exploded. The roar of the rocket filled the interior of the ship. The spacephone speaker bellowed again:

"We've got a megaton-bomb missile headed down! This is our last word! Permit landing or we come in fighting!"

The object from the crude cannon went off violently. With the emergency rocket flaming to help, it lifted the Med ship, which jerked upward, settled back—and only two of its fins touched solidity. It began to topple because there was no support for the third.

Once toppled over, it would be helpless. It could be blasted with deliberately placed charges between its hull and the ground. A crater already existed where support for the third landing fin should have been.

Calhoun pushed the stud down full. The ship steadied and lifted. It went swinging across the level center of the landing-grid. Its slender, ultra-high-velocity flame knifed down through the sod, leaving a smoking, incandescent slash behind. The figures about the bomb-throwers scattered and fled. The Med ship straightened to an upright position and began to rise.

Calhoun swore. The grid was the planet's defense against landings from space, because it could fling out missiles of any size with perfect aim at any target within some hundred thousand miles—a good twelve planetary diameters. Its operators meant to defy the fleet from Phaedra and had to get rid of the Med ship before they dared energize its coils. Now they were rid of it. Now they could throw bombs, or boulders, or anything else its force-fields could handle.

The spacephone roared again:

"On the ground there! Our missile is aimed straight for your grid! It carries a megaton fission bomb! Evacuate the area!"

Calhoun swore again. The gang, the guard, the young-warrior group at the grid would be far too self-confident to heed such a threat. If there were wiser heads on Canis III, they could not enforce their commands. A human community has to be complete or it is not workable. The civilization which had existed on Phaedra II was shattered by the coming doom of its sun. The fragments—on Phaedra, in the fleet, in each small occupied community on Canis III—were incomplete and incapable of thinking or acting in concert with any other. Every small group on this planet, certainly, gave only lip-service to the rest. The young world was inherently incapable of organizing itself, save on a miniature scale. And one such miniature group had the grid and 

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