"You're the officer in command, Conn," his father told him. "Your decision. How soon can you attack? We're almost through to the crater." "There's a vertical shaft right above us, and a lot of noise at the top. We'll send up a couple of bomb-robots to clear things at the shaft-head and follow with everything we have." "Noncombatants and all?" He nodded. "Only thing we can do." An old quotation occurred to him. "'If you want to make an omelet, you have to break eggs.'" He wondered who'd said that in the first place. One of the old Pre-Atomic conquerors; maybe Hitler. No, Hitler would have said, "If you want to make sauerkraut, you have to chop cabbage." Maybe it was Caesar. "We'd better send Gumshoe Gus up, first," Sylvie suggested. "You handle him. Take a quick look around, and then pull him back. We'll need him later." It was the first time he'd ever caught himself calling a robot "him," instead of "it." He thought for a second, and added: "Give your father and Mr. Vibart the controls for the two window-washers; you handle the snooper." He gave more instructions: Yves Jacquemont to turn his bomb-robot right, Vibart to turn his left; the two lorries to follow the jeep up the shaft, the scows to follow. Then he leaned back and looked at the screens that had been rigged under the top of the jeep. A circle of light appeared in one, growing larger and brighter as the snooper approached the top of the shaft; two more came on as the bomb-robots followed. "All right; follow me," he said into the inter-vehicle radio, and started the jeep slowly up the shaft. The snooper popped out of the shaft, onto a gallery that had been cut into the solid rock, fifty feet high and a hundred and fifty across, with a low parapet on the outside and the mile-deep crater beyond. There were a few grounded aircars and lorries in sight, and a medium airboat rested a hundred or so feet on the right of the shaft-opening. Fifteen or twenty men were clustered around it, with a lifter loaded with ammunition. They looked like any crowd of farm-tramps. Suddenly, one of them saw the snooper, gave a yell, and fired at it with a rifle. Sylvie pulled it back into the shaft; her father and the chief engineer sent the two bomb-robots up onto the gallery. The right-hand robot sped at the airboat; the last thing Conn saw in its screen was a face, bearded and villainous and contorted with fright, looking out the pilot's window of the airboat. Then it went dead, and there was a roar from above. On the other side, several men were firing straight at the pickup of the other robot; it went dead, too, and there was a second explosion. In the communication screen, somebody was yelling, "Give them another one for Milt Hennant!" and his father was urging him to get in fast, before they recovered. In peace or war, screen communication was a wonderful thing. The only trouble was that it let in too many kibitzers.