hammered into the heart of
Miracastle. Night and day it converted the pulverized substance of the
planet in the white-hot core of its atomic furnaces.

Acid rivers snapped at the wind and changed to salt deposits and
super-heated steam. In the gaseous atmosphere, neutral crystals formed
and fell like powdered rain. Miracastle heated and cooled and shivered
with the virus of man-made chemical reactions, and the storms screamed
and tore at the age-old mountains.

Inside the eternal, self-renewing Richardson domes, the technicians
worked and waited and superintended the computers which controlled the
processes raging beyond them.

The long ship lifted steadily and majestically through the battering
storm and the driving rain of dust and crystals. Out beyond the dense
space that surrounds all stars, the long ship probed the ever-shifting
currents in the four-dimensional universe. The long ship found a
low-density flaw, where space could hardly be said to exist at all. The
long ship, described mathematically, was half as long as the
continuum--the length being inversely proportional and related only to
mass. Time was but a moth's wing between twin cliffs of eternity.

Inside Miracastle's orange sun, at its very core, an atom of hydrogen
was destroyed completely; and in the inconceivable distance, an atom of
hydrogen appeared. The pulsing, steady-state equation of the universe
maintained its knife-edge and inevitable thermo-dynamic balance.

Inside the long ship, a pilot-machine ordered the destruction of a
vastly greater collection of matter. The atoms of the ship and the
sailors--fixed in relationship, each to each--imploded into nothingness.

And the long ship and the men aboard it were born again at a low-density
area a million light years away--halfway to Earth. Born and were
destroyed again, in the blink of an eye.

Beyond the ship now lay Sol, pulsing in its own warmth and warming its
children embedded in the cold and distant texture of the universe. The
sailors were ghosts come home.

Miracastle was alone with her conquerors.

* * * * *

General Max Shorter, a few weeks later, began writing a diary.

"I have been Destroyed thirty-seven times during forty years' service
with the long ships," he wrote. He wrote with a pen, using a metal
straight edge as a line rule.

"I have served faithfully and I believe as well as any man the Corps,
the planet and mankind. It is perhaps a