ng forward and
upward with maximum acceleration, screaming bolts of energy flaming out
for miles behind each heptagon as the full power of its generators was
unleashed--it was made clear that the homeland of the hexans was far
from unprotected. The verdant plain disappeared in a blast of radiance,
revealing a transparent surface, through which could be seen masses of
machinery filling level below level, deep into the ground as far as the
eye could reach; and from the bright liquid of the girdling moat there
shot vertically upward a coruscantly refulgent band of intense yellow
luminescence. These were the hexan defences, heretofore invulnerable and
invincible. Against them any ordinary warcraft, equipped with ordinary
weapons of offense, would have been as pitifully impotent as a naked
baby attacking a battleship. But now those defenses were being
challenged by no ordinary craft; it had taken the mightiest intellects
of Vorkulia two long lifetimes to evolve the awful engine of destruction
which was hurling itself forward and upward with an already terrific and
constantly increasing speed.

Onward and upward flashed the gigantic duplex cone, its entire whirling
mass laced and latticed together--into one mammoth unit by green tractor
beams and red pressors. These tension and compression members, of
unheard-of power, made of the whole fleet of three hundred forty-three
fortresses a single stupendous structure--a structure with all the
strength and symmetry of a cantilever truss! Straight through that wall
of yellow vibrations the vast truss drove, green walls flaming blue
defiance as the absorbers overloaded; its doubly braced tip rearing
upward, into and beyond the vertical as it shot through that searing
yellow wall. Simultaneously from each heptagon there flamed downward a
green shaft of radiance, so that the whole immense circle of the cone's
mouth was one solid tractor beam, fastening upon and holding in an
unbreakable grip mile upon mile of the hexan earthworks.

Practically irresistible force and supposedly immovable object!
Every loose article in every heptagon had long since been stored in
its individual shockproof compartment, and now every Vorkul coiled his
entire body in fierce clasp about mighty horizontal bars: for the entire
kinetic energy of the untold millions of tons of mass comprising the
cone, at the terrific measure of its highest possible velocity, was
to be hurled upon those unbreakable linkages of f