s as the heptagon was
hurled end over end by a stupendous force. With a splintering crash it
came to rest upon the ground.

"I wonder how that happened? They should have rayed us out or exploded
us," Kromodeor pondered. The Vorkuls, with their inhumanly powerful,
sinuous bodies, were scarcely affected by the shock of that frightful
fall.

"They must have had a whole battery of pressors on us when our greens
went out--they threw us half-way across the city, almost into the gate
we made first," Wixill replied, studying the situation of the vessel in
the one small screen still in action. "We aren't hurt very badly--only a
few holes that they are starting to weld already. When the absorber and
dissipator crews get them cooled down enough so that we can use power
again, we'll go back."

But they were not to resume their place in the attack. Through the
holes in the still-glowing walls, hexan soldiery were leaping in
steady streams, fighting with the utmost savagery of their bloodthirsty
natures, urged on by the desperation born of the knowledge of imminent
defeat and total destruction. Hand-weapons roared, flashed, and
sparkled; heavy bars crashed and thudded against crunching bones;
mighty bodies and tails whipped crushingly about six-limbed forms which
wrenched and tore with monstrously powerful hands and claws. Fiercely
and valiantly the Vorkuls fought, but they were outnumbered by hundreds
and only one outcome was possible.

Kromodeor was one of the last to go down. Weapons long since exhausted,
he unwrapped his deadly coils from about a dead hexan and darted toward
a storeroom, only to be cut off by a horde of enemies. Throwing himself
down a vertical shaft, he flew toward a tiny projector-locker, in the
lowermost part of one of the great star's points, the hexans in hot
pursuit. He wrenched the door open, and even while searing planes of
force were riddling his body, he trained the frightful weapon he had
sought. He pressed the contact, and bursts of intolerable flame swept
the entire passage clear of life. Weakly he struggled to go out into the
aisle, but his muscles refused to do the bidding of his will and he lay
there, twitching feebly.

In the power room of the heptagon a hexan officer turned fiercely to
another, who was offering advice.

"Vorkuls? Bah!" he snarled, viciously. "Our race is finished. Die we
must, but we shall take with us the one enemy, who above all others
needs destruction!" and he hurled