e generators, and only the two were needed for any number
of ships drawing power from the station, providing their protection was
rugged enough to stand the strain.

Actually, they were isolated in vast spherical steel chambers with thick
walls, so that nothing but air pressure would be hurled against them,
and this, of course, would be self-neutralizing, coming as it did from
all directions.

The "sub-disintegrator power" reached the ships as an ordinary broadcast
reception at a negligible amperage, but from one to 500 "quints"
(quintillions) voltage, controllable only by the fields of the _"B"
ionomagnetic_ coils. It had a wave-length of about ten meters. In the
_dis_ ray generator, this wave-length was broken up into an almost
unbelievably high frequency, and became a directionally controlled wave
of an infinitesimal fraction of an inch. This wave-length, actually
identical with the diameter of an electron, that is to say, being
accurately "tuned" to an electron, disrupted the orbital paths and
balanced pulsations of the electrons within the atom, so desynchronizing
them as to destroy polarity balance of the atom and causing it to cease
to exist as an atom. It was in this way that the ray reduced matter to
"nothingness."

This destruction of the atom, and a limited power for its reconstruction
under certain conditions, marked the utmost progress of the Han science.

CHAPTER V

American Ultronic Science

Our own engineers, working in shielded laboratories far underground, had
established such control over the "de-atomized" electrons as to dissect
them in their turn into _sub-electrons_. Moreover, they had carried
through the study of this "order" to the point where they finally
"dissected" the _sub-electron_ into its component _ultrons_, for the
fundamental laws underlying these successive orders are not radically
dissimilar. And as they progressed, they developed constructive as well
as destructive practice. Hence the great triumphs of ultron and
inertron, our two wonderful synthetic elements, built up from
super-balanced and sub-balanced ultronic whorls, through the
_sub-electronic_ order into the _atomic_ and _molecular_.

Hence also, come our relatively simple and beautifully efficient
ultrophones and ultroscopes, which in their phonic and visual operation
penetrate obstacles of material, electronic and sub-electronic nature
without let or hindrance, and with the consumption of but infinitesimal
p