wed
by careful heating and recooling till the beryl-steel reached its
maximum strength. Over the hull swarmed spacesuited men, using that
strange new power, heat-treating the stubborn metal in a manner never
before possible.

The generators were charging the atoms of the ship's beryl-steel hide
with the same hazy force that had trapped and held the gangster ship in
a mighty vise. Thus charged, no material thing could penetrate them. The
greatest meteor would be crushed to drifting dust without so much as
scarring that wall of mighty force ... meteors traveling with a speed
and penetrative power that no gun-hurled projectile could ever hope to
attain.

Riding under her own power, driven by the concentration of gravitational
lines, impregnable to all known forces, containing within her hull the
secrets of many strange devices, the _Invincible_ wheeled in space.

* * * * *

Russell Page lounged in a chair before the control manual of the
tele-transport machine. He puffed placidly at his pipe and looked out
through the great sweep of the vision panel. Out there was the black of
space and the glint of stars, the soft glow of distant Jupiter.

Greg Manning was hunched over the navigation controls, sharp eyes
watching the panorama of space.

Russ looked at him and grinned. On Greg's face there was a smile, but
about his eyes were lines of alert watchfulness and thought. Greg
Manning was in his proper role at the controls of a ship such as the
_Invincible_, a man who never stepped backward from danger, whose spirit
hungered for the vast stretches of void that lay between the worlds.

Russ leaned back, blowing smoke toward the high-arched control room
ceiling.

They had burned their bridges behind them. The laboratory back in the
mountains was destroyed. Locked against any possible attack by a sphere
of force until the tele-transport had lifted from it certain items of
equipment, it had been melted into a mass of molten metal that formed a
pool upon the mountain top, that ran in gushing, fiery ribbons down the
mountain side, flowing in gleaming curtains over precipices. It would
have been easier to have merely disintegrated in one bursting flash of
energy, but that would have torn apart the entire mountain range,
overwhelmed and toppled cities hundreds of miles away, dealt Earth a
staggering blow.

A skeleton crew had taken the _Comet_ back to Earth and landed it on
Greg's estate. Once