n it
unless they had the ray and knew where to use it.

From the airlock, they went directly to the power room. Here they heard
the soft purring of a large oscillator tube and the indistinguishable
murmur of smoothly running AC generators powered by large contraterrene
reactors.

The elder Dr. Arcot glanced in surprise at the heavy-duty ammeter in a
control panel.

"Half a billion amperes! Good Lord! Where is all that power going?" He
looked at his son.

"Into the storage coils. It's going in at ten kilovolts, so that's a
five billion kilowatt supply. It's been going for half an hour and has
half an hour to run. It takes two tons of matter to charge the coil to
capacity, and we're carrying twenty tons of fuel--enough for ten
charges. We shouldn't need more than three tons if all goes well, but
'all' seldom does.

"See that large black cylinder up there?" Arcot asked, pointing.

Above them, lying along the roof of the power room, lay a great black
cylinder nearly two feet in diameter and extending out through the wall
in the rear. It was made integral with two giant lux metal beams that
reached to the bow of the ship in a long, sweeping curve. From one of
the power switchboards, two heavy cables ran up to the giant cylinder.

"That's the main horizontal power unit. We can develop an acceleration
of ten gravities either forward or backward. In the curve of the ship,
on top, sides, and bottom, there are power units for motion in the other
two directions.

"Most of the rest of the stuff in this section is old hat to you,
though. Come on into the next room."

Arcot opened the heavy relux door, leading the way into the next room,
which was twice the size of the power room. The center of the floor was
occupied by a heavy pedestal of lux metal upon which was a huge,
relux-encased, double torus storage coil. There was a large switchboard
at the opposite end, while around the room, in ordered groups, stood the
familiar double coils, each five feet in diameter. The space within them
was already darkening.

"Well," said Arcot, senior, "that's some battery of power coils,
considering the amount of energy one can store. But what's the big one
for?"

"That's the main space control," the younger Arcot answered. "While our
power is stored in the smaller ones, we can shoot it into this one,
which, you will notice, is constructed slightly differently. Instead of
holding the field within it, completely enclosed, the big one