* * * *

Leaving the task force on guard, to counter any move the Stretts might
be able to make, Hilton shot the _Sirius_ out to the planet's moon.
There Sawtelle and his staff and tens of thousands of Omans and machines
were starting to work. No part of this was Hilton's job; so all he and
Temple did was look on.

Correction, please. That was not _all_ they did. But while resting and
eating and loafing and sleeping and enjoying each other's company, both
watched Operation Moon closely enough to be completely informed as to
everything that went on.

Immense, carefully placed pits went down to solid bedrock. To that rock
were immovably anchored structures strong enough to move a world.
Driving units were installed--drives of such immensity of power as to
test to the full the highest engineering skills of the Galaxy. Mountains
of fuel-concentrate filled vast reservoirs of concrete. Each was
connected to a drive by fifty-inch high-speed conveyors.

Sawtelle drove a thought and those brutal super-drives began to blast.

As they blasted, Strett's satellite began to move out of its orbit. Very
slowly at first, but faster and faster. They continued to blast, with
all their prodigious might and in carefully-computed order, until the
desired orbit was attained--an orbit which terminated in a vertical line
through the center of the Stretts' supposedly impregnable retreat.

The planet Strett had a mass of approximately seven times ten to the
twenty-first metric tons. Its moon, little more than a hundredth as
massive, still weighed in at about eight times ten to the
nineteenth--that is, the figure eight followed by nineteen zeroes.

And moon fell on planet, in direct central impact, after having fallen
from a height of over a quarter of a million miles under the full pull
of gravity and the full thrust of those mighty atomic drives.

The kinetic energy of such a collision can be computed. It can be
expressed. It is, however, of such astronomical magnitude as to be
completely meaningless to the human mind.

Simply, the two worlds merged and splashed. Droplets, weighing up to
millions of tons each, spattered out into space; only to return, in
seconds or hours or weeks or months, to add their atrocious
contributions to the enormity of the destruction already wrought.

No trace survived of any Strett or of any thing, however small,
pertaining to the Stretts.

Epilogue

As had become a daily custo