Joe felt a remarkable exhilaration. Later he might think about the poor devil--there could have been only one--who had been destroyed some 3,700 miles above the surface of the Earth. He might think unhappily of that man as a victim of hatred rather than as a hater. He might become extremely uncomfortable about this, but at the moment he felt merely that he and the Chief had won a startling victory. "I think," he said, "that you can treat them with silent contempt. They won't have proximity fuses. Those friends of ours who want so badly to kill us have found that proximity fuses don't work. Unless one is on a collision course I don't think you need to do anything about them." The Chief was muttering to himself in Mohawk, twenty miles away. Joe said: "Chief, how about getting back to the Platform?" The Chief growled. "_My great-grandfather would disown me! Winning a fight and no scalp to show! Not even counting coup! He'd disown me!_" But Joe saw his rockets flare, away off against the stars. The war rockets were very near, now. They still emitted monstrous jettings of thick white vapor. They climbed up with incredible speed. One went by Joe at a distance of little more than a mile, and its fumes eddied out to half that before they thinned to nothingness. They went on and on and on.... They burned out somewhere. It would be a long time before they fell back to Earth. Hours, probably. Then they would be meteors. They'd vaporize before they touched solidity. They wouldn't even explode. But Joe and the Chief rode back to the Platform. It was surprising how hard it was to match speed with it again, to make a good entrance into the giant lock. They barely made it before the Platform made its plunge into that horrible blackness which was the Earth's shadow. And Joe was very glad they did make it before then. He wouldn't have liked to be merely astride a skinny framework in that ghastly darkness, with the monstrous blackness of the Abyss seeming to be trying to devour him. Haney met them in the airlock. He grinned. "Nice job, Joe! Nice job, Chief!" he said warmly. "Uh--the Lieutenant Commander wants you to report to him, Joe. Right away." Joe cocked an eyebrow at him. "What for?" Haney spread out his hands. The Chief grunted. "That guy bothers me. I'll bet, Joe, he's going to explain you shouldn't've gone out when he didn't want you to. Me, I'm keeping away from him!" The Chief shed his space suit and swaggered away, as well as anyone could swagger while walking on what happened to be the ceiling, from Joe's point of view. Joe put his space gear in its proper place. He went to the small cubbyhole that Brown had appropriated for the office of the Platform Commander. Joe went in, naturally without saluting.