Hafnium from the one bit of machinery from the one beam-generator of an enemy war-craft, was extended to supply the engine-rooms of a thousand space-craft of the Starshine's design.

In a myriad other ways individuals worked at their chosen problems. Hundreds undoubtedly toiled to contrive a shield for the fighting beams—tuned to kill men only—which were the means by which Ades was to be devastated. The scientists of half a galaxy had tried that five thousand years before without success.

But one man did come up with a plausible device. He proposed a shielding paint containing crystals of the hormone to which the fighting-beams were tuned. The crystalline material should absorb the deadly frequencies, so they could not pass on to murder men.

It would have been simple enough to synthesize any desired organic substance, but Kim pointed out grimly that the shield would be made useless by changing the tuning of the beams. Other men devised horrific and generally impractical weapons.

But again, one man came up with a robot ship idea, a ship which could be fought without humans on board and controlled even at interstellar distances. Radio signals at the speed of light would be fantastically too slow.

He proposed miniature matter-transmitters automatically shuttling a magnetic element between ship and planet-station and back to the ship again, the solid object conveying all the information to be had from the ship's instruments to the planet-station, and relaying commands to the ship's controls. The trick could have been made to work, and it would be vastly faster than any radiation-beam. But there was no time to manufacture them.

Actually, only four days after the return of the partly dismantled Starshine from the farther side of nowhere, Kim took off again from Ades with fifty other ships following him. There were twenty other similar squadrons ready to take space in days more.

But for a first operation he insisted on a small force to gain experience without too much risk. At transmitter-speeds there could be no such thing as cruising in fleet formation, nor of arriving at any destination in a unit. Guerilla warfare was inevitable.

The navy of the criminals of Ades, though, went swirling up through the atmosphere of that cold planet like a column of voyaging wild geese. It broke through the upper atmosphere and there were all the suns of the Galaxy shining coldly on every 

 Prev. P 26/42 next