ked around in
amazement for their opponent.

Arcot was heading for the magnetic force field which surrounded the city
when Torlos made a mistake. He turned the powerful heat beam downwards
and picked off an enemy battleship. It fell, a blazing wreck, but the
ray touched a building behind it, and the ionized air established a
conducting path between the ship and the planet.

The apparatus was not designed to make a planet invisible, but it made a
noble effort. As a result one of the tubes blew, and the _Ancient
Mariner_ was visible again. Arcot had no time to replace the tube; the
Satorian fleet kept him too busy.

Arcot drove the ship, shooting, twisting upward; Wade and Morey kept
firing the molecular beams with precision. The pale rays reached out to
touch the battleship, and wherever they touched, the ships went down in
wreckage, falling to the city below. In spite of the odds against it,
the _Ancient Mariner_ was giving a good account of itself.

And always, Arcot was working the ship toward the magnetic wall and the
base of the city.

Suddenly, giant pneumatic guns from below joined in the battle, hurling
huge explosive shells toward the Earth-ship. They managed to hit the
_Ancient Mariner_ twice, and each time the ship was staggered by the
force of the blast, but the foot-thick armor of lux metal ignored the
explosions.

The magnetic rays touched them a few times, and each time Torlos was
thrown violently to the floor, but the ship was in the path of the beams
for so short a time that he was not badly injured. He more than made up
for his injuries with the ray he used, and Morey was no mean gunner,
either, judging from the work he was doing.

Three ships attempted to commit suicide in their efforts to destroy the
Earthmen. They were only semi-successful; they managed to commit
suicide. In trying to crash into the ship, they were simply caught by
Morey's or Wade's molecular beam and thrown away. Morey actually
developed a use for them. He caught them in the beam and used them as
bullets to smash the other ships, throwing them about on the molecular
ray until they were too cold to move.

Arcot finally managed to reach the magnetic wall.

"Wade!" he called. "Get that projector building!"

A molecular beam reached down, and the black metal dome sailed high into
the sky, breaking the solidity of the magnetic wall. An instant later,
the _Ancient Mariner_ shot through the gap. In a few moments, they would
be