ll be."

"Chambers and his gang won't fight according to any rules. There'll be
no holds barred, no more feeble attempts like the one they tried
tonight. From now on we need a base that simply can't be located."

"The ship," said Russ.

_CHAPTER FOURTEEN_

The _Invincible_ hung in space, an empty, airless hull, the largest
thing afloat.

Chartered freighters, leaving their ports from distant parts of the
Earth, had converged upon her hours before, had unloaded crated
apparatus, storing it in the yawning hull. Then they had departed.

Now the sturdy little space-yacht, _Comet_, was towing the great ship
out into space, 500,000 miles beyond the orbit of the Moon. Slowly the
hull was being taken farther and farther away from possible discovery.

Work on the installation of the apparatus had started almost as soon as
the _Comet_ had first tugged at the ponderous mass. Leaving only a
skeleton crew in charge of the _Comet_, the rest of the selected crew
had begun the assembly of the mighty machines which would transform the
_Invincible_ into a thing of unimaginable power and speed.

The doors were closed and sealed and the air, already stored in the
ship's tanks, was released. The slight acceleration of the _Comet's_
towing served to create artificial weight for easier work, but not
enough to handicap the shifting of the heavier pieces of apparatus. An
electric cable was run back from the little yacht and the _Invincible_
took her first breath of life.

The work advanced rapidly, for every man was more than a mere engineer
or spacebuster. They were a selected crew, the men who had helped to
make the name of Gregory Manning famous throughout the Solar System.

First the engines were installed, then the two groups of five massive
power plants and the single smaller engine as an auxiliary supply plant
for the light, heat, air.

The accumulators of the _Comet_ were drained in a single tremendous
surge and the auxiliary generator started. It in turn awoke to life the
other power plants, to leave them sleeping, idling, but ready for
instant use to develop power such as man never before had dreamed of
holding and molding to his will.

Then, with the gigantic tools these engines supplied ... tools of pure
force and strange space fields ... the work was rapidly completed. The
power boards were set in place, welded in position by a sudden furious
blast of white hot metal and as equally sudden freezing, to be follo