ostigan picked up
the projector, again donned his spy-ray goggles, and the two hurried on.

"Nice work, Chief--it must be a gift to rough-house the way you do,"
Bradley exclaimed. "That's why you took the live one?"

"Practice helps some, too! I've been in brawls before, and I'm a lot
younger and maybe some faster than you are," Costigan explained briefly,
penetrant gaze rigidly to the fore as they ran along one corridor after
another.

Several more guards, both living and mechanical, were encountered on the
way, but they were not permitted to offer any opposition. Costigan saw
them first. In the furious beam of the projector of the dead pirate they
were riven into nothingness, and the two officers sped on to the room
which Costigan had located from afar. The three suits of Triplanetary
space armor had been sealed into a cabinet whose doors Costigan
literally blew off with a blast of force, rather than consume time in
tracing the power leads.

"I feel like something now!" Costigan, once more encased in his own
armor, heaved a great sigh of relief. "Rough-and-tumble's all right with
one or two, but that generator room is full of grief, and we won't have
any too much stuff as it is. We've got to take Clio's suit along--we'll
carry it down to the door of the power room, drop it there, and pick it
up after we've wrecked the works."

Contemptuous now of possible guards, the armored pair strode toward the
room which housed the pulsating heart of the immense fortress of space.
Guards were encountered, and captains--officers who signaled frantically
to their chief, since he alone could unleash the frightful forces at his
command, and who profanely wondered at his unwonted silence--but the
enemy beams were impotent against the mighty ether-walls of that armor;
and the pirates, without armor in the security of their own planet as
they were, vanished utterly in the ravening beams of the twin Lewistons.
As they paused before the door of the power room, both men felt Clio's
voice raised in her first and last appeal, an appeal wrung from her
against her will by the extremity of her position.

"Conway! Hurry! Oh, hurry! I can't last much longer--good-bye, dear!" In
the horror-filled tones both men read clearly the girl's dire extremity.
Each saw plainly a happy, care-free young earth girl, upon her first
trip into space, locked inside an ether-wall with an over-brained,
under-conscienced human machine--a super-intelligent but le