at our own level and less
than two miles from us. Its searchbeam vanished. For a moment it
hung, a sleek, cylindrical silver shape, gleaming in the Earthlight.

Snap looked at me and murmured, "It's descending."

It slowly settled, cautiously picked its landing place amid the crags
and pits of the tumbled, scarred valley floor. It came to rest, a
vague, menacing silver shape lurking in the lower shadows, close at
the foot of the inner opposite crater wall.

A few moments of tense waiting passed. Soon tiny lights were moving
down there, some out on the rocks near the ship, others up under its
deck dome.

A stab of searchlight shot across the valley, swung along our ledge
and clung with its glaring ten foot circle to the front of our main
building. Then a ray flashed.

The assault had begun!

XXXIV

It seemed, with that first shot from the enemy, that a great relief
came to us--an apprehension fallen away. We had anticipated this
moment for so long, dreaded it. I think all our men felt it. A shout
went up:

"Harmless!"

It was not that. But our building withstood it better than I had
feared. It was a flash from a large electronic projector mounted on
the deck of the brigand ship. It stabbed up from the shadows across
the valley at the foot of the opposite crater wall, a beam of vaguely
fluorescent light. Simultaneously the searchlight vanished.

The stream of electrons caught the front face of our main building in
a six foot circle. It held a few seconds, vanished, then stabbed
again, and still again. Three bolts. A total, I suppose, of nine or
ten seconds.

I was standing with Grantline at a front window. We had rigged an
oblong of insulated fabric like a curtain; we stood peering, holding
the curtain cautiously aside. The ray struck some twenty feet away
from us.

"Harmless!" The men shouted it with derision.

But Grantline swung on them: "Don't get that idea!"

An interior signal panel was beside Grantline. He called the duty men
in the instrument room.

"It's over. What are your readings?"

The bombarding electrons had passed through the outer shell of the
building's double wall, and been absorbed in the rarefied, magnetized
aircurrent of the Erentz circulation. Like poison in a man's veins,
reaching his heart, the free alien electrons had disturbed the motors.
They accelerated, then retarded. Pulsed unevenly, and drew added power
from the reserve tanks. But they had normalized at once w