The crew of the second ship were stunned. But the second ship went slowly and cautiously down into atmosphere, and its communicators picked up voices issuing stern warnings that troops must be welcomed by all citizens, and that absolute obedience must be given to all men wearing the uniform of His Magnificence the Despot of Lith. And then there was babbling confusion and contradictory shoutings, and a hoarse voice ordered all soldiers of His Magnificence to keep a ceaseless watch upon the sky, because a ship had come down from overhead, and when the fighting-beams struck it--to kill its crew--it appeared to have fired some devastating projectile which had destroyed half a great city. All ships seen in the sky were to be shot down instantly. His Magnificence, the Despot of Lith, would avenge the outrage. The lonely surviving ship went dazedly away from the planet which once had been friendly to the men of Ades. It went back to Ades' sun, and searched despairingly once again, and then fled to the Second Galaxy and Terranova, to tell of what it had seen. That was an event of some importance. At least all of one planet had been rocked to its core from the detonation of a space-ship which flashed into collision with it at uncountable multiples of the speed of light, and was thereby raised to the temperature of a hot sun's very heart. And besides, there was agitation and suspicion and threats and diplomatic chaos among the planetary governments who had joined to loot the dependencies of Ades, once Ades was eliminated from the scene. But a vastly, an enormously more significant event took place on a planet very far away, at almost the same instant. The planet was Donet Three, the only habitable planet of its system. It was a monstrous, sprawling world, visibly flattened by the speed of its rotation and actually habitable only by the fact that its rotation partly balanced out its high gravity. The _Starshine_ approached over a polar region and descended to touch atmosphere. Then, while Dona looked curiously through the electron telescope at monstrous ice-mountains below, Kim donned a space-suit, went into the airlock, and dropped a small object out of the door. He closed the door, returned to the control-room, and took the _Starshine_ out to space again. That was the most significant single action, in view of its ultimate meaning, that had been performed in the First Galaxy in ten thousand years. And yet, in a sense, it was purely a matter of form. It was not necessary for Kim to do it. He had arranged for the same effect to be produced, in time yet to come, upon every one of the three hundred million inhabited planets of the First Galaxy. The thing was automatic; implicit in the very nature of the tyrannical governments sustained by the disciplinary circuit.