Three days later Bill Norden took his hands from the back of his neck, and sat up. He joined Miles and Pat at the screen of the big life-force "radar." Far out in space, a group of swiftly moving objects were drawing together, according to the pips that traced their course. They formed into clusters and began heading outwards.
The pips grew dimmer almost instantly, though they should have lost only half their brightness after a billion miles of traveling.
"Obviously faster than light, and heading straight toward Sirius," Miles said slowly. "The poor devils! Until some darned fool from Earth goes there one day to try to make peace with them, they're going to live every hour of their lives in the horrible certainty that we can wipe them out whenever we choose—and that the best their race could do was a total failure. They'll probably have sunk back to being scared, unhappy savages before we reach them."
Norden thought of the charts that had been shown him while he lay in the communicating position. Earth had enough life-force projectors to sweep the skies with lethal radiation already, and she had just begun to tool up.
The Aliens had guessed wrongly about every step—they'd followed a logical pattern against a race that defied logic.
And somehow, his hatred of them was gone. "You'll have the superlight drive next year, probably," he guessed. "There are enough of their ships out there now with Aliens who died before they could set off their bombs for you to figure that out. Earth will be sending a ship there before they can revert to complete savagery."
"And I suppose you want to be on it?" Pat asked. She looked at her father, smiling thoughtfully as he grinned in answer to her lifted eyebrow. "I imagine the three of us could swing permission, at that."
Norden nodded. He'd planned it all out. He'd have to go back to university work, pretending to explore the new trails of science that had opened with the discovery of Hardwick's spectrum. The formulae he'd developed had been destroyed, but he could always remember enough to keep up with the eager young men who would go plunging into the field.
Maybe, that way, by the time the probable levels of telepathy and other psi-phenomenon had been discovered, the world would be ready for them. He had no intention of acting as a super-brain, however well equipped he might be. With the emergency over, the human race could discover enough by itself.
Miles and his daughter would be busy with the long and difficult job of trying to re-settle the planets that the Aliens had despoiled. But all three of them would be ready when the first ship capable of reaching the stars had been built.