dead blackness, interested the Physicist
immensely.

The ship was a constant source of wonder to them all. They investigated
the laboratory and then went up to the second floor. Morey and Fuller
greeted them at the door, and each of the four Earthmen took a group
around the ship, explaining as they went.

The library was a point of great interest, exceeded only by the control
room. Arcot found some difficulty in taking care of all his visitors;
there were only four chairs in the control room. The Three could sit
down, but Arcot needed the fourth chair to pilot the ship. The rest of
the party had to hold on as best they could, which was not too difficult
for men of such physical strength; they were accustomed to high
accelerations in their elevators.

Morey, Wade, and Fuller strapped themselves into the seats at the ray
projectors at the sides and stern.

Arcot wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ship's armament
first, and then the maneuverability. He picked a barren hillside for the
first demonstration. It was a great rocky cliff, high above the timber
line, towering almost vertically a thousand feet above them.

Wade triggered his molecular projector, and a pale beam reached out
toward the cliff. Instantly, the cliff leaped ten miles into the air,
whining and roaring as it shot up through the atmosphere. Then it
started to fall. Heated by its motion through the air, it struck the
mountaintop as a mass of red hot rock which shattered into fragments
with a terrific roar! The rocks rolled and bounced down the
mountainside, their path traced by a line of steam clouds.

Then, at Arcot's order, the heat beams were all turned on the mountain
at full power. In less than a minute, the peak began to melt, sending
streamers of lava down the sides. The beams began to eat out a crater in
the center, where the rock began to boil furiously under the terrific
energy of the heat beams.

Then Arcot shut off the heat beams and turned on the molecular ray.

The molecules of the molten rock were traveling at high velocities--the
heat was terrific. Arcot could see that the rock was boiling quite
freely. When the molecular beam hit it, every one of those fast moving
molecules shot upward together! With the roar of a meteor, it plunged
toward space at five miles a second!

It had dropped to absolute zero when the beam hit it, but at that speed
through the air, it didn't stay cold long! Arcot followed it up in the
_Ancie