it up."

Soon they arrived at their objective and maintained a position well in
the van, but not sufficiently far ahead of the rest to call forth a
restraining ray from their captors. Already strongly affected by the
gravitational pull of the mass of the satellite, many of the smaller
portions of the wreck, not directly held by the tractors, began to
separate from the main mass. As each bit left its place another beam
leaped out, until it became apparent that no more were available, and
Stevens strapped the girl and himself down before two lookout plates.

"Now for it, Nadia!" he exclaimed, and simultaneously threw on the power
of his own projectors and sent out the radio impulse which closed the
relays he had so carefully set. They were thrown against the restraining
straps savagely and held there by an enormous weight as the gigantic
dirigible projectors shot their fragment of the wreck away from the
comparatively slight force which had been acting upon it, but they
braced themselves and strained their muscles in order to watch what
was happening. As the relays in the various fragments closed, the
massed power of the accumulators was shorted dead across the converters
and projectors instead of being fed into them gradually through the
controls of the pilot, with a result comparable to that of the explosion
of an ammunition dump. Most of the masses, whose projectors were fed
by comparatively few accumulator cells, darted away entirely with a
stupendous acceleration. A few of them, however, received the unimpeded
flow of complete batteries. Those projectors tore loose from even
their massive supports and crashed through anything opposing them like
a huge, armor-piercing projectile. It was a spectacle to stagger the
imagination, and Stevens grinned as he turned to the girl, who was
staring in wide-eyed amazement.

"Well, ace, I think they're busy enough now so that it'll be safe
to take that long-wanted look at their controls," and he flashed
the twin beams of his lookout light out beyond the upper half of the
_Arcturus_--only to see them stop abruptly in mid-space. Even the
extremely short carrier-wave of Roeser's Rays could not go through the
invisible barrier thrown out by the tiny, but powerful globe of space.

"No penetration?" Nadia asked.

"Flattened them out cold. 'However,' as the fox once remarked about the
grapes, 'I'll bet they're sour, anyway.' We'll have some stuff of our
own, one of these days. I su