er Dawes_, and, let's say, three of
these gunboats. Let me see. _Goblin_, Fred Karski. And _Vampire_,
Charley Gatworth. And _Dragon_, Stefan Jorisson. They're all good men.
Home Guard; trained them myself."

"Aren't you coming, Colonel?"

"Oh, I'd like to, Conn, but I can't. I don't want to be away from
here; no telling what might happen. But you keep in constant
screen-contact; if you get into any trouble, I'll come with everything
I can put into the air."

IX

Barathrum was a grim land, naked black and gray. Spines and crags of
bare rock jutted up, lava-flows like black glaciers twisting among
them. It was split by faults and fissures, pimpled with ash-cones.
Except for the seabirds that nested among the cliffs and the few thin
patches of green where seeds windblown from the mainland had taken
root, it was as lifeless as when some ancient convulsion had thrust it
up from the sea, Barathrum was a dead Inferno, untenanted even by the
damned; by comparison, the Badlands seemed lushly fertile.

The four craft crossed above the line of white breakers that marked
the division of sea and land; the gunboat _Goblin_ in the lead, her
sisters, _Vampire_ and _Dragon_ to right and left and a little behind,
and the _Lester Dawes_ a few miles in the rear. Fred Karski was at the
_Goblin's_ controls; Conn, beside him, was peering ahead into the
teleview screen and shifting his eyes from it to the map and back
again.

Somebody behind him was saying that it would be a nice place to be
air-wrecked. Somebody else was telling him not to joke about it. From
the radio, his father was asking: "Can you see it, yet?"

"Not yet. We're on the right map-and-compass direction; we should
before long."

"We're picking up radiation," Fred Karski said. "Way above normal
count. I hope the place isn't hot."

"We're getting that, too," Rodney Maxwell said. "Looks like power
radiation; something must be on there."

After forty years, that didn't seem likely. He leaned over to look at
the omnigeiger, then whistled. If that was normal leakage from
inactive power units, there must be enough of them to power ten towns
the size of Litchfield.

"Something's operating there," he said, and then realized what that
meant. Somebody had beaten them to the spaceport. That would be one of
the new companies formed after the opening of Force Command. He was
wishing, now, that he hadn't let himself be talked out of coming here
first. Older and wiser