it; get his name!"

Missiles were coming up from the planet, now. Valkanhayn's detection
officer was trying to locate the source. While he was trying, a big
melon-shaped thing fell away from the _Nemesis_, and in the jiggling,
radiation-distorted intership screen Harkaman's image was laughing.

"Hellburner just went off; target about 50 deg. south, 25 deg. east of the
sunrise line. That's where those missiles are coming from."

Counter-missiles sped toward the big metal melon; defense missiles,
robot-launched, met them. The hellburner's track was marked first
by expanding red and orange globes in airless space and then by
fire-puffs after it entered atmosphere. It vanished into the darkness
beyond the sunset, and then made sunlight of its own. It _was_ sunlight;
a Bethe solar-phoenix reaction, and it would sustain itself for hours.
He hoped it hadn't landed within a thousand miles of their objective.

* * * * *

The ground operation was a nightmare of a different sort. He went down
in a command car, with Paytrik Morland and a couple of others. There
were missiles and gun batteries. There were darting patterns of flights
of combat vehicles, blazing gunfire, and single vehicles that shot past
or blew up in front of them. Robots on contragravity--military robots,
with missiles to launch, and working robots with only their own mass to
hurl, flung themselves mindlessly at them. Screens that went crazy from
radiation; speakers that jabbered contradictory orders. Finally, the
battle, which had raged in the air over two thousand square miles of
mines and refineries and reaction plants, became two distinct and
concentrated battles, one at the packing plant and storage vaults and
one at the power-unit cartridge factory.

Three pinnaces came down to form a triangle over each; the _Space
Scourge_ hung midway between, poured out a swarm of vehicles and big
claw-armed manipulators; armored lighters and landing craft shuttled
back and forth. The command car looped and dodged from one target to the
other; at one, keg-like canisters of plutonium, collapsium-plated and
weighing tons apiece, were coming out of the vaults, and at the other
lifters were bringing out loads of nuclear-electric power-unit
cartridges, some as big as a ten liter jar, to power a spaceship engine,
and some small as a round of pistol ammunition, for things like
flashlights.

Every hour or so, he looked at his watch, and it woul