Shrieking, the Miran pilots clawed their way from the controls as the
fearful flood of ultra-violet light struck their unaccustomed skins.
Others too felt that burning flood.
The second torpedo they caught and deflected on a beam of
alternating-current magnetism that repelled it. It did not come nearer
than half a mile to the ship. The third they turned their deflecting
beam on--and something went strangely wrong with the beam. It pulled
that torpedo toward the ship with a sickening acceleration--and the
torpedo exploded in that frightful violet flame.
* * * * *
Five-foot diameter UV beams are nothing to play with. The Mirans were
dodging these now as they loosed atomic bombs, only to see them exploded
harmlessly by neutron guns, or caught in the magnetic screen. Gamma ray
bombs were as useless. Again the beam of disintegrating force was turned
on--
The present opponent was not a ship. It was an IP defense station,
equipped with everything Solarian science knew, and the dome was an
eight-foot wall of tungsten-beryllium. The eight feet of solid,
ultra-resistant alloy drank up that crumbling beam, and liked it. The
wall did not fail. The men inside the fort jerked and quivered as the
strange beam, a small, small fraction of it, penetrated the eight feet
of outer wall, the six feet or so of intervening walls, and the mercury
atostor reserves.
"Concentrate all those UV beams on one spot, and see if you can blast a
hole in him before he shakes it loose," ordered the ray technician.
"He'll wiggle if you start off with the beam. Train your sights on the
nose of that first ship--when you're ready, call out."
"Ready--ready--" Ten men replied. "Fire!" roared the technician. Ten
titanic swords of pure ultra-violet energy, energy that practically no
unconditioned metal will reflect to more than fifty per cent, emerged.
There was a single spot of intense incandescence for a single hundredth
of a second--and then the energy was burning its way through the inner,
thinner skins with such rapidity that they sputtered and flickered like
a broken televisor.
One hundred and twenty-nine ships retreated hastily for conference,
leaving a gutted, wrecked hull, broken by its fall, on Europa.
Triumphantly, the Europa IP station hurled out its radio message of the
first encounter between a fort and the Miran forces.
Most important of all, it sent a great deal of badly wanted information
regarding the Miran weapons. Particularly interesting was the fact that
it had withstood the impact of that disintegrating ray.