For a long time Kim Rendell sat still, with his eyes closed. The dosage of the fighting-beam had been greater than they had ever experienced together, though. It left him weak and sick.
"Funny," he said presently. "Barbarous enough to have soldiers with decorative uniforms and shiny dingle-dangles on them, and modern enough to have fighting-beam projectors, and a weapon that's wiped Ades out of space. We've got to find out who they are, Dona, and where they came from. They've something quite new."
"I wonder," said Dona. But she still looked at Kim with troubled eyes.
"Eh?"
"If it's new," said Dona. "If it's a weapon. Even if—if Ades is destroyed."
Kim stared at her.
"Now, what do you mean by that?"
"I don't quite know," admitted Dona. "I say things, and you turn them over in your head, and something quite new comes out. I told you a story about a dust-grain, once, and you made the transmitter-drive that took us to Ades in the first place and made everything else possible afterward."
"Hmmm," said Kim meditatively. "If it's new. If it's a weapon. If Ades is destroyed. Why did you think of those three things?"
"You said no planet had ever been destroyed," she told him. "If anybody could think of a way to do such a thing, you could. And when Sinab had to be fought, and there weren't any weapons, you worked out a way to conquer them with things that certainly weren't weapons. Just broadcasters of the disciplinary-circuit field. So I wondered if what they used was a weapon. Of course if it wasn't a weapon, it was probably something that had been used before for some other purpose, and it wouldn't be new."