e. But it did have the drawback that
the yacht would have to be left behind, a dead loss, when the liner was
seized.

Hoddan thought it over soberly. Long before he reached Walden, of
course, he could have his own crew so terrified that they'd fight like
fiends for fear of what he might do to them if they didn't. But if he
could keep the space-yacht also--

He nodded gravely. He liked the new possibility. If it didn't work,
there was the first plan in reserve. In any case he'd get a modern
space-liner and a suitable cargo to present to the emigrants of Colin.
And afterward--

There were certain electronic circuits which were akin. The Lawlor
drive unit formed a force field, a stress in space, into which a nearby
ship necessarily moved. The faster-than-light angle came from the fact
that it worked like a donkey trotting after a carrot held in front of
him by a stick. The ship moving into the stressed area moved the stress.
The force fields of a landing grid were similar. A tuning principle was
involved, but basically a landing grid clamped an area of stress around
a spaceship, and the ship couldn't move out of it. When the landing grid
moved the stressed area up or down--why--that was it.

All this was known to everybody. But a third trick had been evolved on
Zan. It was based on the fact that ball lightning could be generated by
a circuit fundamentally akin to the other two. Ball lightning was an
area of space so stressed that its energy-content could leak out only
very slowly, unless it made contact with a conductor, when all bets were
off. It blew. And the Zan pirates used ball lightning to force the
surrender of their victims.

Hoddan began to draw diagrams. The Lawlor drive-unit had been installed
long after the yacht was built. It would be modern, with no nonsense
about it. With such-and-such of its electronic components cut out, and
such-and-such other ones cut in, it would become a perfectly practical
ball lightning generator, capable of placing bolts wherever one wanted
them. This was standard Zan practice. Hoddan's grandfather had used it
for years. It had the advantage that it could be used inside a gravity
field, where a Lawlor drive could not. It had the other advantage that
commercial spacecraft could not mount such gadgets for defense, because
the insurance companies objected to meddling with Lawlor drive
installations.

* * * * *

Hoddan set to work with the remnant