Grunting in effort, Charless shoved his throttle all the way in and raced towards the converging fleets. He snapped the radio, hoping to call. The speaker blared forth a myriad of orders in two languages all across the tuning dials. Jason shook his head unhappily; any hope of penetrating that curtain of signals with his own was gone. His own radio, he calculated, was no more powerful than the individual sets of the fleet aircraft. Then, with himself at maximum range for radar, his signal would have been completely lost in the powerful mixture of transmitters at the close hand of flight pattern. His only hope was to beat both fleets to the converging spot. He watched the two fleets coming across the range-marker circles and made some quick calculations. Then he groaned wearily; they would be locked in sky battle while he was yet twenty miles to the North. * * * * * Maximum radar range was thirty minutes of flying time; therefore with two fleets converging, it took fifteen minutes for the lead planes to meet. The fore squadrons of both fleets hurtled at one another out of the sky and the gunners took a firm grip on the controls. Nose Gunner Hammond set his dials, aimed his sights, and pressed the trigger. Radar, fire director, and flight-angle computer would do the rest and the gun would chatter when all conditions were satisfied. The gun was pointed off at a cockeyed angle, which did not bother Gunner Hammond because bullet at a few thousand feet per second and enemy target at five hundred miles per hour would meet at an hypothetical point apparently illogical to people who thought the way to hit anything with a gun is to point at the target. So he waited. And he waited. But nothing happened. Wondering whether his fire-control gear were out of commission, Gunner Hammond set his sights on the second plane, set his dials again, and pressed the trigger. The wicked-looking gun embrasure did not move, its four snouts aiming at the same section of the sky. Hammond swore and turned off the servo mechanism that trained the gun turret. He took the grip of the gang-mounted guns in his hand and-- Could not move the guns. He pressed the mechanical trigger. Or, rather, Hammond pressed upon the trigger; it did not move. Gunner Hammond turned to the intercom--and for the first frantic time Hammond realized that the speaker was a buzzing, chipmunk-chatter of cursing voices that all repeated, substantially, the same story. No gun would move, no gun would fire. The American Fleet, for all its mighty armament, might as well have been unarmed. In the enemy fleet, Admiral Sarne heard the same reports from his own gunners. Openly and angrily he swore in his throat. Helplessly, he cried to the heavens that it was not fair; that Justice must not let his fleet be shot down in flames without being able to make a single stroke for itself.