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In the control room, Bors watched out of a direct-vision port, giving occasional glances to the screens. There were flecks of light from innumerable stars. Then the shining cloud-bank of the gas-giant planet went black. Screens showed all of the fleet each blip with a nimbus about it which identified it as a friend, not a foe. There was the blip of the leading ship, the "point" of the formation.
You folks can see just as well, even on the direct-vision wall plates, with light heterodyned on the fifth, so we'll close all ether bands, absolutely. All we'll have to leave open will be the one extremely narrow band upon which our projector is operating, and I'll protect that with a detector screen.
The Jan Smuts vanished in a blaze of light that blinded everybody in the room; when they could see again, after some thirty seconds, the screen was dark. In the direct-vision screen from the Sky-Spy, the whole countryside of the Konk Valley, five hundred miles north of Konkrook, was lighted. The heat and radiation detectors were going insane.
Half an hour later, Major Thornton stood on the hull of the Shudos, surrounded by the sixty men of the boarding party. "Anybody see anything through those windows?" he asked. Several of the men had peered through the direct-vision ports, playing spotlight beams through them. "Nothing alive," said a sergeant, a remark which was followed by a chorus of agreement.
They were visible things on the direct-vision ports. Something flashed, and rushed toward the little Kandarian space-can. "Fire one, two, three," Bors ordered. Things hurtled on before him. A screen showed that the missiles first fired by the enemy went off-course, chasing the later-fired missiles from the Isis.