As soon as they were lost to view, the cavern began to be filled by a steady stream of thousands upon thousands of silvery Panadurs silently filing in from the inner caverns.
"What in Phobos happened to him?" Mark thought aloud, trying to understand the incomprehensible conduct of the Panadur Leader.
"Don't ask me riddles about this fantastic race of beings!" Palanth exclaimed irritably, waving his handkerchief. "What has radiant energy got to do with them anyway?"
"Just a hunch of mine, Palanth. If the energy they absorb from minerals is radiant energy ... well, we might be able to defy the Terran Fleet itself ... if!"
"You still speak in riddles, O Thou specially not wanted!" Palanth lapsed into his usual grandiloquent manner. "At any rate, your idea of fighting the Terran Fleet with radiant energy certainly had a startling effect on that mysterious biped of yours." He pressed still another offensively perfumed handkerchief to his face and eyed the changing landscape of Europa with distaste. It was a raw panorama of great tracts of vivid red soil, exposed by the melting snows; outcrops of glittering rocks rich in minerals flashed in rainbow hues under the powerful ultra-visibility reflectors that were substituting for Terra's Sol. In the near distance, gigantic skeletal structures were a babel of sound, and beyond, the mile-high weather control towers fought steadily the numbing cold.
"Must I explain in words of one syllable so that dubious intellect of yours can absorb it?" Mark asked mockingly. "Well, while asking the Panadur about radiant energy, I had in mind building thousands of tiny spacers out of some of the Spacer Transports that brought us here. These tiny swarms are to be filled with radiant energy and aimed by mechanical robot control directly at the Terran Fleet so that they will explode on contact, annihilating everything in their path. Thus lives will be conserved.... But the radiant energy must come from the Panadurs!"
"Too many ifs," Palanth replied unconvinced. "However, we can have a fleet of miniature spacers ready before the Council's butchers get within a million parsecs of Europa.
"But without either your damned radiant energy or some explosive that will do what no explosive has ever done before, or ray either, for that matter, the ships will be as useless as ... as a Panadur in a fight!"
"Build the fleet!" came the startling telepathic command from the direction of the cavern country.