familiar to you! You have it? You can fight it?"
asked Zezdon Afthen excitedly.

"We know it, and can fight it, if that is all they have."

"They have more--much more I fear," replied Zezdon Afthen. "At any rate,
we saw what they intended. If our world was inhabited, they would
destroy every one on it, and then other men of their race were to float
in on their great ships, and settle on that largest of our worlds.

"We had to stop them so we did what we could. We had powerful machines,
which would amplify and broadcast our thoughts. So we broadcast our
thought-waves, and implanted in the mind of their leader that it would
be wise to land, and learn the extent of the civilization, and the
weapons to be met. Also, as the ship drew nearer, we made him decide on
a certain spot we had prepared for him.

"He never guessed that the thoughts were not his own. Only the ideas
came to him, seeming to spring from his own mind.

"He landed--and we used our one weapon. It was a thing left to one group
of rulers when the Ancient Masters left us to care for ourselves. What
it was, we never knew; we had never used it in the fifteen thousand
years since the Great Masters had passed--never had to. But now it was
brought out, and concealed behind great piles of rock in a deep canyon
where the ship of the enemy would land. When it landed, we turned the
beam of the machine on it, and the apparatus rotated it swiftly, and a
cone of the beam's ray was formed as the beam was swung through a small
circle in the vertical plane. The machine leaped backward, and though it
was so massive that a tremendous amount of labor had been required to
bring it there, the push of the pencil of force we sent out hurled it
back against a rocky cliff behind it as though it were some child's toy.
It continued to operate for perhaps a second, perhaps two. In that time
two great holes had been cut in the enemy ship, holes fifteen feet
across, that ran completely through the hull as though a die had cut
through the metal of the ship, cutting out a disc of metal.

"There was a terrific concussion, and a roar as the air blasted out of
the ship. It did not take us long to discover that the enemy were dead.
Their terrible, bloated corpses lay everywhere in the ship. Most of the
men we were able to recognize, having seen them in the mentovisor. But
the colors were distorted, and their forms were peculiar. Indeed, the
whole ship seemed strange. The only time that thi