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outer screens as though they had been so much inactive webbing.
    Through the second and through the first. Through the wall-shield, even that ultra-powerful field scarcely flashing as it went down. Through the armor, violating the prime tenet then held and which has just been referred to, that no object free in space can be damaged—in this case, so unthinkably vehement was the thrust, the few atoms of substance in the space surrounding the doomed cruisers afforded resistance enough. Through the ship itself, a ravening cylinder of annihilation.
    For perhaps a second—certainly no longer—those incredible, those undreamed-of beams persisted before winking out into blackness; but that second had been long enough. Three riddled hulks lay dead in space, and as the three original projectors went black three more flared out.
    Then three more. Nine of the mightiest of Civilization's ships of war were riddled before the others could hurl themselves backward out of range!
    Most of the officers of the flagship were stunned into temporary inactivity by that shocking development, but two reacted almost instantly.
    "Thorndyke!" the admiral snapped. "What did they do, and how?"
    And Kinnison, not speaking at all, leaped to a certain panel, to read for himself the analysis of those incredible beams of force.
    "They made super-needle-rays out of their main projectors," Master Technician LaVerne Thorndyke reported, crisply. "They must have shorted everything they've got onto them to burn them out that fast."
    "Those beams were hot—plenty hot," Kinnison corroborated the findings. "These recorders go to five billion and have a factor of safety of ten. Even that wasn't anywhere nearly enough—everything in the recorder circuits blew."
    "But how could they handle them . . ." von Hohendorff began to ask.
    "They didn't—they pointed them and died," Thorndyke explained, grimly. "They traded one projector and its crew for one cruiser and its crew—a good trade from their viewpoint."
    "There will be no more such trades," Haynes declared.
    Nor were there. The Patrol had maulers enough to englobe the enemy craft at a distance greater even than the effective range of those suicidal beams, and it did so.
    Shielding screens cut off the Boskonians' intake of cosmic power and the relentless beaming of the bull-dog maulers began. For hour after hour it continued, the cordon ever tightening as the victims' power lessened. And finally even the gigantic accumulators of the immense fortresses were drained. Their screens went down under the hellish fury of the maulers'
    incessant attack, and in a space of minutes thereafter the structures and their contents ceased to exist save as cosmically atomic detritus.
    The Grand Fleet of the Galactic Patrol remade its formation after a fashion and set off toward the galaxy at touring blast.
    And in the control room of the flagship three Lensmen brought a very serious conference to a close.
    "You saw what happened to Helmuth's planet," Kinnison's voice was oddly hard, "and I gave you all I could get of the thought about the destruction of all life on Sol III. A big enough duodec bomb in the bottom of an ocean would do it. I don't really know anything except that we hadn't better let them catch us asleep at the switch again—we've got to be on our toes every second."
    And the Gray Lensman, face set and stern, strode off to his quarters.

CHAPTER 2
WIDE-OPEN TWO-WAY
    During practically all of the long trip back to earth Kinnison kept pretty much to his cabin, thinking deeply, blackly, and, he admitted ruefully to himself, to very little purpose. And at Prime Base, through week after week of its feverish activity, he continued to think. Finally, however, he was snatched out of his dark abstraction by no less a personage than Surgeon-Marshal Lacy.
    "Snap out of it, lad," that worthy advised, smilingly. "When you concentrate on one thing too long, you know, the vortices of thought occupy narrower and narrower loci, until