ably even keel. Von Schlichten rose, helping Paula to her feet,
and found that they had been kissing one another passionately. They
were still in each other's arms when the pitching and rolling of the
cutter ceased and somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

He came out of the embrace and looked around. It was Lieutenant (j.g.)
Morrison.

"What the devil, lieutenant?" he demanded.

"Sorry to interrupt, sir, but we're starting back to _Procyon_. And
here; you'll want this, I suppose." He held out a glass disc. "I never
expected to see it, but at that it took three A-bombs to blow you
loose from your monocle."

"Oh, that?" Von Schlichten took his trade mark and set it in his eye.
"I didn't lose it," he lied. "I just jettisoned it. Don't you know,
lieutenant, that no gentleman ever wears a monocle while he's kissing
a lady?"

He looked around. They were at about eight hundred to a thousand feet
above the water, with a stiff following wind away from the explosion
area. The 90-mm gun, forward, must have been knocked loose and carried
away; it was gone, and so was the TV-pickup and the radar. Something,
probably the gun, had slammed against the front of the bridge--the
metal skeleton was bent in, and the armor-glass had been knocked out.
The cutter was vibrating properly, so the contragravity-field had not
been disturbed, and her jets were firing.

"It was the second and third bombs that did the damage, sir," Morrison
was saying. "We'd have gone through the effects of our own bomb with
nothing more than a bad shaking--of course, on contragravity, we're
weightless relative to the air-mass, but she was built to stand the
winds in the high latitudes. But the two geek bombs caught us off
balance...."

"You don't need to apologize, lieutenant. You and your crew behaved
splendidly, lieutenant-commander; best traditions, and all that sort
of thing. It was a pleasure, commander; hope to be aboard with you
again, captain."

They found Kent Pickering at the rear of the bridge, and joined him,
looking astern. Even von Schlichten, who had seen H-bombs and
Bethe-cycle bombs, was impressed. Keegark was completely obliterated
under an outward-rolling cloud of smoke and dust that spread out for
five miles at the bottom of the towering column.

* * * * *

There had been a hundred and fifty thousand people in that city, even
if their faces were the faces of lizards and they had four arms and
quartz-sp