ce-ships so viciously attacking
and so stubbornly defending Roger's planetoid. In the captain's sanctum
Lyman Cleveland crouched tensely above his ultracameras, his sensitive
fingers touching lightly their micrometric dials. His body was rigid,
his face was set and drawn. Only his eyes moved; flashing back and forth
between his instruments and the smoothly-running strands of spring-steel
wire upon which were being recorded the frightful scenes of carnage and
destruction.

Silent and bitterly absorbed, though surrounded by staring officers
whose fervent, almost unconscious cursing was prayerful in its
intensity, the visiray expert kept his ultra-instruments upon that awful
struggle to its dire conclusion. Flawlessly those instruments noted
every detail of the destruction of Roger's fleet, of the transformation
of the armada of Triplanetary into an unknown fluid, and finally of the
dissolution of the gigantic planetoid itself. Then furiously Cleveland
drove his beam against the crimsonly opaque obscurity into which the
peculiar, viscous stream of substance was disappearing. Time after time
he applied his every watt of power, with no result. A vast volume of
space, roughly ellipsoidal in shape, was closed to him by forces
entirely beyond his experience or comprehension. But suddenly, while his
rays were still trying to pierce that impenetrable murk, it disappeared
instantly and without warning: the illimitable infinity of space once
more lay revealed upon his plates and his beams flashed unimpeded
through the void.

"Back to Tellus, sir?" The _Chicago's_ captain broke the strained
silence.

"I wouldn't say so, if I had the say." Cleveland, baffled and
frustrated, straightened up and shut off his cameras. "We should report
back as soon as possible, of course, but there seems to be a lot of
wreckage out there yet that we can't photograph in detail at this
distance. A close study of it might help us a lot in understanding what
they did and how they did it. I'd say that we should get close-ups of
whatever is left, and do it right away, before it gets scattered all
over space; but of course I can't give you orders."

"You can, though," the captain made surprising answer. "My orders are
that you are in command of this vessel."

"In that case we will proceed at full emergency acceleration to
investigate the wreckage," Cleveland replied, and the cruiser--sole
survivor of Triplanetary's supposedly invincible force--shot away