"We're beaten, then," said the Colony Organizer bitterly. "Ades will be wiped out, we'll starve and the Sinabians will go through the First Galaxy, killing off the men on planet after planet and then moving in to take over." Dona murmured again in Kim's ear. The Mayor of Steadheim growled profanely, furiously. Dona laughed softly. The two visitors stared at her suspiciously. "What do we do, Kim Rendell?" "I suppose," said Kim wryly, "we'll have to fight. We've no fuel and no weapons--but that ought to surprise them." "Eh?" "They'll be prepared," Kim explained, "to defend themselves against any conceivable resistance by any conceivable weapon. And a warship a fairly intelligent planet could build should be able to wipe out ten thousand _Starshines_. So when we attack them without any weapons at all they won't quite know what to do." The two visitors simply stared at him. "You've got to get hafnium! You've got to get fuel! You can't face a battleship!" "But," said Kim, "battleships have fuel on board and they'll have hafnium too. It'll be risky--but convenient...." 3 _Contact!_ Actually there was less than a quart of fuel in the _Starshine's_ tanks. Kim knew it ruefully well. It would run the little ship at interplanetary speed for perhaps six hours. On normal overdrive--two hundred light-speeds--it would send her just about one-seventh of a light-year, and star-systems averaged eight light-years apart in both the First and Second Galaxies. Of course, on transmitter-drive--the practically infinite speed the _Starshine_ alone in history had attained--the ship might circumnavigate the cosmos on a quart of fuel. But merely rising from Terranova would consume one-third of it, and landing on any other planet would take another third. Actually the little ship was in the position of being able to go almost anywhere, but of having no hope at all of being able to come back. It rose from Terranova though, just three days after the emergency was made clear. There were a few small gadgets on board--hastily made in the intervening seventy-two hours--but nothing deadly--nothing that could really be termed a weapon. The _Starshine_ climbed beyond the atmosphere of the Second Galaxy planet. It went on overdrive--at two hundred light-speeds--to a safe distance from Terranova's planetary system. Then it stopped in normal space, not stressed to allow for extra speed. Kim jockeyed it with infinite care until it was aimed straight at the tiny wisp of nebulous light which was the First Galaxy, unthinkable thousands of light-years away. At long last he was satisfied. He pressed the transmitter-field button--and all space seemed to reel about the ship. At the moment the transmitter-field went on, the _Starshine_ had a velocity of twenty miles per second and a mass of perhaps two hundred tons. The kinetic energy it possessed was fixed by those two facts.