tevens flashed on his ultra-violet projector and swung it into the
thickest ranks of the enemy. In the beam many of the monsters died,
but the Terrestrial ray was impotent compared with the weapons of the
Titanians, and Stevens, snapping off the beam with a bitter imprecation,
shot the visiray out toward the bare, black cone of the extinct volcano
and studied it with care.

"Barkovis, I've got a thought!" he snapped into the microphone. "Their
stronghold is in that mountain, and there's millions of them in there
yet, coming out along their tunnels. They've got all the vegetation
eaten away for miles, so there's nothing much left there to spread a
fire if I go to work on that hill, and, I'll probably melt enough water
to put out most of the fires I start. Detail me a couple of ships to
drop your fire-foam bombs on any little blazes that may spread, and I'll
give them so much to worry about at home, that they'll forget all about
Titania."

The _Forlorn Hope_ darted toward the crater, followed closely by two of
the dazzling globes. They circled the mountain until Stevens found a
favorable point of attack--a stupendous vertical cliff of mingled rock
and crystal, upon the base of which he trained his terrific infra-red
projector.

"I'm going to draw a lot of power," he warned the Titanians then. "I'm
giving this gun everything she'll take."

He drove the massive switches in, and as that dull red beam struck the
cliff's base there was made evident the awful effect of a concentrated
beam of real and pure heat upon such an utterly frigid world. Vast
columns of fire roared aloft, helping Stevens, melting and destroying
the very ground as the bodies of the Sedlor in that gigantic ant-heap
burst into flames. Clouds of superheated steam roared upward, condensing
into a hot rain which descended in destructive torrents upon the
fastnesses of the centipedes. As the raging beam ate deeper and deeper
into the base of the cliff, the mountain itself began to disintegrate;
block after gigantic block breaking off and crashing down into the
flaming, boiling, seething cauldron which was the apex of that ravening
beam.

Hour after hour Stevens drove his intolerable weapon into the great
mountain, teeming with Sedlorean life; and hour after hour a group of
Titanian spheres stood by, deluging the surrounding plain with a flood
of heavy fumes, through which the holocaust could not spread for lack of
oxygen. Not until the mountain was gone--