heads indeed!

Fred Karski whistled shrilly into his radio phone. "Attention
everybody! General alert. Prepare for combat; prepare to take
immediate evasive action. We must assume that the spaceport is
occupied, and that the occupants are hostile. Captain Poole, will you
please make ready aboard your ship? Reduce both speed and altitude,
and ready your guns and missiles at once."

"Well, now, wait a minute, young fellow," Poole began to argue. "You
don't know--"

"No. I don't. And I want all of us alive after we find out, too,"
Karski replied.

Rodney Maxwell's voice, in the background, said something
indistinguishable. Poole said ungraciously, "Well, all right, if you
think so...."

The _Lester Dawes_ began dropping to the rear and going down toward
the ground. Conn returned to the teleview screen in time to see the
truncated cone of the extinct volcano rise on the horizon, dwarfing
everything around it. Fred Karski was talking to Colonel Zareff, back
at Force Command, giving him the radiation count.

"That's occupied," the old soldier replied. "Mass-energy converter
going. Now, Fred, don't start any shooting unless you have to, but
don't get yourself blown to MC waiting on them to fire the first
shot."

The dark cone bulked higher and higher in the screen. It must be seven
miles around the crater, and a mile deep; when that thing blew out,
ten or fifteen thousand years ago, it must have been something to see,
preferably from a ship a thousand miles off-planet. It was so huge
that it was hard to realize that the jumbled foothills around it were
themselves respectably lofty mountains.

When they were within five miles of it, something twinkled slightly
near the summit. An instant later, the missileman, in his turret
overhead, shouted:

"Missile coming up; counter-missile off!"

"Grab onto something, everybody!" Karski yelled, bracing himself in
his seat.

Conn, on his feet, flung his arms around an upright stanchion and hung
on. Fred's hand gave a twisting jerk on the steering handle; the
_Goblin_ went corkscrewing upward. In the rearview screen, Conn saw a
pink fireball blossom far below. The sound and the shock-wave never
reached them; the _Goblin_ outran them. _Dragon_ and _Vampire_ were
spiraling away in opposite directions. The radio was loud with voices,
and a few of the words were almost printable. A gong began clanging
from the command post on top of the mesa on the mainland.

"Be quiet, all o