he 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 sub-ether 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 ethereal and sub-ethereal writhings and
distortions and screamings grew worse and worse; harder and ever 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 won! 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.

*