steady.

The pointer, sitting in front of the crew chief, moved a hand and
flicked a switch.

"Locked on."

The crew chief glanced over the man's shoulder, reached out to put his
hand on a polished lever, and pressed. Mechanism at the rear of the
long projector clicked. The faint glow over the beam formers became a
blaze. A charge case dropped out and rolled into a chute. Another
charge slid in to replace it and for a brief instant, a coruscating
stream of almost solid light formed a bridge between house and carrier.

Then the busy click of mechanism was drowned by the crash of an
explosion. A ragged mass of flame shot from the house, boiled skyward,
then darkened, to be replaced by a confused blur of smoke and flying
debris. The crew chief took his hand from the lever and waited.

At last, the drumroll of echoes faded to silence--the debris fell back
to ground--the smoke drifted down the valley with the light breeze. And
the rising sun again flooded its light over the estate.

The rambling white house, shaded by its miniature grove of trees, had
gone. Charred timbers reached toward the sky from a blackened scar in
the grass. On the carefully kept lawn, little red flowers bloomed,
their black beds expanding as the flaming blossoms grew.

Near the charred skeleton of the house, one tree remained stubbornly
upright, its bare branches hanging brokenly. About it, bright flames
danced on the shattered bits of its companions.

In the fields about the house, men were getting to their feet, to
stretch cramped muscles and exercise chilled limbs. A few of them
started toward the ruins and the man by the speaker got to his feet to
wave them back.

"Too hot to approach yet," he shouted. "We'll let a clean-up crew go
over it later."

The scene faded. For an instant, the royal colors of Oredan filled the
screen, then the banner folded back and Daniel Stern faced his
audience, his gaze seeming to search the thoughts of those before him.

"And so," he said, "Harle Waern came to bay and elected to shoot it out
with the Enforcement Corps." He moved his head from side to side.

"And with the armament he had gathered, he and his companions might
even have succeeded in burning their way to the mountains, despite the
cordon of officers surrounding their hide-out. He thought he could do
that. But precautions had been taken. Reinforcements were called in.
And such force as was needed was called into play." He sighed.

"So ther