“I’ll never be able to thank you,” I sniff. “L-Look, cousin, that looks like a school of minnows but we ain’t near no water. There’s a thous--it is the saucers!” “Axtonithula!” Quantum yips into a mike he snatches up! “Gargus! Zoona! Yagiz! Hooxl! Yax Benzi!” He puts down the mike and says he has ordered his four squadron leaders to prepare for the attack on the Nougat rockets that are now just a million miles away. “We want to capture their leader, Mepha Spaam, alive!” “That I must see,” I says. “Nobody, but nobody can convince me I’m here, and if I am not I am cuttin’ out paper dolls back in the neuropsychiatorium, and I don’t know which is worst or more unhealthy!” “Your forebears would give their shirts to be here, Sep,” the New Muan side of the family says. “In a few light seconds I will ask them personally, Quantum,” I retort, and wipe enough worry dew off my pan to oil all the saucers all around us. “The Spinks sure never missed a thing, did they?” It is about ten seconds away, the most decisive battle in the history of a dozen worlds. Waterloo, the Marne, Midway, hah; spitball fights. Wait until I tell you. “Flumpozza!” my wierd cousin yelps, and I find out after that it is New Muan for ‘Tallyho!’ All the little pear-headed citizens take their battle stations, and then I see guns stick their noses out of the ports all around the flying saucer. Just picture a pin-wheel buzzing a quadrillion revs every minute, and shooting ammo loaded with worse than hydrogen or split-up atoms. In less time than it took me to say Liberace the New Muan saucers chew through a wedge-shaped formation of Nougatine jets. It is like a thousand circular saws have busted loose and all I can hear is parts of rockets pelting down on the roof of the saucer’s control cabin. A Nougat rocket shell spits through the saucer right over my dome and leaves a hole you could drive a cow through, but in the very next second there is no hole. It has sealed itself. “Get me the head nurse!” I yelp. “I need a shock treatment!” I look out through the port and see that we are chasing a Nougat space ship right over the top of Asphasia. It is red and black and has a four-legged bird painted on the top. “It is Mepha Spaam’s rocket,” Quantum says. “Watch, Sep!” The enemy space hot rod is galloping at least forty thousand miles every half a minute but the New Mu crate is outlegging it faster than a rabbit does a turtle with arthritis. Then a beam of light shoots out from Quantum’s saucer and stabs at the Nougatine space buggy and all at once my tongue glues itself to the roof of my mouth and my eyes bulge out worse than those of the citizen sitting next to me. The saucer stops dead in space and so does the Nougat hot rod.