manifestations of energy which they had just witnessed. Scarcely had the search
begun, however, when the visirays were again cut off sharply—the rapidly-advancing
main fleet of the hexans had arrived and the scintillant Vorkulian screens were again in
place.
True to hexan nature, training and tradition the fleet, hundreds strong, rushed
savagely to the attack. Above, below, and around the far-flung cone the furious globes
dashed, attacking every Vorkulian craft viciously with every resource at their command;
with every weapon known to their diabolically destructive race. Planes of force stabbed
and slashed, concentrated beams of annihilation flared fiercely through the reeking
atmosphere, gigantic aerial bombs and torpedoes were hurled with full radio control
against the unwelcome visitors—with no effect. Bound together in groups of seven by
the mighty bands of force, the Vorkulian units sailed calmly northward, spiraling along
with not the slightest change in formation or velocity. The frightful planes and beams of
immeasurable power simply spent themselves harmlessly against those sparklingly
radiant green walls—seemingly as absorbent to energy as a sponge is to water, since
the eye could not detect any change in the appearance of the screens under even the
fiercest blasts of the hexan projectors. Bombs, torpedoes, and all material projectiles
were equally futile—they exploded harmlessly in the air far from their objectives, or
disappeared at the touch of one of those dark, dull-red pressors. And swiftly, but calmly
and methodically as at a Vorkulian practice drill, the heptagons were destroying the
hexan fleet. Seven mighty tractors would lash out, seize an attacking sphere, and snap
it into the center of mass of the unit of seven. There would be a brief flash of dull red, a
still briefer flare of incandescence, and the impalpable magnets would leap out to seize
another of the doomed globes. It was only a matter of moments until not a hexan vessel
remained; and the Vorkulian juggernaut spiraled onward, now at full acceleration,
toward the hexan stronghold dimly visible far ahead of them—a vast city built around
Jupiter’s northern pole.
At the controls of his projector, Kromodeor spun a dial with a many-fingered,
flexible hand and spoke.
“Wixill, I am being watched again — I can feel very plainly that strange
intelligence watching everything I do. Have the tracers located him?”
“No, they haven’t been able to synchronize with his wave yet. Either he is using a
most minute pencil or, what is more probable, he is on a frequency which we do not
ordinarily use. However, I agree with you that it is not a malignant intelligence. All of us
have felt it, and none of us senses enmity. Therefore it is not a hexan—it may be one of
those strange creatures of the satellites, who are, of course, perfectly harmless.”
“Harmless, but unpleasant,” returned Kromodeor. “When we get back I’m going
to find his beam myself and send a discharge along it that will end his spying upon me. I
do not . . .”
A wailing signal interrupted the conversation, and every Vorkul in the vast fleet
coiled even more tightly about his bars, for the real battle was about to begin. The city of
the hexans lay before them, all her gigantic forces mustered to repel the first real
invasion of her long and warlike history. Mile after mile it extended, an orderly labyrinth
of spherical buildings arranged in vast interlocking series of concentric circles—a city of
such size that only a small part of it was visible, even to the infra-red vision of the
Vorkulians. Apparently the city was unprotected, having not even a wall. Outward from
the low, rounded houses of the city’s edge there reached a wide and verdant plain,
which was separated from the jungle by a narrow moat of shimmering liquid— a liquid of
such dire potency that across it even those frightful growths could neither leap nor
creep.
But as the Vorkulian phalanx approached—now shooting forward and upward
with maximum acceleration, screaming bolts of energy naming out for miles behind
each heptagon as the full power of its generators was unleashed— it was made clear
that the homeland of the hexans was far from unprotected. The verdant plain
disappeared in a blast of radiance, revealing a transparent surface, through which could
be seen masses of machinery filling level below level, deep into the ground as far as the
eye could reach; and from the bright liquid of the girdling moat there shot vertically
upward a coruscantly refulgent band of intense yellow luminescence. These were the
hexan defenses, heretofore invulnerable and invincible. Against them any ordinary war-
craft, equipped with ordinary weapons of offense, would have been as pitifully impotent
as a naked baby attacking a battleship. But now those defenses were being challenged
by no ordinary craft; it had taken the mightiest intellects of Vorkulia two long lifetimes to
evolve the awful engine of destruction which was hurling itself forward and upward with
an already terrific and constantly increasing speed.
Onward and upward flashed the gigantic duplex cone, its entire whirling mass
laced and latticed together into one mammoth unit by green tractor beams and red
pressors. These tension and compression members, of unheard-of power, made of the
whole fleet of three hundred forty three fortresses a single stupendous structure—a
structure with all the strength and symmetry of a cantilever truss! Straight through that
wall of yellow vibrations the vast truss drove, green walls flaming blue defiance as the
absorbers overloaded: its doubly-braced tip rearing upward, into and beyond the
vertical, as it shot through that searing yellow wall. Simultaneously from each heptagon
there flamed downward a green shaft of radiance, so that the whole immense circle of
the cone’s mouth was one solid tractor beam, fastening upon and holding in an
unbreakable grip mile upon mile of the hexan earthworks.
Practically irresistible force and supposedly immovable object! Every loose article
in every heptagon had long since been stored in its individual shock-proof compartment,
and now every Vorkul coiled his entire body in fierce clasp about mighty horizontal bars:
for the entire kinetic energy of the untold millions of tons of mass comprising the cone,
at the terrific measure of its highest possible velocity, was to be hurled upon those
unbreakable linkages of force which bound the trussed aggregation of Vorkulian
fortresses to the deeply-buried intrenchments of the hexans. The gigantic composite
tractor beam snapped on and held. Inconceivably powerful as that beam was, it
stretched a trifle under the incomprehensible momentum of those prodigious masses of
metal, almost halted in their terrific flight. But the war-cone was not quite halted; the
calculations of the Vorkulian scientists had been accurate. No possible artificial
structure, and but few natural ones — in practice maneuvers entire mountains had been
lifted and hurled for miles through the air—could have withstood the incredible violence
of that lunging, twisting, upheaving impact. Lifted bodily by that impalpable hawser of
force and cruelly wrenched and twisted by its enormous couple of angular momentum,
the hexan works came up out of the ground as a waterpipe comes up in the teeth of a
power shovel. The ground trembled and rocked and boulders, fragments of concrete
masonry, and masses of metal flew in all directions as that city-encircling conduit of
diabolical machinery was torn from its bed.
A portion of that conduit fully thirty miles in length was in the air, a twisted,
flaming inferno of wrecked generators, exploding ammunition, and broken and short-
circuited high-tension leads before the hexans could themselves cut it and thus save the
remainder of their fortifications. With resounding crashes the structure parted at the
weakened points, the furious upheaval stopped, and, the tractor beams shut off, the
shattered, smoking, erupting mass of wreckage fell in clashing, grinding ruin upon the
city.
The enormous duplex cone of the Vorkuls did not attempt to repeat the
maneuver but divided into two single cones, one of which darted toward each point of
rupture. There, upon the broken and unprotected ends of the hexan cordon their points
of attack lay: theirs the task to eat along that annular fortress, no matter what the
opposition might bring to bear —to channel in its place a furrow of devastation until the
two cones, their work complete, should meet at the opposite edge of the city. Then what
was left of the cones would separate into individual heptagons, which would so
systematically blast every hexan thing into nothingness as to make certain that never
again would they resume their insensate attacks upon the Vorkuls. Having counted the
cost and being grimly ready to pay it, the implacable attackers hurled themselves upon
their objectives.
Here were no feeble spheres of space, commanding only the limited energies
transmitted to their small receptors through the ether. Instead there were all the
offensive and defensive weapons developed by hundreds of generations of warrior-
scientists; wielding all the incalculable power capable of being produced by the massed
generators of a mighty nation. But for the breach opened in the circle by the irresistible