ll cut out the visible spectrum before the
flash, and convert and reconvert the infra-red. That'll let us see what
happens, without the direct effect of the glare--won't burn our eyes
out. What's my force number on the next nearest one, Mart?"

"Twenty-nine."

* * * * *

Seaton fastened a detector ray upon stop twenty-nine of the tracer-ray
panel and followed its beam of force out to the torpedo hastening upon
its way toward the next doomed cruiser. Flashing ahead in its line as he
had done before, he located the vessel and clamped the electrodes of
force upon the prodigious driving bar. Again, as Dunark drove home the
detonating switch, there was a frightful explosion and a wild glare of
frenzied incandescence far out in that desolate region of interstellar
space; but this time the eyes behind the visiplates were not torn by the
high frequencies, everything that happened was plainly visible. One
instant, there was an immense space-cruiser boring on through the void
upon its horrid mission, with its full complement of the hellish
Fenachrone performing their routine tasks. The next instant there was a
flash of light extending for thousands upon untold thousands of miles in
every direction. That flare of light vanished as rapidly as it had
appeared--instantaneously--and throughout the entire neighborhood of the
place where the Fenachrone cruiser had been, there was nothing. Not a
plate nor a girder, not a fragment, not the most minute particle nor
droplet of disrupted metal nor of condensed vapor. So terrific, so
incredibly and incomprehensibly vast were the forces liberated by that
mass of copper in its instantaneous decomposition, that every atom of
substance in that great vessel had gone with the power-bar--had been
resolved into radiations which would at some distant time and in some
far-off solitude unite with other radiations, again to form matter, and
thus obey Nature's immutable cyclic law.

Thus vessel after vessel was destroyed of that haughty fleet which until
now had never suffered a reverse and a little green light in the
galactic model winked out and flashed back in rosy pink as each menace
was removed. In a few hours the space surrounding the system of the
Fenachrone was clear; then progress slackened as it became harder and
harder to locate each vessel as the distance between it and its torpedo
increased. Time after time Seaton would stab forward with his detector
screen