lly_ 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 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
be 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 near