Old Nasty. Give me a minute to brace myself."

He didn't take the minute; he didn't really need it. He walked over to the solidiphone and punched in the code numbers. Three seconds later, General Director Eckisster was sitting in the middle of the room.

"You're ready, eh? All right; go ahead," he said. "Find out what you can—if anything. I have no further instructions—just don't get yourself killed while you're working."

The heavy space boot that came from Roysland's hand sailed through the image just as it was dissolving. Eckisster had cut off without waiting for Roysland's answer.

"One of these days," Kiffer said, "you're going to be in his office, and you'll forget it isn't a solidograph image and let go with a boot, or something, and knock the boss' teeth in."

Roysland shook his head emphatically as he walked over to pick up the boot. "Nope. If he's actually there in person, I'm going to have a poisoned needle to jab into him. I'll show him how to needle people!"

The Enlissa weapon was fired at Kandoris at 30:00 hours. Spaceships posted along the long line of fire between the satellite of Kandoris VI and the sun itself had sent out instrument-filled drones in the path of the beam to check the beam frequency. The time required for the subetheric wave to travel the eight hundred million miles from the planetary orbit to primary was too short to be measured. As far as the recording instruments were concerned, the beam was instantaneous.

The projector itself was fired by remote control; there were no personnel within three miles of the Enlissa projector when it went off.

The resultant recordings were run through the differential analyzers, and the final graphs were delivered to Kiffer Samm.

After four hours of working with the data, Kiffer made his report to Roysland.

"It's an odd wave length," he said. "Actually, it's a harmonic of three different basic frequencies. Look here: the thing is definitely frequency modulated, but it's a comparatively simple thing." He ran his finger along the primary recordings. "The thing wouldn't really have to be run through the differentials; it could be figured out with a slipdisk.

"The thing that makes it different is the extremely short wave length. The longest of the three has a wave 

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