en their transmission was crude. All they had was simple
old-fashioned short-range radio, and even that was noisy and erratic.
And their reception was as bad. We had to use a kilowatt before they
could pick it up at 200 miles. We didn't know then it was all
organically generated; that they had no equipment."

The Admiral sipped his wine, frowning at the recollection. "I was pretty
sure they were bluffing when I changed course and started after them. I
had to hold our acceleration down to two and a half gees because I had
to be able to move around the ship. And at that acceleration we gained
on them. They couldn't beat us. And it wasn't because they couldn't take
high gees; they liked six for comfort, you remember. No, they just
didn't have the power."

* * * * *

The Admiral looked out the window.

"Add to that the fact that they apparently couldn't generate ordinary
electric current. I admit that none of this was conclusive, but after
all, if I was wrong we were sunk anyway. When Thomas told me the nature
of the damage to our radar and communications systems, that was another
hint. Their big display of Mancji power was just a blast of radiation
right across the communication spectrum; it burned tubes and blew fuses;
nothing else. We were back in operation an hour after our attack.

"The evidence was there to see, but there's something about giant size
that gets people rattled. Size alone doesn't mean a thing. It's rather
like the bluff the Soviets ran on the rest of the world for a couple of
decades back in the war era, just because they sprawled across half the
globe. They were a giant, though it was mostly frozen desert. When the
showdown came they didn't have it. They were a pushover.

"All right, the next question is why did I choose H. E. instead of going
in with everything I had? That's easy, too. What I wanted was
information, not revenge. I still had the heavy stuff in reserve and
ready to go if I needed it, but first I had to try to take them alive.
Vaporizing them wouldn't have helped our position. And I was lucky; it
worked.

"The, ah, confusion below evaporated as soon as the Section chiefs got a
look at the screens and realized that we had actually knocked out the
Mancji. We matched speeds with the wreckage and the patrols went out to
look for a piece of ship with a survivor in it. If we'd had no luck we
would have tackled the other half of the ship, which was still in