of light, and a roar as the soil below spouted up,
the station was gone. It had failed.

Instantly the ring of ships expanded as the great screen was weakened by
the withdrawal of this support. Wider was the path of destruction now as
the forces moved on.

But high, high in the sky, far out of sight of the naked eye, was a tiny
spot that was in reality a giant ship. It was flashing forward, and in
moments it was visible. Then, as another deserted city vanished, it was
above the Thessian fleet.

Their rays were directed downward through a hole that was even larger. A
second station had gone with that city. But, as by magic, the hole
closed up, and chopped their rays off with a decisiveness that startled
them. The interference was so sharp now that not even the dullest of
reds showed where their beams touched. The close interference was giving
off only radio! In amazement they looked for this new station of such
enormous power that their combined rays did not noticeably affect it. A
world had been fighting their rays unsuccessfully. What single station
could do this, if the many stations of the world could not? There was
but one they knew of, and they turned now to search for the ship they
knew must be there.

"No horrors this time; just clean, burning energy," muttered Arcot.

It was clean, and it was burning. In an instant one of the forts was a
mass of opalescence that shifted so swiftly it was purest white, then
rocketed away, lifeless, and no longer relux.

The other fort had its screen up, though its power, designed to
withstand the attack of a fleet of enormous intergalactic,
matter-driven, fighting ships lasted but an instant under the driving
power of half a million million suns, concentrated in one enormous ray
of energy. The sheer energy of the ray itself, molecular ray though it
was, heated the material it struck to blinding incandescence even as it
hurled it at a velocity close to that of light into outer space. With
little sparkling flashes battleships of the void after giant cruisers
flashed into lux, and vanished under the ray.

A tremendous combined ray of magnetism and cosmic ray energy replaced
the molecular, and the ships exploded into a dust as fine as the
primeval gas from which came all matter.

Sweeping energy, so enormous that the defenses of the ships did not even
operate against it, shattered ship after ship, till the few that
remained turned, and, faster than the pursuing energies coul