necessary to fend off the terrific counter-attack of her intended prey, and she turned in
flight. Small and agile as she was, the enormous mass of the Sirius precluded any
possibility of maneuvering with the Jovian, but Brandon had no intention of
maneuvering. Rapid as the motions of the stranger were and frantic as was her
dodging, the terrific forces of the tractor beams of the Inter-Planetary vessel held her in
an unbreakable grip, and although she dragged the massive Sirius hither and thither,
she could not escape.
“Hm . . .m . . . m,” mused Brandon. “We seem to be getting nowhere fast. How
much power we using, Mac, and how much’ve we got coming in?”
“Output, eighty five thousand kilofranks,” replied Mac-Donald, the first assistant.
“Intake forty nine thousand.”
“Not so good—can’t hold out forever at that rate. Shove out the receptor screens
to the limit and drive ’em. They figure a top of sixty thousand, but we ought to pick up a
little extra from that blaze out there. Drive ’em wide open or up to sixty five, whichever
comes first. Can’t seem to crush his screens, so guess we’ll have to try something else,”
and a thoughtful expression came over his face as he slowly extended his hand toward
another switch, with a questioning glance at Westfall.
“Better not do that yet, Norman. Use that only as a last resort, after everything
else has failed.”
“Yeah—I’m scared to death of trying it, and it ain’t necessary yet. He must have
an open slit somewhere to work through, same as we’ve got. I’ll feel around for it a
while.”
“Is there any way of heterodyning the new visiray upon the exploring frequency?”
“Hm . . . m . . . Never thought of that—it’d be nice, too . . . Can do, I think. Watch
’em, Quince, and yell if they start anything.”
He abandoned his desk and established the necessary connections between the
visiray apparatus and the controls of his board. There was a fierce violet-white glare
from the plate as he closed the switch, and he leaped back with his hands over his
eyes, temporarily blinded.
“Wow, that’s hot stuff!” he exclaimed. “It works, all x, to the queen’s taste,” as he
donned his heavy ray-goggles and resumed his place.
After making certain that the visiray was precisely synchronized and phased with
the searching frequency, he built up the power of that beam until it was using twenty
thousand kilofranks. Then, by delicately manipulating the variable condensers and
inductances of, his sensitive shunting relay circuits, he slowly shifted that frightful rod of
energy from frequency to frequency, staring into the brilliant blank-ness of his
micrometer screen as he did so. After a few minutes of search the screen darkened
somewhat, revealing the image of the Jovian globe. Brandon instantly shifted into that
one channel the entire power of his attack; steadying the controls to bring the sphere of
the Jovians into the sharpest possible focus, knowing that he had found the open slit
and that through it there was pouring upon the enemy the full power of his terrible
weapon.
In the fraction of a. second before the Jovians could detect the attack and close
the slit he saw a portion of the wall of their vessel flare into white heat and literally
explode outward in puffs and gouts of flaming, molten metal and of incandescent gases.
But the thrust, savage as it was, had not been fatal and the enemy countered instantly.
Now that the crushing force of the full-coverage attack was lessened for a moment,
through another slit there poured a beam of energy equal to the Terrestrials’ own—a
beam of such intense power that the outer screen of the Sinus flared from red through
the spectrum, to and beyond the violet and went black in less than a second, and the
inner screen had almost gone down before Brandon’s lightning hands could restore the
complete coverage that so effectively blanketed the forces of the enemy.
“Well, we’re back to the status quo,” announced Brandon, calmly. ” ‘Sa good gag
they didn’t have time to locate our working slit—if they’d pushed that stuff through our
open channel we’d’ve got frizzled a bit. As it was we got the edge on that
exchange—take it from your Uncle Dudley, Quince, that bird knows that he’s been
nudged!”
Again he searched the entire band for an opening, but could find none. The
enemy had apparently retired into a tightly-closed shell of energy. The small vessel no
longer struggled, nor even moved, but was merely resisting passively.
“Not an open channel, not even one for him to work through—he can’t wiggle.
Well, that won’t get him anything. We’re so much bigger than he is that we can outlast
him and will get him sometime, since he’s bound to run out of power before we do. I
don’t believe that he can receive anything, sealed up as he is, and he can’t have
accumulators enough more efficient than ours to make up the difference, can he,
Quince?”
“It is quite possible. For instance, it was known long ago that the synthesis of any
unstable isotope of very high atomic number gives an almost perfect accumulator.”
“Boloney!” Brandon snorted. “And the required shielding weighs so much that the
full power of the perfect accumulator can’t lift it off the ground.”
“We could postulate, I think, a form of intelligent life which would not require as
much shielding as we do.”
“Yeah?” The big physicist almost sneered. “You can postulate that the second
satellite of the fourth planet of Aldebaran is made of green cheese, too, but you’d have a
hell of a time proving it. Moreover, you can’t postulate an unshielded radiation from an
unstable isotope that our gadgets here wouldn’t tell us about, nor any kind of a force
screen that can stop neutrons. Or can you?”
“Not off-hand. However, you are the very last man to deny the possibility of
either. But to return to the subject in hand: whatever the power system of the Jovians
may be, what can we do about it?”
“Don’t know yet.” Brandon’s passion evaporated in an instant. “I do know,
though, that we ain’t half as ready for trouble as I thought we were. There’s a dozen
things I want to do that I can’t because we ain’t got the stuff. Don’t say ‘I told you so’,
either—I know you did! You’re the champion ground-and-lofty thinker of the century.
Alcantro!”
“Here!”
“Round up the gang, will you, and figure me out a screen and a set of meters that
will indicate an open band ? We lose too much time feeling around, the way it is, and
we’re too apt to take one on the chin while we’re doing it. Ought to make it so it’ll shoot a
jolt into the opening, too, while you’re at it.”
“We shall begin at once,” and the massive Martian stepped over to the
calculating machine.
“Well, Quince, we can’t do much to him this way—he’s crawled into a hole and
pulled the hole in after him. Damnation, I wish we had more stuff!”
“After all, we have everything whose necessity and practicability could have been
foreseen in the light of the information we had at hand. We can, of course, now go
further.”
“You chirped it! But we can’t let things go on this way or we’ll get our fingers
burned. About time to try the grand slam, don’t you think?”
“I am afraid so.”
“Put everything on the center of the band?”
“That would probably be best.”
“He can’t control, so we’ll push him down close to the ground before we go to
work on him—so we won’t have so far to fall if anything gives way. Here’s hoping
nothing does!”
The Sirius almost against the flaming screens of the Jovian and both vessels
very close to the surface of the satellite, Brandon tested the power leads briefly,
adjusted dials and coils, then touched the button which actuated the relays — relays
which in turn drove home the gigantic switches that launched a fearsome and as yet
untried weapon. Instantly released, the full seven hundred thousand kilo-franks of their
stupendous batteries of accumulators drove into the middle frequency of the attacking
band, and Brandon’s heart was in his mouth as he stared into the plate to see what
would happen. He saw! Everything in the Sirius held fast. Under the impact of the
inconceivable plane of force the screens of the enemy vessel flared instantly into an
even more intense incandescence and in that same fleeting instant went down. All
defenses vanished as the metal sphere fell apart into two halves as would an apple
under the full blow of a broad-axe.
Brandon quickly shut off his power and stared in relief into the central
compartment of the globular ship of space, now laid open, and saw there figures, one or
two of which were moving weakly. As he looked, one of these feebly attempted to raise