and
the other side's a workshop."

That sounded interesting. With contragravity, of course, terms like
"escape-velocity" and "mass-ratio" were of purely antiquarian
interest.

"How long," he asked Pearson, "would it take to fit that vehicle with
a full set of detection instruments--radar, infrared and ultraviolet
vision, electron-telescope, heat and radiation detectors, the whole
works--and spot it about a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles above
Keegark?"

"That I couldn't say, general," Emmett Pearson replied. "It'd have to
be a shipyard job, and a lot of that stuff's clear outside my
department. Ask Air-Commodore Hargreaves."

"Les!" he called out. "Wake up, Les!"

"Just a second, general." Hargreaves scribbled frantically on his pad.
"Now," he said, raising his head. "What is it, sir?"

"Emmett, here, has a junior-grade spaceship that he used to service
those orbital telecast-relay stations of his. He'll tell you what it's
like. I want it fitted with every sort of detection device that can be
crammed into or onto it, and spotted above Keegark. It should, of
course, be high enough to cover not only the Keegark area, but
Konkrook, Kankad's, and the lower Hoork and Konk river-valleys."

"Yes, I get it." Hargreaves snatched up a phone, punched out a
combination, and began talking rapidly into it in a low voice. After
awhile, he hung up. "All right, Mr. Pearson--Colonel Pearson, I mean.
Have your space-buggy sent around to the shipyard. My boys'll fix it
up." He made a note on another piece of paper. "If we live through
this, I'm going to have a couple of supra-atmosphere ships in service
on this planet.... Now, general; I have a tentative set-up. We're
going to need the _Elmoran_ for patrol work south and east of
Konkrook, and the _Gaucho_ and _Bushranger_ to the north and
north-east, based on Kankad's. We'll keep the _Aldebaran_ at Kankad's,
and use her for emergencies. And we'll have patrols of light
contragravity like this." He handed a map, with red-pencil and
blue-pencil markings, along to von Schlichten. "Red are Kankad-based;
blue are Konkrook-based."

"That looks all right," von Schlichten said. "There's ano