impregnable covering over his head and neck, threw all his power into his
tail—tightening, with terrific, rippling surges, that already throttling band about the throat
of his opponent. Only one result was possible. Soon Zerexi lay quiet, and a violet beam
of light flared from a torch at the ringside, bathing both contenders. At the flash the
winner disengaged himself from the loser, and stood by until the latter had recovered
the use of his paralyzed muscles. The two combatants then touched wing tips in salute
and flew away together, over the heads of the crowd; plunging into a doorway and
disappearing as the two officers uncoiled from their “seats” and wriggled out into the
corridor.
“Fine piece of contact work,” said Wixill, thoughtfully. “I’m glad that Sintris won,
but I did not expect him to win so easily. Zerexi shouldn’t have gone into a knot so early
against such a fast man.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” argued Kromodeor. “His big mistake was in that second body
check. If he had blocked the sixth arm with his fifth, taken out .the fourth and second
with his third, and then gone in with . . .” and so, quite like two Earthly experts after a
good boxing match, the friends argued the fine points of the contest long after they had
reached their quarters.
Day after day the vast duplex cone of Vorkulian fortresses sped toward the north
pole of the great planet, with a high and constant velocity. Day after day the complex
geometrical figure in space remained unchanged; no unit deviating measurably from its
precise place in the formation. Over rapacious jungles, over geysers spouting hot water,
over sullenly steaming rivers and seas, over boiling lakes of mud, and high over gigantic
volcanoes in uninterrupted eruptions of cataclysmic violence the Vorkulian phalanx
flew—, straight north. The equatorial regions, considerably hotter then the poles, were
traversed with practically no change in scenery—it was a world of steaming fog, of
jungle, of hot water, of boiling, spurting mud, and of volcanoes. Not of such mild and
sporadic volcanic outbreaks as we of green Terra know, but of gigantic primordial
volcanoes, in terrifyingly continuous performances of frightful intensity. Due north the
Vorkulian spearhead was hurled, far into the northern hemisphere before the rigorous
geometrical alignment was altered.
“All captains, attention!” Finally, in a high latitude, the flagship sent out final
instructions. “The hexans have detected us, and our long range observers report that
they are coming to meet us in force. We will now go into the whirl, and proceed with the
maneuvers exactly as they have been planned. Whirl!”
At the command each vessel began to pursue a tortuous spiral path. Each group
of seven circled slowly about its own axis, as though each structure were attached
rigidly to a radius rod, and at the same time spiraled around the line of advance in such
fashion that the whole gigantic cone, wide open maw to the fore, seemed to be boring
its way through the air.
“Lucky again!” Kromodeor, in the wardroom, turned to Wixill as the two prepared
to take their respective watches. “It looks as though the first action would come while
we’re on duty. I’ve got just one favor to ask—if you have to economize on power, let
Number One alone, will you?”
“No fear of that,” Wixill hissed, with the Vorkulian equivalent of a chuckle. “We
have abundance of power for all of you projector officers. But don’t waste any of it, or I’ll
cut you down five ratings!”
“You’re welcome. When I shine old Number One on any hexan work, one flash is
all we’ll take. See you at supper,” and, leaving his superior at the door of the power
room, Kromodeor wriggled away to his station upon the parallel horizontal bars before
his panel.
Making sure that his tail coils were so firmly clamped that no possible lurch or
shock could throw him out of position, he set an eye toward each of his sighting
screens, even though he knew that it would be long before those comparatively short
range instruments would show anything except friendly vessels. Then, ready for any
emergency, he scanned his one “live” screen—the one upon which were being flashed
the pictures and reports secured by the high-powered instruments of the observers.
With the terrific acceleration employed by the hexan spheres, it was not long until
the leading squadron of fighting globes neared the Vorkulian war-cone. This advance
guard was composed of the new, high-acceleration vessels. Their crews, with the innate
blood-lust and savagery of their breed, had not even entertained the thought of
accommodating their swifter pace to that of the main body of the fleet. These vast, slow-
moving structures were no more to be feared than those similar ones whose visits they
had been repulsing for twenty long Jovian years—by the time the slower spheres could
arrive upon the scene there would be nothing left for them to do. Therefore, few in
number as were the vessels of the vanguard, they rushed to the attack. In one blinding
salvo they launched their supposedly irresistible planes of force — dazzling, scintillating
planes under whose fierce power the studying, questing, scouting fortresses previously
encountered had fled back southward; cut, beaten, and crippled. These spiraling
monsters, however, did not pause or waver in their stolidly ordered motion. As the
hexan planes of force flashed out the dull green metal walls broke into a sparkling green
radiance, against which the Titanic bolts spent themselves in vain. Then there leaped
out from the weird brilliance of the walls of the fortresses great shafts of pale green
luminescence—tractor ray after gigantic tractor ray, which seized upon the hexan
spheres and drew them ruthlessly into the yawning open end of that gigantic cone.
Then, in each group of seven, similar great streamers of energy reached out from
fortress to fortress, until each group was welded into one mighty unit by twenty-one
such bands of force. The unit formed, a ray from each of its seven component
structures seized upon a designated sphere, and under the combined power of those
seven tractors the luckless globe was literally snapped into the center of mass of the
Vorkulian unit. There seven dully gleaming red pressor rays leaped upon it, backed by
all the power of seven gigantic fortresses, held rigidly in formation by the unimaginable
mass of the structures and by their twenty-one prodigious tractor beams. Under that
awful impact the screens and walls of the hexan spheres were exactly as effective as so
many structures of the most tenuous vapor. The red glare of the vortex of those beams
was lightened momentarily by a flash of brighter color, and through the foggy
atmosphere there may have flamed briefly a drop or two of metal that was only
liquefied. The red and green beams snapped out, the peculiar radiance died from the
metal walls, and the gigantic duplex cone of the Vorkuls bored serenely northward—as
little marked or affected by the episode as is a darting swift who, having snapped up a
chance insect in full flight, darts on.
“Great Cat!” Far off in space, Brandon turned from his visiray screen and wiped
his brow. “Czuv certainly chirped it, Perce, when he called those things flying fortresses.
But who, what, why, and how? We didn’t see any apparatus that looked capable of
generating or handling those beams—and of course when they got started their screens
cut us off. Wish we could have made some sense out of their language—like to know a
few of their ideas— find out whether we can’t get on terms with them some way or
other. Funny-looking wampuses, but they’ve got real brains. If they have it in mind to
take us on next, old son, it’ll be just . . . too . . . bad!”
“And then some,” agreed Stevens. “They’ve got something—no fooling. It looks
like the hexans are going to get theirs, good and plenty, pretty soon—and then what? I’d
give my left lung and four front teeth for one look at their controls in action.”
“You and me both—’sfunny, the way those green ray-screens stick to the walls,
instead of being spherical, as you’d expect . . . should think they’d have to radiate from
a center, and so be spherical,” Brandon cogitated. “However, we’ve got nothing
corkscrewy enough to go through ’em, so we’ll have to stand by. We’ll stay inside
whenever possible, look on from outside when we must, but all the time picking up
whatever information we can. In the meantime, now that we’ve got our passengers, old
Doctor Westfall prescribes something that he says is good for what ails us.
Distance—lots of distance, straight out from the sun—and I wouldn’t wonder if we’d
better take his prescription.”
The two Terrestrial observers relapsed into silence, staring into their visiray
plates, searching throughout the enormous volume of one of those great fortresses in
another attempt to solve the mystery of the generation and propagation of the incredible