"I'm coming to that. It is impossible as it stands; but there's a good chance that I'll be able to soften Grand Base up. You know, like a worm—bore from within. Anyway, that's the only possible way to do it, so I've got to try it. You'll have to put detector nullifiers on every ship assigned to the job, but that'll be easy. I would suggest sending all the maulers and first-class battleships we've got, but you will, of course, work that out later."
"The important thing, as I gather it, is timing."
"Absolutely to the minute, since I won't be able to communicate, once I get inside their thought-screens. How long will it take to concentrate everything we've got and put it in that cluster?"
"Seven weeks—eight at the outside."
"Plus two for allowances. QX. At exactly Hour 20, ten weeks from to-day, let every projector of every vessel that you can possibly get there cut loose on that base with everything they can pour in. Where's that other print? Here—twenty-six main objectives, you see. Blast them all, simultaneously to the second. If they all go down, the rest will be possible. If not, it will be just too bad. Then work along these lines here, straight from those twenty-six stations to the dome, blasting everything as you go. Make it last exactly fifteen minutes, not a minute more or less. If, by fifteen minutes after twenty, the main dome hasn't surrendered by cutting its screens, blast that, too, if you can. It'll take a lot of blasting, I'm afraid. From then on you and the fleet commander will have to do whatever is appropriate to the occasion."
"Your plan doesn't cover that, apparently. Where will you be? How will you be fixed—if the main dome does not cut its screens?"
"I'll be dead, and you'll be just starting the damnedest war that this galaxy ever saw."
XXIII.
While servicing and checking over the speedster required only a couple of hours, Kinnison did not leave Earth for almost two days. He had requisitioned much special equipment, the construction of one item of which—a suit of armor such as had never been seen upon Earth before—caused almost all of the delay. When it was ready the greatly interested port admiral accompanied the young Lensman out to the steel-lined, sand-filled concrete dugout, in which the suit had already been mounted upon a remote-controlled dummy. Fifty feet from that dummy there was a heavy, water-cooled machine rifle, with its armored crew standing by. As the two approached the crew leaped to attention.