I am still looking at them when B seizes my arm painfully and points below us. I see nothing and say so. B whispers it was there a moment ago, it is pretty cloudy down there--Yes Lizzie there it is _look_. And I see it. Over to the left, very faint and far below, a pin-prick of light. Light in the polar wastes of a sparsely inhabited planet, and since we are still five miles up it is a very powerful light too. No doubt about it, as we descend farther; about fifty miles from our objective there are men, quite a lot of them. I think it is just then that I understand, _really_ understand, the hazard of what we are doing. This is not an exercise. This is in dead earnest, and if we have missed an essential factor or calculated something wrong the result will be not a bad mark or a failed exam, or even our personal deaths, but incalculable harm and misery to millions of people we never even heard of. Dead earnest. How in Space did we ever have cheek enough for this? The lights might be the essential factor we have missed, but there is nothing we can do about them now. Mr. Yardo suddenly chuckles and points to the screen. "There you are, girlies! He's down!" There, grayly dim, is the map the colonel showed us; and right on the faint line of the cliff-edge is a small brilliant dot. The map is expanding rapidly, great lengths of coastline shooting out of sight at the edge of the screen. Mr. Yardo has the cross-hairs centered on the dot which is _Gilgamesh_. The dot is changing shape; it is turning into a short ellipse, a longer one. The gyros are leaning her out over the sea. I look at my chronometer; 12.50 hours exactly. B looks, too, and grips my hand. Thirty seconds later the Andite has not blown; first fuse safety turned off. Surely she is leaning far enough out by now? We are hovering at five hundred feet. I can actually see the white edge of the sea beating at the cliff. Mr. Yardo keeps making small corrections; there is a wind out there trying to blow us away. It is cloudy here: I can see neither moons nor stars. Mr. Yardo checks the radio. Nothing yet. I stare downwards and fancy I can see a metallic gleam. Then there is a wordless shout from Mr. Yardo; a bright dot hurtles across the screen and at the same time I see a streak of blue flame tearing diagonally downwards a hundred feet away. The hopper shudders to a flat concussion in the air, we are all thrown off balance, and when I claw my way back to the screen the moving dot is gone. So is _Gilgamesh_. B says numbly, "But it wasn't a meteor. It can't have been." "It doesn't matter what it was," I say. "It was some sort of missile, I think. They must be even nearer to war than we thought." We wait. What for, I don't know. Another missile, perhaps. No more come. At last Mr. Yardo stirs. His voice sounds creaky. "I guess," he says, then clears his throat, and tries again. "I guess we have to go back up." B says, "Lizzie, who was it? Do you know?"