their magnetic shield, and some of the magnetic bombs tore and
twisted viciously at the heavy metal walls. The thin atmosphere of Mars
leaked in. Grimly the men waited. Atomic bombs--or ships to investigate?
It did not matter much to them personally--

Gresth Gkae smiled with his old vigor as he ordered one of the great
interstellar ships to land beside the powerless station, approaching
from such an angle that the still-active Mars Center station could not
attack. One of the fleet of Phobos rose, and circled about the planet,
and settled gracefully beside the station. For half an hour it lay there
quietly, waiting and watching. Then a crew of two dozen Mirans started
across the dry, crumbly powder of Mars' sands, toward the fort.
Simultaneously almost, three things happened. A three-foot UV beam wiped
out the advancing party. A pair of fifteen-foot beams cut a great gaping
hole in the wall of the interstellar ship, as it darted up, like a
startled quail, its weapons roaring defiance, only to fall back,
severely wounded.

And the radio messages pounded out to Earth the first description of the
Miran people. Methodically the men in Deenmor station used all but one
ton of their power to completely and forever wreck and destroy the
interstellar cripple that floundered for a few moments on the sands a
bare mile away. Presently, before Deenmor was through with it, the
atomic bombs stopped coming, and the atomic shells. The magnetic shield
that had been re-established for the few minutes of this last, dying
sting, fell.

Deenmor station vanished in a sudden, colossal tongue of blue-green
light as the ton of atomically distorted mercury was exploded by a
projector beam turned on the tank.

* * * * *

It was long gone, when the first atomic bombs and magnetic bombs dropped
from Phobos reached the spot, and only hot rock and broken metal
remained.

Mars Center failed in fact the next time Phobos rode high over it. The
apparatus here had been carefully destroyed by technicians with a view
of making it indecipherable, but the Mirans made it even more certain,
for no ship settled here to investigate, but a stream of atomic bombs
that lasted for over an hour, and churned the rock to dust, and the dust
to molten lava, in which pools of fused tungsten-beryllium alloy bubbled
slowly and sank.

"Ah, Jarth--they are a brave race, whatever we may say of their queer
shape," sighed Gresth Gkae as the