"Straight, or with water?" he asked. "Straight, please." Seu tilted his glass, swallowed and shuddered. Cudyk watched him in silence. Seu, alone in the Quarter, owned a Niori communicator--an elaborate mechanism which reproduced sound, vision in three dimensions, odors, modulated temperature changes and several other things perceptible only to Niori. There was no restriction on their sale, and they were cheap enough, but the Niori broadcasts were as dull or as incomprehensible to men as a Terrestial breakfast program would have been to Niori. Seu used his as a source of Galactic news. Today, Cudyk guessed, the news had been very bad. "It's Rack, isn't it?" he said finally. Seu glanced at him and nodded. "Yes, it's Rack. I haven't told anyone else about it yet. The Quarter's in a half-hysterical state as it is. But if you don't mind my talking it out to you--" "Go ahead," said Cudyk. "It's worse than anything we expected." Seu took another swallow of the whisky, and made a face. He said, "They've got a hydrogen-lithium bomb." " ... I was afraid of that." Seu went on as if he had not heard. "But they're not using it on planets. They're bombing suns, Laszlo." * * * * * For a moment, Cudyk did not understand, then he felt his abdominal muscles contract like a fist. "They couldn't," he said hoarsely. "It would explode before it got past the outer layers." "Under faster-than-light drive?" Seu asked. "I did some figuring. At 1000 _C_, it would take the bomb about two point six thousandths of a second to travel from the surface to the center of an average G-class star. I think that is a short enough interval, but maybe it isn't. Maybe they have also found some way to increase the efficiency of the standard galactic drive for short periods. Anyway, does it matter?" He looked at Cudyk again. "I have seen the pictures. I _saw_ it happen." Cudyk's throat was dry. "Which stars?" he said. "Törkas. Rud-Uri. That's the Oladi sun. And Gerzión. Those three, so far." Cudyk's fingers were nervously caressing the smooth metal of his wristwatch. He looked down at it suddenly, remembering that the Oladsa had made it. And now they were gone, all but their colonies and travelers on other worlds, and those who had been in space at the time. All those spidery, meticulous people, with their million-year-old culture and their cities of carved opal, wiped out as a man would swat a fly. Seu took another drink. His face flushed, and drops of sweat stood out on his forehead and cheeks. He said, "They'll have to learn to kill, now. There isn't any alternative. They intercepted one of the New Earth ships and sprayed it with the stasis field. It didn't work; the ship got away. They'll have to learn to kill. Do you know what that means?" "Yes."