"Give me six hours."

"Start now," he ordered, "And somebody hand Cob and me our pants. We've got work to do!"

The next hours were a nightmare of feverish activity aboard the T.R.S. Cleopatra. Two of her six skeeterboats were fitted with hyper screens that were made in the machine shop under Ivy Hendricks' close supervision. Power was shunted from the surge circuit generators and run out through automatic spools to the screen bearing skeeterboats to form the two poles of the hyper warp. Ivy was everywhere at once, giving orders, overseeing construction. Strike and Cob co-ordinated the efforts of the crew and workmen.

"We'll pick out our planetoid," Strike explained to them, "And line up our skeeters on an arbitrary north-south axis. The spools will pay out the power lines as the boats travel. When everything is aligned, we turn on the juice and hope for the best."

"Then," interjected Bayne, "as the planetoid takes its place in prime space without orbital velocity ... and only some 4,000,000 miles from 40 Eridani C ... we clear out. Fast. 40 Eridani C is an M6 star ... surface temperature only about 3,000 Centigrade. It's small ... smaller than Sol, because it has shrunk. But under its semi-solid crust there are trillions of tons of matter that will burst free as soon as anything cracks the surface tension. Our bomb should act as a fuse to light one of the biggest fire-crackers ever imagined."

"One thing," said Ivy to Strike, "whoever pilots the skeeters ... and I presume you intend to handle one yourself ... will have to be extremely careful. As soon as our planetoid exists in prime-space it will have a planetoid's mass and gravity. Don't be caught with your jets cold. I'd miss you, Strike."

Celia Graham interrupted the conference to tell them that the equipment was ready, and the ship in position. Strike looked around at the suddenly tense faces of his companions. He didn't like to think what failure might mean to them ... to Terra and the whole Solar Combine. He rose to his feet purposefully.

"Let's go," he said.

The skeeterboat dove out of the valve trailing its cable. Strike glanced back through the rear port to see the second shark-like shape close behind. Even banged up as he was, Cob would let no one take the second boat but himself. Strike's smile was broad. Good man to have around, that Coburn Whitley.

Ahead lay 

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