pot was set on fire, and a
quantity of small-arms and machine-gun ammunition piled outside for
transportation to the outer defenses blew up. An explosive bomb landed
on the roof of the building between Company House and the telecast
station, blowing a hole in the roof and demolishing the upper floor.
And another load of thermoconcentrate, missing the power-plant, set
fire to the dry grass between it and the ruins of the native-troops
barracks.

Before the air-attack had been broken up, the soldiers of King Firkked
and their irregular supporters were swarming through the dead section
of wire. They had four or five big farm-tractors, nuclear-powered but
unequipped with contragravity-generators, which they were using like
ground-tanks of the First Century. This attack penetrated to the
middle of the Reservation before it was stopped and the attackers
either killed or driven out; for the first time since daybreak, the
red-and-yellow lights came on around the power-plant.

As soon as the combined air and ground attack was beaten off, von
Schlichten ordered all his available contragravity up, flying patrols
around the Reservation and retaliatory bombing missions against Skilk,
and began bombarding the city with his 90-mm guns. A number of fires
broke out, and at about 0200 a huge expanding globe of orange-red
flame soared up from the city.

"There goes Firkked's thermoconcentrate stock," he said to Paula, who
was standing beside him in front of the screen.

Half an hour later, he discovered that he had been overly optimistic.
Much of the enemy's supply of Terran thermoconcentrate had been
destroyed, but enough remained to pelt the Reservation and the Company
buildings with incendiaries, when a second and more severe air-attack
developed, consisting of forty or fifty makeshift lorry-bombers and
fifteen aircars. The previous attack von Schlichten had viewed in the
screen at the telecast station; it was his questionable good fortune
to observe the second one directly, having been out inspecting the
defenses around the ordnance-depot at the time.

Like the first, the second air-attack was beaten off, or, more
exactly, down. Most of the enemy contragravity was destroyed; at least
two dozen vehicles crashed inside the Reservation. As in the first
instance, there was a simultaneous ground attack from the southern
side, with a demonstration-attack at the north end. For a while, von
Schlichten found himself fighting hand-to-hand