High in the stratosphere the Chickladorian cut the acceleration to a thousand and Cloud took stock. "Hurt, anybody?" Nobody was. "QX. We'll repeat, then, on the other side of the lagoon." And as the cruiser began to descend upon the new course the vengeful Dhilian fleet arrived upon the scene. Looping, diving, beaming, often crashing in suicidal collision, the two factions went maniacally to war. Friend and foe alike, however, avoided the plunging Tellurian ship. That monster, they had learned, was a thing about which they could do nothing. The second fortress fell exactly as the first had fallen, and as the pilot brought the cruiser gently to ground in the middle of the shallow lake, Cloud saw that the Dhilians, overwhelmingly superior in numbers now, had cleared the air of the ships of Uhal. "Can you fellows and your ships keep them off of my flitter while I take my readings?" he demanded. "We can," the natives radiated, happily. Four of the armored bone-heads were _wearing_ the semi-portables. They had them perched lightly atop their feeding heads, held immovably in place by two huge arms apiece. One hand sufficed to operate the controls, leaving two hands free to whatever else might prove in order. "Let us out!" The lock opened, the Dhilian warriors sprang out and splashed away to meet the foot-soldiers who were already advancing into the lagoon. Cloud watched pure carnage for a few minutes. He hoped--yes, there they were! The loyalists, seeing that their cause was not lost after all, had hastily armed themselves and were coming into the fray. There would be no tanks--the navy would see to that. The Blaster broke out his flitter then, set it down near the vortex, and made his observations. Everything was normal. The sigma curve was the spectacularly unpredictable thing which he had come to expect. He selected three bombs from the cruiser's vast store, loaded them into the tubes, and lofted. He set his screens, adjusted his goggles, and waited, while far above him and wide around him his guardian Dhilian war-vessels toured watchfully, their drumming blasts a reassuring thunder. He waited, eyeing the sigma curve as it flowed backward from the tracing pen, until finally he could get a satisfactory ten-second prediction. That is, he knew that ten seconds thence, the activity of the vortex would match, closely enough, one of his bombs. He shot his flitter forward, solving instantaneously the problems of velocity and trajectory. At exactly the correct instant he released the bomb. He swung his little bomber aside, went inertialess.... * * * * *