"I'm not sure I could _ever_ design one," Belle said, thoughtfully, "but of course I'm not the engineer you are...." Then, she could not help adding, "... yet." "No, and you never will be," he said, flatly. "No? That's what _you_ think!" Even in such circumstances as those, Belle Bellamy was eager to carry on her warfare with her Project Chief. "That's _exactly_ what I think--and I'm so close to knowing it for a fact that the difference is indetectible." Belle almost--but not quite--blew up. "Well, what _are_ you going to do?" "Unless and until I can figure out something effective to do, I'm not going to try to do anything. If you, with your vaunted and flaunted belief in the inherent superiority of the female over the male, can dope out something useful before I do, I'll eat crow and help you do it. As for arguing with you, I'm all done for the moment." Belle gritted her teeth, flounced away, and plumped herself down into a chair. She shut her eyes and put every iota of her mind to work on the problem of finding something--_anything_--that could be done to help this doomed world and to show that big, overbearing jerk of a Garlock that she was a better man than he was. Which of the two objectives loomed more important, she herself could not have told, to save her life. And Garlock looked around. The air and the sky over the now-vanished city were both clear of Dilipic craft. The surviving Arpalone fighters and other small craft were making no attempt to land, anywhere on the world's surface. Instead, they were flying upward toward, and were being drawn one by one into the bowels of, huge Arpalonian space-freighters. When each such vessel was filled to capacity, it flew upward and set itself into a more-or-less-circular orbit around the planet. Around and around and around the ruined world the _Pleiades_ went; recording, observing, charting. Fifty-eight of those atrocious Dilipic vortices had been driven to ground. Every large land-mass surrounded by large bodies of water had been struck once, and only once; from the tremendous area of the largest continent down to the relatively tiny expanses of the largest islands. One land-mass, one vortex. One only. "What d'you suppose _that_ means?" James asked. "Afraid of water?" "Damfino. Could be. Let's check ... mountains, too. Skip us back to where we started--oceans and mountains both fairly close there." The city had disappeared long since; for hundreds of almost-level square miles there extended a sparkling, seething, writhing expanse of--of what? The edge of that devouring flood had almost reached the foot-hills, and over that gnawing, dissolving edge the _Pleiades_ paused. * * *