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He sighed in resignation, and turned to walk back to the chapel aboard the ship. One last prayer to Jarth Gresth Gkae stopped abruptly. The great ship was lurching strangely. Men shouted sudden, frightened cries. The clanking and thud of relays sounded, the shrill of alarms.
Expeditions went to the great Southern Plateau, the Plateau of Storms, where the titanic air currents resulted in an everlasting display of terrific lightnings, great burning balls of electric force floating dangerous and deadly across the frozen, ultra-cold plain. And the expeditions brought back data. Yet still Gresth Gkae could not sleep, his thoughts intruding constantly.
They had power for perhaps four days more, thanks to the fact that the long Lunar day had begun shortly after Gresth Gkae's impatient attack had started. Also, the "S Doradus" had brought in several hundred tons of charged mercury on each trip, though this was no great quantity individually, it had mounted up in the ten trips she had made.
The thin atmosphere of Mars leaked in. Grimly the men waited. Atomic bombs or ships to investigate? It did not matter much to them personally Gresth Gkae smiled with his old vigor as he ordered one of the great interstellar ships to land beside the powerless station, approaching from such an angle that the still-active Mars Center station could not attack.
Like most successful forms of intelligent life, Gresth Gkae was omnivorous. An intelligent form of life is necessarily adaptable, and adaptation meant being able to eat what was at hand. One of his eyes, the upper one, was fully twice the size of the lower one. This was his telescopic eye.
Time and again as the days passed, they watched Gresth Gkae, gaining strength very, very slowly, taken away despondent at the end of his forty hours of work.
The expedition ship sank slowly toward Sthor. A swarm of smaller craft had flown up at its approach to meet it. A gaily-colored small ship marked the official greeting-ship. Gresth had withheld his news purposely. Now suddenly he began broadcasting it from the powerful transmitter on his ship.
One hundred and thirty sailed on. One hundred and thirty ships reached Europa and they sailed on hurriedly, one hundred and twenty-nine of them. Gresth Gkae did not know it then, but the fleet had lost its first ship. The IP station on Europa had spoken back. They sailed in, a mighty armada, and the first dropped through Europa's thin, frozen atmosphere.
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