At that moment Peter the Meter, busy scanning the sky with his battery of instruments, loosed a shrill eureka signal. Bigboss thought for a moment that one of the latter's gamma ray spectrometers had been swamped. But, on monitoring Peter's telemetered stream, he discerned that the impulse was from an infrared photometer. A check of co-ordinates showed the source of disturbance to be skyward, with a dead zenith orientation. He commandeered one of Sky Watcher's planetary telesensors and redirected it at the source of new emanation. Now there were additional data to throw light on the manifestation. The disturbance was in the visual range; classification--material. A rapidly shifting parallax suggested either constant location and swift expansion, or steady size and brisk approach. Sky Watcher, on his own adaptive initiative, settled that uncertainty. His radar gear calculated a variable approach momentum averaging twelve hundred kilometers an hour and decreasing. Peter also improvised on his function, bringing into play a photometer that instantly gauged the emissive intensity of the disturbance: comparable to the parameter for solar brilliance. The object had shifted from zenith and was drifting over into the quadrant wherein the clan's Totem was located. Bigboss responded with some degree of concern to this development. Did it represent a threat to their revered symbol of metallic kinship? Then he had the object in his own visual field. It was a great, blazing ball of brilliance that extended a flickering tongue downward. Atop the sphere of fiery energy sat a shining silver needle that resembled nothing as much as it did _the clan's own Totem_! Evaluation circuits frozen in a confusion of indecision, he stood there fully unaware that he had discontinued his protective scanning and had not brought Minnie into one of his lines of sight for a number of sine wave epipeaks. He was shocked back into action, however, when an equilibrium circuit tripped the alarm that his attitude was unstable and beyond compensation within the limits of gyroscopic control. He pivoted sharply and planted two pedal discs down in the direction of fall. As he did so, his upper command section swung around, bringing a video lens to bear on Minnie. Refocusing, he saw she had crept up from his blind quadrant and had begun drilling into his power-plant section. Fool. In her thirst for supremacy, didn't she realize she could touch off an explosion that would hurl them both halfway to the pink planet? He pulled away from the grinding bite of her drill and brought his vise swinging forcibly upward. It slammed into her forward analyzing compartment and sent her reeling backward. Her equilibrium system overextended, she toppled sideways and lay there kicking ineffectually. By then, the great blazing light had disappeared beyond the hills at almost the exact site where the Totem was located.