"That suits me," said Laney. He shook hands with Kirk solemnly. Then he turned to Charteris and the others who were gathered with anxious face? in the conference room. "I think we may as well get started." Charteris sighed. He picked up the intercom and spoke into it briefly. * * * * * Northward, the fields around Orville were brightening with a new day. In the meadow behind the Kirk house the briars and the Queen Anne's Lace were beaten down by the passage of men and trucks. They were all gone now except for one truck with massive electronic equipment, pulled back to a safe distance from the Orion scout. The necessary changes had been made in the ship's control system. Now the crew of the truck waited for a signal from the house. It came. The truck crew went to work, activating the remote-control relays, setting up a locked-in series of coordinates. Then the firing key was pressed. With every semblance of life, the Orion scout took off on its destined course--a Judas goat, empty and silent, with no living thing inside its hull. Standing on the steps of the Vinson's house, Lyllin watched it rise and vanish in the blue air. She had had one short call from Kirk. _Wait there. I'll come back._ Now the small dying thunder of the scout-ship's flight seemed like the receding footsteps of everything she had ever loved, passing over the distant hills. She turned slowly and went back into the house. CHAPTER IX The sky screamed light, beneath them. The Sun, its atoms ceaselessly riven and then reborn, shrieked raving energy, magnetism, electricity, light, radiant heat, a rage across the heavens, a cosmic storm flinging up wild plumes and spindrift of violet calcium, of yellow sodium, of blue and red and purple. Over it, as over a limitless fiery ocean, hung the shoal of silver ships. Tossed and twitched by storms of radiation, wrenched by the mighty claws of the titan magnetic field, scorched by the blaze of the star, they fought to hold position. Their formation wavered, sagged, re-formed and wavered again, and still they held together. On the bridge of the _Starsong_, clutching a stanchion as the deck heeled and shuddered under him, Kirk stood with Garstang watching the screens. "Not a sign!" said Garstang in his ear. "And we can't sit up here forever!" The rim of the Asteroid Belt showed on one screen, a jagged wheeling of rock fragments, dust and pebbles and little naked worlds, black on their shadow-sides flashing like heliographs where they caught the light. Beyond them was space, very deep, very dark, very empty, looking toward Orion and his pendant sword. In that deep emptiness out there, five ships moved slowly. Earth ships, behaving like a normal patrol. The remainder of Earth's fleet was hidden among the asteroids. Even the searching rays that fed the screen could not see them.