"For two years, Carl, that mass of merbohydrate was on an orbit about the sun. Every once in a while I'd come out and add more to the main mass. Today I figured I had enough. I hauled it out of its orbit, took it as close as I could to the sun. Right smack to the edge of the boiling zone. Then I gave it a running start and let go. The sun and the merbohydrate will meet at the convergence of their trajectories."
It was hotter as they moved toward the sun. Carl was sopping. The very air danced. Under him the chair was beginning to burn him. The cosmic bomb was a full three hundred thousand miles inside the boiling zone. Carl could never catch up with it. He wordlessly banked the ship in a long half-circle that put it a hundred miles inside the boiling zone, and then on the road out.
He poured in every ounce of power he could, while thoughts zig-zagged crazily in his head. He had gone beyond rage. He had ascended the scale of human emotion and he was numb.
When the ship was near Worta, he turned on Rex. "What," he said, "do you expect to gain by this?"
A simmering violence burst in Rex's eyes. His muscles bulged against his bonds. "The Wortans!" he mimicked. "The Wortans! If you love those Wortans so much why don't you plan to live with them the rest of your life? They never did like me, and that goes double."
Carl said gently, "You don't murder people you don't like."
"Murder?" the word came sharply. He relaxed. "They don't use their sun. They won't miss it."
Rex looked at him. Then his eyes shifted. He muttered, "The explosion won't touch Worta. Too far away."
Carl said, "The explosion will rip that planet crossways and endways. It'll turn it inside out. It'll tear it up into little pin-size lumps, roast and boil the lumps, and dissipate the lumps into gases made of dancing free electrons. That big gob of gas will puff itself out over a few light-years of space, and that will be the end of Worta. Maybe you didn't think of that. Or maybe you convinced yourself it wouldn't happen."
A trapped expression grew on Rex's face. "It _won't_ happen!" he shouted. He screamed, "Let me alone! Stop badgering me! You can't change anything. I didn't know if it'd hurt Worta or not. I didn't care any more. I came back to Worta to get you, just in case something happened I didn't figure on. All I cared about was getting home. I want to go home!"