inute inspection and
checked the catapult and the bomb-sight, and then went up on the
bridge.

"Ready for the bombing mission, sir?" the skipper, a Lieutenant (j.g.)
Morrison, asked.

"Ready if you are, Lieutenant. Carry on; we're just passengers."

"Thank you, sir. We'd thought of going in over the city at about five
thousand for a target-check, turning when we're half way back to the
mountains, and coming back for our bombing-run at fifteen thousand. Is
that all right, sir?"

Von Schlichten nodded. "You're the skipper, lieutenant. You'd better
make sure, though, that as soon as the bomb-off signal is flashed,
your engineer hits his auxiliary rocket-propulsion button. We want to
be about fifteen miles from where that thing goes off."

The lieutenant (j.g.) muttered something that sounded unmilitarily
like, "You ain't foolin', brother!"

"No, I'm not," von Schlichten agreed. "I saw the _Jan Smuts_ on the
TV-screen."

* * * * *

The _Elmoran_ pointed her bow, and the long blade of the figure-head
warrior's spear, toward Keegark. The city grew out of the ground-mist,
a particolored blur at the delta of the dry Hoork River, and then a
color-splashed triangle between the river and the bay and the hills on
the landward side, and then it took shape, cross-ruled with streets
and granulated with buildings. As they came in, von Schlichten, who
had approached it from the air many times before, could distinguish
the landmarks--the site of King Orgzild's nitroglycerine plant, now a
crater surrounded by a quarter-mile radius of ruins; the Residency,
another crater since Rodolfo MacKinnon had blown it up under him; the
smashed _Christian De Wett_ at the Company docks; King Orgzild's
palace, fire-stained and with a hole blown in one corner by the
_Aldebaran's_ bombs.... Then they were past the city and over open
country.

"I wish we had some idea where the rest of those bombs are stored,
sir," Lieutenant Morrison said. "We don't seem to have gotten anything
significant when we flew reconnaissance with the radiation detectors."

"No; about all that was picked up was the main power-plant, and the
radiation-escape from there was normal," Pickering agreed. "The bombs
themselves wouldn't be detectable, except to the extent that, say, a
nuclear-conversion engine for an airboat would be. They probably have
them underground, somewhere, well shielded."

"Those prisoners Kankad's commandos dragged i