ssible strength, toughness, and
resistance, that frightful beam drove before the automatically-reacting
detector closed the slit and the impregnable defensive screens, driven
by their mighty uranium bars, flared into incandescent defense. Driven
as they were, they held, and the Fenachrone, finding that particular
attack useless, shut off their power.

"Wow! They sure have got something!" Seaton exclaimed in unfeigned
admiration. "They sure gave us a solid kick that time! We will now take
time out for repairs. Also, I'm going to cut our slit down to a width of
one kilocycle, if I can possibly figure out a way of working on that
narrow a band, and I'm going to step up our shifting speed to a hundred
thousand. It's a good thing they built this ship of ours in a lot of
layers--if that'd go through the interior we would have been punctured
for fair. You might weld up those holes, Mart, while I see what I can do
here."

Then Seaton noticed the women, white and trembling, upon a seat.

"'Smatter? Cheer up, kids, you ain't seen nothing yet. That was just a
couple of little preliminary love-taps, like two boxers kinda feeling
each other out in the first ten seconds of the first round."

"Preliminary love-taps!" repeated Dorothy, looking into Seaton's eyes
and being reassured by the serene confidence she read there. "But they
hit us, and hurt us badly--why, there's a hole in our _Skylark_ as big
as a house, and it goes through four or five layers!"

"Yes, but we're not hurt a bit. They're easily fixed, and we've lost
nothing but a few tons of inoson and uranium. We've got lots of spare
metal. I don't know what I did to him, any more than he knows what he
did to us, but I'll bet my other shirt that he knows he's been nudged!"

Repairs completed and the changes made in the method of projection,
Seaton actuated the rapidly-shifting slit and peered through it at the
enemy vessel. Finding their screens still up, he directed a
complete-coverage attack upon them with four bars, while with the entire
massed power of the remaining generators concentrated into one
frequency, he shifted that frequency up and down the spectrum, probing,
probing, ever probing with that gigantic beam of intolerable
energy--feeling for some crack, however slight, into which he could
insert that searing sheet of concentrated destruction. Although much of
the available power of the Fenachrone was perforce devoted to repelling
the continuous attack of the Te