fed into the automatic computers under him. He merely gave the signal to execute. In response, the ship seemed to pick itself up and hurl itself down the radius of the circle to the waiting enemy fleet.

He could not see them, but he knew that, behind him, lay the other nine ships of the flight, in column, spaced so close that an error in calculation of but a few millionths of a second would have caused disaster. But the automatic and inconceivably fast and accurate calculators in the ships, tied together by tight communication beams, held them there in safety.

As he came within range of possible enemy action, Dennis pressed another button, and the Random Computer took command. Operated by the noise a vacuum tube generates because electrons are discrete particles, it gave random orders, weighted only by a preference to bring the ship's course back to the remembered target.

The column behind obeyed these same orders. The whole flight seemed to jitter across space, moving at random but coming back to a reasonably good course towards the target, utterly confusing any enemy fire-control computers.

To the men in the ships, one to each, it seemed as if their very nerve cells must jar apart. They felt themselves incapable of coherent action, or, even, thought. But they did not need coherency. Their function was done until the ship was out of danger, when a new formation would be made, a new target designated, and a new order to execute given.

Because the electronic computers took care of the attack. They had to. No human could react as fast as was needed. Out from the enemy ships reached fingers of pure delta-field, reaching for gamma-matter. The touch of a finger meant death in a fiery inferno as the gamma-matter that fueled the ship and formed the war-heads of their lethal eggs would release its total energy. There was only one defense. The delta-field could be propagated only in a narrow beam, and at a rate much slower than the speed of light. By keeping the enemy computers confused, they kept those beams wandering aimlessly through space, always where the little ships might have been, but were not. Unless their luck ran out.

Flight One kept moving in, with constantly increasing speed, except for random variations. Once through the outer screen of small ships, a relay closed and the link was broken between the ships of the column. Each then moved in independent manner. The designated target was an area to the computers, rather than a ship. Radar beams reached out to find specific targets. As they found them and moved close, the random computer switched off for a small moment of time, while the missiles were dispatched on a true bearing. And then the ships moved on, leaving their eggs behind them.

The eggs moved in with fantastic acceleration to their targets. Half their energy went into that acceleration, to get them there before the delta beams could find them. The other half was given up in incandescent heat when they found their targets. Becoming pinpoints of pure star matter, they seared their way into the enemy vitals. But, even with their fantastically concentrated energy, it was not enough. For the dreadnoughts were armored with densely degenerate matter, impervious to any but a direct hit, and compartmented to require many hits.

The flights moved in and passed on through. And other flights came in. And others followed them. The first flights halted, found each other, turned, and drove in again. Pass and repass. A myriad of blue-white flashes gave measure of the struggle.

On Base Q, in the I.C. room, the Commander watched the tank. Curt orders designated new target areas as the enemy fleet broke up under the whiplash. Slowly, one by one, the points of light that marked the enemy vanished, leaving only the void.

Finally, as must any fleet that faces annihilation, they turned and fled. The battle was over. All that remained was to give the orders to bring the flights home. And that was soon done.

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