Triplanetary

r-Ship I

e was ready for her maiden flight. As nearly ready, that is, as the thought and labor of man could make her. Rodebush and Cleveland had f

rew," Samms argued. "In that case it isn't safe enough for you men

too full of too many new and untried mechanisms, too many extrapolations beyond all existing or possible data. Theoretically, she is sound, but you know that theory can go only so far, and that mathematically negligible factors may become opera

l, anyway. Start out

t to be everything or nothing, as soon as the neutralizers go on. We could start out on the projectors, of

be as careful

suicide just yet if we can help it. And remember about everybody staying inside when we

bye, f

nking into the room. Chains and cables were made fast and, mighty steel rails groaning under the load, the space-ship upon her rolling w

llers, trucks, the enormous steel I-beams of the tracks, even the deep-set concrete piers and foundations and a vast hemisphere of the solid ground; all had disappeared utterly and instantaneously. But almost as suddenly as it had been formed the vacuum was filled by a cyclonic rush of air. There was a detonation as of a hundred vicious thunderclaps made one, and, through the howling, shrieking blasts of wind, there rained down upon the valley, plain and metaled mountain a veritable avalanche of debris: bent, twisted, and broken rai

n which held spellbound most of the denizens of the Hill. But all were not so held--no conceiv

recover it. I put everything I've got behind a tracer on that

ship? Reason told him that they were gone. They must be gone, or else his ultra-beams--energies of such unthinkable velocity of propagation that man's most sensitive instruments had never been able even to estimate it--would have held the ship's transmitter in spite of any velocity attainable by any matter under any conceivable conditions. The sh

when an emergency call came snapping in; a call of such import that h

Orion. Here he is," and there appeared upon the screen the face of the Commissioner of Public Safety,

All in Sector M; Dx about 151. I have ordered all traffic out of space for the duration of the emergency, and since even our warships seem useless, every ship is making for the nearest

g--and very probably the ending--of the trial flight, concluding: "It looks bad, but if there was any possible w

m the Pittsburgh station for the Commissio

screens of the observers; a view being recorded from the air. It required only seconds for the commissioner to order every available man and engine of war to the seat of conflic

and thither as the detectors of the amphibians searched out the richest deposits of the precious iron for which the inhuman visitors had come so far. Iron, once solid, now a viscous red liquid, was sluggishly flowing in an ever-thickening stream up that intangible crimson duct and into the capacious storage tanks of the Nevian raider; and wherever that flaming beam went there went also ruin, destruction, and death. Office buildings, skyscrapers

invader in formation, with but little more success. Under the impact of their beams the stranger's screens had flared white, then poised ship and flying squadron alike had been lost to view in a murkily opaque shroud of crimson flame. The cloud had soon dissolved, and from the plac

r slaughter! They haven't got a thing--they

helped--wait a minute! The Washington cone is reporting. They're as close as the other, and they hav

more the screens of the Nevian flared into brilliance, once more the red cloud of destruction was flung abroad. But these vessels were not entirely defenseless. Their iron-driven ultra-generators threw out screens of the Nevians' own formulae, screens of prodigious power to which the energies of the amp

yet uncovered their full strength. Thus the last desperate effort of mankind was proved futile as the invaders forced their beams deeper and deeper into the overloaded, defensive