great silver
ship land. He had been helping in the examination of the wrecked enemy
ships.

"Have they attacked anywhere else on the planet?" Arcot asked as he
opened the airlock.

Torlos nodded. "They hit five other cities, but they didn't use as big a
fleet as they did here. The plan of battle seems to have been for the
ships with the new weapons to hit here first and then hit each of the
other cities in turn. They didn't have enough to make a full-scale
attack; evidently, your presence here made them desperate.

"At any rate, the other cities were able to beat off the magnetic beam
ships with the projectors of molecular beams."

"Good," Arcot thought. "Then the Nansal-Sator war is practically over!"

XXIII

Richard Arcot stepped into the open airlock of the _Ancient Mariner_ and
walked down the corridor to the library. There, he found Fuller and Wade
battling silently over a game of chess and Morey relaxed in a chair with
a book in his hands.

"What a bunch of loafers," Arcot said acidly. "Don't you ever _do_
anything?"

"Sure," said Fuller. "The three of us have entered into a lifelong pact
with each other to refrain from using a certain weapon which would make
this war impossible for all time."

"What war?" Arcot wondered. "And what weapon?"

"This war," Wade grinned, pointing at the chess board. "We have agreed
absolutely never to read each other's minds while playing chess."

Morey lowered his book and looked at Arcot. "And just what have you been
so busy about?"

"I've been investigating the weapon on board the Satorian ships we
captured," Arcot told them. "Quite an interesting effect. The Nansalian
scientists and I have been analyzing the equipment for the past three
days.

"The Satorians found a way to cut off and direct an electrostatic field.
The energy required was tremendous, but they evidently separated the
charges on Sator and carried them along on the ships.

"You can see what would happen if a ship were charged negatively and the
ship next to it were charged positively! The magnitude of electrostatic
forces is terrific! If you put two ounces of iron ions, with a positive
charge, on the north pole, and an equivalent amount of chlorine ions,
negatively charged, on the south pole, the attraction, even across that
distance, would be three hundred and sixty tons!

"They located the negative charges on one ship and the positive charges
on the one next to it. Their mutual attracti