damage. The seventy-five million cubic feet of free oxygen, driven downward and
prevented from escaping into the open atmosphere by Radnor’s forces, quickly diffused
into a killing concentration throughout the Chloran city save inside that one upstanding
dome. Almost everywhere else throughout that city the natives died exactly as had died
the people of the Valeronian village in the strangling chlorin of the invaders; for oxygen is
as lethal to that amoebic race as is their noxious halogen to us.
Long before the bombs reached the ground Radnor was probing with his spy ray at the
great central dome from within which Klynor Siblin’s message had in part been sent. But
now he could not get through it; either they had detected Siblin’s beam and blocked that
entire communication band or else they had already put up additional barriers around
their headquarters against his attack, quickly though he had acted.
Snapping off the futile visiray, he concentrated his destructive beam into a cylinder of the
smallest possible diameter and hurled it against the dome; but even that frightful pencil of
annihilation, driven by Radnor’s every resource of power, was utterly ineffective against
that greenly scintillant hemisphere of force. The point of attack flared into radiant
splendor, but showed no sign of overloading or of failure.
Knowing now that there was no hope at all of rescuing Siblin and that he himself had only
a few minutes left in which to work, Radnor left his beam upon the dome only long
enough for his recording photometers to analyze the radiations emanating from the point
of contact. Then, full driven still, but now operating at maximum aperture he drove it in a
dizzying spiral outwardly from the dome, fusing the entire unprotected area of the
metropolis into a glassily fluid slag of seething, smoking desolation. Those of the mon-
strosities who were beneath the protective hemisphere he could not touch, but all the
others died. Some were riven asunder by the fragmentation of the bombs, many expired
in the flood of lethal oxygen, the rest were cremated instantly in the unimaginable fury of
Radnor’s ravening beams.
But beneath that dome of force there was a mighty fortress indeed. It is true that her
offensive weapons had not seen active service for many years; not since the last
rebellion of the slaves had been crushed. It is also true that the Chloran officers whose
duty it was to operate these weapons had been caught napping-as thoroughly surprised
at that fierce counterattack as would be a group of Earthly hunters were the lowly rabbits
to turn upon them. with repeating rifles in their furry paws.
But it did not take long for those officers to tune in their offensive armament, and that
armament was driven by no such puny engines as Radnor’s space ship bore. Being
stationary and a part of the regular equipment of a fortress, their size and mass were of
course much greater than anything ordinarily installed in any vessel, of whatever class or
tonnage. Also, in addition to being superior in size and number, the Chloran generators
were considerably more efficient in the conversion and utilization of interatomic energy
than were any then known to the science of Valeron.
Therefore, as Radnor had rather more than expected, he was not long allowed to wreak
his will. From the dome there reached out slowly, almost caressingly, a huge arm of
force incredible, at whose first blighting touch his first or outer screen simply vanished-
flared through the visible spectrum and went down, all in the veriest twinkling of an eye.
That first screen, although the weakest by far of the four, had never even radiated under
the heaviest test loads that Radnor had been able to put upon it. Now he sat at his
instruments, tense but intensely analytical, watching with bated breath as that Titanic
beam crashed through his second screen and tore madly at his third.
Well it was for Valeron that day that Radnor had armed and powered his vessel to
withstand not only whatever forces he expected her to meet, but had, with the true
scientific spirit and in so far as he was able, provided against any conceivable
emergency. Thus, the first screen was, as has been said, sufficiently powerful to cope
with anything the vessel was apt to encounter. Nevertheless, the power of the other
defensive courses increased in geometrical progression; and, as a final precaution, the
fourth screen, in the almost unthinkable contingency of its being overloaded, threw on
automatically in the moment of its failure an ultimately impenetrable zone of force.
That scientific caution was now to save not only Radnor’s life, but also the whole
civilization of Valeron. For even that mighty fourth screen, employing in its generation as
it did the unimaginable sum total of the power possible of production by the massed
converters of the space flyer, failed to stop that awful thrust. It halted it for a-few
minutes, in a blazingly, flamingly pyrotechnic display of incandescence indescribable, but
as the Chlorans meshed in additional units of their stupendous power plant it began to
radiate higher and higher into the ultra-violet and was certainly doomed.
It failed, and in the instant of its going down actuated a zone of force-a complete stasis
in the ether itself, through which no possible manifestation, either of matter or of energy
in any form, could in any circumstances pass. Or could it? Radnor clenched his teeth and
waited. Whether or not there was a subether-something lying within and between the
discrete particles which actually composed the ether-was a matter of theoretical
controversy and of some academically scientific interest.
But, postulating the existence of such a medium and even that of vibrations of such
infinitely short period that they could be propagated therein, would it be even theoretically
possible to heterodyne upon them waves of ordinary frequencies? And could those
amorphous monstrosities be so highly advanced that they had reduced to practical
application something that was as yet known to humanity only in the vaguest, most
tenuous of hypotheses?
Minute after minute passed, however, during which the Valeronian remained alive within
an intact ship which, he knew, was hurtling upward and away from Chlora at the absolute
velocity of her inertia, unaffected by gravitation, and he began to smile in relief. Whatever
might lie below the level of the ether, either of vibration or of substance, it was becoming
evident that the Chlorans could no more handle it than he could.
For half an hour Radnor allowed his craft to drift within her impenetrable shield. Then,
knowing that he was well beyond atmosphere, he made sure that his screens were full
out and released his zone. Instantly his screens sprang into a dazzling, coruscant white
under the combined attack of two space ships which had been following him. This time,
however, the Chloran beams were stopped by the third screen. Either the enemy had not
had time to measure accurately his power, or they had not considered such
measurement worth while.
They were now to pay dearly for not having gauged his strength. Radnor’s beam, again a
stabbing stiletto of pure energy, lashed out against the nearer vessel; and that luckless
ship mounted no such generators as powered her parent fortress. That raging spear,
driven as it was by all the power that Radnor had been able to pack into his cruiser, tore
through screens and metal alike as though they had been so much paper; and in mere
seconds what had once been a mighty space ship was merely a cloud of drifting,
expanding vapor. The furious shaft was then directed against the other enemy, but it was
just too late-the canny amoebus in command had learned his lesson and had already
snapped on his zone of force.
Having learned many facts vital to the defense of Valeron and knowing that his return
homeward would now be unopposed, Radnor put on full touring acceleration and drove
toward his native world. Motionless at his controls, face grim and hard, he devoted his
entire mind to the problem of how Valeron could best wage the inevitable war of
extinction against the implacable denizens of the monstrous, interloping planet Chlora.
18 VALERON VERSUS CHLORA
As has been said, Radnor’s reply to Siblin’s message was unheard, for his ultraphones
were not upon his person, but were lying disregarded in a corner of the room in which
their owner had undergone examination by his captors. They still lay there as the
Valeronian in his cage was wafted lightly back into the space ship from which he had
been taken such a short time before; lay there as that vehicle of vacuous space lifted
itself from its dock and darted away toward distant Valeron.
During the earlier part of that voyage Radnor was also in the ether, traveling from
Valeron to Chlora. The two vessels did not meet, however, even though each was
making for the planet which the other had left and though each pilot was following the