o have prepared some kind of a space-suit in which
he can be brought from his vessel to ours," and the surgeon took the
measurements and went to see that the "operating table" and suit were
made ready for Kromodeor, the sorely wounded Vorkul.

* * * * *

It was not long until the projectors of the heptagon went out and
she lay inert in space, power completely exhausted. Knowing that the
screens of the enemy would absorb any ordinary ray, the scientists had
calculated the most condensed beam they could possibly project, a beam
which, their figures showed, should be able to puncture those screens by
sheer mass action--puncture them practically instantaneously, before the
absorbers could react. To that end they had arranged their circuits to
hurl seven hundred sixty-five thousand kilofranks--the entire power of
their massed accumulators and their highest possible cosmic intake--in
one tiny bar of superlative density, less than one meter in diameter!
Everything ready, Brandon shot in prodigious switches that launched that
bolt--a bolt so vehement, so inconceivably intense, that it seemed
fairly to blast the very ether out of existence as it tore its way along
its carefully predetermined line. The intention was to destroy all the
control panels of the absorber screens; parts so vital that without them
the great vessel would be helpless, and yet items which the Terrestrials
could reconstruct quite readily from their photographs and drawings.

As that irresistible bolt touched the Vorkulian wall-screen, the spot
of contact flared instantaneously through the spectrum and into the
black beyond the violet as that screen overloaded locally. Fast as it
responded and highly conductive though it was, it could not handle that
frightfully concentrated load. In the same fleeting instant of time
every molecule of substance in that beam's path flashed into tenuous
vapor--no conceivable material could resist or impede that stabbing
stiletto of energy--and the main control panel of the Vorkulian
wall-screen system vanished. Time after time, as rapidly as he could
sight his beam and operate his switches, Brandon drove his needle of
annihilation through the fortress, destroying the secondary controls.
Then, the walls unresisting, he cut in the vastly larger, but infinitely
less powerful, I-P ray, and with it systematically riddled the immense
heptagon. Out through the gaping holes in the outer walls rushed the