r into one enormous pressor
beam.

The three were thrown to the floor and held there by an awful weight as
the lifeboat darted away at the stupendous acceleration of the beam's
reaction against the unimaginable mass of the Nevian sky-rover; but the
flight was of short duration. Along that pressor beam there crept a dull
red rod of energy, which surrounded the fugitive shell and brought it
slowly to a halt. Furiously then Costigan set and reset his controls,
launching his every driving force and his every weapon, but no beam
could penetrate that red murk, and the lifeboat remained motionless in
space. No, not motionless--the red rod was shortening, drawing the
truant craft back toward the launching port from which she had so
hopefully emerged a few days before. Back and back it was drawn;
Costigan's utmost efforts futile to affect by a hair's breadth its line
of motion. Through the open port the boat slipped neatly, and as it came
to a halt in its original position within the multi-layered skin of the
monster, the prisoners heard the heavy doors clang shut behind them, one
after another.

And then sheets of blue fire snapped and crackled about the three suits
of Triplanetary armor--the two large human figures and the small ones
were outlined starkly in blinding blue flame.

"That's the first thing that has come off according to schedule."
Costigan laughed, a short, fierce bark. "That is their paralyzing ray,
we've got it stopped cold, and we've each got enough iron to hold it
forever."

"But it looks as though the best we can do is a stalemate," Bradley
argued. "Even if they can't paralyze us, we can't hurt them, and we are
heading back for Nevia."

"I think Nerado will come in for a conference, and we'll be able to make
terms of some kind. He must know what these Lewistons will do, and he
knows that we'll get a chance to use them, some way or other, before he
gets to us again," Costigan asserted, confidently--but again he was
wrong.

The door opened, and through it there waddled, rolled, or crawled a
metal-clad monstrosity--a thing with wheels, legs and writhing tentacles
of jointed bronze; a thing possessed of defensive screens sufficiently
powerful to absorb the full blast of the Triplanetary projectors without
effort. Three brazen tentacles reached out through the ravening beams of
the Lewistons, smashed them to bits, and wrapped themselves in
unbreakable shackles about the armored forms of the three human be