The officers grinned at each other, wanting to yell their delight. They had known Kortha in the old days. One of them stepped ahead, hesitantly.
"We—ah—we are very curious, Kortha. The way in which you beat us, that is. There were no guns in Ruuzol. There was no way to beat us. You could not defeat us. Yet you did. When the explosions began, Guantra went a little mad. He called you 'brood of Zut.' Frankly, a lot of us thought there was something supernatural about it, too. As a matter of fact I still do, and so do the rest of us."
Kortha grinned at them, saying, "As a matter of fact, you have the same weapon I used aboard the flagship. Aboard every ship in the fleet, for that matter."
They looked at him, and their eyes bulged.
Kortha walked hand in hand with Ilse toward a cabinet inset in the tower wall. The officers came to stand around him in a semi-circle, watching him bring forth a small box fitted with a row of electronic tubes and cables fitted to two plates.
"It looks like a radio set," said one of the officers.
"It is," replied Kortha. "Except that it sends a stream of high frequency waves back and forth between those plates, instead of a voice into space. It internally induces heat into an object placed between the plates."
Kortha took an iron bar and set it on the lower plate. He turned switches, looking down. Almost instantly the bar glowed faintly red, then waxed brighter and brighter. From brilliant crimson, it turned white with heat. Kortha flipped the current off.
"The electronic tubes shoot a flow of high frequency waves between the plates."
"But that's ancient," protested an officer. "We cook that way on board—"