't care if we do run the
batteries down some, but I don't want to hold that load on the bus-bars
very long. However, if my hunch is right, I won't be on that beam five
minutes before it's cut from Jupiter--and I'll bet you four dollars that
you won't see the original crew in that fort when you get into it."

He set upper and lower bands of dirigible projectors to apply a
powerful sidewise thrust, and the _Sirius_ darted off her course.
Flashing a minute pencil behind the huge heptagon, Brandon manipulated
his tuning circuits until a brilliant spot in space showed him that he
was approaching resonance with the heptagon's power beam. Micrometer
dials were then engaged and the delicate tuning continued until the
meters gave evidence that the two beams were precisely synchronized and
exactly opposite in phase. Four plunger switches closed, that tiny pilot
ray became an enormous rod of force, and as those two gigantic beams met
in exact opposition and neutralized each other, a solid wall of blinding
brilliance appeared in the empty ether behind the Vorkulian fortress. As
that dazzling wall sprang into being, the sparkling green protection
died from the walls of the heptagon.

"Go to it, Quince!" Brandon yelled, but the suggestion was entirely
superfluous. Even before the wall-screen had died, Westfall's beam was
trying to get through it, and when the visiray revealed the interior of
the heptagon, the quiet and methodical physicist was shaken from his
habitual calm.

"Why, they aren't the winged monsters at all--they're _hexans_!"
he exclaimed.

"Sure they are." Brandon did not even turn his heavily-goggled eyes
from the blazing blankness of his own screen. "That was my hunch. Those
snakes went about things in a business-like fashion. They didn't strike
me as being folks who would pull off such a wild stunt as trying to
chase us clear out of the solar system, but a gang of hexans would do
just that. Some of them must have captured that ship and, already having
it in their cock-eyed brains that we were back of what happened on
Callisto, they decided to bump us off if it was the last thing they ever
did. That's what I'd do myself, if I were a hexan. Now I'll tell you
what's happening back at the home power plant of that ship and what's
going to happen next. I'm kicking up a horrible row out there with my
interference, and a lot of instruments at the other end of that beam
must be cutting up all kinds of didoes, right now. T