l say we can't," Garlock agreed. "Ten megacycles, and cycling only
twenty per second." He whistled raucously through his teeth. "My guess
is it'd take four months to design and build a generator to put out that
kind of stuff. It's worse than our Op field."

"I'm not sure I could _ever_ design one," Belle said, thoughtfully, "but
of course I'm not the engineer you are...." Then, she could not help
adding, "... yet."

"No, and you never will be," he said, flatly.

"No? That's what _you_ think!" Even in such circumstances as those,
Belle Bellamy was eager to carry on her warfare with her Project Chief.

"That's _exactly_ what I think--and I'm so close to knowing it for a
fact that the difference is indetectible."

Belle almost--but not quite--blew up. "Well, what _are_ you going to
do?"

"Unless and until I can figure out something effective to do, I'm not
going to try to do anything. If you, with your vaunted and flaunted
belief in the inherent superiority of the female over the male, can dope
out something useful before I do, I'll eat crow and help you do it. As
for arguing with you, I'm all done for the moment."

Belle gritted her teeth, flounced away, and plumped herself down into a
chair. She shut her eyes and put every iota of her mind to work on the
problem of finding something--_anything_--that could be done to help
this doomed world and to show that big, overbearing jerk of a Garlock
that she was a better man than he was. Which of the two objectives
loomed more important, she herself could not have told, to save her
life.

And Garlock looked around. The air and the sky over the now-vanished
city were both clear of Dilipic craft. The surviving Arpalone fighters
and other small craft were making no attempt to land, anywhere on the
world's surface. Instead, they were flying upward toward, and were being
drawn one by one into the bowels of, huge Arpalonian space-freighters.
When each such vessel was filled to capacity, it flew upward and set
itself into a more-or-less-circular orbit around the planet.

Around and around and around the ruined world the _Pleiades_ went;
recording, observing, charting. Fifty-eight of those atrocious Dilipic
vortices had been driven to ground. Every large land-mass surrounded by
large bodies of water had been struck once, and only once; from the
tremendous area of the largest continent down to the relatively tiny
expanses of the largest islands. One land-mass, one vortex. One on