Kit's use of the word "they," which, of course, meant Ploorans to everyone except his sisters, concealed his knowledge of the fact that the Eddorians had taken over the defense of Ploor. Eddorians were handling those screens. Eddorians were directing and correlating those far-flung task forces, with a precision which Kinnison soon noticed. "Much smoother work than I ever saw them do before," he commented. "Suppose they have developed a _Z9M9Z_?" "Could be. They copied everything else you invented, why not that?" Again the highly ambiguous "they." "No sign of it around Arisia, though--but maybe they didn't think they'd need it there." "Or, more likely, they didn't want to risk it so far from home. We can tell better after the mopping-up starts--if the widget performs as per specs. But if your dope is right, this is about close enough. You might tip the boys off, and I'll call Mentor." Kinnison could not reach nth space, but it was no secret that Kit could. The terminus of one of the Patrol's hyperspatial tubes erupted into space close to Ploor. That such phenomena were expected was evident--a Boskonian fleet moved promptly and smoothly to englobe it. But this was an Arisian tube; computed, installed, and handled by Arisians. It would be in existence only three seconds; the nearest defending task force could not possibly get there in time. To the observers in the _Z9M9Z_ those three seconds stretched endlessly. What would happen when that utterly foreign planet, with its absolutely impossible intrinsic velocity of over fifteen times that of light, erupted into normal space and went inert? Nobody, not even the Arisians, knew. Everybody there had seen pictures of what happened when the insignificant mass of a spaceship, traveling at only a hundredth of the velocity of light, collided with a planetoid. That was bad enough. This projectile, however, had a mass of about eight times ten to the twenty-first power--an eight followed by twenty-one zeros--metric tons; would tend to travel fifteen hundred times as fast; and kinetic energy equals mass times velocity squared. There seemed to be a theoretical possibility, since the mass would instantaneously become some higher order of infinity, that all the matter in normal space would coalesce with it in zero time; but Mentor had assured Kit that operators would come into effect to prevent such an occurrence, and that untoward events would be limited to a radius of ten or fifteen parsecs. Mentor could solve the problem in detail, but since the solution would require some two hundred Klovian years and the event was due to occur in two weeks-- "How about the big computer at Ultra Prime?" Kinnison had asked, innocently. "You know how fast that works." "Roughly two thousand years--if it could take that kind of math, which it can't," Kit had replied, and the subject had been dropped. * * * * *