ceed to Talso, as soon as possible. You might
send Fentes down in a shell of artificial matter," suggested Zezdon
Afthen.

"Which," said Arcot, after this had been done, and they were on their
way to Talso, "shows the danger of a mad _Thought_!"

Chapter XXI

THE POWER OF "_THE THOUGHT_"

But it seemed, or must have seemed to any infinite being capable of
watching it as it moved now, that the _Thought_ was a mad thought. With
the time control opened to the limit, and a touch of the space control,
it fled across the Universe at a velocity such as no other thing was
capable of.

One star--it flashed to a disc, loomed enormous--overpowering--then
suddenly they were flashing _through_ it! The enormous coils fed their
current into the space-coils and the time field, and the ship seemed to
twist and writhe in distorted space as the gravitational field of a
giant star, and a giant ship's space field fought for a fraction of time
so short as to be utterly below measurement. Then the ship was gone--and
behind it a star, the center of which had suddenly been hurled into
another space forever, as the counteracting, gravitational field of the
outer layers was removed for a moment, and only its own enormous density
affected space, writhed and collapsed upon itself, to explode into a
mighty sea of flames. Planets it formed, we know, by a process such as
can happen when only this man-made accident happens.

But the ship fled on, its great coils partly discharged, but still far
more charged than need be.

It was minutes to Talso where it had been hours with the _Ancient
Mariner_, but now they traveled with the speed of _Thought_!

Talso too was the scene of a battle, and more of a battle than Ortol had
been, for here where more powerful defensive forces had been active, the
Thessians had been more vengeful. All their remaining ships seemed
concentrated here. And the great molecular screen that terrestrian
engineers had flung up here had already fallen. Great holes had
opened in it, as two great forts, and a thousand ships, some mighty
battleships of the intergalactic spaces, some little scout cruisers,
had turned their rays on the struggling defensive machines. It had held
for hours, thanks to the tremendous tubes that Talso had in their
power-distribution stations, but in the end had fallen, but not before
many of their largest cities had been similarly defended, and the people
of the others had scattered broadcast.