"At what?" Kiffer wanted to know. "The robot can't track unless it has a target." "We've got targets," Roysland said quietly. "Millions of 'em." "The Torpedoes? But--wait a minute! Millions?" Kiffer slapped his palm against his forehead. "Why didn't I think of it before? The stars, of course!" "Right," said Roysland. "They radiate in the subetherics. But no one ever thought of firing at them before, because there's no way of telling whether you hit it or not; a star could soak up all the energy of the whole Galactic Fleet without noticing it. But we don't care whether we _hit_ the target or not; all we want is a target to _fire_ at." "I'll reset the recorders," Kiffer said. "Let's see what happens." "I'm going up to the bridge," Roysland said. "Set those gimmicks going; we want a record, even if this knocks us silly." * * * * * Up on the bridge, Roysland explained what he wanted done to Captain Dobrin. "It can't hurt anything," Dobrin said. "We'll take a pot shot at the dwarf out there. They give a fairly small, bright target." The ship plunged into the no-space of ultradrive as the generators were cut in, and she began to move toward a point just to one side of the dimmest of the three stars. "Target at three fifty-two million," said the observer. "Track and fire," said the FCO. Roysland held his breath as the projectors moved, hummed, and clicked again. And nothing happened. Roysland let his breath out slowly. "Was that O.K.?" the fire control officer asked. "We can't tell whether we hit or not." "I doubt if you could miss even a white dwarf star at this range," Roysland said. "But you're right, of course; there's no way of being _absolutely_ positive." He turned back to the captain. "Let's play around with this for a while. Make a few passes, back and forth at that star and let's see what we get on the recorders." What they got didn't look like much. "Here's the background noise," Kiffer said, pointing at the graph. "This time, it's almost a perfect sine wave; it's the backwash from the drive generators. Here's the harmonic generated when the _aJ_'s go off. And here"--he pulled a strip from the differential analyzer--"are the components. This one is the container phase for the energy envelope that holds the raw violence of the beam itself. And this is the carrier wave phase." Roysland looked at the graphs and shook his head slowly. "And it all looks perfectly harmless." "_Looks_, hell!" said Kiffer. "It _is_ harmless. Believe me, Roysland, it is definitely not the backwash from the _aJ_ guns that's causing the mindjammer effect. We'll have to look somewhere else." "I guess you're right," Roysland agreed reluctantly. "If it isn't here--" His voice trailed off. He was right back where he started, and he didn't have anything to go on. Finally, he reached over to the intercom and punched for the bridge. "O.K., captain," he said, "let's turn the thing around and go home!"