But the meter climbed suddenly, and the world was suddenly a tremendous
blaze of light. The solid rock had struck the giant cup, 110,000 miles
in diameter. It was silent, as a world pitted its enormous kinetic
energy against the combined forces of a universe. Soundless--and as
hopeless. Its strength was nothing, its energy pitted unnoticed against
the energy of five hundred thousand million suns--as vain as those
futile attempts of the Thessian battleships on the invulnerable walls of
the _Thought_.

What use is there to attempt description of that scene as
2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons of rock and metal and matter
crashed against a wall of energy, immovable and inconceivable. The
planet crumpled, and split wide. A thousand pieces, and suddenly there
was a further mistiness about it, and the whole enormous mass, seeming
but a toy, as it was from this distance in space, and as it was in this
ship, was enclosed in that same, immovable, unalterable wall of energy.

The ship was as quiet and noiseless, as without indication of strain as
when it hummed its way through empty space. But the planet crumpled and
twirled, and great seas of energy flashed about it.

The world, seeming tiny, was dashed helpless against a wall that stopped
it, but the wall flared into equal and opposite energy, so that matter
was raised not to the twelve thousand Morey had estimated but nearer
twenty-four thousand degrees. It was over in less than half an hour, and
a broken, misshapen mass of blue incandescence floated in space. It
would fall now, toward the sun, and it would, because it was motionless
and the sun moved, take an eccentric orbit about that sun. Eventually,
perhaps, it would wipe out the four inferior planets, or perhaps it
would be broken as it came within the Roches limit of that sun. But the
planet was now a miniature sun, and not so very small, at that.

And from every planet of the system was pouring an assorted stream of
ships, great and small, and they all set panic-stricken across the void
in the same direction. They had seen the power of the _Thought_, and did
not contest any longer its right to this system.

Chapter XXII

THETT

Through the utter void of intergalactic space sped a tiny shell, a wee
mite of a ship. Scarcely twenty feet long, it was one single power
plant. The man who sat alone in it, as it tore through the void at the
maximum speed that even its tiny mass was capable of, when every la