THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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the time incredulously; the battle seemed to have been going on forever,
instead of just four hours?the /Lester Dawes/ had moved halfway around
the volcano and was almost due west of it, and the eight gunboats were
spaced all around the perimeter. Then one stopped transmitting; in the
other screens, there was a rising fireball where she had been. The radio
was loud with verbal reports.

"/Poltergeist/," Zareff said, naming half a dozen names. One or two of
them had been schoolmates of Conn's at the Academy; he knew how he'd
feel about it later, but now it simply didn't register.

"They're launching missiles faster than we can shoot them down," he said.

"That's usually the beginning of the end," Zareff said. "I saw it happen
too often during the War. We've got to get inside that place. It's a lot
of harmless fun to send contragravity robots out to smash each other,
but it doesn't win battles. Battles are won by men, standing with their