g. But I
believe this is something important to Paula. Let her go with you,
because if you go alone and don't come back, I don't think she will
ever be happy again."

He looked at Kankad curiously, wondering, as he had so often before,
just what went on inside that lizard-skull. Then he looked at Paula,
and, after a moment, he nodded.

"All right, colonel, objection withdrawn," he said.

Aboard the _Elmoran_, they gave the bomb a last-minute inspection and
checked the catapult and the bomb-sight, and then went up on the
bridge.

"Ready for the bombing mission, sir?" the skipper, a Lieutenant
(j.g.) Morrison, asked.

"Ready if you are, lieutenant. Carry on; we're just passengers."

"Thank you, sir. We'd thought of going in over the city at about five
thousand for a target-check, turning when we're half-way back to the
mountains, and coming back for our bombing-run at fifteen thousand. Is
that all right, sir?"

Von Schlichten nodded. "You're the skipper, lieutenant. You'd better
make sure, though, that as soon as the bomb-off signal is flashed,
your engineer hits his auxiliary rocket-propulsion button. We want to
be about fifteen miles from where that thing goes off."

The lieutenant (j.g.) muttered something that sounded unmilitarily
like, "You ain't foolin', brother!"

"No, I'm not," von Schlichten agreed. "I saw the _Jan Smuts_ on the
TV-screen."

The _Elmoran_ pointed her bow, and the long blade of the figurehead
warrior's spear, toward Keegark. The city grew out of the ground-mist,
a particolored blur at the delta of the dry Hoork River, and then a
color-splashed triangle between the river and the bay and the hills on
the landward side, and then it took shape, cross-ruled with streets
and granulated with buildings. As they came in, von Schlichten, who
had approached it from the air many times before, could distinguish
the landmarks--the site of King Orgzild's nitroglycerin plant, now a
crater surrounded by a quarter-mile radius of ruins; the Residency,
another crater since Rodolfo MacKinnon had blown it up under him; the
smashed _Christiaan De Wett_ at the Company docks; King Orgzild's
Palace, fire-stained and with a hole blown in one corner by the
_Aldebaran_'s bombs.... Then they were past the city and over open
country.

"I wish we had some idea where the rest of those bombs are stored,
sir," Lieutenant Morrison said. "We don't seem to have gotten anything
significant when we flew reconnaissance wi