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Updated: May 6, 2025
Smoke was beginning to filter out now, and Kendall recognized a new, and deadlier menace! Heat quantities of heat were being poured into the little ship, and the neutron guns were doing their best to add to it. The paraffin was confined in there and like any substance, it could be volatilized, and as a vapor, develop pressure explosive pressure!
Simultaneously, from the three leaders, terrific neutron rays shot out. The paraffin block walls stopped those and the cruisers started to explain their feelings on the subject. They were the IP-J-37, 39, and 42. The 37 turned up the full power of the UV ray.
"We can't do anything, as far as I can see. They're using an electric field all right, and projecting it. I can't see how we can do that." "Neither can I," agreed Kendall, "so we can't use that weapon. I really didn't want to anyway. Like the neutron gun which I told Commander McLaurin would be useless as a weapon, they'd be prepared for it, you can be sure.
Their single five KT bomb contained at least enough plutonium for two critical masses, if brought together inside a good neutron reflector. Each mass should give about a two kiloton explosion. And they did have a good neutron reflector nuclite. There wasn't anything better. "What have we got for a neutron source?" he asked aloud. He was really asking himself, but he got a quick answer from Koa.
The Miran answered with the neutron beam, atomic and gamma bombs and the crumbler ray. Gently, softly a halo of shimmering-violet luminescence built up about the T-208. The UV beam continued to flare, wavering slightly in its aim then fell way off to one side. The T-208 staggered suddenly, wandered from her course whole, but uncontrolled. For the men within the ship were dead.
First, two or more pieces of plutonium large enough to form a critical mass. Second, a neutron source—some material with the type of radioactivity that produced neutrons—to start the reaction. Third, some kind of neutron reflector. And fourth, explosive to drive the pieces together. Did they have all those items? He checked them off.
He was really asking himself, but he got a quick answer from Koa. "Sir, some of the stuff left in the craters from the other explosions gives off neutrons." "You’re right," Rip agreed instantly. A small piece from one of the craters, when combined with half of the neutron source in the bomb, should be enough. As for the explosive, they had exploding heads on their attack rockets.
The newer nuclear drive cruisers had no need to stop. Their atomic piles needed new neutron sources only once every few years, and they carried thousands of tons of methane, compressed into solid form, for their reaction mass. The voice horn in the rocket cabin sounded. "The SCN Scorpius is passing Valve Two, landing at Valve Eight."
The actual limit is when the star has reached the density of a neutron, and this star hasn't collapsed that far by a long shot. "But that star is only forty kilometers or less than twenty-five miles in diameter!" It took nearly two hours of careful juggling to get an orbit which Arcot considered reasonably circular.
As he watched, the air around it fairly sizzled blue with the rays of neutron disruption blasters, and then it blew apart. The three police cars turned and came back more slowly. The three-thousand-ton passenger ship which had been hastily fitted with armament was circling about; the great dock conveyer which had brought it was gone, transposed back to Police Terminal to pick up another ship.
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