r column,
gathering speed and hitting the ship with enough impact to carry it
through the shell? It was worth trying anyhow. Wilma became greatly
excited, too, when she grasped the nature of my inspiration.

Feverishly I looked around for some formation of branches against which
I could rest the pistol, for I had to aim most carefully. At last I
found one. Patiently I sighted on the hulk of the ship far above us,
aiming at the far side of it, at such an angle as would, so far as I
could estimate, bring my bullet path through the forward repellor beam.
At last the sights wavered across the point I sought and I pressed the
button gently.

For a moment we gazed breathlessly.

Suddenly the ship swung bow down, as on a pivot, and swayed like a
pendulum. Wilma screamed in her excitement.

"Oh, Tony, you hit it! You hit it! Do it again; bring it down!"

We had only one more rocket of extreme range between us, and we dropped
it three times in our excitement in inserting it in my gun. Then,
forcing myself to be calm by sheer will power, while Wilma stuffed her
little fist into her mouth to keep from shrieking, I sighted carefully
again and fired. In a flash, Wilma had grasped the hope that this
discovery of mine might lead to the end of the Han domination.

The elapsed time of the rocket's invisible flight seemed an age.

Then we saw the ship falling. It seemed to plunge lazily, but actually
it fell with terrific acceleration, turning end over end, its
disintegrator rays, out of control, describing vast, wild arcs, and once
cutting a gash through the forest less than two hundred feet from where
we stood.

The crash with which the heavy craft hit the ground reverberated from
the hills--the momentum of eighteen or twenty thousand tons, in a sheer
drop of seven thousand feet. A mangled mass of metal, it buried itself
in the ground, with poetic justice, in the middle of the smoking,
semi-molten field of destruction it had been so deliberately ploughing.

The silence, the vacuity of the landscape, was oppressive, as the last
echoes died away.

Then far down the hillside, a single figure leaped exultantly above the
foliage screen. And in the distance another, and another.

In a moment the sky was punctured by signal rockets. One after another
the little red puffs became drifting clouds.

"Scatter! Scatter!" Wilma exclaimed. "In half an hour there'll be an
entire Han fleet here from Nu-yok, and another from Bah-flo. They'