can't we, Mart?"

"Certainly. Fifty pounds of salt is a ridiculously cheap price for what
he is doing for us, even though it is very rare here."

Dunark acknowledged the gift with shining eyes and heartfelt, but not
profuse, thanks, and bore the precious bag to the palace under a heavy
escort. He returned with a small army of workmen, and after making tests
to assure himself that the power-bar would work as well through arenak
as through steel, he instructed the officers concerning the work to be
done. As the wonderfully skilled mechanics set to work without a single
useless motion, the prince stood silent, with a look of care upon his
handsome face.

"Worrying about Mardonale, Dunark?"

"Yes. I cannot help wondering what that terrible new engine of
destruction is, which Nalboon now has at his command."

"Say, why don't you build a bus like the Skylark, and blow Mardonale off
the map?"

"Building the vessel would be easy enough, but X is as yet unknown upon
Osnome."

"We've got a lot of it...."

"I could not accept it. The salt was different, since you have plenty.
X, however, is as scarce upon Earth as salt is upon Osnome."

"Sure you can accept it. We stopped at a planet that has lots of it, and
we've got an object-compass pointing at it so that we can go back and
get more of it any time we want it. We've got more of it on hand now
than we're apt to need for a long time, so have a hunk and get busy,"
and he easily carried one of the lumps out of his cabin and tossed it
upon the dock, from whence it required two of Kondal's strongest men to
lift it.

The look of care vanished from the face of the prince and he summoned
another corps of mechanics.

"How thick shall the walls be? Our battleships are armed with arenak the
thickness of a hand, but with your vast supply of salt you may have it
any thickness you wish, since the materials of the matrix are cheap and
abundant."

"One inch would be enough, but everything in the bus is designed for a
four-foot shell, and if we change it from four feet we'll have to
redesign our guns and all our instruments. Let's make it four feet."

Seaton turned to the crippled Skylark, upon which the first crew of
Kondalian mechanics were working with skill and with tools undreamed-of
upon Earth. The whole interior of the vessel was supported by a complex
falsework of latticed metal, then the four-foot steel plates and the
mighty embers, the pride of the great MacDougall, we