on its surface as soon as they came
within its powerful gravitational field. Therefore some fifty of the
creatures, who had had space experience in their spherical vessels,
had spent the preceding days in manufacturing space equipment. Let the
weight-fiends plan upon detonating magazines of explosives, upon laying
mines calculated to destroy the invaders, even the vessel itself and
all within it. Let them plan upon any other such idle schemes, which
were certain to be foreseen and guarded against by the space-hardened
veterans who undoubtedly moaned that all-powerful and vengeful football
of scarred gray metal. Space-fighters were they, and as space-fighters
would they die; taking with them to their own inevitable death a full
quota of the enemy.

* * * * *

Thus it came about that the head of the column of police had scarcely
passed a certain door, when in the room behind it there began to
assemble the half-hundred spacehounds of the hexans. When the vanguard
had approached that room, Crowninshield had inspected it thoroughly with
his infra-red beams. He had found it punctured and airless, devoid of
life or of lethal devices, and had passed on. But now the space-suited
warriors of the horde, guided in their hiding by their own visirays,
were massing there. When the center of the I-P column reached that door,
it burst open. There boiled out into the corridor, into the very midst
of the police, fifty demoniacal hexans, fighting with Berserk fury,
ruled by but one impulse--to kill.

Hand-weapons flashed viciously, tearing at steel armor and at bulging
space-suits. Space-hooks bit and tore. Pikes and lances were driven with
the full power of brawny arms. Here and there could be seen trooper and
hexan, locked together in fierce embrace far from any hand-line--six
limbs against four, all ten plied with abandon in mortal, hand-to-hand,
foot-to-foot combat.

"Give way!" yelled Crowninshield into the ears of his men. "Epstein,
back! LeFevre, advance! Get out of block ten--give us a chance to use
a beam!"

As the police fell back out of the designated section of the corridor,
Brandon's beam tore through it, filling it from floor to ceiling with
a volume of intolerable energy. In that energy walls, doorway, and
space-lines, as well as most of the hexans, vanished utterly. But the
beam could not be used again. Every surviving enemy had hurled himself
frantically into the thickest ranks of the p