ce.

As the _Skylark_ leaped away, Seaton focussed an attractor upon the one
who had apparently signaled the attack. Rolling the vessel over in a
short loop, so that the captive was hurled off into space upon the other
side, he snatched the tube from the figure's grasp with one auxiliary
attractor, and anchored head and limbs with others, so that the prisoner
could scarcely move a muscle. Then, while Crane and the women scrambled
up off the floor and hurried to the visiplates, Seaton cut in rays six,
two-seven, and five-eight. Ray six, "the softener," was a band of
frequencies extending from violet far up into the ultra-violet. When
driven with sufficient power, this ray destroyed eyesight and nervous
tissue, and its power increased still further, actually loosened the
molecular structure of matter. Ray two-seven was operated in a range of
frequencies far below the visible red. It was pure heat--under its
action matter became hotter and hotter as long as it was applied, the
upper limit being only the theoretical maximum of temperature. Ray
five-eight was high-tension, high-frequency alternating current. Any
conductor in its path behaved precisely as it would in the Ajax-Northrup
induction furnace, which can boil platinum in ten seconds! These three
rays composed the beam which Seaton directed upon the mass of metal from
which the enemy had elected to continue the battle--and behind each ray,
instead of the small energy at the command of its Osnomian inventor,
were the untold millions of kilowatts developed by a one-hundred-pound
bar of disintegrating copper!

* * * * *

There ensued a brief but appalling demonstration of the terrible
effectiveness of those Osnomian weapons against anything not protected
by ultra-powered ray screens. Metal and men--if men they were--literally
vanished. One moment they were outlined starkly in the beam; there was a
moment of searing, coruscating, blinding light--the next moment the beam
bored on into the void, unimpeded. Nothing was visible save an
occasional tiny flash, as some condensed or solidified droplet of the
volatilized metal re-entered the path of that ravening beam.

"We'll see if there's any more of them loose," Seaton remarked, as he
shut off the force and probed into the wreckage with a searchlight.

No sign of life or of activity was revealed, and the light was turned
upon the captive. He was held motionless in the invisible grip of the
a