He leaned there against the wall, trying to think.
Had it happened? He was in good health, sound, uninjured. His thirst had been mental rather than physical; his throat hadn’t been dry.
He pulled up his trouser leg and looked at the calf. There was a long white scar there, but a perfectly healed scar; it hadn’t been there before. He zipped open the front of his shirt and saw that his chest and abdomen were criss-crossed with tiny, almost unnoticeable, perfectly healed scars.
It had happened!
The scouter, under automatic control, was already entering the hatch of the mothership. The grapples pulled it into its individual lock, and a moment later a buzzer indicated that the lock was airfilled. Carson opened the hatch and stepped outside, went through the double door of the lock.
He went right to Brander’s office, went in, and saluted.
Brander still looked dazed. “Hi, Carson,” he said. “What you missed; what a show!”
“What happened, sir?”
“Don’t know, exactly. We fired one salvo, and their whole fleet went up in dust! Whatever it was jumped from ship to ship in a flash, even the ones we hadn’t aimed at and that were out of range! The whole fleet disintegrated before our eyes, and we didn’t get the paint of a single ship scratched!
“We can’t even claim credit for it. Must have been some unstable component in the metal they used, and our sighting shot just set it off. Man, too bad you missed all the excitement!”