"Get it fired up," said Dusty shortly. "Full power." * * * * * The screech of air came first as a thin whistle, and then thundered and slammed down at Earth below as the thirteen Marandanian spacecraft were inched lower and lower into the complaining atmosphere. The howling racket dinned into the ears of Russian and Chinese and Hawaiian and Californian and New Yorker and Briton and Frenchman and Indian and Malayan and Indonesian and Argentinian and South African and Australian and Mexican and Floridian. Around it went, across the land and the sea, a thunder blast of rent air that piled shock wave on shock wave and sent them tearing down at the ground below. The thunder cracked windows and made plaster sift down from ceilings. It dinned down a tree or two, and it hurled some people to the ground. It flipped a parked fleet of jetplanes over in crumpled ruin like a windstorm hitting a deck of cards. Across the world, radar operators looked blankly at the signal pips that raced across their screens and began to make apologetic reports. Interceptors tried to rise, but were tossed madly in the racing shock-stream to lose ground and return to earth limping. But in the lead spacecraft of this mad fleet, the barytrine operator watched his detector hopefully. The entire screen was aglow, but he watched it and finally said, "I think it's down there somewhere." He pointed to a region in Indiana not far from the lower tip of Lake Michigan. The fleet circled Terra once more, swung high for the long dive, and then came howling down on a long slant, while Dusty took the radio and cried: "Junior Spacemen of The Space Patrol, _Attention_!" The radio, powered by machinus forces, hammered down and blanketed the radio broadcast stations. It broke up the video screens in a mash of spots, flecks and snowflakes. Dusty's voice roared into telephone lines and onto the commercial radio links and chattered indistinctly in direction-finding equipment and made incomprehensible squiggles clutter the radar screens. "Junior Spacemen, Attention to Official Orders! By now you are aware that your Commander, Dusty Britton, flies with a fleet of spacecraft above you. Now hear this! "Within a few hundred miles of the lower tip of Lake Michigan there is concealed somewhere a dangerous device known as a barytrine generator. This must be located and stopped. "Now! To the Junior Spaceman who locates this machine I will personally award the Medal of Merit. And to the entire Group Command of which he is a member I will award full scholarships as Space Midshipmen in a real Space Academy, to make them real spacemen. "Now, Junior Spacemen, go out and find me that barytrine generator!" Dusty signed off as the down-rushing fleet swaybacked close to the ground and pulled out to swap ends and go screaming up in a stark vertical climb, its drivers fighting the rise to a standstill fifty miles in the sky.