d to pour forth their deadly frequencies.
The bars glowed more fiercely as they were advanced to full working
load--the stranger was one blaze of incandescent ionization, but she
still fought on; and Seaton noticed that the pyrometers recording the
temperature of the shell were mounting rapidly, in spite of the
refrigerators.

"Dunark, put everything you've got upon one spot--right on the end of
his nose!"

As the first shell struck the mark, Seaton concentrated every force at
his command upon the designated point. The air in the _Skylark_ crackled
and hissed and intense violet flames leaped from the bars as they were
driven almost to the point of disruption. From the forward end of the
strange craft there erupted prominence after prominence of searing,
unbearable flame as the terrific charges of explosive copper struck the
mark and exploded, liberating instantaneously their millions upon
millions of kilowatt-hours of intra-atomic energy. Each prominence
enveloped all three of the fighting vessels and extended for hundreds of
miles out into space--but still the enemy warship continued to hurl
forth solid and vibratory destruction.

A brilliant orange light flared upon the panel, and Seaton gasped as he
swung his visiplate upon his defenses, which he had supposed
impregnable. His outer screen was already down, although its mighty
copper generator was exerting its utmost power. Black areas had already
appeared and were spreading rapidly, where there should have been only
incandescent radiance; and the inner screen was even now radiating far
into the ultra-violet and was certainly doomed. Knowing as he did the
stupendous power driving those screens, he knew that there were
superhuman and inconceivable forces being directed against them, and his
right hand flashed to the switch controlling the zone of force. Fast as
he was, much happened in the mere moment that passed before his flying
hand could close the switch. In the last infinitesimal instant of time
before the zone closed in, a gaping black hole appeared in the
incandescence of the inner screen, and a small portion of a ray of
energy so stupendous as to be palpable, struck, like a tangible
projectile, the exposed flank of the _Skylark_. Instantly the refractory
arenak turned an intense, dazzling white and more than a foot of the
forty-eight-inch skin of the vessel melted away, like snow before an
oxy-acetylene flame: melting and flying away in molten globes and
sp