Bolt after bolt rammed down from the open ports, scorching the ground, blasting great holes in solid rock formations, leveling hills, raking huge furrows where before there had been only level soil.
One of the laser beams—perhaps the fiftieth or sixtieth—took the nose section off the Photon, leaving only jagged metal as an undignified crown marring its architectural integrity. Another found its mark too, annihilating one of the helpless ship's hydraulic fins and tearing a gaping hole in its engine section. The Photon tilted precariously, but somehow managed to remain upright.
Then the assaulting vessel was gone, swallowed from the sky by the ridge of hills over which it had passed in completing its low-altitude sweep.
Minute followed minute in the breathless silence that punctuated the impossible attack. Stewart knew he should be pushing on to the Photon to see if Carol and the others had happened to be in the demolished nose section.
But he only stood there, paralyzed. For, as he looked back on the unbelievable action, he realized that the vicious attack had, after all, come as no surprise to him!
He had expected it all along!
That must have been the nameless fear lurking behind a curtain in his mind. And abruptly he knew with a certainty that expectation of this assault had been the basis of his indescribable apprehension.
He had known that a ship—an alien vessel—would be here waiting for them!
And the Photon's crew would be taken all the more off guard because it was incredible, in the first place, that the galaxy might have spawned two intelligent, star-seeking races within the same sector.
But, if he had had that knowledge, how could he have forgotten anything so crucially important?