on everyone's mind.

Commodore Hartnett smiled. "It was Horowitz who really doped the thing out, gentlemen. I just put the plan into operation. You see, plutonium can be used as a sort of booster charge in a chain reaction explosion ... you all know that. You, yourself, Blake, and you men from the station moved the stuff into a spot that would be directly under the poor old Artemis when the shooting started.

"You youngsters don't remember much about land warfare, so it was up to me to rig the trap. The bait was Artemis. The teaser was the spread-beam radio message about the three dreadnaughts that we aren't.... Remember that, Mr. Scott?"

Scott blushed furiously and nodded.

"Well," continued Hartnett, "It was something of a gamble, I suppose. But the odds were long and the chances weren't too bad.

"You all know how anxious the Cats are to try something new. Those cyclotronic rifles must have been literally burning a hole in their pockets ... and the range was short ... they couldn't resist the temptation to try them. If they had stuck to proton guns they would have melted Artemis down and that would have been the end of it ... they would have had the X-R to do with as they pleased. But they got itchy fingers with the new stuff ... as I prayed they would. Curiosity, I suppose. The feline instinct. Have you ever seen a cat trying to open a package? Same kind of people.

"The rest was just a repetition of the atom blasts of the first Martian War and the earlier wars on Terra. The only difference was the size of the bomb. The cyclotrons set off the chain reaction in the plutonium ... the plutonium set off the reaction in the U-235 ... common enough on a world made practically all of pitchblende and other Uranium compounds. The same thing could happen to ... say Terra ... if we ever started a chain reaction in one of the commoner elements such as iron, or carbon. Or even one of the commoner gases. Anyway there are only three satellites in the Uranian System now ... and eight less Cat cruisers and one less superdreadnaught. I suspect the Cats can hardly afford to lose them, too. Wouldn't surprise me to hear that Mars has been feeling around for an armistice even by the time we get home. The very fact that they have no idea how their fleet was destroyed will tickle them in the right place, I suppose."

Scott spoke in surprised tones. "So they blew themselves up with their own fancy cannon."

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