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And, remote from the other ships, to the south, a tiny speck of blue-gray, almost invisible against the sky, and a smaller twinkle of reflected sunlight a garbage-scow, unflatteringly but somewhat aptly rechristened Hildegarde Hernandez, which had been altered as a bomb-carrier, and the gun-cutter Elmoran.
With the glasses, he could see a bulky cylinder being handled off the scow and loaded onto the improvised bomb-catapult on the Elmoran's stern. Shortly thereafter, the gun-cutter broke loose from the tender and began to approach the fleet. "General, I must protest again against your doing this," Air-Commodore Hargreaves said. "There's simply no sense in it.
As they went past, in the light of the burning-city, he could see that at least three of them had multiple rocket-launchers on top. In a matter of seconds, a gun-cutter raced after them, and a second, which had been over Konkrook, jettisoned a bomb and turned away to follow. "Maybe that's it," Paula said. "Well, if it is, we won't be any better off anywhere else than here," he told her.
If it didn't blow, and the geeks found it, they'd know that another one would be along shortly, and.... An invisible hand caught the gun-cutter and hurled her end-over-end, sending von Schlichten and Paula sprawling at full length on the deck, still clinging to one another.
The gun fired again and again, flooding the screen with momentary yellow light and disturbing the image as the recoil shook the gun-cutter. The enemy ship began firing in reply; the shots were all wide misses. Apparently the geek gun-crew didn't know how to synchronize the radar sights, and were ignorant of the correct setting for the proximity-fuzes.
They paused, as the gun-cutter nuzzled up to the Procyon and the canvas-entubed gangway was run out and made fast, looking back at the fearful thing that had sprouted from where Keegark had been. "You know," Paula was saying, echoing his earlier thought, "but for the female pornographer, that would have been Konkrook." He nodded. "Yes.
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