aight toward their ship
as they turned. He snapped the relux screens in front of his eyes an
instant before the enemy cosmics reached his ship. Immediately the thud
of four heavy relays rang through the ship. The quarter of a million ton
ship leaped forward under a terrific acceleration, and then, as the four
relays cut out again, the acceleration was gone. The screen regained
life as Arcot opened the shutters. Before them, still directly in their
path, was the huge Thessian ship. But now its screen was down, the relux
iridescent in decomposition. It was falling, helplessly falling to the
rocky plateau seven miles below. Its rays reached out even yet--and
again the _Ancient Mariner_ staggered under the terrific pull of some
acceleration. The Thessian ship lurched upward, and a terrific
concussion came, and the entire neighborhood of that projector
disappeared in a flash of radiation.

Arcot drove the _Ancient Mariner_ down beneath the Thessian ship in its
long fall, and with a powerful molecular beam ripped a mighty chasm in
the deserted plateau. The Thessian ship fell into a quarter mile rift in
the solid rock, smashing its way through falling debris. A moment later
it was buried beneath a quarter mile of broken rock as Arcot swept a
molecular beam about with the grace of a mine foreman filling breaks.

An instant later, a heat ray followed the molecular in dazzling
brilliance. A terrific gout of light appeared in the barren rocks. In
ten minutes the plateau was a white hot cauldron of molten rocks,
glowing now against a darkening sky. Night was falling.

"That ship," said Arcot with an air of finality, "will never rise
again."

Chapter VI

THE SECOND MOVE

"What happened to him, though?" asked Wade, bewildered. "I haven't yet
figured it out. He went down in a heap, and he didn't have any power. Of
course, if he had his power he could have pulled out again. He could
just melt and burn all the excess rock off, and he would be all set. But
his rays all went dead. And why the explosion?"

"The magnetic beam is the answer. In our boat we have everything
magnetically shielded, because of the enormous magnetic flux set up by
the current flowing from the storage coils to the main coil. But--with
so many wires heavily charged with current, what would have happened if
they had not been shielded?

"If a current cuts across a magnetic field, a side thrust is developed.
What do you suppose happened when the terri