t could be driven,
close behind a widespread detector net. He soon found the enemy cruiser,
but so immense was the distance that it was impossible to hold the
projection anywhere in its neighborhood. They flashed beyond it and
through it and upon all sides of it, but the utmost delicacy of the
controls would not permit of holding even upon the immense bulk of the
vessel, to say nothing of holding upon such a relatively tiny object as
the power bar. As they flashed repeatedly through the warship, they saw
piecemeal and sketchily her formidable armament and the hundreds of men
of her crew, each man at battle station at the controls of some
frightful engine of destruction. Suddenly they were cut off as a screen
closed behind them--the Earth-men felt an instant of unreasoning terror
as it seemed that one-half of their peculiar dual personalities vanished
utterly. Seaton laughed.

"That was a funny sensation, wasn't it? It just means that they've
climbed a tree and pulled the tree up after them."

"I do not like the odds, Dick," Crane's face was grave. "They have many
hundreds of men, all trained; and we are only two. Yes, only one, for I
count for nothing at those controls."

"All the better, Mart. This board more than makes up the difference.
They've got a lot of stuff, of course, but they haven't got anything
like this control system. Their captain's got to issue orders, whereas
I've got everything right under my hands. Not so uneven as they think!"

* * * * *

Within battle range at last, Seaton hurled his utmost concentration of
direct forces, under the impact of which three courses of Fenachrone
defensive screen flared through the ultra-violet and went black. There
the massed direct attack was stopped--at what cost the enemy alone
knew--and the Fenachrone countered instantly and in a manner totally
unexpected. Through the narrow slit in the fifth-order screen through
which Seaton was operating, in the bare one-thousandth of a second that
it was open, so exactly synchronized and timed that the screens did not
even glow as it went through the narrow opening, a gigantic beam of
heterodyned force struck full upon the bow of the _Skylark_, near the
sharply-pointed prow, and the stubborn metal instantly flared blinding
white and exploded outward in puffs of incandescent gas under the awful
power of that Titanic thrust. Through four successive skins of inoson,
the theoretical ultimate of po