The Panadur gazed at them with evident scorn. "Europa," he telepathed with a curious sort of sardonic benignity, "would be quite willing to supply radiant energy bombs!" The nearest thing to a smile seemed to flit over his delicate features, as he noted their reaction to the dreaded reminder.
"And we will furnish plastics such as your worlds have never seen!" The man from Neptune spoke at last. The Amazon merely clanked her awful Power-rapier significantly.
II
"No strikes yet!" Bill Nardon said softly, his eyes glued to the Electronoscope. "Sense anything, Freml?"
"Only an outflow of thought-energy ... infinitely distant.... I don't quite know, Nardon. It's voiceless ... patternless, to me at least." The Panadur leader sounded uncertain. Even to his stupendous mind-power, the voiceless susurration, alive, malignant, was a tenuous thing sensed more than felt, directionless, part of the vast, galactic night that engulfed the bait ship in blackness so velvety it was like smothering charred ash. The gigantic super-spacer in the building of which six planets had tried to outdo each other, knifed through the impalpable vibrations in its endless flight. Back of it, a tiny smouldering disk, like a glowing ruby-brooch, nearly three-quarters of a billion miles away, was the sun.
Ahead, Saturn was slowly coming into position, and the great wings of light that were its rings shone with the glory of an eternal rainbow, paling the immense crystalline jewel that was Pluto.
The tension within the spacer mounted perceptibly. Yet interminably the hours dragged on and on. All screens were down, save those for meteorite protection, as if deliberately inviting an attack. Every member of the heterogeneous crew knew their assigned tasks so that mechanically they would spring to their stations at the least warning.
Saturn grew immense, glorious beyond belief, until Bill Nardon was forced from the Electronoscope by the intolerable light. It was then that some one laughed. Rather, it was a cachinnation sounding eerily in their midst.
Abruptly, Bill Nardon tensed, his preternatural faculties alert. He swung slowly from the eye piece of the 'scope and faced the emissaries—scientists-explorers all, of the six planets. It was the Neptunian who had laughed. He was shaking silently now, as if some hidden mirth convulsed him.