load,
and rushing back, as the coil, reaching a spatial condition which
supplied no energy, fell back. In a hundredth of a second it had reached
equilibrium, and they were in a weirdly, terribly distorted space. But
the triple-ray of the Thessians seemed to sheer off, and miss, no matter
how it was directed. And it was painfully weak, for the coil sucked up
the energy of whatsoever matter disintegrated in the neighborhood.

Then suddenly the performance was over. And they plunged into artificial
space that was black and clean, and not a thing of wavering, struggling
energies. Morey, from his control in the _Banderlog_, had succeeded in
getting sufficient energy, by using his space distortion coils, to
destroy the great projector mechanism. Instantly Arcot, now able to
create the artificial space without the destruction of the coils by the
struggling ray-feed coil, had thrown them to comparative safety.

Space writhed before they could so much as turn from the instruments.
The Thessians had located their artificial space, and reached it with an
attraction ray. They already had been withstanding the drain of the
enormous fields of the giant planet and the giant sun; the attractive
ray was an added strain. Arcot looked at his instruments, and with a
grim smile set a single dial. The space about them became black again.

"Pulling our energy--merely let 'em pull. They're pulling on an ocean,
not a lake this time. I don't think they'll drain those coils very
quickly." He looked at his instruments. "Good for two and a half hours
at this rate.

"Morey, you sure did your job then. I was helpless. The controls
wouldn't answer, of course, with that titanic thing flopping its wings,
so to speak. What are we going to do?"

Morey stood in the doorway, and from his pocket drew a cigarette, handed
it to Arcot, another to each of the others who smoked, and lit them, and
his own. "Smoke," he said, and puffed. "Smoke and think. From our last
experience with a minor tragedy, it helps."

"But--this is no minor tragedy, they have burst open the wall of this
invulnerable ship, destroyed one of those enormous coils, and can do it
again," exclaimed Zezdon Afthen, exceedingly nervous, so nervous that
the normal courage of the man was gone. His too-psychic breeding was
against him as a warrior.

"Afthen," replied Stel Felso Theu calmly, "when our friends have smoked,
and thought, the _Thought_ will be repaired perfectly, and it will be
ma