"I ... I think so. Lover-Girl has power to burn. And we could set up the screens on two skeeterboats so that ... yes! By heaven, it will work! All we have to do is make and set up the equipment!" Cob sat up on his bunk and gave a low whistle. "Ye gods! No one can ever accuse you two of having small ideas, that's for sure!" "It will work!" Ivy insisted. Her eyes narrowed. She was all the engineer now, working out a problem. "The explosion that almost killed you and set Lover-Girl on her beam ends came from the annihilation of one tiny slug of steel at a distance of five miles. Just think what the destruction of a twenty mile planetoid will do when we...." "How long will it take?" Strike interrupted. "Give me six hours." "Start now," he ordered, "And somebody hand Cob and me our pants. We've got work to do!" * * * * * The next hours were a nightmare of feverish activity aboard the T.R.S. _Cleopatra_. Two of her six skeeterboats were fitted with hyper screens that were made in the machine shop under Ivy Hendricks' close supervision. Power was shunted from the surge circuit generators and run out through automatic spools to the screen bearing skeeterboats to form the two poles of the hyper warp. Ivy was everywhere at once, giving orders, overseeing construction. Strike and Cob co-ordinated the efforts of the crew and workmen. "We'll pick out our planetoid," Strike explained to them, "And line up our skeeters on an arbitrary north-south axis. The spools will pay out the power lines as the boats travel. When everything is aligned, we turn on the juice and hope for the best." "Then," interjected Bayne, "as the planetoid takes its place in prime space without orbital velocity ... and only some 4,000,000 miles from 40 Eridani C ... we clear out. Fast. 40 Eridani C is an M6 star ... surface temperature only about 3,000 Centigrade. It's small ... smaller than Sol, because it has shrunk. But under its semi-solid crust there are trillions of tons of matter that will burst free as soon as anything cracks the surface tension. Our bomb should act as a fuse to light one of the biggest fire-crackers ever imagined." "One thing," said Ivy to Strike, "whoever pilots the skeeters ... and I presume you intend to handle one yourself ... will have to be extremely careful. As soon as our planetoid exists in prime-space it will have a planetoid's mass and gravity. Don't be caught with your jets cold. I'd miss you, Strike." Celia Graham interrupted the conference to tell them that the equipment was ready, and the ship in position. Strike looked around at the suddenly tense faces of his companions. He didn't like to think what failure might mean to them ... to Terra and the whole Solar Combine. He rose to his feet purposefully. "Let's go," he said.