"With around a million fleets to handle, we can't spend much time on anyone," he thought at Worsel, "but after we get them lined up and get our Rigellians broken in, it won't be so bad." The breaking in did not take long; definite and meaningful orders flew faster and faster along the tiny, but steel-hard beams of the communicators. "Take off.... Increase drive four point five.... Decrease drive two point seven.... Change course to--" and so it went, hour after hour and day after day. And with the passage of time came order out of chaos. The red lights formed a gigantically sweeping, curving wall, its almost imperceptible crawl representing an actual velocity of almost one hundred parsecs an hour. Behind that wall blazed a sea of amber, threaded throughout with the brilliant filaments which were the Ryerson lights. Ahead of it lay a sparkling, almost solid blaze of green. Closer and closer the wall crept toward the bright white star. And in the "reducer"--the standard, ten-foot tank in the lower well--the entire spectacle was reproduced in miniature. It was plainer there, clearer and much more readily seen; but it was so crowded that details were indistinguishable. Haynes stood beside Kinnison's padded chair one day, staring up into the immense lens and shaking his head. He went down the flight of stairs to the reducer, studied that, and again shook his head. "This is very pretty, but it doesn't mean a thing," he thought at Kinnison. "It begins to look as though I'm going along just for the ride. You--or you and Worsel--will have to do the fighting, too, I'm afraid." "Uh-huh," Kinnison demurred. "What do we--or anyone else--know about tactics, compared to you? You've got to be the brains. That's why we had the boys rig up the original working model there, for a reducer. On that you can watch and figure out the gross developments and tell us in general terms what to do. Knowing that, we will know who ought to do what, from the big tank here, and we will pass your orders along." "Say, that _will_ work, at that!" and Haynes brightened visibly. "Looks as though a couple of those reds are going to knock our star out of the tank, doesn't it?" "It'll be close in that reducer. They'll probably touch. Close enough in real space--less than three parsecs." The zero hour came and the Tellurian armada of eighty-one sleek destroyers--eighty superdreadnoughts and the _Directrix_--spurned Earth and took its place in that hurtling wall of crimson. Solar system after solar system was passed; fleet after fleet leaped into the ether and fitted itself into the smoothly geometrical pattern which GFO was nursing along so carefully. Through the Galaxy the formation swept, and out of it, toward a star cluster. It slowed its mad pace; the center hanging back, the edges advancing and folding in.