But was it? Was it?
Was it?
No, but what in the name of—?
Garna and Ordana and Geggenschein were gone from the Telfan sky. What was this? Why should planets disappear?
Planets were about as permanent as—but they must still remain, it was their light that was gone! Sandra shouted. McBride! The lens. In her mind she saw the scaled layout; Sirius, Telfu, the other planets, and Soaky, the satellite that was oh, so close to Telfu. Place two biconvex lenses, one near Sirius and one near Telfu—and any light from Sirius that could normally reach Telfu—and the planets in line from Sirius—would be cut off by the lens, refracted into the energy beam that would ultimately be focused on Soaky.
They'd started at last! Sandra looked upward into the area containing Soaky.
And as she looked, a mite of colored pinpoint appeared in the sky above. It did not rise into the incandescence, it leaped. It passed upward through the red, the orange, the yellow, and the blue with lightning-flash speed, and then settled down in color to an intolerable white. It seared the eyes, that microscopic speck, and its brightness made it appear huge.
Sandra shook her head and looked down. The darkness was fading, and sharp shadows of the low bushes and herself marked the ground. The stars beside Soaky began to fade to the eye, and as the brightness took on solar brilliance, it was like the sudden return of daylight.
A flicker of the light caused Sandra to look into that intolerable light again. No, Soaky was still going strong. But it was scintillating, now, and there were streamers of incandescent vapor leaving the coruscating nucleus that was Soaky.
Full against Soaky the Sirian beam drove, and the surface vaporized. The streamers were the high-temperature vapors of incandescent metal, being driven away from the tortured satellite by the radiation pressure of that intolerable brilliance. The vapors condensed in finely divided droplets of metal, but still floated away in lines and whorls.