"Why not? In a year, two years, I'll be stronger than Earth!"
Leila stared at him again. "The population of the moons is about twenty million. Earth has over three billion," she recited as if in a classroom. "'Stronger than Earth'?"
"Your thinking in terms of population figures," said Gedner, "is very crude. Don't you know what the real strength of Earth has been for the past three hundred years? Not a mass of three billion people—but ten or a dozen battleships, the backbone of the fleet. Do you know what a star-class battleship is? A thousand feet of hull, tungsten-alloy armor ten feet thick, twenty-six-gravity mercury engines, fifteen to twenty-one atomic blast guns, a thousand tons or so of atomic explosives. Those are the surface features—but what matters is that they're the biggest carriers and distributors of pure energy that have ever operated in the Solar System. And they remain effective as long as there's atomic energy to power their weapons."
"I know all that," said the girl impatiently.
"All right. What you evidently don't know is that right now, in the year of civilization 745, Earth is almost at the end of its supply of power metals. They've been importing Martian power—solar power—for the last two decades, hoarding their own dwindling stores of the heavy elements, in case of war, and at the same time trying to build up the domestic helio-dynamic plants. But it's plain that Earth hasn't the power to fight a major war at present."
"A major war?" said Leila helplessly. "What makes you think it would take a major war to smash your scheme?"
"Evidently," said Gedner, "Doc Chaikoski didn't tell you all he knows."
Leila remembered, with a queer chill, the sentence that had been interrupted by Gedner's return. She opened her mouth and closed it without saying anything. Gedner, who had been pacing up and down paused and gave her a long, intent look.
"I intended you to know, in any case. You'll go with me to Kroniopolis, as soon as the Zodiac comes back.... Leila, my love, this moon is lousy with uranium."