at the suits were not only absolute insulators against
electricity, heat, and sound, but were also ray-filters proof against
any harmful radiations. As each helmet was equipped with radiophones,
conversation was not interfered with in the least.

Rovol took up a tiny flash-pencil, and with it deftly cut off a bit of
Rovolon, almost microscopic in size. This he placed upon a great block
of burnished copper, and upon it played a force. As he manipulated two
levers, two more beams of force flattened out the particle of metal,
spread it out over the copper, and forced it into the surface of the
block until the thin coating was at every point in molecular contact
with the copper beneath it--a perfect job of plating, and one done in
the twinkling of an eye. He then cut out a piece of the treated copper
the size of a pea, and other forces rapidly built around it a structure
of coils and metallic tubes. This apparatus he suspended in the air at
the extremity of a small beam of force. The block of copper was next cut
in two, and Rovol's fingers moved rapidly over the keys of a machine
which resembled slightly an overgrown and exceedingly complicated
book-keeping machine. Streams and pencils of force flashed and crackled,
and Seaton saw raw materials transformed into a complete power-plant, in
its center the two-hundred-pound lump of plated copper, where an instant
before there had been only empty space upon the massive metal bench.
Rovol's hands moved rapidly from keys to dials and back, and suddenly a
zone of force, as large as a basketball appeared around the apparatus
poised in the air.

"But it'll fly off and we can't stop it with anything," Seaton
protested, and it did indeed dart rapidly upward.

The old man shook his head as he manipulated still more controls, and
Seaton gasped as nine stupendous beams of force hurled themselves upon
that brilliant spherical mirror of pure energy, seized it in mid-flight,
and shaped it resistlessly, under his bulging eyes, into a complex
geometrical figure of precisely the desired form.

Lurid violet light filled the room, and Seaton turned towards the bar.
That two-hundred-pound mass of copper was shrinking visibly, second by
second, so vast were the forces being drawn from it, and the searing,
blinding light would have been intolerable but for the protective
color-filters of his helmet. Tremendous flashes of lightning ripped and
tore from the relief-points of the bench to the ground-