ldn't be as if
trouble had been anticipated at just this time.

The squad ship steadied. Sergeant Madden looked with pleasurable
anticipation back to where the ship had come out of overdrive and
lingered for twenty-four seconds. Willis had moved the squad ship from
that position, but the sergeant had left a substitute. The small object
he'd dropped from the ejector tube now swelled and writhed and
struggled. In pure emptiness, a shape of metal foil inflated itself. It
was surprisingly large--almost the size of the squad ship. But in
emptiness the fraction of a cubic inch of normal-pressure gas would
inflate a foil bag against no resistance at all. This flimsy shape even
jerked into motion. Released gas poured out its back. There was no
resistance to acceleration save mass, which was negligible.

A sudden swirling cloud of vapor appeared where the squad ship's
substitute went mindlessly on its way. The vapor rushed toward the
space-marker.

A star appeared. It was a strictly temporary star, but even from a
quarter-million-mile distance it was incredibly bright. It was a bomb,
blasting a metal-foil flimsy which the electronic brain of a
missile-rocket could only perceive as an unidentified and hence enemy
object. Bomb and rocket and flimsy metal foil turned together to
radioactive metal vapor.

Sergeant Madden knew professional admiration.

"Thirty-four seconds!" he said approvingly.

The Huks could not have expected the appearance of an enemy just here
and now. It was the first such appearance in all the planet's history.
They certainly looked for no consequences of the seizure of the
_Cerberus_, carefully managed as that had been. So to detonate a bomb
against an unexpected inimical object within thirty-four seconds after
its appearance was very good work indeed.

"Hm-m-m," said Sergeant Madden, "we've nothing more to do right now,
Willis. We'll go back to that hunk of ice you spotted comin' in, and
wait for the _Aldeb_."

Patrolman Willis obediently set the hop-timer and swung the squad ship
to a proper aiming. He pressed the overdrive button.

His manner, like that of Sergeant Madden, was the manner of someone
conducting a perfectly routine operation.

* * * * *

"If my son Timmy were with me on this job," said Sergeant Madden, "I'd
point out the inner meaning of the way we're going about handling it."

He reposed in his bucket-seat in the squad ship, which at that moment