ng the power leads.

"I feel like something now!" Costigan, once more encased in his own
armor, heaved a great sigh of relief. "Rough-and-tumble's all right with
one or two, but that generator room is full of grief, and we won't have
any too much stuff as it is. We've got to take Clio's suit along--we'll
carry it down to the door of the power room, drop it there, and pick it
up on the way back."

Contemptuous now of possible guards, the armored pair strode toward the
power plant--the very heart of the immense fortress of space. Guards
were encountered, and captains--officers who signaled frantically to
their chief, since he alone could unleash the frightful forces at his
command, and who profanely wondered at his unwonted silence--but the
enemy beams were impotent against the ether walls of that armor; and the
pirates, without armor in the security of their own planetoid as they
were, vanished utterly in the ravening beams of the twin Lewistons. As
they paused before the door of the power room, both men felt Clio's
voice raised in her first and last appeal, an appeal wrung from her
against her will by the extremity of her position.

"Conway! Hurry! His eyes--they're tearing me apart! Hurry, dear!" In the
horror-filled tones both men read clearly--however inaccurately--the
girl's dire extremity. Each saw plainly a happy, carefree young
Earth-girl, upon her first trip into space, locked inside an ether-wall
with an over-brained, under-conscienced human machine--a
super-intelligent, but lecherous and unmoral mechanism of flesh and
blood, acknowledging no authority, ruled by nothing save his own
scientific drivings and the almost equally powerful urges of his desires
and passions! She must have fought with every resource at her command.
She must have wept and pleaded, stormed and raged, feigned submission
and played for time--and her torment had not touched in the slightest
degree the merciless and gloating brain of the being who called himself
Roger. Now his tantalizing, ruthless cat-play would be done, the
horrible gray-brown face would be close to hers--she wailed her final
despairing message to Costigan and attacked that hideous face with the
fury of a tigress.

Costigan bit off a bitter imprecation. "Hold him just a second longer,
sweetheart!" he cried, and the power room door vanished.

Through the great room the two Lewistons swept at full aperture and at
maximum power, two rapidly-opening fans of death and dest