"Huh?" Haynes half pulled himself up from the davenport, then sank back. "Why?" he demanded.
"Because we used the negasphere—a negative-matter bomb of planetary antimass—to wipe out Jalte's planet, and because we smashed Jarnevon between two colliding planets," the Lensman explained, concisely. "Can the present defenses of Tellus cope with either one of those offensives?"
"I'm afraid not—no," the port admiral admitted. "But—"
"We can admit no 'buts,' admiral," Kinnison declared, with grim finality. "Having used those weapons, we must assume that the Boskonian scientists—we'll have to keep on calling them 'Boskonians,' I suppose, until we find a truer name—had recorders on them and have now duplicated them. Tellus must be made safe against anything that we have ever used; against, as well, everything that, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, we can conceive of the enemy using."
"You're right—I can see that," Haynes nodded.
"We have been underestimating them right along," Kinnison went on. "At first we thought that they were merely organized outlaws and pirates. Then, when it was forced upon us that they could match us—overmatch us in some things—we still would not admit that they must be as large and as widespread as we are—galactic in scope. We know now that they were wider-spread than we are. Intergalactic. They penetrated into our Galaxy, riddled it, before we knew even that theirs was inhabited or inhabitable. Right?"
"To a hair, although I never thought of it in exactly that way before."
"None of us have—mental cowardice. And they have the advantage," Kinnison continued, inexorably, "in knowing that our Prime Base is upon Tellus; whereas, if Jarnevon was not in fact theirs, we have no idea whatever where it is. And another point. Does that fleet of theirs, as you look back on it, strike you as having been a planetary outfit?"
"Well, Jarnevon was a big planet, and the Eich were a mighty warlike race."
"Quibbling a bit, aren't you, chief?"