ldn't be."

* * * * *

The task force emerged. Each ship darted toward its pre-assigned 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 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 t