Then the two dozen mighty ships lifted in the air above Pluto and headed for Sirius. They joined the Haywire Queen on her way from the Plutonian Lens, and after a few minutes of discussion—all done while accelerating at one hundred and fifty feet per second per second—they fell silent and started on the run to Sirius, nine light-years away.
The trip was made without mishap.
"Now," said McBride, through the general communicator, "in order that we understand, I'm going to repeat the general plan again.
"This is a problem different from the central heating system. We are not going to make a planet livable—we are going to destroy it! Honestly, it is but a satellite, but the problem is only made more difficult since it is harder to hit with a stellar beam. But enough of that, we've got the calculations necessary.
"We intend to burn Soaky. Our trick, then, is to set up the maximum possible heat-energy field around or on Soaky. Therefore a lens-system such as the Plutonian Lens is out of the question. Far better is a duplex system. We shall, therefore, send twelve of our ships to a point in space less than thirty million miles from Sirius. This will give us a solid-angle of considerable magnitude—a power intake, if you will—that will extract about all that we can handle.
"The front lens-element will cause the divergent rays from Sirius to become parallel or nearly so. We can't help but lose some.
"Now these parallel rays will hit the second element, which will be set up less than ten million miles from Telfu. That's about as close as we can get without losing our control due to Soaky's field-absorption. And it will focus the entire possible bundle of energy on Soaky. Unless Soaky is utterly impossible, we'll cook his goose. Right?"