n the giants.
Tremendous induction beams snapped out through the dark, star-flecked
space, to meet tremendous screens that threw them back and checked them.
Then all the awful power of annihilating matter was thrown against them,
and titanic flaming screens reeled back under the force of the beams,
and the screens of the ships from Outside flamed gradually violet, then
blue, orange--red--the interference was getting broader, and ever less
effective. Their own beams were held back by the very screens that
checked the enemy beams, and not for the briefest instant could matter
resist that terrible driving beam.

For F-1 had discovered a far more efficient release-generator than had
the Outsiders. These tiny dancing motes, that hung now so motionlessly
grim beside some giant ship, could generate all the power they
themselves were capable of, and within them strange, horny-skinned men
worked and slaved, as they fed giant machines--poor inefficient giants.
Gradually these giants warmed, grew hotter, and the screened ship grew
hotter as the overloaded generators warmed it. Billions of flaming
horse-power flared into wasted energy, twisting space in its mad
conflict.

Gradually the flaming orange of the screens was dying and flecks and
spots appeared so dully red, that they seemed black. The greenish beams
had been striving to kill the life that was in the machines, but it was
life invulnerable to these beams. Powerful radio interference vainly
attempted to stem imagined control, and still these intelligent machines
clung grimly on.

But there had not been quite ten thousand of the tiny machines, and some
few free ships had turned to the help of their attacked sister-ships.
And one after another the terrestrial machines were vanishing in puffs
of incandescent vapor.

Then--from one after another of the Earth-ships, in quick succession, a
new ray reached out--the ray of green radiance that killed all life
forms, and ship after ship of that interstellar host was dead and
lifeless. Dozens--till suddenly they ceased to feel those beams, as a
strange curtain of waving blankness spread out from the ships, and both
induction-beam and death-beam alike turned as aside, each becoming
useless. From the outsiders came beams, for now that their slowly
created screen of blankness was up, they could work through it, while
they remained shielded perfectly.

Now it was the screens of the Earth-machines that flamed in defense. As
at the o