The screen's view veered and closed in. A great ship sparked and one of the frantic attackers glowed angrily, twisted out of focus, swung back and rammed. The Cluster bowed wildly and survived the glancing blow that drove the attacker off in twisting reflection.
The newsman's smooth unimpassioned delivery continued to the last blow and the last hulk.
Then a pause, and a large similar voice-and-picture of the fight off Mnemon, to which the novelty was added of a lengthy description of a hit-and-run landing - the picture of a blasted city - huddled and weary prisoners - and off again.
Mnemon had not long to live.
The pause again - and this time the raucous sound of the expected brasses. The screen faded into the long, impressively soldier-lined corridor up which the government spokesman in councilor's uniform strode quickly.
The silence was oppressive.
The voice that came at last was solemn, slow and hard: "By order of our sovereign, it is announced that the planet, Haven, hitherto in warlike opposition to his will, has submitted to the acceptance of defeat. At this moment, the forces of our sovereign are occupying the planet. Opposition was scattered, unco-ordinated, and speedily crushed."
The scene faded out, the original newsman returned to state importantly that other developments would be transmitted as they occurred.
Then there was dance music, and Ebling Mis threw the shield that cut the power.
Toran rose and walked unsteadily away, without a word. The psychologist made no move to stop him.
When Bayta stepped out of the kitchen, Mis motioned silence.
He said, "They've taken Haven."
And Bayta said, "Already?" Her eyes were round, and sick with disbelief.
"Without a fight. Without an unprin-" He stopped and swallowed. "You'd better leave Toran alone. It's not pleasant for him. Suppose we eat without him this once."
Bayta looked once toward the pilot room, then turned hopelessly. "Very well!"
Magnifico sat unnoticed at the table. He neither spoke nor ate but stared ahead with a concentrated fear that seemed to drain all the vitality out of his thread of a body.
Ebling Mis pushed absently at his iced-fruit dessert and said, harshly, "Two Trading worlds fight. They fight, and bleed, and die and don't surrender. Only at Haven - Just as at the Foundation-"
"But why? Why?"
The psychologist shook his head. "It's of a piece with all the problem. Every queer facet is a hint at the nature of the Mule. First, the problem of how he could conquer the Foundation, with little blood, and at a single blow essentially - while the Independent Trading Worlds held out. The blanket on nuclear reactions was a puny weapon - we've discussed that back and forth till I'm sick of it - and it did not work on any but the Foundation.
"Randu suggested," and Ebling's grizzly eyebrows pulled together, "it might have been a radiant Will-Depresser. It's what might have done the work on Haven. But then why wasn't it used on Mnemon and Iss - which even now fight with such demonic intensity that it is taking half the Foundation fleet in addition to the Mule's forces to beat them down. Yes, I recognized Foundation ships in the attack."
Bayta whispered, "The Foundation, then Haven. Disaster seems to follow us, without touching. We always seem to get out by a hair. Will it last forever?"
Ebling Mis was not listening. To himself, he was making a point. "But there's another problem - another problem. Bayta, you remember the news item that the Mule's clown was not found on Terminus; that it was suspected he had fled to Haven, or been carried there by his original kidnappers. There is an importance attached to him, Bayta, that doesn't fade, and we have not located it yet. Magnifico must know something that is fatal to the Mule. I'm sure of it. "
Magnifico, white and stuttering, protested, "Sire... noble lord... indeed, I swear it is past my poor reckoning to penetrate your wants. I have told what I know to the utter limits, and with your probe, you have drawn out of my meager wit that which I knew, but knew not that I knew."
"I know... I know. It is something small. A hint so small that neither you nor I recognize it for what it is. Yet I must find it - for Mnemon and Iss will go soon, and when they do, we are the last remnants, the last droplets of the independent Foundation."
The stars begin to cluster closely when the core of the Galaxy is penetrated. Gravitational fields begin to overlap at intensities sufficient to introduce perturbations in an interstellar jump that can not be overlooked.
Toran became aware of that when a jump landed their ship in the full glare of a red giant which clutched viciously, and whose grip was loosed, then wrenched apart, only after twelve sleepless, soul-battering hours.
With charts limited in scope, and an experience not at all fully developed, either operationally or mathematically, Toran resigned himself to days of careful plotting between jumps.
It became a community project of a sort. Ebling Mis checked Toran's mathematics and Bayta tested possible routes, by the various generalized methods, for the presence of real solutions. Even Magnifico was put to work on the calculating machine for routine computations, a type of work, which, once explained, was a source of great amusement to him and at which he was surprisingly proficient.
So at the end of a month, or nearly, Bayta was able to survey the red line that wormed its way through the ship's trimensional model of the Galactic Lens halfway to its center, and say with Satiric relish, "You know what it looks like. It looks like a ten-foot earth-worm with a terrific case of indigestion. Eventually, you'll land us back in Haven."
"I will," growled Toran, with a fierce rustle of his chart, "if you don't shut up."