The officer roared something at his men. They rose up– good lord! They were going to charge!

Before Dunneldeen could make his firing pass, the downslope was loaded with charging, shouting Russians. They were angry, beserk! They stopped, fired, ran, stopped, fired!

The slope was a roaring sheet of flame going both up and down!

Psychlos tried to stem this avalanche of ferocity. Assault rifles were hammering and flaming.

Blast guns were roaring. Dunneldeen, unable to shoot without killing Russians, hung helplessly in despair. One pass and those Psychlos would be knocked into unconsciousness.

The Russians were in among the Psychlos, firing ceaselessly!

The remaining Psychlos tried to run back to their vehicles. The Russians were right on top of them!

Huge bodies went tumbling down the slope. Isolated groups tried to stand their ground. Assault rifles racketed into solid sheets of sound. Then one last Psychlo almost made it to the cab of a truck. A Russian knelt, sighted, and cut him in two.

A cheer went up from the Russians. The slope went quiet. Jonnie surveyed the ruin.

Over a hundred Psychlo bodies. Three dead Russians.

Smoke drifting up from clothing that still burned.

Disaster! They had been there to capture Psychlos!

Jonnie went plunging down the slope. He found the Russian officer standing there, obviously intending to shoot any Psychlo that twitched.

“Find some alive!” Jonnie shouted at him. “Don't finish off the wounded. Find some alive!”

The Russian looked at him with battle-glazed eyes. Seeing it was Jonnie, he began to unwind a bit. He fished about for some English. “That show Psychlo! They kill colonel!”

Jonnie finally got it across that he wanted them to find any live ones. Neither the officers nor the rest of the Russians thought this very sensible. They did finally understand it. They went poking among the recumbent Psychlos to find any that were still breathing, a fact that could be determined by a flutter of a breathe-mask valve.

They finally located about four that were shot up but still alive. They couldn't move the thousand-pound bodies very much but they straightened them out.

MacKendrick put in an appearance, walking, half-sliding down the slope. He looked at the four and shook his head. “Maybe. I don't know much about Psychlo anatomy but I can stop that green blood oozing out.”

One of them had a different tunic from the rest. An engineer? “Do all you can!” he told MacKendrick and hobbled up the slope toward the ambush point.

Bittie was beckoning to him from the top of a rock, then scrambled down and vanished behind it.

Jonnie came up and surveyed the scene. The command post they had chosen was a hollow in the rocks and it was a mess. The Basher tank had scored a hit just above it.

The gear was all smashed up. Their radio was in bits.

Bittie was kneeling beside Sir Robert, lifting his head. The old veteran's eyes were blinking. He was coming to.

They were stunned with concussion. Some blood was coming out of their ears and noses. Jonnie walked closer. Probably some broken fingers, lots of bruises. None of it serious.

With water from a canteen on a bandana, he went about the work of bringing them around. Robert the Fox,

Colonel Ivan, two Coordinators, and a Scot radioman.

Jonnie clambered up on a rock and looked down the defile. The convoy was all there. Nothing had blown up so the Russians must have been using plain, not radioactive, slugs. But they hadn't been after the material. They'd been after live Psychlos.

Three Russians and Angus were getting the lead Basher tank open, a trick to do for it was upside-down, which sealed its hatches. Angus got a side port open with a torch. The Russians looked in. Jonnie cupped his hands. “Any alive in there?”

Angus saw him up there, looked into the tank and back up to Jonnie: Angus shook his head negatively. He called back, “Crushed and suffocated!”

Sir Robert had made his way up to Jonnie, very shaky and white of face.

Jonnie looked at him.

Sir Robert started to speak and Jonnie joined him in chorus.

“The best-planned raid in history!”

It took them three hard-working days to clean up the mess and occupy the Lake Victoria minesite.

The ore road had gone south to skirt the mountain ranges and turned back north to the minesite itself.

In full view when the overcast parted, to the northwest of the minesite, were the Mountains of the Moon. It was a long range that contained at least seven peaks up to sixteen thousand feet high. Right here on the equator, in all this heat and humidity, one didn't look for snow and ice, but there it was atop those peaks. There were even glaciers up there; now and then the towering tops were briefly visible, blazingly white.

At one time this range had been the border between two or three countries of ancient times. At the period of the Psychlo invasion or perhaps before, the passes had been mined with nuclear tactical weapons. Needless to say, close as the mountains were to the minesite, the Psychlos never went there. There were several small tribes in the Mountains of the Moon, brown and black and even some whites remaining; they were often starved despite the teeming forests and savannahs full of game below them, and although they could come down now, long tradition kept them from approaching the minesite.

An ancient dam the man-maps said was the “Owens Falls Dam” provided power for the minesite, power so plentiful that the Psychlos just left all lights blazing.

This was an extensive minesite with seven underground levels and many branches working for tungsten and cobalt, and it was plentifully supplied with machinery and equipment. But MacArdle in his original raid had blown up their fuel and ammunition plant and all their dumps.

The four wounded Psychlos were in a sealed-off section of the dormitory and breathe-gas was pumping into it. MacKendrick did not have much hope for them but he was working on it.

The problem of the other bodies they had solved. There was no morgue, and fighting time in this equatorial heat, they had hastily gotten forklifts and ore freighters from the minesite and lofted the Psychlo bodies up through the clouds to the freezing temperatures and crusted ice and snow of a mountain peak once called, the man-maps said, "Elgon." They were up there now, ninety-seven bodies, around a thousand pounds each, neatly laid out in the frigid zone.

“We may have no diplomas,”

Dunneldean had said when they finished, “but it would seem we are pretty good Psychlo undertakers!” And then he looked down from the dizzy altitude to the plains below and added, “Or is it overtakers?" The Scots scorned his joke, it was so terrible.

They had opened up the road with blade scrapers and righted the Basher tank with a crane and driven the vehicles the rest of the way to the minesite. Despite company regulations they stored the fuel, ammunition, and breathe-gas underground out of the way of attack. They were experts in attacking such dumps.

Thor had come back to help them. He said some of the people in the tribes had seen the flashes of the battle and when they heard the last Psychlos were mopped up they had named the day the Tyler Battle day. Thor had flown a hunting party down to the savannah and they had come back with game and there had been a lot of feasting and dancing. “It is sometimes very gratifying, Jonnie, to be taken for you! But I had to disappear during the battle. You can't be in two places at once.” Thor had spotted the convoy exit from the forest and had discreetly stood by at two hundred thousand feet to assist if needed. He had full picto-recorder discs of the whole battle and was surprised that nobody wanted to see them.