t struck the fort--and the fort recoiled under its
energy. The marvelous new tubes that ran its ray screen flashed
instantly to a temperature inconceivable, and, so long as the elements
embedded in the infusible relux remained the metals they were, those
tubes could not fail. But they were being lashed by the energy of half a
sun. The tubes failed. The elements heated to that enormous temperature
when elements cannot exist--and broke to other elements that did not
resist. The relux flashed into blinding iridescence--

And from the fort came a beam of pure silvery light. It struck the
_Thought_ just behind the bow, for the operator was aiming for the point
where he knew the control room and pilot must be. But Arcot had designed
the ship for mental control, which the enemy operator could not guess.
The beam was a flat beam, perhaps an inch thick, but it fanned out to
fifty feet width. And where it touched the _Thought_, there was a
terrific explosion, and inconceivably violent energy lashed out as the
cosmium instantaneously liberated its energy.

A hundred feet of the nose was torn off the ship, and the enormously
dense air of Thett rushed in. But that beam had cut through the very
edge of one of the ray projectors, or better, one of the ray feed
apparatus. And the ray feed released it without control; it released all
the energy it could suck in from space about it, as one single beam of
cosmic energy, somewhat lower than the regular cosmics, and it flashed
out in a beam as solid matter.

There was air about the ship, and the air instantly exploded into atoms
of a different sort, threw off their electrons, and were raised to the
temperature at which no atom can exist, and became protons and
electrons. But so rapidly was that coil sucking energy from space that
space tended to close in about it, and in enormous spurts the energy
flooded out. It was directed almost straight up, and but one ship was
caught in its beam. It was made of relux, but the relux was powdered
under the inconceivable blow that countless quintillions of cosmic ray
photons struck it. That ray was in fact, a solid mass of cosmium moving
with the velocity of light. And it was headed for that satellite of
Thett, which it would reach in a few hours time.

The _Thought_, due to the spatial strains of the wounded coil, was
constantly rushing away to an almost infinite distance, as the ship
approached that other space toward which the coil tended with its