onverted field, and into the cosmium, he forced some light photons,
half bound, half free. The fixture he formed into the letters, and
welded forever on the gigantic prow of the ship, and on its huge sides.
_Thought_, it stood in letters ten feet high, made of clear transparent
cosmium, and the golden light photons, imprisoned in it, the slowly
disintegrating lux metal, would cause those letters to shine for
countless aeons with the steady golden light they now had.

The _Thought_ continued on now, and as they slowed their progress for
Ortol, they saw that messengers of Thett had barely arrived. The fort
here too had been razed to the ground, and now they were concentrating
over the largest city of Ortol. Their rays were beating down on the
great ray screen that terrestrial engineers had set up, protecting the
city, as Earth had been protected. But the fleet that stood guard was
small, and was rapidly being destroyed. A fort broke free, and plunged
at last for the ray screen. Its relux walls glowed a thousand colors as
the tremendous energy of the ray-screen struck them--but it was through!

A molecular ray reached down for the city--and stopped halfway in a
tremendous coruscating burst of light and energy. Yet there was none of
the sheen of the ray screen. Merely light.

The fort was still driving downward. Then suddenly it stopped, and the
side dented in like the side of a can some one has stepped on, and it
came to sudden rest against an invisible, impenetrable barrier. A
molecular reached down from somewhere in space, hit the ray screen of
Ortol, which the Thessians had attacked for hours, and the screen
flashed into sudden brilliance, and disappeared. The ray struck the
Thessian fort, and the fort burst into tremendous opalescence, while the
invisible barrier the ray had struck was suddenly a great sheet of
flaming light. In less than half a second the opalescence was gone, the
fort shuddered, and shrieked out of the planet's atmosphere, a mass of
lux now, and susceptible to the moleculars. And everything that lived
within that fort had died instantly and painlessly.

The fleet which had been preparing to follow the leading fort was
suddenly stopped; it halted indecisively.

Then the _Thought_ became visible as its great golden letters showed
suddenly, streaking up from distant space. Every ship turned cosmic and
moleculars on it. The cosmic rebounded from the cosmium walls, and from
the artificial matter that