of vapor.
'Ugh! Disintegrators!' said the girl. 'So they really had them!'
'Why not? To the mechanical mind everything is possible except commonsense. Instead of negotiating with Allistair they'll be confident of their superiority. And, fire for fire, they are stronger. Also their tactics are perfect. But young Allistair's tactics are bound to be faulty, which means that his ships will show up where they couldn't possibly be and blow whole protean units to hell and gone. His fire-control has the edge on them in that it's unpredictable.'
Babe's eyes were astern, on the colossal battles going on; on the forces being released that made a Fleet flagship's biggest big guns seem feeble. 'This part of space,' she said, 'will never be the same. It'll be like trying to plot a course inside the orbit of Mercury. I suggest that you proclaim that fact to the world.'
Bartok grinned. 'More speed,' he said. 'I wouldn't want to be caught in one of their fireballs. See that?' He pointed excitedly at a moving fleck of light that had separated itself from a monster flying fort just off the ground. 'That thing's as big as Ceres—and it's explosive. More speed, Babe, if you value my hide.'
'I do,' she said shortly. 'The colonial system, or what's left of it, is going to need a firm hand to tide over the stresses and strains of this robots'
war.'
'It shouldn't last for more than a few years,' said Bartok. 'When a force like that gets split, they haven't got time for anything else. And don't fret about the colonial system. There's a lot left of it yet, and it's right in the palm of my hand.'
Babe MacNeice looked hard at the Commander. 'If any other man,' she said, 'told me that, I'd make it a point to blow up this ship before we touched Earth. But I think you can be trusted.'
'Algol ahead,' said Bartok, pointing to a star-disk off the bow. 'The outposts of empire, where they're chewing their nails about the strange noises and flashes to be seen and heard over the communications systems. We'll have to evacuate them nearer Alpha Centauri or thereabouts. Can't chance one of those fireballs hitting a planet of the system!'
He reached for a recorder and began barking orders into the mouthpiece. Before the cylinder was half grooved he had—verbally—
evacuated three galactic sectors, reorganized the Intelligence Wing, scrapped the now-obsolete graving-docks where no battlewagon would ever dock again, converted the lighters and tenders of the Fleet into freight ships for emergency use, and begun to draft a new constitution for the All Earth and Colonies Federation.
'That,' said Babe happily, 'is the way I like to hear you talk.'
Algol loomed ahead.
The Adventurers
It was a fair-to-middling afternoon at the Adventurers Club. Cleveland was not pre-blitz London, so it looked little enough like a club; instead of oak paneling, the walls were a bilious green plaster. The waiters were not ancient and subservient Britons, but mostly flippant youths in overstarched mess-jackets; they wore chronometer wristwatches and finger-rings. The Club did not radiate the solid certainty of the fixed and immovable, which is supposed to be such a comfort to the English.
It had, as a matter of fact, been established in its present two floors of a business district office building for only three months, having been evicted from a Lake Boulevard loft-building destined to be torn down and replaced by a garage and parking lot. The Adventurers, however, had done their best in the brief quarter-year to make the place homey.
Mounted heads covered the walls like a rash, and an obviously non-functional fireplace had been assembled of polished marble slabs and over it written the Adventurers' motto: 'A Hearth and Home for Those Who Have Strayed Far from the Beaten Path.' On two new brass andirons in the center of the big fireplace were two small, uncharred logs crossed at an angle of 45 degrees.
If the Club was out of character, however, so were most of its members.
Over his roast beef, the Man Who Had Known Dr. Cook was presiding.
He puffed, between sleepy chews: 'I tell you, sir, the Doctor is one of the most maligned men in the history of exploration. I have been a naval officer myself and know what it is to lay aloft in a gale, but I hold no sort or kind of brief for Peary, the man who crucified the Doctor.' It was an impossible stretch of the imagination to picture the Man Who Had Known Dr. Cook laying aloft in a gale or, for that matter, doing anything but exactly what he was doing: sloppily chewing roast beef that would add to the many inches of his paunch and further lubricate his greasy face.
At a coffee-table, Captain Trevor-Beede was drinking, but not coffee.
'Prunes,' he was thickly saying to a waiter, 'prunes are what you need.
Here in the States, here you don't know how to cook prunes. Another b.
and s.' The waiter went for the b. and s., and Captain Trevor-Beede continued to address a moth-eaten springbok head opposite him:
'prunes should be soaked. That's all there is to cooking prunes. Prunes should be soaked overnight, and then you should cook them. That's all there is to cooking prunes.' Captain Trevor-Beede was in the diplomatic service.
At a quarter slot-machine in a corner, under a mournful and rather small walrus-head with chipped ivories, the Headshrinker was losing money with nervous haste. Click-whiz-whirr-bump, bump, bump.
Click-whiz-whirr-bump, bump, bump. Click-whiz-whirr-bump, bump, bump. A minor payoff broke the rhythm, and he frowned as some quarters clunked into the scoop. He picked them up and began again.
Click-whiz-whirr-bump, bump, bump. He had contributed one of the most unusual of the exhibits which filled a glass case against a wall: the doll-size, shrunken body of his eight-year-old son, born to him during his captivity, by his Jivaro wife. The son had died during the rigorous escape to the sea, and the Headshrinker had used his acquired tribal knowledge to do a really superior job of shrinking before he continued on his lighter way. Click-whiz-whirr- bump, bump, bump. 'I was delirious, you know,' he would shyly explain, 'but it's really an ambitious bit of work. There weren't the right kind of ants there, you know, and I was in a perfect funk for fear they'd botch the skin all up.'
He was a one. Click-whiz-whirr-bump, bump, bump.
A waiter slouched up to a placid young man in a grey uniform. 'Betcha nervous,' he said in a chummy way. 'You want a drink?'
'Drink? Oh, no!' he said, very much surprised. He thought most people knew by then that the Shield was a lot stronger guarantee of Sobriety than the White Ribbon had ever been. But it was news to the waiter; he shrugged and walked away, and the young man continued to wait in a comfortable armchair that would have suggested a London club if its leather upholstery had not been Cocktail-Lounge Red.
The Man Who Had Known Dr. Cook was through with his roast beef, his baked potato, his chef's salad, his two baskets of French bread, his innumerable pats of butter, his sweetened coffee and his pie a la mode.
He wobbled over to the young man and said: 'I think we're ready for you now, youngster; the committee- room's back there.' He followed him and on the way the Man collected Captain Trevor-Beede, who shambled after like a bear in tweeds, and the Headshrinker, who had finally lost all his quarters. The youth had met them at dinner the day before.
The committee-room had a long table and carved-oak chairs with the names of late adventurers engraved on brass plates sunk into their backs. The Man closed the door solemnly, wobbled to the head of the table and wedged himself into an armchair. The others sat down, but the young man didn't know whether he was supposed to until the Headshrinker cracked a nervous smile and jerked out the chair next to him. 'It's quite all right, you know,' he told him; 'we don't stand on ceremony here.'
He sat down, and the Man started: 'I tell you, sir, it's good to see young blood about the old Hearth and Home
