ses. Still greater grew the
stream of force from the _Skylark_, and, now that the attack had ceased,
Seaton opened the slit wider and stopped its shifting, in order still
further to increase the efficiency of his terrible weapon. Face set in a
fighting mask and eyes hard as gray iron, deeper and deeper he drove his
now irresistible forces. His flying fingers were upon the keys of his
console; his keen and merciless eyes were in a secondary projector near
the now doomed ship of the Fenachrone, directing masterfully his
terrible attack. As the output of his generators still increased, Seaton
began to compress a searing hollow sphere of seething energy upon the
furiously-straining defensive screens of the Fenachrone. Course after
course of the heaviest possible screen was sent out, driven by massed
batteries of copper now disintegrating at the rate of tons in every
second, only to flare through the ultra-violet and to go down before
that dreadful, that irresistible onslaught. Finally, as the inexorable
sphere still contracted, the utmost efforts of the defenders could not
keep their screens away from their own vessel, and simultaneously the
prow and the stern of the Fenachrone cruiser was bared to that awful
field of force, in which no possible substance could endure for even the
most infinitesimal instant of time.

There was a sudden cessation of all resistance, and those Titanic
forces, all directed inward, converged upon a point with a power behind
which there was the inconceivable energy of four hundred thousand tons
of uranium, being disintegrated at the highest possible rate, short of
instant disruption. In that same instant of collapse, the enormous mass
of power-copper in the Fenachrone cruiser and the vessel's every atom,
alike of structure and contents, also exploded into pure energy at the
touch of that unimaginable field of force.

In that awful moment before Seaton could shut off his power it seemed to
him that space itself must be obliterated by the very concentration of
the unknowable and incalculable forces there unleashed--must be
swallowed up and lost in the utterly indescribable brilliance of the
field of radiance driven to a distance of millions upon incandescent
millions of miles from the place where the last representatives of the
monstrous civilization of the Fenachrone had made their last stand
against the forces of Universal Peace.

Epilogue

The three-dimensional, moving, talking, almo