it became increasingly
difficult for the Dilipics to fill. More and more Arpalone fighters were
getting inside. They were lasting longer and doing more damage all the
time. The tube was growing narrower and narrower.

All four Galaxians perceived all this in seconds. Garlock weighed out
and detonated a terrific matter-conversion bomb in the exact center of
one of the largest vessels of the attacking fleet. It had no effect.
Then a larger one. Then another, still heavier. Finally, at over a
hundred megatons equivalent, he did get results--of a sort. The
invaders' guns, ammunition, and missiles were blown out of the ship and
scattered outward for miles in all directions; but the structure of the
Dilipic ship itself was not harmed.

Belle had been studying, analyzing, probing the things that were coming
down through that hellish tube.

"Clee!" She drove a thought. "Cut out the monkey-business with those
damn firecrackers of yours and look here--pure, solid force, like ball
lightning or our Op field, but entirely different--see if you can
analyze the stuff!"

"Alive?" Garlock asked, as he drove a probe into one of the things--they
were furiously-radiating spheres some seven feet in diameter--and began
to tune to it.

"I don't know--don't think so--if they are, they're a form of life that
no sane human being could even imagine!"

"Let's see what they actually do," Garlock suggested, still trying to
tune in with the thing, whatever it was, and still following it down.

This particular force-ball happened to hit the top of a six-story
building. It was not going very fast--fifteen or twenty miles an
hour--but when it struck the roof it did not even slow down. Without any
effort at all, apparently, it continued downward through the concrete
and steel and glass of the building; and everything in its path became
monstrously, sickeningly, revoltingly changed.

"I simply can't stand any more of this," Lola gasped. "If you don't
mind, I'm going to my room, set all the Gunther blocks it has, and bury
my head under a pillow."

"Go ahead, Brownie," James said. "This is too tough for _anybody_ to
watch. I'd do the same, except I've got to run these cameras."

Lola disappeared.

* * *

Garlock and Belle kept on studying. Neither had paid any attention at
all to either Lola or James.

Instead of the structural material it had once been, the bore that the
thing had traversed was now full of a sp