han ours, Dick?" Dorothy asked
curiously. "I thought you said we had the very last word in rays."

"I thought we had, but those birds we met back there spoke a couple of
later words. Their rays work on an entirely different system than the
one we use. They generate an extremely short carrier wave, like the
Millikan cosmic ray, by recombining some of the electrons and protons of
their disintegrating metal, and upon this wave they impose a pure heat
frequency of terrific power. The Millikan rays will penetrate anything
except a special ray screen or a zone of force, and carry with
them--somewhat as radio frequencies carry sound frequencies--the heat
rays, which volatilize anything they touch. Their ray screens are a lot
better than ours, too--they generate the entire spectrum. It's a sweet
system and when we revamp ours so as to be just like it, we'll be able
to talk turkey to those folks on the third planet."

"How long will it take you to build it?" asked Crane, who, dexterously
turning the pages of "Vega's Handbuch" was calculating their course.

"A day or so--maybe less. I've got all the stuff and with my Osnomian
tools it won't take long. If you find you'll get there before I get
done, you'll have to loaf a while--kill a little time."

"Are you going to connect the power plant to operate on the entire
vessel and all its contents?"

"No--can't do it without redesigning the whole thing and that's hardly
worth while for the short time we'll use this old bus."

Building those generators would have been a long and difficult task for
a corps of earthly mechanics and electricians, but to Seaton it was
merely a job. The "shop" had been enlarged and had been filled to
capacity with Osnomian machinery; machine tools that were capable of
performing automatically and with the utmost precision and speed any
conceivable mechanical operation. He put a dozen of them to work, and
before the vessel reached its destination, the new offensive and
defensive weapons had been installed and thoroughly tested. He had added
a third screen-generator, so that now, in addition to the four-foot hull
of arenak and the repellers, warding off any material projectile, the
Skylark was also protected by an outer, an intermediate, and an inner
ray-screen; each driven by the super-power of a four-hundred-pound bar
and each covering the entire spectrum--capable of neutralizing any
dangerous frequency known to those master-scientists, the Fenachrone.