d, his sinuous length coiled comfortably in slack loops about
two horizontal bars. But at least one enormous, extensible eye was
always pointed toward the board, always was at least one nimble and
bat-like ear cocked attentively in the direction of the signal panel.

A whistling, shrieking ululation rent the air and the officer's coils
tightened as he reared a few feet of his length upright, shooting out
half a dozen tentacular arms to various switches and controls upon his
board, while throughout the great heptagon, hundreds of other Vorkuls
sprang to attention at their assigned posts of duty. As the howling wail
came to a climax in a blast of sound Kromodeor threw over a lever, as
did every other projector officer in every other heptagon, and there was
made plain to any observer the reason for the burns and scars in the
tortured space between the lofty inner and outer walls of Vorkulia.
For these heptagons were the monstrous flying fortresses which Czuv
had occasionally seen from afar, as they went upon some unusual errand
above the Jovian banks of mist, and which Brandon was soon to see in
his visiray screen. The seared and disfigured metal of the pavement
and walls was made so by the release of the furious blasts of energy
necessary to raise those untold thousands of tons of mass against the
attraction of Jupiter, more than two and a half times the gravity of our
own world! Vast volumes of flaming energy shrieked from the ports. Wave
upon wave, flooding the heptagons, it dashed back and forth upon the
heavy metal between the walls. As more and more of the inconceivable
power of those Titanic generators was unleashed, it boiled forth in
a devastating flood which, striking the walls, rebounded and leaped
vertically far above even those mighty ramparts. Even the enormous
thickness of the highly conducting metal could not absorb all the
energy of that intolerable blast, and immediately beneath the ports new
seven-pointed areas of disfigurement appeared as those terrific flying
fortresses were finally wrenched from the ground and hurled upward.

* * * * *

High in the air, another signal wailed up and down a peculiar scale of
sound and the mighty host of vessels formed smoothly into symmetrical
groups of seven. Each group then moved with mathematical precision into
its allotted position in a complex geometrical formation--a gigantic,
seven-ribbed, duplex cone in space. The flagship flew at