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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 pressor beams.
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 these enormous heptagons Vortel Kromodeor, First Projector Officer, rested before a gigantic and complex instrument board.
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.
Bombs, torpedoes, and all material projectiles were equally futile they exploded harmlessly in the air far from their objectives, or disappeared at the touch of one of those dark, dull-red pressor rays. And swiftly, but calmly and methodically as at a Vorkulian practice drill, the heptagons were destroying the hexan fleet.
Many of its component units would go down, but it would go on and on and on until every hexan 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 hexan armament, Kromodeor reared upright as his projector controls went dead beneath his hands.
With the "crazy-quilt" a patch-work of heptagons of different hues and patterns around his shoulders, clothing him with all the colors of the rainbow, he sat up in bed, wincing at each concussion. "I might as well get up!" he exclaimed. "I'll see her once more the perverse beauty!" And tossing the kaleidoscopic covering viciously from him, he began to dress.
For these heptagons were the monstrous flying fortresses which Czuv 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 visiray screen.
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.
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.
Then what was left of the cones would separate into individual heptagons, which would so systematically blast every hexan thing into nothingness as to make certain that never again would they resume their insensate attacks upon the Vorkuls. Having counted the cost and being grimly ready to pay it, the implacable attackers hurled themselves upon their objectives.
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