 XI. The Vorkulia, the city of the Vorkules, was an immense, seven-pointed star. At its center, directly upon the south pole of Jupiter, rose a tremendous shaft, its cross-section likewise a tapering, seven-pointed star, which housed the directing intelligence of the nation. Radiating from the seven cardinal points of the building were short lanes leading to star-shaped open plots, from which in turn branched out ways to other stellate areas, ways reaching, after many such steps, to the towering inner walls of the metropolis. The outer walls, still loftier and even more massive ramparts of sullen gray-green metal, formed a seamless, jointless barrier against an utterly indescribable foe. A barrier whose outer faces radiated constantly a searing, coruscating, green emanation. Metal alone could not long have barred that voracious and implacably relentless enemy, but against that lethal green emanation, even that ravening Jovian jungle could not prevail, but fell back impotent. Riving and crawling, loathsomely palpitant with an unspeakable exuberance of foul and repellent vigor, possible only to such meteorological conditions as obtained there, it threw its most hideously prolific growths against that radiant wall in vain. The short zigzag lanes, the ways and the seven-pointed areas, were paved with a greenish glass. This pavement was intended solely to prevent vegetable growth and carried no traffic whatever, since few indeed of the vorkools had ever been earthbound and all traffic was in the air. The principal purpose of the openings was to separate, and thus to render accessible by air, the mighty buildings, which, level upon level, towered upward, with airships hovering at or anchored to doorways and entrances at every level. Buildings, entrances, everything visible, all replicated, reiterated, repeated infinite variations in the one theme, that of the septinate stelaform. Ever ran riot. Masses varied from immense blocks of awe-inspiring grandeur to delicate tracery of sheerst gossamer. Lights flamed and flared in wide bands and in narrow flashing pencils. But in all, through all, over all, and dominating all, was the seven-pointed star. In and almost filling the space, at least a mile in width, between the inner and the outer walls, were huge seven-sided structures, featureless, squat, forbidding heptagons of dull green metal. No thing living was to be seen in that space. Its pavement was of solid metal and immensely thick, and that metal, as well as that of the walls, was burned and blackened and seared, as though by numberless exposures to intolerable flame. In a lower compartment of one of those enormous heptagons, Vortel Cromodior, first projector officer, rested before a gigantic and complex instrument board. He was at ease, his huge wings folded, his sinuous length coiled comfortably in slack loops about two horizontal bars. But at least one enormous, extensible eye was always pointed toward the board, always was at least one nimble and bat-like ear cocked attentively in the direction of the signal panel. A whistling, shrieking allulation ret the air, and the officer's coils tightened as he reared a few feet of his length upright, shooting out half a dozen tentacular arms to various switches and controls upon his board, while throughout the great heptagon hundreds of other Vortkools sprang to attention at their assigned posts of duty. As the howling wail came to a climax, in a blast of sound, Cromodior threw over a lever, as did every other projector officer in every other heptagon, and there was made plain to any observer the reason for the burns and scars in the tortured space between the lofty inner and outer walls of Vorkulia. For these heptagons were the monstrous flying fortresses which Khazov had occasionally seen from afar, as they went upon some unusual errand above the Jovian banks of Mist, and which Brandon was soon to see in his vis-a-ray screen. The seared and disfigured metal of the pavement and walls was made so by the release of the furious blasts of energy necessary to raise those untold thousands of tons of mass against the attraction of Jupiter, more than two and a half times the gravity of our own world. Vast volumes of flaming energy shrieked from the ports, wave upon wave flooding the heptagons, it dashed back and forth upon the heavy metal between the walls. As more and more of the inconceivable power of those titanic generators was unleashed, it boiled forth in a devastating flood, which, striking the walls, rebounded and leaped vertically, far above even those mighty ramparts. Even the enormous thickness of a highly conducting metal could not absorb all the energy of that intolerable blast, and immediately beneath the ports the new seven-pointed areas of disfigurement appeared as those terrific flying fortresses were finally wrenched from the ground and hurled upward. High in the air another signal wailed up and down a peculiar scale of sound, and the mighty host of vessels formed smoothly into symmetrical groups of seven. Each group then moved with mathematical precision into its allotted position in a complex geometrical formation, a gigantic, seven-ribbed, duplex cone in space. The flagship flew at the apex of this stupendous formation, behind and protected by the full power of the other floating citadels of the forty-nine groups of seven. Due north the amazing armada sped in rigorous alignment, flying along a predetermined meridian due north. At the end of his watch Cromodior relinquished his board to the officer relieving him and shot into the air, propelled by the straightening of the powerful coils of his snake-like body and tail. Wings half-spread, lateral and vertical-ruttering fins outthrust, he soared across the room toward a low opening. Just before they struck the wall upon either side of the doorway the great wings snapped shut, the fins retracted, and the long and heavy body struck the floor of the passage without a jar. With a wriggling serpentine motion he sped like a vibrant arrow along the hall and into a wardroom. There, after a brief glance around the room, he coiled up beside a fellow officer, who, with one eye, was negligently reading a scroll held in three or four hands. While with another eye, poised upon its slender pedicle, he watched a moving picture upon a television screen. Hello, Cromodior! Wicksill, Chief Power Officer, greeted the newcomer in the wailing, hissing language of the Vorkools. He tossed the scroll into the air, where it instantly rolled into a tight cylinder and shot into an opening in the wall of the room. Glad to see you! Books and shows are all right on practice cruises, but I can't seem to work up much enthusiasm about such things now. More elevated an eye and studied the screen, upon which, to the accompaniment of whistling, shrieking sound, whirled and gyrated an interlacing group of serpentine forms. A good show, Wicksill, the projector officer replied, but nothing to hold the attention of men engaged in what we are doing. Think of it, after twenty years of preparation, two long lifetimes, and for the first time in our history we are actually going to war. I have thought of it at length. It is disgusting, compelled to traffic with an alien form of life. Were it not to end in the extinction of those unspeakable hexons, it would be futile to the point of silliness. I cannot understand them at all. There is ample room upon this planet for all of us. Our races combined are not using one-seventh-thousandth of its surface. You would think that they would shun all strangers. Yet for ages they have attacked us, refusing to let us alone, until finally they forced us to prepare means for their destruction. They seem as senselessly savage as the jungle growths, and, but for their very evident intelligence, one would class them as such. You would think that, being intelligent and being alien to us, they would not have anything to do with us in any way, peacefully or otherwise. However, their intrusions and depredations are about to end. They certainly are. Vorkulia has endured much, too much, but I am glad that our forefathers did not decide to exterminate them sooner. If they had, we could not have been doing this now. There speaks the rashness of youth, Cromodior. It is a violation of all our instincts to have any commerce with outsiders, as you will learn as soon as you see one of them. Then, too, we will lose heavily, since we have studied their armaments so long, and have subjected every phase of the situation to statistical analysis. It is certain that we are to succeed, but you also know at what cost. Two sevenths of our force, with a probable error of one in seven, replied the younger Vorkul, and because that figure cannot be improved within the next seven years, and because of the exceptional weakness of the Hexans due to their unexpectedly great losses upon Callisto, we are attacking at this time. Their spherical vessels are nothing, of course. It is in the reduction of the city that we will lose men and vessels. But at that each of us has five chances in seven of returning, which is good enough odds, much better than we had in the last expedition into the jungle. But by the mighty seven I shall make myself wrap around one Hexan for my brother's sake, and his coils tightened unconsciously. Hidious, repulsive monstrosities! Creatures so horrible should not be allowed to live! They should have been tossed over the wall to the jungle ages ago! Cromodiur curled out an eye as he spoke, and complacently surveyed the writhing cylinder of sinuous supple power that was his own body. Better avoid contact work with them, if possible, cautioned Wixill. You might not be able to unwrap, and to touch one of them is almost unthinkable. Speaking of wrapping, you know that they are putting on the finals of the contact work in the star this evening. Let's watch them. They slid to the floor and wriggled away in perfect step, undulating along in such nice synchronism that their adjacent sides, only a few inches apart, formed two waving rigidly parallel lines. Deep in the lower part of the fortress they entered a large assembly room, provided with a raised platform in the center and having hundreds of short, upright posts in lieu of chairs, most of which were already taken by spectators. The two officers curled their tails comfortably around two of the vacant pillars, elevated their heads to a convenient level of sight and directed each an eye or two upon the stage. This was, of course, heptagonal. Its sides, like those of the mighty flying forts themselves, were not straight, but angled inward sufficiently to make the platforms a seven-pointed star. The edge was outlined by a low rail, and bulwark and floor were padded with thick layers of a hard but smooth and yielding fabric. In this star-shaped ring two young vorkools were contending for the championship of the fleet, in a contest that seemed to combine most of the features of wrestling, boxing, and bar room brawling, with no holds barred. Four hands of each of the creatures held heavy leather billies, and could be used only in striking with those weapons, the remaining hands being left free to employ as the owner saw fit. Since the sport was not intended to be lethal, however, the eyes and other highly vulnerable parts were protected by metal masks, and the wing-ribs were similarly guarded by leather shields. The guiding fins, being comparatively small and extremely tough, required no protection. We're just in time, Cromodyor whistled. The main bout is nicely on. See anyone from the ship? I might stake a couple of corpals that Sintris will paint the symbol upon his wing. Most of their men seemed to be across the star, Wicksill replied, and both beings fell silent, absorbed in the struggle going on in the ring. It was a contest well worth watching. Wing crashed against mighty wing, and the life-hard bodies snapped and curled this way and that, almost faster than the follow, in quest of advantageous holds. Above the shrieking wails of the crowd could be heard the smacks and thuds of the eight flying clubs as they struck against the leather shields or against tough and scaly hides. For minutes the conflict raged, with no advantage apparent. Now the fighters were flat upon the floor of the star, now dozens of feet in the air above it as one or the other sought to gain a height from which to plunge downward upon his own it. But both stayed upon or over the star. To leave its boundaries was to lose disgracefully. Then, high in the air, the visiting warrior thought he saw an opening and grappled. Wings crashed in fierce blows, hands gripped and furiously wrenched. Two powerful bodies, tapering smoothly down to equally powerful tails, cork screwed around each other viciously, winding up into something resembling tightly twisted lamp-cord, and the two four cools, each helpless, fell to the mat with a crash. Fast as was Zerexi, the gladiator from the flagship, centris was the merest trifle faster. Like the straightening of a twisted spring of tempered steel, that long body uncoiled as they struck the floor, and up under those shielding wings an infinitesimal fraction of a second slow in interposing, that lithe tail sped. Two lightening loops flashed around the neck of the visitor, and tightened inexorably. Desperately the victim fought to break that terrible strangle-hold, but every maneuver was countered as soon as it was begun. Beating wings, under whose frightful blows the very air quivered, were met and parried by wings equally capable. Hands and clubs were of no avail against that corded cable of sinew, and centris, his head retracted between his wings and his own hands reinforcing that impregnable covering over his head and neck, threw all his power into his tail, tightening with terrific, rippling surges that already throttling banned 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 Wixil thoughtfully. I'm glad that centris 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 Cromodiore. His big mistake was 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 early 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 vercoolian 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 vercoolian phalanx flew, straight north. The equatorial regions, considerably hotter than 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 vercoolian spearhead was hurled 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! Cromodior and the Wardroom turned to Wixil 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! Wixil hissed, with the vercoolian equivalent of a chuckle. We have abundance of power for all of your 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 Hexen work, one flash is all they'll take. See you at supper. And, leaving his superior at the door of the Power Room, Cromodior 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 Hexen spheres, it was not long until the leading squadron of fighting globes neared the vercoolian war-cone. This advanced guard was composed of the new high-acceleration vessels. Their crews, with the innate bloodlust and savagery of their breed, had not even entertained the thought of accommodating their swifter pace to that of the 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 Hexen planes of force flashed out, the dull green metal walls broke into a sparkling scene 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 Hexen 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, array 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 presser-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 Hexen 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 Vorkul's 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 visoray screen and wiped his brow. Gazov certainly chirped it, purse, 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 at the pockets. 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. Their think tanks are very evidently full of bubbles. 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 Hexons 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 long look at their controls in action. You and me both. It's funny 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 them, 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 Dr. Westfall prescribes something that he says is good for what ails us. Distance, lots of distance, straight out from the sun. I wouldn't wonder if we'd better take his prescription. The two terrestrial observers relapsed into silence, staring into their visor ray 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 manifestations of energy which they had just witnessed. Scarcely had the search begun, however, when the visor rays 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, hundred 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. Plains 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 visitor, with no effect. Bound together in groups of seven by the mighty pale green 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 small 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 presser rays. And swiftly, but calmly and methodically, as at a Vorkulian practice drill, the Heptagons were destroying the Hexan fleet. Seven mighty green 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, Cromodia spun a dial with a many-fingered, flexible hand and spoke. Wickshill, 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 sense his 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 Cromodia. When we get back, I am going to find this 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 vor cool 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 their gigantic forces muster 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 infrared 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 flaming 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 correspondingly refulgent band of intense yellow luminescence. These were the Hexan defences, here to for invulnerable and invincible. Against them any ordinary warcraft equipped with ordinary weapons of offense would have been as pitifully impotent as a naked baby attacking a battleship. But now those defences 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 lattice together into one mammoth unit by green tractor beams and red pressers. These tension and compression members of unheard of power made the whole fleet of 343 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 their flame 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 Hexen 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 trust aggregation of Vorkulian fortresses to the deep buried entrenchments of the Hexens. 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 Vorkone 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 howser of force, and cruelly wrenched and twisted by its enormous couple of angular momentum, the hexenworks came up out of the ground as a water pipe comes up in the teeth of a power shovel. The ground trembled and rocked, and boulders, fragments of concrete masonry, the 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 Hexens 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 beam shut off, the shattered, smoking, erupting mass of wreckage fell in clashing, grinding ruin upon the city. The enormous duplex cone of the Vorkhules 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 Hexen cordon, their points of attack lay. There's 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 away every Hexen thing into nothingness as to make certain that never again would they resume their insensate attacks upon the Vorkhules. 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 aether. 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 open in the circle by the irresistible surprise attack, they would have been invulnerable, and hampered as they were by the defenseless ends of what should have been an endless ring, the Hexens took heavy toll. The heptagons, massive and solidly braced as they were, and anchored by tractor rays as well, shuddered and trembled throughout their mighty frames under the impact of fiercely driven presser beams. Solidly radiant green wall screens flared brighter and brighter as the Vorkhulian absorbers and dissipators, mighty as they were, continued more and more to overload. For there were being directed against them beams from the entire remaining circumference of the stronghold. Every deadly frequency and emanation known to the fiendish Hexen intellect, backed by the full power of the city, was poured out against the invaders in sizzling, shrieking bars, bands and planes of frenzied incandescence. Nor was vibratory destruction alone. Armor-piercing projectiles of enormous size and weight were hurled, diamond-hard, drilled-headed projectiles which clung and bore upon impact. High explosive shells, canisters of gas, and the frightful aerial bombs and radio-derigible torpedoes of highly scientific war, all were thrown with lavish hand as fast as the projectors could be served. But thrust for thrust, ray for ray, projectile for massive projectile, the brobding neggy and creations of the Vorkhuls gave back to the Hexens. The material lining of the ghastly moat was the only substance capable of resisting the action of its contents, and now that lining destroyed by the uprooting of the fortress, that corrosive, brilliantly mobile liquid cascaded down into the trough and added its hellish contribution to the furious scene. For whatever that devouring fluid touched, flared into yellow flame, gave off clouds of lurid, strangling vapor, and disappeared. But through yellow haze, through blasting frequencies, through clouds of poisonous gas, through rain of metal and through storm of explosive, the two cones ground implacably onward, their every offensive weapon centered upon the fast receding exposed ends of the Hexen fortress. Their bombs and torpedoes ripped and tore into the structure beneath the invulnerable shield and exploded, demolishing and hurling aside like straws, the walls, projectors, hexads, and vast mountains of earth. Their terrible rays bored in, softening, fusing, volatilizing metal, short circuiting connections, destroying life far ahead of the point of attack, and drawn along by the relentlessly creeping composite tractor-beam, there progressed around the circumference of the Hexen city two veritable Saturnalia of destruction, uninterrupted cataclysmic detonations of sound, and sizzling, shrieking, multicolored displays of pyrotechnic incandescence, combining to form a spectacle of violence incredible. But the heptagons could not absorb nor radiate indefinitely those torrents of energy, and soon one greenishly incandescent screen went down. Giant shells pierced the green metal walls, giant beams of force fused and consumed them. Faster and faster the huge heptagon became a shapeless, flowing mass, its metal dripping away in flaming gout of brilliance. Then it disappeared utterly in one terrific blast, as some probing enemy ray reached a vital part. The cone did not pause nor waver. Many of its component units would go down, but it would go on, and on and on, until every Hexen trace had disappeared, or until the last Vorkulian heptagon had been annihilated. In one of the lowermost heptagons, one bearing the full brunt of the Hexen armament, Cromodia reared upright as his projector controls went dead beneath his hands. Finding his communicator screens likewise lifeless, he slipped to the floor and wriggled to the room of the Chief Power Officer, where he found Wixil idly fingering his controls. "'Are we out?' asked Cromodia or Thursley. "'All done,' the Chief Power Officer calmly replied. "'We have power left, but we cannot use it, as they have crushed our screens and are fusing our outer walls. Two out of seven chances, and we drew one of them. We are still working on the infraband over across the Seconds Board, but we won't last long.' As he spoke, the mighty fabric lurched under them, and only their quick and powerful tails, darting in lightning loops about the bars, saved them from being battered to death against the walls as the heptagon was hurled end over end by a stupendous force. With a splintering crash it came to rest upon the ground. "'I wonder how that happened. They should have raided us out or exploded us,' Cromodia pondered. The Vork Kools, with their inhumanly powerful, sinuous bodies, were scarcely affected by the shock of that frightful fall. "'They must have had a whole battery of pressers on us when our greens went out. They threw us half way across the city, almost into the gate we made first,' Wicksill replied, studying the situation of the vessel in one small screen still in action. "'We aren't hurt very badly. Only a few holes that they are starting to weld already. When the absorber and dissipator crews get them cool down enough so that we can use power again, we'll go back.' But they were not to resume their place in the attack. Through the still glowing walls, Hexen's soldiery were leaping in steady streams, fighting with the utmost savagery of their bloodthirsty natures, urged on by the desperation born of the knowledge of imminent defeat and total destruction. Hand weapons roared, flashed, and sparkled. Heavy bars crashed and thudded against crunching bones. Mighty bodies and tails whipped crushingly about six limbed forms which wrenched and tore with monstrously powerful hands and claws. Fiercely and valiantly the Vorkools fought, but they were outnumbered by hundreds and only one outcome was possible. Cromodior was one of the last to go down. Weapons long since exhausted he unwrapped his deadly coils from about a dead Hexen and darted toward a storeroom, only to be cut off by a horde of enemies. Throwing himself down a vertical shaft he flew toward a tiny projector locker, in the lowermost part of one of the great stars' points, the Hexen's in hot pursuit. He wrenched the door open and even while searing planes of force were riddling his body he trained the frightful weapon he had sought. He pressed the contact and bursts of intolerable flames swept the entire passage clear of life. Weekly he struggled to go out into the isle, but his muscles refused to do the bidding of his will and he lay there twitching feebly. In the power room of the Heptagon a Hexen officer turned fiercely to another, who was offering advice. Vorkools, bah! he snarled viciously. Our race is finished. Die we must, but we shall take with us the one enemy, who above all others needs destruction. And he hurled the captured Vorkoolian fortress into the air. As the Heptagon lurched upward the massive door of a lower projector locker clang shut, and Cromodiore collapsed in a corner, his consciousness blotted out. Well, that certainly tears it. That's a... I... Stephen's ready vocabulary failed him and he turned to Brandon, who was still staring narrow-eyed into the plate, watching the destruction of the Hexen city. They've got something all right. You've got to hand it to them," Brandon replied. And we thought we knew something about forces and physical phenomena in general. Those birds have forgotten more than we ever will know. Just one of those things could take the whole IP fleet, armed as we are now, any morning after breakfast, just for setting up exercises. We've got to do something about it, but what? It's okay, whatever you say. There may be an out somewhere, but I don't see it. And Stephen's gloomy tone matched his words. Highly trained scientists both, they had been watching that which transcended all the science of the inner planets and knew themselves outclassed immeasurably. Only one thing to do as I see it," Brandon cogitated. That's to keep on going straight out, the way we're headed now. We better call a Council of War to dope out a line of action. End of Chapter 11. Chapter 12 of Space Hounds of IPC by E. E. Doc Smith This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Space Hounds of IPC. Chapter 12. The Citadel in Space For the first time in many days Brandon and Westfall sat at dinner in the main dining-room of the Sirius. They were enjoying greatly the unaccustomed pleasure of a leisurely formal meal, but still their talk concerned the projection of pure forces instead of subjects more appropriate to the table. Still their eyes paid more attention to diagrams drawn upon scraps of paper than to the diners about them. But I tell you, Quince, you're full of little red ants, clear to the neck," Brandon snorted, as Westfall waved one of his arguments aside. You must have had help to get that far off. No one man could possibly be as wrong as you are. Why, those feels absolutely will... Quince, hi Norman," a merry voice interrupted. Still fighting as usual, I see. What kind of knights are you anyway, to rescue us poor damsels in distress, and then never even to know that we're alive? A tall willowy brunette had seen the two physicists as she entered the saloon and came over to their table, a handout stretched to each in cordial greeting. Ho, Verna," both men exclaimed, and came to their feet as they welcomed the smiling graceful newcomer. Sit down here, Verna. We have hardly started," Westfall invited, and Brandon looked at the girl in assumed surprise as she seated herself in the proffered chair. Well, Verna, it's like this, he began. That's enough, she broke in. That phrase always was your introduction to one of the world's greatest brainstorms. But I know that this is the first time you have had time even to eat like civilized beings, so I'll forgive you this once. Why all the registering of amazement, Norman? I'm astonished that you aren't being monopolized by some husband or other. Surely the officers of Yachturus weren't so dumb that they'd stand for your still being Verna Pickering, were they? Not dumb, Norman. No. Far from it. But I'm still working for my MRS degree, and I haven't succeeded in snaring it yet. You'd be surprised at how cagey those officers got after a few of them had been captured. But they're just like any other hunted game, I suppose. The antelopes that survive get pretty wild, you know, she concluded, plaintively. Well, that certainly is one tough break for a poor little girl, Brandon sympathized. Quince, our little Nell here hasn't been done right by. I'm bashful, and you're a woman-hater. But between us, some way, we've simply got to take steps. You might take longer steps than you think, Verna laughed, her regular white teeth and vivid coloring emphasized by her olive skin and her startling hair, black as Brandon's own. Perhaps I would like a scientist better than an IP officer anyway. The more I think of it, the sureer I am that Nadia Newton had the right idea. I believe that I'll catch me a physicist too. Either of you would do quite nicely, I think. And she studied the two men carefully. Westfall, the methodical and precise, had never been able to defend himself against Verna Pickering's badnage. But Brandon's ready tongue took up the challenge. Verna, if you really decided to get any living man, he wouldn't stand a chance in the world, he declared. If you've already made up your mind that I'm your meat, I'll come down like Davy Crockett's coon. But if either of us will do, that'll give us each a 50-50 chance to escape your toils. What say we play a game of freeze out to decide it? Fine, Norman, when shall we play? Oh, between Wednesday and Thursday, any week you say. And the two fenced on, banteringly but skillfully, with Westfall an appreciative and unembarrassed listener. Dinner over, Brandon and Westfall went back to the control room, where they found Stevens already seated at one of the master screens. All X, purse? All X! The observers report no registrations during the last two watches. And the three fell into discussion, long they talked, studying every angle of the situation confronting them, until suddenly a speaker rattled furiously and an enormous staring eye filled both master plates. Brandon's hand flashed to a switch, but the image disappeared even before he could establish the full screen. I'm on the upper band, take the lower, he snapped. But Stevens projector was already in action. Trained minds all, they knew that some intelligence had traced them, and all realized that it was of the utmost importance to know what and where that intelligence was. Stevens found the probing frequency in his range and they flash their own beam along it, encountering finally one of the monstrous Vorkulian Fortresses, far from Jupiter and almost directly between them and the planet. Its wall screens were in operation and no frequency at their command could penetrate that neutralizing blanket of vibrations. What kind of an eye was that? Ever see anything like it, purse? Brandon demanded. I don't think so, though of course we got only an awfully short flash of it. It didn't look like the periscopic eyes that those flying snakes had. Looks more like a Hexen eye, don't you think? Couldn't very well be Hexen though, and that kind of a ship. Don't think so either. Maybe it's a purely mechanical affair that they use for observing. Anyway, old sons, I don't like the looks of things at all. Quince, you're the brains of this outfit, shift the massive old intellect into high and tell us what to do. Westfall, staring into the eyepiece of the filer micrometer, finished measuring the apparent size of the heptagon before he turned toward Stevens and Brandon. It is hard to decide upon a course of action since anything that we do may prove to be wrong, he said slowly. However, I do not see that this latest development can operate to change the plan we have already adopted. That of running away straight out from the sun. We may have to increase our acceleration to the highest value the women and babies can stand. A series of observations of our pursuer will, of course, be necessary to decide that point. It would be useless to go to Titan, for they would be powerless to help us. We could not hold their mirror upon either the Sirius or their torpedoes against such forces as that fortress has at her command. Then, too, we might well be bringing down upon them an enemy who would destroy much of their world before he could be stopped. Both Uranus and Neptune are approximately upon our present course. Do the Titanians know anything of either of them, Steve? Not a thing, the computer replied. They can't get nearly as far as Uranus on their power beam. It's all they can do to make Jupiter. They seem to think, though, that one or more of the satellites of Uranus or Neptune may be inhabited by beings similar to themselves, only perhaps even more so. But considering the difference between what we found on the Jovian satellites and on Titan, I'd say that anything might be out there on Uranus, Neptune, their satellites, or anywhere else. Cancel Uranus and double that for Neptune, Brandon commanded. Realize how far away they are. That's right, too, agreed Stevens. Before we got there, with any acceleration we can use now, this whole mess will be cleaned up one way or the other. Westfall completed the series of observations and calculated his results. Then, with a gray face, he went to consult the medical officers. The women, children, and the two Martian scientists were sent to the sick bay, and the acceleration was raised slowly to twenty meters per second per second, above which point the physicians declared they should not go unless it became absolutely necessary. Then the scientists met again, met without Alcantro and Fadanzo, who lay helpless upon narrow hospital bunks, unable even to lift their massive arms. While Westfall made another series of precise measurements of the super-dreadnought of space so earnestly pursuing them, Brandon stumbled heavily about the room, hands jammed deep into pockets, eyes unseeing, emitting clouds of smoke from his villainously reeking pipe. The Venetians, lacking Brandon's physical strength and by nature, quieter of disposition, sat motionless, keen mind's heart at work. Stephen sat at the calculating machine, absolutely setting up and knocking down weird and meaningless integrals, while he also concentrated upon the problem before them. They are still gaining, but comparatively slowly, Westfall finally reported. They seem to be—in that case, we may be all X, Brandon interrupted, brandishing his pipe vigorously. We know that they're on a beam. Apparently, we're the only ones hereabouts having cosmic power. If we can keep away from them until their beam attenuates, we can whittle them down to our size and then take them, no matter how much accumulator capacity they've got. But can we keep away from them that long? asked Dole Keenor pointedly, and his fellow Venerian also had a question to propound. Would it not be preferable to lead them in a wide circle, back to a rendezvous with the Space Fleet, which will probably be ready by the time of the meeting? I'm afraid that that would be useless, Westfall frowned in thought. Given power, that fortress could destroy the entire fleet almost as easily as she could wipe out the Sirius alone. Keenor's right, Stevens spoke up from the calculator. You're getting too far ahead of the situation. We are adapt to keep ahead of them long enough to do much leading anywhere. The Titanians can hold a beam together from Saturn to Jupiter. Why can't these snake folks? Several reasons, Brandon argued stubbornly. First place, look at the mass of that thing, and remember that the heavier the beam, the harder it is to hold it together. Second, there's no evidence that they wander around much in space. If their beams are designed principally for travel upon Jupiter, why should they have any extraordinary range? I say they can't hold that beam forever. We've got a good long lead, and in spite of their higher acceleration, I think we'll be able to keep out of range of their heavy stuff. If so, we'll trace a circle, only one a good deal bigger than the one Amunar suggested, and meet the fleet at a point where that enemy ship will be about out of power. Thus for hours the scientists argued, agreeing upon nothing, while the Vorkulian fortress crept ever closer. At the end of three days of the mad flight, the pursuing spaceship was in plain sight, covering hundreds of divisions of the micrometer screens. But now the size of the images was increasing with extreme slowness, and the scientists of the Sirius watched with strained attention the edges of those glowing green pictures. Finally, when the pictured edges were about to cease moving across the finely ruled lines, Brandon cut down his own acceleration of trifle, and kept on decreasing it at such a rate that the heptagon still crept up, foot by foot. Hey, what's the big idea? Stevens demanded. Cokes them along. If we run away from them, they'll probably reverse power and go back home, won't they? Their beam is falling apart fast, but they're still getting so much stuff along it that we couldn't do a thing to stop them. If they think that we're losing power even faster than they are, though, they'll keep after us until their beam's so thin that they'll just be able to stop on it. Then they'll reverse, or else go on to their accumulators. Reverse, probably, since they'll be a long ways from home by that time. We'll reverse, too, and keep just out of range. Then, when we both have stopped and are about to start back, their beam will be at its minimum, and we'll go to work on them. Foot, horse, and marines. Nobody can run us as ragged as they have been doing and get away with it as long as I'm conscious and stand a chance in the world of hanging one onto their chins in retaliation. I've got a hunch. If it works, we can take those birds alone and take them so they'll stay took. We might as well break up. This is going to be an ordinary job of piloting for a few days, I think. I'm going up and work with the Martians on that hunch. You fellows work out any ideas you want to. Watch them close, Mack. Keep kidding them along, but don't let them get close enough to puncture us. Everything worked out practically as Brandon had foretold, and a few days later, their acceleration somewhat less than terrestrial gravity, he called another meeting in the control room. He came in grinning from ear to ear, accompanied by the two Martians, and seated himself at his complex power panel. Now watch the professor closely, gentlemen, he invited. He is going to cut that beam. But you can't, protested Pyrrhus Amunar. I know you can't, ordinarily, when a beam is tight and solid. But that beam's as loose as ashes right now. I told you I had a hunch, and Alcantro and Fadonzo worked out the right answer for me. If I can cut it, quints, and if their screens go down for a minute, shoot your visoray into them and see what you can see. All X, how much power are you going to draw? Plenty. It figures a little better than 400,000 kilofranks. I'll draw it all from the accumulators, so as not to disturb you fellows on the cosmic intake. We don't care if we do run the batteries down some, but I don't want to hold that load on the bus bars very long. However, if my hunch is right, I won't be on that beam five minutes before it's cut from Jupiter, and I'll bet you four dollars that you won't see the original crew in that fort when you get into it. He set the upper and lower bands of dirigible projectors to apply a powerful sidewise thrust, and the serious darted off her course. Flashing a minute pencil behind the huge heptagon, Brandon manipulated his tuning circuits until a brilliant spot in space showed him that he was approaching resonance with the heptagon's power beam. Micrometer dials were then engaged, and the delicate tuning continued until the meters gave evidence that the two beams were precisely synchronized and exactly opposite in phase. Four plunger switches closed, that tiny pilot ray became an enormous rod of force, and as those two gigantic beams met in exact opposition and neutralized each other, a solid wall of blinding brilliance appeared in the empty ether behind the Vorkulian Fortress. As that dazzling wall sprang into being, the sparkling green protection died from the walls of the heptagon. Go to it, Quince! Brandon yelled, but the suggestion was entirely superfluous. Even before the wall screen had died Westfall's beam was trying to get through it, and when the visoray revealed the interior of the heptagon, the quiet and methodical physicist was shaken from his habitual calm. Why, they aren't the winged monsters at all! They're hexons," he exclaimed. Sure they are! Brandon did not even turn his heavily goggled eyes from the blazing blankness of his own screen. That was my hunch. Those snakes went about things in a business-like fashion. They didn't strike me as being folks who would pull off such a wild stunt as trying to chase us clear out of the solar system, but a gang of hexons would do just that. Some of them must have captured that ship, and, already having it in their cock-eyed brains that we were back of what happened on Callisto, they decided to bump us off if it was the last thing they ever did. That's what I'd do myself if I were a hexon. Now I'll tell you what's happening back at the home power of that ship, and what's going to happen next. I'm kicking up a horrible row out there with my interference, and a lot of instruments at the other end of that beam must be cutting up all kinds of didos right now. They'll check up on that ship with the expedition, by radio and whatnot, and when they find out that it's clear out here, chop! Didn't get to see much, did you? No, they must have switched over to their accumulators almost instantly. Yeah, but if they've got accumulator capacity enough to hold off our entire cosmic intake and get back to Jupiter besides, I'm a polyp. We're going to take that ship, fellows, and learn a lot of stuff we never dreamed of before. Ha! There goes his beam! Pay me the four, quints!" The dazzling wall of incandescence had blinked out without warning, and Brandon's beam bore on through space, unimpeded. He shut it off and turned to his fellows with a grin, a grin which disappeared instantly as a thought struck him and he leaped back to his board. Sound the high-acceleration warning quick, purse! He snapped and drove in switch after switch. Cosmic intakes gone down to zero, exclaimed McDonald as the serious leaped away. Had to cut it, they might shoot a jolt through that band. Just thought of something. Maybe unnecessary, but no harm done if—it's necessary. All X. We're taking a sweet kissing right now. You see, even though we're at a pretty long range, they've got some horrible projectors, and they were evidently mad enough to waste some power taking a good solid flash at us. And if we hadn't been expecting it, that flash would have been a bountiful sufficiency, believe me. Great cat! Look at that meter! And I've got to throw in number ten shunt! The outer screen is drawing five hundred forty thousand! They stared at the meter in amazement. It was incredible, even after they had seen those heptagons in action that at such extreme range any offensive beam could be driven with such unthinkable power. Power requiring for its neutralization almost the full output of the prodigious batteries of the accumulators carried by the Sirius. Yet for five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes that beam drove furiously against their straining screens, and even Brandon's face grew tense and hard as that frightful attack continued. At the end of twenty-two minutes, however, the pointer of the meter snapped back to the pin, and every man there breathed an explosive sigh of relief. The almost unbearable bombardment was over. The screen was drawing only its maintenance load. Wow! Brandon shouted. I thought for a minute they were going to hang to us until we cracked, even if it meant that they'd have to freeze to death out there themselves. It would have meant that too, don't you think? asked Stevens. I imagine so. Don't see how they could possibly have enough power to get back to Jupiter if they shined that thing on us much longer. Of course, the more power they waste on us, the quicker we can take them. But I don't want much more of that beam. I'll tell the world, I just about had heart failure before they cut off. The massive heptagon was now drifting back toward Jupiter at constant velocity. The Hexons were apparently hoarding jealously their remaining power, for their wall screens did not flash on at the touch of the visor-a. Through unresisting metal the probing terrestrial beam sped, and the scientists studied minutely every detail of the Vorkulian armament, while the regular observers began to make a detailed photographic survey of every room and compartment of the great fortress. Much of the instrumentation and machinery was familiar, but some of it was so strange that study was useless. Days of personal inspection and experiment, perhaps complete dismantling would be necessary to reveal the secrets hidden within those peculiar mechanisms. They're trying to save all the power they can. They go make them spend some more, Brandon remarked, and directed against the heptagon a heavy destructive beam. We don't want them to get back to Jupiter until after we've boarded them and found out everything we want to know. Come here, quints, what do you make of this? Both men stared at the heptagon, frankly puzzled. For the screens of the strange vessel did not radiate, nor did the material of the walls yield under the terrible force of the beam. The destructive ray simply struck that dull green surface and vanished, disappeared without a trace, as a tiny stream of water disappears into a partially soaked sponge. Do you know what you are doing? asked Westfall, after a few minutes' thought. I believe that you are charging their accumulators at a rate of, he glanced at a meter, exactly thirty-one thousand five hundred kilofranks. Great cat! Brandon's hand flashed to a switch and the beam expired. But they can't just simply grab it and store it, quints. It's impossible. The word impossible in that connection, coming from you, has a queer sound, Westfall said pointedly, and Brandon actually blushed. That's right, too. We have got pretty much the same idea in our cosmic intake fields. But we didn't carry things half as far as they have done. Ha! They're flashing us again. But those thin little beams don't mean anything. They're just trying to make us feed them some more, I guess. But we've got to hold them back some way. Wonder if they can absorb a tractor field. Hexans had lashed out a few times with their lighter weapons, but finding the serious unresponsive had soon shut them off and were stalledly plunging along toward Jupiter. Brandon flung out a tractor-rod and threw the mass of his cruiser upon it, as it locked into those sullen green walls. But as soon as the enemy felt its drag, their screens flared white, and the massive terrestrial spaceship quivered in every member as that terrific cable of force was snapped. They apparently cannot store up the energy of a tractor, commented Westfall. But you will observe that they have no difficulty in radiating when they care to. Those two ideas didn't pan out so heavy. There's lots of things not tried yet, though. Our next bet is to get around in front of them and push back. If they wiggle away from more than 50% of a presser, they're really good. The pilot maneuvered the Sirius into line, directly between Jupiter and the Pentagon, and as the driving projectors went into section Brandon drove a mighty presser field along their axis, squarely into the center of mass of the Vorkulian Fortress. For a moment it held solidly. Then, as the screens of the enemy went into action, it rebounded and glanced off in sparkling, cascading torrents. But the Hexons, with all their twisting and turning, could not present to that prodigious beam of force any angle sufficiently obtuse to rob it of half its power, and the driving projectors of the Pentagon, again burst into activity as the backward pushing mass of the Sirius made itself felt. In a short time, however, the wall screens were again cut off. Apparently more power was required to drive them than they were able to deflect. Although even the enormous tonnage of the terrestrial cruiser was insignificant in comparison with the veritable mountain of metal to which she was opposed, so that the fiercest thrust of her driving projectors did not greatly affect the monster's progress, yet Brandon and his cohorts were well content. It's a long trip back to where they came from, and since they wanted to drift all the way, I think they'll be out of power before they get there, Brandon summed up the situation. We aren't losing any power either, since we are using only a part of our cosmic intake. In a few hours the struggle had settled down to a routine matter, the Sirius being pushed backwards steadily against the full drive of her every projector, contesting stubbornly every mile of space traversed. Assured that the regular pilots and look-outs were fully capable of handling the vessel, the scientists were about to resume their interrupted tasks when one of the photographers called them over to look at something he had discovered in one of the lowermost and smallest compartments of the heptagon. All crowded around the screens and saw pictured there the winged, snake-like form of one of the original crew of the Vorkulian vessel. Dead, Brandon asked. Not yet, replied the photographer. He is twitching a little once in a while, but you see he's pretty badly cut up. I see he is. He must have a lot of vitality to have lasted this long. Maybe he'll live through it yet. Hold him on the plate and get his exact measurements. He turned to the communicator. Dr. von Stifel, can you come down to the control room a minute? We may want you to operate upon one of these South Jovians after a while. Himmel ist da. The great surgeon, bearded and massive, stared into the plate, and in his surprise started to speak in his native German. He paused, his long powerful fingers tracing the likeness of the Vorkul upon the plate, then went on. I would like very much to operate, but not understanding our intentions, he would, of course, struggle. And then that body struggles, shirechtlikheit, and he waved his arms in a pantomime of wholesale destruction. I thought of that. That's why I'm talking to you now instead of when we get to him, two or three days from now. We'll give you his exact measurements, and a crew of mechanics will, under your direction, sink holes in the steel floor and install steel bands heavy enough to hold him rigid, from tail fins to wingtips. We'll hold him there until we can make him understand that we're friends. It is of the utmost importance to save that creature's life if possible, because we do not want one of their fortresses launched against us, and in any event it will not do us any harm to have a friend in the city of the south. Right. I will also have prepared some kind of a space suit in which he can be brought from his vessel to ours. And the surgeon took the measurements and went to see that the operating table and suit were made ready for Cromodior, the sorely wounded Vorkul. It was not long until the projectors of the Heptagon went out and she lay inert in space, power completely exhausted. Knowing that the screens of the enemy would absorb any ordinary ray, the scientists had calculated the most condensed beam they could possibly project, a beam which, their figure showed, should be able to puncture those screens by sheer mass action, puncture them practically instantaneously, before the absorbers could react. To that end they had arranged their circuits to hurl 765,000 kilofranks, the entire power of their massed accumulators and their highest possible cosmic intake, in one tiny bar of superlative density, less than one meter in diameter. Everything ready, Brandon shot in prodigious switches that launched that bolt, a bolt so vehement, so inconceivably intense that it seemed fairly to blast the very ether out of existence as it tore its way along its carefully predetermined line. The intention was to destroy all the control panels of the absorber screens, part so vital that without them the great vessel would be helpless, and yet items which the terrestrials could reconstruct quite readily from their photographs and drawings. As that irresistible bolt touched the Vorkulian wall screen, the spot of contact flared instantaneously through the spectrum and into the black beyond the violet as that screen overloaded locally. Fast as it responded, and highly conductive though it was, it could not handle that frightfully concentrated load. In the same fleeting instant of time every molecule of substance in that beam's path flashed into tenuous vapor. No conceivable material could resist or impede that stabbing stiletto of energy, and the main control room of the Vorkulian wall screen system vanished. Time after time, as rapidly as he could sight his beam and operate his switches, Brandon drove his needle of annihilation through the fortress, destroying the secondary controls. Then the walls unresisting he cut in the vastly larger but infinitely less powerful IP-ray, and with it systematically riddled the immense heptagon. Out through the gaping holes in the outer walls rushed the dense atmosphere of Jupiter, and the hexons in their masked hundreds died. The Sirius was brought up beside the heptagon so that her main airlock was against one of the yawning holes in the green metal wall of the enemy. There she was anchored by tractor beams and the two hundred picked men of the IP police in full space equipment prepared to board the gigantic fortress of the void. Brandon sat tense at his controls, ready to send his beam ahead of the troopers against any hexons that might survive in some as yet unpunctured compartment. General Crowninshield sat beside the physicist and an auxiliary board, phones at ears, and four infrared visor-ray plates ranged in front of him. Ready through light or darkness to direct and oversee the attack, no matter where it might lead or how widely separated the platoons might become before the citadel was taken. The space-line men, the engineers of weightless combat, led the van, protected by the projectors of their fellows. There's the task to set up ways of rope, along which the others could advance. Power drills bit savagely into metal, making holes to receive the expanding eye-bolts. Grappling hooks seized fast every pertuberance and corner. Points of little stress were supported by powerful suction cups. And at intervals were strong beam-fed lanterns, illuminating brilliantly the line of march. Through compartments and down corridors they went, bridging the many gaps in the metal through which Brandon's beams had blasted their way, guided by Crowninshield along the shortest feasible path toward the little projector room in which Cremodior, the wounded Vorkul, lay. There were so many chambers and compartments in the heptagon that it had, of course, been impossible to puncture them all, and in some of the tight rooms were groups of hexons, anxious to do battle. But the general's eye led his men, and if such a room lay before them Brandon's frightful beam entered at first, and where that beam entered, life departed. But the hexons were really intelligent, as had been said. They had had time to prepare for what they knew awaited them, and they were rendered utterly desperate by the knowledge that, no matter what might happen, their course was run. Their power was gone, and even if the present enemy should be driven off, they would float idly in space until they died of cold. Or, more probably, hurtling toward Jupiter as they were, they would plunge to certain death upon its surface as soon as they came within its powerful gravitational field. Therefore, some fifty of the creatures, who had had space experience in their spherical vessels, had spent the preceding days in manufacturing space equipment. Let the weight fiends plan upon detonating magazines of explosives, upon laying mines calculated to destroy the invaders, even the vessel itself and all within it. Let them plan upon any other such idle schemes, which were certain to be foreseen and guarded against by the space-hardened veterans who undoubtedly moaned that all-powerful and vengeful football of scarred gray metal. Space fighters were they, and as space fighters would they die, taking with them to their own inevitable death a full quota of the enemy. Thus it came about that the head of the column of police had scarcely passed a certain door, when in the room behind it there began to assemble the half-hundred space hounds of the Hexons. When the vanguard had approached that room Crown and Shield had inspected it thoroughly with his infrared beams. He had found it punctured and airless, devoid of life, or of lethal devices, and had passed on. But now the space-suited warriors of the Horde, guided in their hiding by their own visor-rays, were massing there. When the center of the IP column reached that door it burst open. There boiled out into the corridor, into the very midst of the police, fifty demoniical Hexons, fighting with berserk fury, ruled by but one impulse, to kill. Hand weapons flashed viciously, tearing at steel armor and at bulging space suits. Space hooks bit and tore, pikes and lances were driven with the full power of brawny arms. Here and there could be seen Trooper and Hexon locked together in fierce embrace, far from any hand-line. Six limbs against four, all ten plied with abandon, in mortal, hand-to-hand, foot-to-foot combat. Give way! yelled Crown and Shield into the ears of his men. Epstein! Back! Lafavre! Advance! Get out of block ten! Give us a chance to use a beam! As the police fell back out of the designated section of the corridor, Brandon's beam tore through it, filling it from floor to ceiling with a volume of intolerable energy. In that energy, walls, doorway and space lines, as well as most of the Hexons, vanished utterly. But the beam could not be used again. Every surviving enemy had hurled himself frantically into the thickest ranks of the police and the battle raged fiercer than ever. It did not last long. The ends of the column had already closed in. The police filled the corridor and overflowed into the yawning chasm cut by the annihilating ray. Outnumbered, surrounded upon all sides, above and below by the terrestrials, the Hexons fought with mad desperation to the last man, and to the last man died. And even though, in lieu of their own highly efficient space armor, they had fought in weak, crude and hastily improvised spacesuits which were pitifully inferior to the ray-resistant, heavy steel armor of the IP forces, nevertheless the enormous strength and utter savagery of the Hexons had taken toll, and when the advance was resumed it was with extra lookout scanning the entire neighbourhood of the line of march. Since the troops had entered the fortress as close to their goal as possible, it was not long until the leading platoon reached the door behind which Cromodior lay. Tools and cylinders of air were brought up, and the engineers quickly fitted pressure bulkheads across the corridor. There was a screaming hiss from the valves, the atmosphere in that walled-off space became dense and mechanics attacked with their power drills the door of the projector room. It opened, and four husky orderlies rapidly but gently encased the long body of the Vorkul in the spacesuit built especially to receive it. As that monstrous form in its weirdly bulging envelope was guided through the airlocks into the Sirius, Crown and Shield barked orders into his transmitter and the police reformed. They would now systematically scour the fortress, to wipe out any Hexons that might still be in hiding, to discover and destroy any possible traps or infernal machines which the enemy might have planted for their undoing. Assured that the real danger to the Sirius was over and that his presence was no longer necessary, Brandon turned his controls over to an assistant and went up to the Vanirian rooms where Von Steifel and his staff were to operate upon the Vorkul. There, in the dense hot air, but little different now from the atmosphere of Jupiter, Cromodiore lay, bolted down to the solid steel of the floor by means of padded steel straps. So heavy were the bands that he could not possibly break even one of them, so closely were they spaced that he could scarcely have moved a muscle had he tried. But he did not try. So near death was he that his mighty muscles did not even quiver at the trenchant bite of the surgeon's tools. Von Steifel and his aides, meticulously covered with sterile gowns, hoods, and gloves, worked in most rigidly asceptic style, deathly and rapidly closing the ghastly wounds inflicted by the weapons of the Hexons. Hi, Brandon! The surgeon grunted as he straightened up the work completed. I did not use much antiseptic on him, because of the possible differences in blood chemistry and in ignorance of his native bacteria. I depended almost wholly upon asepsis and his natural resistance. It is a good thing that we did not have to use an anesthetic. He is in bad shape, but if we can feed him successfully, he may pull through. Feed him? I never thought of that. What do you suppose he eats? I have an idea that it is something highly concentrated from his anatomy. I shall try giving him sugar, milk, chocolate, something of the kind. First I shall try maple syrup. Being a liquid, it is easily administered, and its penetrating odor also may be a help. A can of the liquid was brought in, and to the amazement of the terrestrials, the long, delicate antennae of the Vorkul began to twitch as soon as the can was opened. Motioning hastily for silence, Von Steifel filled a bowl and placed it upon the floor beneath Cromodior's grotesque nose. The twitching increased, until finally one dull, glazed eye brightened somewhat and curled slowly out upon its slender pedicle toward the dish. His mouth opened sluggishly and a long red tongue reached out, but as his perceptions quickened he became conscious of the strangers near him. The mouth snapped shut, the eye retracted, and heaving, rippling surges traversed that powerful body as he struggled madly against the unbreakable shackles of steel biting him to the floor. Ah! Kintlein! The surgeon bent anxiously over that grotesque but frightened head, soothing polysyllabic German crooning from his bearded lips. Here, let's try this. I'm good on it," Stephen suggested, bringing up the Calestonian thought exchanger. All three men dawned headsets and sent wave after wave of friendly and soothing thoughts toward that frantic and terrified brain. He has got his brain shut up like a clam, Brandon snorted. Open up, guy, we aren't going to hurt you. We're the best friends you've got if you only knew it. Himmler, on he is himself killing," moaned Von Steifel. One more chance that might work, and Brandon stepped over to the communicator, demanding that Verna Pickering be brought in at once. She came in as soon as the airlocks would permit, and the physicist welcomed her eagerly. This fellow's fighting so he's tearing himself to pieces. We can't make him receive a thought, and Von Steifel's afraid to use an anesthetic. Now it's barely possible that he may understand Hexen. I thought you wasted time learning any of it, but maybe you didn't. See if you can make him understand that we're friends. The girl flinched and shrank back involuntarily, but forced herself to approach that awful head. Bending over, she repeated over and over one harsh, barking syllable. The effect of that word was magical. Instantly, Chromodior C. struggling, an eye curled out, and that long, supple tongue flashed down and into the syrup. Not until the last sticky trace had been licked from the bold did his attention wander from the food. Then the eye, sparkling brightly now, was raised toward the girl. Simultaneously, four other eyes arose, one directed at each of the men and the other surveying his bonds and the room in which he was. Then the Vorkul spoke, but his whistling, hissing manner of speech so garbled the barking sounds of the Hexen words he was attempting to utter that Verna's slight knowledge of the language was of no use. She therefore put on one of the headsets, motioning the men to do the same, and approached Chromodior with the other, repeating the Hexen word of friendly import. This time the Vorkul's brain was not sealed against the visitors and thoughts began to flow. You've used those things a lot, Brandon turned to Stevens in a quick aside. Can you hide your thoughts? Sure, why? All I can think of is that power system of theirs, and he'd know what we were going to do, sure. And I'd better be getting at it anyway. So you can wipe that off your mind with a clear conscience. The rest of us will get everything they've got there. Your jobs to get everything you can out of this bird's brain. All X? All X. Why, you didn't put yours on, Verna exclaimed. No, I don't think I'll have time. If I get started talking to him now, I'd be here from now on, and I've got a lot of work to do. Steve can talk to him for me. See you later." And Brandon was gone. He went directly to the Vorkulian fortress, bare now of all Hexen life and devoid of Hexen snares and traps. There he and his fellows labor day after day, learning every secret of every item of armaments and equipment aboard the Heptagon. Did you finish up to-day, Norm? asked Stevens one evening. Cromodior's coming to life fast. He's able to wiggle around a little now, and is insisting that we take off the one chain we keep on him and let him use a plate to call his people. All washed up. Guess I'll go in and talk to him. You all say he's such an egg. With this stuff off my mind, I can hide it well enough. By the way, what does he eat? And the two friends set out for the Vanirian rooms. Anything that's sweet, apparently, with just enough milk to furnish a little protein. Won't eat meat or vegetables at all. Von Steifel says they haven't got much of a digestive tract. And I know that they haven't got any teeth. He's already most all the syrup we had on board. All of the milk chocolate and a lot of the sugar. But none of us can get any kind of a raise out of him at all. Not even Nadia when she fed him a whole box of chocolates. No, I mean, what does he eat when he's home? It seems to be a sort of syrup made from the juices of jungle plants, which they drag in on automatic conveyors and process on automatic machinery. But he's a funny mutt, hard to get. Some of his thoughts are lucid enough, but others, we can't make out at all. They are so foreign to all human nature that they simply do not register as thoughts at all. One funny thing, he isn't the least bit curious about anything. He doesn't want to examine anything, doesn't ask us any questions, won't tell us anything about anything, so that all we know about him we found out purely by accident. For instance, they like games and sports, and seem to have families. They also have love, liking, and respect for others of their own race. But they seem to have no emotions whatever for outsiders. They're utterly inhuman. I can't describe it. You'll have to get it for yourself. Did you find out about the Calistonians who went to see them? Negatively yes. They never arrived. They probably couldn't see in the fog and must have missed the city. If they tried to land in that jungle, it was just too bad. That would account for everything. So they're strictly neutral, eh? Well, I'll tell them high anyway. Now in the sick room Brandon picked up the headset and sent out a wave of cheery greeting. To his amazement the mind of the Vorkul was utterly unresponsive to his thoughts. Not disdainful, not inimical, not appreciative, nor friendly, simply indifferent to a degree unknown and incomprehensible to any human mind. He said Brandon only one message, which came clear and coldly emotionless. I do not want to talk to you. Tell the hairy doctor that I am now strong enough to be allowed to go to the communicator screen. That is all. The Vorkul's mind again became an oblivious maze of unintelligible thoughts. Not deliberately were Cromodior's thoughts hidden. He was constitutionally unable to interest himself in the thoughts or things of any alien intelligence. Well, that for that—a puzzled, thoughtful look came over Brandon's face as he called Von Steifel. A queer duck, if ever there was one. However, their ship will never bother us. That's one good thing. And I think we've got about everything of theirs that we want anyway. The surgeon, after careful examination of his patient, unlocked the heavy collar with which he had been restraining the over-anxious Vorkul and supported him lightly at the communicator panel. As surely as though he had used those controls for years, Cromodior shot the visoray beam out into space. One hand upon each of the several dials and one eye upon each meter, it was a matter only of seconds for him to get in touch with Vorkulia. To the terrestrials the screen was a gray and foggy blank, but the manifest excitement, shrieking and whistling from the speaker in response to Cromodior's signals made it plain that his message was being received with enthusiasm. They are coming," the Vorkul thought and lay back, exhausted. Just as well that they're coming out here at that, Brandon commented. We couldn't begin to handle that structure anywhere near Jupiter. In fact, we wouldn't want to get very close ourselves with passengers aboard. Such was the power of the Vorkulian vessels that in less than twenty hours another heptagon slowed to a halt beside the Sirius, and two of its crew were wafted aboard. They were ushered into the Vanirian Room, where they talked briefly with their wounded fellow before they dressed him in a spacesuit which they filled with air to their own pressure. Then all three were lifted lightly into the air and without a word or a sign were born through the airlocks of the vessel and into an opening in the wall of the rescuing heptagon. A green tractor beam reached out, seizing the derelicts, and both structures darted away at such a pace that in a few minutes they had disappeared in the black depths of space. Well, that, as I may have remarked before, is indisputably and conclusively that. Brandon broke the surprised, almost stunned silence that followed the unceremonious departure of the visitors. I don't know whether to feel relieved at the knowledge that they won't bother us or whether to get mad because they won't have anything to do with us. He sent the all-ex signal to the pilot and the Sirius once more at the acceleration of terrestrial gravity, again bored on through space. End of Chapter 12 Chapter 13 of Space Hounds of IPC by E. E. Doc Smith Now that the Hexen threat that had so long oppressed the humanity of the Sirius was lifted, that dull grey football of armour steel was filled with relief and rejoicing as the pilot laid his course for Europa. Lounges and saloons resounded with noise as police, passengers, and the police, and the police, and the police, and the police, and the police, and the police, and the police, and the police, and the police, and the police, and the police, resounded with noise as police, passengers, and such of the crew as were at liberty made merry. The control room in which were grouped the leaders of the expedition and the scientists was orderly enough, but a noticeable undertone of gladness had replaced the tense air it had known so long. Hi, men! Nadia Stevens and Verna Pickering, arms around each other's wastes, entered the room and saluted the group gaily before they became a part of it. Smatter girls, tired of dancing already? asked Brandon. Oh, no, we could dance from now on, Verna assured him. But, you see, Nadia hadn't seen that husband of hers for 15 minutes and was getting lonesome. Being afraid of all you men, she wanted me to come along for moral support. The real reason I came, though, and she narrowed her expressive eyes and lowered her voice mysteriously, is that you two physicists are here. I went to study my chosen victims a little longer before I decide over which of you to cast the spell of my fatal charm. But you can't do that, he objected vigorously. Quince and I are going to settle that ourselves some day, by shooting dice, or maybe each other, or he broke off listening to an animated conversation going on behind them. Just simply outrageous, Nadia was exclaiming. Here we saved his life, and I fed him a lot of my candy, and he went to all the trouble of bringing their shit back here almost to Jupiter for them, and then they simply dashed off without a word of thanks or anything. And he always acted as though he never wanted to see or hear any of us again, ever. Why, they don't think straight, as Norman would say. They're full of little red ants. Why, they aren't even human. Sure not," Brandon turned to the flushed speaker, they couldn't be, hardly, with their make-up. But is it absolutely necessary that all intelligent beings should possess such an emotion as gratitude? Such a being without it does seem funny to us, but I can't see that its lack necessarily implies anything particularly important. Keep still a minute," he went on, as Nadia tried to interrupt him, and listen to some real wisdom. Quince, you tell him. They are, of course, very highly developed and extremely intelligent, but it should not be surprising that intelligent should manifest itself in ways quite baffling to us human beings, whose minds work so differently. They are, however, well peculiar. I won't keep still, Nadia burst out, at the first opportunity. I don't want to talk about those hideous things any more anyway. Come on, Steve, let's go up and dance. Crown and shield turned to Verna with the obvious intention of leading her away, but Brandon interposed. Sorry, Crown, but this lady is conducting a highly important psychological research, so your purely social claims will have to wait until after the scientific work is done. Why narrow the field of investigation, laughed the girl. I'd rather widen it myself. I might prefer a general, even to a physicist. They went up to the main saloon and joined the melee there, and after one dance with Verna, all he could claim in that crowd of men, Crown and shield turned to Brandon. You two seem to know Miss Pickering extraordinarily well. Would I be stepping on your toes if I gave her a play? Clear ether as far as we're concerned, Brandon shrugged his shoulders. She's been kicking around underfoot ever since she was knee-high to a duck. We gave her her first lessons on a slide rule. Don't be dumb, Norman. That woman's a knockout, a riot, a regular tri-planet call-out. Oh, she's all X as far as that goes. She's a good little scout, too, not half as dumb as she acts, and she's one of the squareest little aces that ever waved a plume, but as far as playing her too much like our kid's sister. Good, me for her! And they made their way back down to the control room. Stevens, after his one dance with Nadia, had already returned. Brandon and Crown and shield found him seated at the calculating machine, continuing a problem which already filled several pages of his notebook. Smatter, Steve, so glad to see a calculator in some paper that you can't let them alone. Not exactly. Just had a thought a day or so ago. Been computing the orbit of the wreckage of the arcturus around Jupiter. Think we should salvage it, the upper half at least. It was left intact, you know. Hmm, that would be nice, all right. Dope enough? Got the direction solid from my own observations. The velocities are pretty rough approximation though, but after allowing for my probable error it figures an ellipse of low eccentricity between the orbits of Io and Europa. Its period is short, about two days. Isn't it wonderful to have a brain? Brandon addressed the room at large. The kid's clever, nobody else would have thought of it, except maybe Westfall. Let's see your figures. Um... According to that, we're within an hour of it right now. He turned to the pilot and sketched rapidly. Get on this line here, please, and decelerate so that the stuff will catch up with us and pass the word to the lookouts. Stevens and I will take the bow plates. That's a good idea, he went on to Stevens as they took their places at main and auxiliary ultra banks. Lot of plunder in that ship. Instruments, boats, and equipment worth millions. Besides most of the junk of the passengers. Clothes, trunks, trinkets and whatnot. You're there, bucko! Thanks, chief! And they fell silent, watching the instruments carefully, and from time to time making computations from the readings of the acceleration and flight meters. There she is! An alarm bell had finally sounded. Ultra lights had flared out into space and upon both screens there shone out images of the closely clustered wreckage of the Arcturus. But both men were more interested just then in the mathematics of the recovery than in the vessel itself. Missed at eight minutes of time and eleven divisions on the scale, reported Stevens. Not so good. Not so bad, either. I've seen worse computation. Thus, lightly was dismissed a mathematical feat which a few years earlier, before the days of IP computers, would have been deemed worthy of publication in The Philosophical Magazine. Director Newton was called in, and it was decided that the many small fragments of the vessel were not worth saving. That its upper half was all that they should attempt to tow the enormous distance back to Telus. The pace of the Sirius was adjusted to that of the floating masses, and tractor beams were clamped upon the undamaged portion of the derelict, and upon the two slices from the nose of the craft. A couple of the larger fragments of wreckage were also taken to furnish metal for the repairs which would be necessary. Acceleration was brought slowly up to normal, and the battle-scarred cruiser of the void, with her heavy burden of inert metal, resumed her interrupted voyage toward Europa, the satellite upon which the passengers and crew of the ill-fated Arcturus had been so long emured. On she boarded through the aether. Detector screens full out, and greenly scintillant, Vorkulian wall screens outlining her football shape in weird and ghastly light, unafraid now of any possible surviving spacecraft of the Hexans. But if the Hexans detected her, they made no sign. Perhaps their fleet had been destroyed utterly. Perhaps it had been impressed upon even their fierce minds that those sparkling green screens were not to be molested with impunity. The satellite was reached without event, and down into the crater landing-shaft the two enormous masses of metal dropped. Callisto's foremost citizens were on hand to welcome the terrestrial rescuers, and revelry reigned supreme in that deeply buried European community. All humanity celebrated. The Callistonians rejoiced because they were now freed from the age-old oppression of the Hexan hordes. Because they could once more extend their civilization over the Jovian satellites, and live again their normal lives upon the surface of those small worlds. The terrestrials were almost equally enthusiastic in the reunion that marked the end of the long imprisonment of the refugees. As soon as the hull of the Arcturus had been warmed sufficiently to permit inspection, its original passengers were allowed to visit it briefly, to examine and to reclaim their belongings. Of course some damage had been done by the cold of interplanetary space, but in general everything was as they had left it. Stevens and Nadia were among the first permitted aboard. They went first to the control room, where Stevens found his bag still lying behind Breckenridge's desk, where he had thrown it when he first boarded the vessel. Then they made their way up to Nadia's state room, which they found in meticulous order and spotless in its cleanliness. There is neither dust nor dirt in space. Nadia glanced about the formal little room and laughed up at her husband. Funny isn't it, sweetheart? How little we know what to expect! Just think how surprised I would have been when I left this room if I had been told that I would have a husband before I got back to it! Breckenridge's first thought was for his precious, triplex automatic chronometer, which he found, of course, way off. Six and three tenths seconds fast. Having corrected the timepiece from that of the Sirius, he immersed himself in the other delicate instruments of his department, and he was easy to find from that time on. Overcrowded as the Sirius already was, it was decided that the original complement of the Arcturus should occupy their former quarters aboard her during the return trip. To this end, core of mechanics set to work upon the salvaged hulk. Heavy metalwork was no novelty to the Calestonian engineers and mechanics, and the Sirius also was well equipped with metalworking machines and men. Thus the prow was welded. Armoured insulating airbrakes were built along the stern, which was the plane of Hexen cleavage. Electrical connections were restored. And lastly, a set of the great forculean wall-screen generators, absorbers and dissipators was installed, with sufficient accumulator capacity for their operation. Director Newton studied this installation in silence for some time, then when in search of Brandon. I hadn't considered the possibility of being attacked again between here and Telus, but there's always the chance, he admitted. If you think that there is any danger, we will crowd them all into the Sirius. It will not be at all comfortable, but it will be better than having any more of us killed. With that outfit they'll be as safe as we will, the scientist assured him. They can stand as much grief as we can. We'll do the fighting for the whole outfit from here, and anything we meet will have to take us before they can touch them. So they had better ride it there, where they'll have passengers accommodations and be comfortable. As to danger, I don't know what to expect. They may all be gone, and they may not. We're going to expect trouble every meter of the way in, though, and be ready for it. Everything ready and thoroughly tested and stream of power flowing into the Arcturus from the cosmic receptors of her sister ship, the passengers and their new possessions were moved into their former quarters. There was a brief ceremony of farewell. The doors of the airlocks were closed, the careful check-out was gone through, and the driving projectors of the Sirius lifted both great vessels up the shaft, slowly and easily. And after them, as long as they could be seen, stared the thousands of Calistonians who throng the great shaft's floor. Many of the spectators were not, strictly speaking, Calistonians at all. They were really Europans, born and reared in that hidden city which was to have been the last stronghold of Callisto civilization. In that throng were hundreds who had never before seen the light of the sun, nor any of the glories of the firmament, hundreds to whom that brief glimpse was a foretaste of the free and glorious life which was soon to be theirs. Up and up mounted that powerful tugboat of space with her heavy barge, falling smoothly upward at normal acceleration. Below her first Europa, then Mighty Jupiter, became moons growing smaller and smaller. In their state room, Nadia's supple waist writhed in the curve of Stephen's arm as she turned and looked up at him with sparkling eyes. Well, big fellow, how does it feel to be out of a job? Or are you going over there every day on a tractor beam to work, as Norman suggested? Not on your sweet young life, he exclaimed. Norm thought he was kidding somebody, but it registered zero. It gives me the pip to loaf around when there's a lot of work to do, but this is entirely different. Nothing's driving us now, and a fellow's entitled to at least one honeymoon during his life. And what a honeymoon this is going to be, little space hound of my heart! Nothing to do but love you all the way from here to tell us. Whoopee! Oh, there's a couple of other things to do," she reminded him gaily. You've got to smoke a lot of good cigarettes. I must eat a lot of Delray's chocolates, and we both really should catch up on eating fancy cooking. Speaking of eating, isn't that the second call for dinner? It is! And they went along the narrow hall toward the elevator. To these two the long journey was to seem all too short. Long though the voyage was, it was uneventful. The occupants of the two vessels were in constant touch with each other by means of the communicators, and there was also much visiting back and forth in person. Stevens and Nadia came off into the serious, and were accompanied frequently by Verna Pickering, who claimed anew her ancient right of kicking around whatever Brandon and Westfall might chance to be, and at such times General Crowninshid was practically certain to appear. And upon days when the beautiful brunette did not appear, the Commandant generally found it necessary to inspect in person something in the Arcturus. Day after day passed, and even the new and ultra-powerful detector screens of the serious remained unresponsive and cold. Day after day the plates before the double lookouts and observers remained blank. Power flowed smoothly and unfailingly into the cosmic receptors, and the products of conversion were discharged with equal smoothness and regularity from the forty-five gigantic driving projectors. The tractor beam held its heavy burden easily, and the generators functioned perfectly. And finally a planet began to loom up in the stern lookout plates. Verna, the irrepressible, was in the control room of the Sirius, quarreling adroitly with Brandon and deftly flirting with Crowninshield. Glancing into the control screen she saw the planet in its end block, then studied the instruments briefly. We're heading for Mars, she declared with conviction. I thought it looked that way yesterday, but supposed it must be only apparent, a trick of piloting or something about the orbit. I thought, of course, you were taking us back home, but you can't possibly get to tell us on any such course as this. Sure not, Brandon replied easily. Certainly it's Mars. Isn't that where the Arcturus started out for? Whoever said we were going to tell us? Of course, if any of the passengers want to go right back, the IPC will undoubtedly furnish transportation gratis. But paste this in your hat, Verna. For future reference, when space hounds start out to go anywhere, they go there, even if they have to spend a year or so on minus time to do it. Closer and closer they approached the red planet. Swinging around in a wide arc in order to make their course coincide exactly with the pilot ray of CheckStation M14, which was now precisely in its scheduled location in space. At the chief pilot's desk in the control room of the Arcturus, Breckenridge checked in with the station, then calculated rapidly the instant of their touching the specially built bumper platforms of spring steel, hemp, and fiber which awaited them upon the Martian dock of the Interplanetary Corporation. Within range of the terminal he plugged into it, waited until the tiny light flashed its green message of attention and reported. IPV Arcturus, Breckenridge chief pilot, trip number 4329, checking in, 446 days, 15 hours, 11 minutes, 38 and 7 tenths seconds minus. The end of Space Hounds of IPC by E. E. Doc Smith.