Then, without warning, a tiny bluish line streaked across one of the screens. A second. A third–fourth–fifth–twentieth–fiftieth—The screens came alive with flashing streaks of blue–green light.
Then something blew. A sphere of violet light appeared on one of the screens. Instantly, it was followed by others with such rapidity that it was impossible to tell which followed which. But there were ten of them.
The silence in the instrument–room was absolute. Burke tried vainly to imagine what had actually happened. The Enemy fleet had been traveling at thirty times the speed of light, which was only possible because of its artificial mass which changed the properties of space to permit it. And then the generators and maintainers of that artificial mass blew out. The ships stopped—so suddenly, so instantly, so absolutely that a millionth part of a second would have been a thousand times longer than the needed interval.
The energy of that enormous speed had to be dissipated. The ships exploded as nothing had ever exploded before. Even a super–nova would not detonate with such violence. The substance of the Enemy ships destroyed itself not merely by degenerating to raw atoms, but by the atoms destroying themselves. And not merely did the atoms fly apart, but the neutrons and protons and electrons of which they were composed ceased to exist. Nothing was left but pure energy—violet light. And it vanished.
Then there was nothing at all. What was left of the globe–fleet went hurtling uselessly onward through space. It would go on and on and on. It would reach the edge of the galaxy and go on, and perhaps in thousands of millions of years some one or two or a dozen of the surviving spheres might penetrate some star–cloud millions of millions of light–years away.
In a pleased voice, Keller said, "I think everything is all right now."
And Sandy went all to pieces. She clung to Burke, weeping uncontrollably, holding herself close to him while she sobbed.
On Earth, of course, there was no such eccentric jubilation. It was observed that crawling red sparks in the gravity–field detectors winked out. As hours and days went by, it was noticed that the solar system continued to exist, and that people stayed alive. It became evident that some part of the terror some people had felt was baseless. And naturally there was much resentment against Burke because he had caused so many people so much agitation.
Within two weeks a fleet of small plastic ships hurtled upward from the vicinity of Earth's north magnetic pole and presently steadied on course toward the fortress asteroid. Burke was informed severely that he should prepare to receive the scientists they carried. He would be expected to coöperate fully in their investigations.
He grinned when Pam handed him the written sheet.
"It's outrageous!" snapped Sandy. "It's ridiculous! They ought to get down on their knees to you, Joe, to thank you for what you've done!"
Burke shook his head.
"I don't think I'd like that. Neither would you. We'll make out, Sandy. There'll be a colony started on that world the matter–transposer links us to. It might be fun living there. What say?"
Sandy grumbled. But she looked at him with soft eyes.
"I'd rather be mixed up with—what you might call pioneers," said Burke, "than people with reputations to defend and announced theories that are going to turn out to be all wrong. The research in this fortress and on that planet will make some red faces, on Earth. And there's another thing."
"What?" asked Sandy.
"This war we've inherited without doing anything to deserve it," said Burke. "In fact, the Enemy. We haven't the least idea what they're like or anything at all about them except that they go off somewhere and spend a few thousand years cooking up something lethal to throw at us. They tired out our ancestors. If they'd only known it, they won the war by default. Our ancestors moved away to let the Enemy have its own way about this part of the galaxy, anyhow. And judging by past performances, the Enemy will just stew somewhere until they think of something more dangerous than artificial sun–masses riding through our solar systems."
"Well?" she demanded. "What's to be done about that?"
"With the right sort of people around," said Burke meditatively, "we could do a little contriving of our own. And we could get a ship ready and think about looking them up and pinning their ears back in their own bailiwick, instead of waiting for them to take pot–shots at us."
Sandy nodded gravely. She was a woman. She hadn't the faintest idea of ever letting Burke take off into space again if she could help it—unless, perhaps, for one occasion when she would show herself off in a veil and a train, gloating.
But it had taken the Enemy a very long time to concoct this last method of attack. When the time came to take the offensive against them, at least a few centuries would have passed. Five or six, anyhow. So Sandy did not protest against an idea that wouldn't result in action for some hundreds of years. Argument about Burke's share in such an enterprise could wait.
So Sandy kissed him.